Sibelius completed the early version of the symphony to celebrate his 50th birthday on 8 December 1915. At the anniversary concert he conducted the Helsinki City Orchestra in the Solemnity Hall of the Imperial Alexander University (University of Helsinki). His 50th birthday became a significant national flag day, celebrated in different parts of Finland. The music performances at the anniversary concert were almost buried under festive speeches, congratulatory addresses, floral decorations, and other festive turmoil.

Sibelius planned to publish the symphony in the form presented at the festival concert, but finally decided to revise the work in 1916. The revised version was performed for the first time on his 51st birthday in Turku, but he even revised this one. The final published version was not completed until 1919.

The score source for the 1915 version of the Fifth Symphony, Sibelius’s own autograph fair copy, is lost; only one page of it is known of, as a facsimile was published in Tidning för musik magazine in December 1915. The critical edition had to be based on orchestral parts made by several copyists, which were used in the symphony’s six performances in December 1915 and in winter and spring 1916. “The 1915 version consisted of four movements, the first and the second of which Sibelius combined in later versions into a continuous whole. There is plenty of new information available on the versions of the symphony in the two volumes of the critical edition,” Timo Virtanen explains.

This newly published volume (JSW I/6a) is the 39th to appear in the series of Sibelius’s collected works. The series will eventually comprise approximately 60 volumes and is being published in collaboration with the National Library, Sibelius-Seura ry/Sibelius-Samfundet rf and the publishing company Breitkopf & Härtel (Wiesbaden).