Klaus Mäkelä
Janine Jansen Jean Sibelius
Richard Strauss

Lars Petter Hagen (b. 1975) wrote Kunstnerens fortvilelse foran de antikke fragmenters storhet (The Artist's Despair Before the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins) for the Oslo Philharmonic, who premiered the piece in 2010. The title is taken from the famous drawing by Johann Heinrich Füssli in which an artist buries his face in his hands in front of Roman ruins - unattainably beautiful in all their transience. Hagen's ruins are Richard Strauss' and Gustav Mahler's music, and the starting point for the piece is Mahler's third symphony. As the artists of antiquity, they established frameworks for their art form that later composers must relate to.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) started violin lessons when he was 14 years old and was soon completely absorbed by the instrument. In the next decade, he dreamed of becoming a concert violinist, but eventually, he gave up and focused instead on composition. Sibelius' Violin Concerto became his unhappy declaration of love for the violin, and the first version was so technically difficult that the soloists did not master the challenges. 

In the 1890s, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) reached new heights as a conductor and composer. In 1989 he finished the symphonic poem Ein Heldenleben in Berlin, where he was employed as a conductor of the court opera. Strauss also had to deal with the masterpieces of the past - especially Beethoven's third symphony Eroica. Both works deal with the heroic and the hero's life; Eroica was originally intended to be dedicated to Napoleon. There are many indications that Ein Heldenleben is a kind of self-portrait in which Strauss describes himself, his wife, and his fiercest critics in music.