The following is a list of works by Jean Sibelius, presented as a sortable table with eight parameters: title, category, key, catalogue number, year of composition, genre, and—if applicable—text author; for some compositions, comments are provided, as well. The table's default ordering is by genre and, within a genre, by date. To assist with navigation, the infobox provides page-jumps to the first entry for each group.
Oeuvre
The compositional career of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius extended over eight decades, from juvenilia and unpublished works written in the 1870s and 1880s to his final works of the 1940s; the 1890s–1920s, however, represent the key years of his activity. Sibelius composed across many genres, and his oeuvre includes large-scale orchestral compositions, chamber music, songs, piano pieces, and choral works. Most highly regarded as a composer for the orchestra, the core of Sibelius's oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies, the last of which erodes the traditional subdivisions of sonata form. In addition, the choral work Kullervo and the orchestral suiteLemminkäinen—both based upon Kalevala myths—are classified occasionally as unnumbered, programmatic symphonies. In addition, Sibelius was a significant contributor to the symphonic poem repertoire. His 16 examples in the form span the duration of his career and include not only two of his most popular works, The Swan of Tuonela and Finlandia, but also some of his most critically acclaimed: En saga, Pohjola's Daughter, Luonnotar, The Oceanides, and Tapiola. Sibelius also frequently composed for the stage, and his scores for Nordic productions of Shakespeare'sThe Tempest and Maeterlinck'sPelléas and Mélisande are particularly admired. Other notable orchestral works include the Karelia Suite, Valse triste, and Rakastava. Within the concertante and chamber genres, the Violin Concerto and the string quartetVoces intimae, respectively, ensure Sibelius's reputation.
Catalogues
Beginning in 1896, Sibelius began to keep a personal catalogue of his works. Throughout his career, he continually curated the collection according to his ever-changing assessment of his own oeuvre, promoting works to or demoting them from the catalogue and filling the resulting availabilities without a strict regard for compositional chronology. The final list of opus numbers, therefore, is an imperfect indicator of his stylistic maturation over time. For works without opus numbers, the convention is to follow the supplemental JS numbering system of :fi:Fabian Dahlström|Fabian Dahlström. A handful of compositions, which primarily date from Sibelius's student years, are without either catalogue designation; they are thus reserved for a supplementary list that follows the sortable table.
