Dominic Lawson: Why do we find it so difficult to accept an artist who decides he has no more to say?

Whatever happened to Sibelius? Over the past fortnight, this newspaper has published an excellent series of booklets on 'The lives and times of the great composers'. Yet Jean Sibelius has not featured. Leave aside aesthetic judgement; topicality alone might have favoured the mighty Finn: last week was the 50th anniversary of his death.

It would have seemed incredible, 50 years ago, for his name to be excluded from any musical pantheon. He was not just acknowledged as the foremost composer of the age: in Great Britain and the USA he was more popular among concertgoers than Mozart and Beethoven.

It's true that the critics of the day were divided: Theodore Adorno described his music as "unutterably provincial... completely without merit." The German Adorno regarded as freakish Sibelius's isolation from the mainstream musical culture – sometimes described as the "Viennese School". Adorno was not alone in regarding Sibelius as a primitive nationalist composer.

It's also true that Sibelius's fame started in 1899 with Finlandia, a symphonic poem written explicitly to encourage opposition against Russia's attempts to restrict the autonomy of its Finnish Grand Duchy. In that sense, Sibelius's most performed and popular work is indeed parochial. Yet the passion for political and intellectual freedom which inspired Finlandia also gives the music universal appeal. It could be the anthem for any oppressed people, in any country, at any time.

It's precisely because Sibelius's music seems hermetically cut off from outside influence that it is so refreshingly distinctive. Vaughan Williams, one of a number of British composers who worshipped his music, said: "Only Sibelius could make the chord of C Major sound entirely his own." Sibelius was fully aware of his own distinctiveness, referring – long before Frank Sinatra appropriated the phrase-– to "my way" of composition. His son-in-law Jussi Jalas records Sibelius saying: "After hearing my third symphony Rimsky-Korsakov shook his head and said, 'Why don't you do it the usual way? You will see that the audience can neither follow nor understand this.' And now I am certain that my symphonies are played more than his."

That remark makes Sibelius sound complacent – but nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps only Anton Bruckner, among the great composers, agonised more. Sibelius would brood on individual symphonies not for years, but decades. Perhaps his most popular, the Fifth, was completely rewritten at least twice – even after a successful premiere – before Sibelius was completely satisfied.

If anything, awareness of his fame made Sibelius even more self-critical: he knew that every major orchestra in the world would play whatever he wrote – and his critics would be rapid to denounce anything which seemed to them to mark a decline in inspiration. We all understand the injustice of obscurity, but the stress of fame does not inspire the same sympathy: we are much more stirred by the struggles of composers who die young and insufficiently appreciated by their contemporaries. As Sibelius noted when he entered his ninth decade: "It is very painful to be eighty. The public love artists who fall by the wayside in life. A true artist must be down and out or die of hunger. In youth he should at least die of consumption."

Perhaps it was this form of stress which provoked the most famous silence in the history of music: for the last 30 years of his life Sibelius wrote nothing – or if he did write, he destroyed the evidence. His final symphony, the Seventh, was premiered in Stockholm in 1926, conducted by the composer himself. It was another instant worldwide success.

As the succeeding years passed without an Eighth Symphony, the great conductors of the day increasingly pestered Sibelius for the right to conduct the world premiere: Herbert von Karajan of the Berlin Philharmonic, Serge Koussevitsky of the Boston Symphony, Britain's Sir Thomas Beecham: all travelled out to Sibelius's villa, Ainola, in Jarvenpaa, to ingratiate themselves with the increasingly reclusive Finn and get him to assign first performance rights to them.

Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, wrote an unintentionally tragic-comic account of his own self-interested pilgrimages to Ainola: "Every time I asked him about the Eighth Symphony he became very upset and nervous. Naturally I always told him that if and when his Eighth Symphony was ready for performance I hoped he would give me the opportunity to give it its world premiere. His hands would begin to tremble even more and he would look away with a troubled expression."

Ormandy had one last attempt, in 1955, when Sibelius was a very frail 89-year-old. This time he brought with him the entire Philadelphia Orchestra in two specially hired buses. There is a photograph of Sibelius, standing next to Ormandy, having been dragged out on to his porch to greet the 110 partially-frozen musicians. Ormandy is grinning broadly. Sibelius is not.

After Sibelius's death, the mystery of the Eighth Symphony was solved: his widow, Aino, revealed that "in the 1940s there was a great auto-da-fe at Ainola. My husband collected a number of manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them in the open fire in the dining room. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood." Sibelius apparently told Jussi Jalas that the Eighth Symphony was among the works which he had consigned to the flames.

To many of Sibelius's admirers, this would seem to be an act of appalling vandalism. Yet no one could know better than the composer himself what should be his own musical legacy. I am convinced by the idea that he could not find a way of developing the symphonic form beyond where he had already taken it.

While most other composers had tended – taking their cue from Beethoven's Ninth – to make the symphony gargantuan in scale, Sibelius sought an ever purer distillation of form and content. The Seventh Symphony represents the apogee of this approach: five movements are somehow compressed into one of little over 20 minutes. It's the most compelling example of Simon Rattle's description of Sibelius's music: "So concentrated and exact, you feel that if one drop touched your skin it would burn right through the bone."

The music critic Tom Service describes the Seventh as "a kind of musical black hole, in which massive, elemental experiences are expressed in mere minutes. It's a completely new way of thinking about musical time, about what music can do."

No light escapes from a black hole, however. I prefer to liken Sibelius's Seventh to the last, unbearably bright, light that a star emanates milliseconds before it implodes.

After that, there is only silence.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk