Erik Werner Tawaststjerna was born in
Mikkeli,
Grand Duchy of Finland in 1916. His piano studies were with
Ilmari Hannikainen, K. Bernhard, Heinrich Leygraf,
Heinrich Neuhaus,
Alfred Cortot and
Jules Gentil. His concert career began in 1943, and was confined to
Scandinavia,
Vienna and the
Soviet Union, after which he became a private teacher. He held posts in the Press and Cultural Affairs Department of the
Foreign Ministry of Finland from 1948 to 1960. and one abridged volume in
Russian. It was awarded the
Tieto-Finlandia Award. The immediate impetus for the work was the 1959 biography of Sibelius by
Harold E. Johnson, which created an uproar in
Finland, and caused Sibelius's family to commission Tawaststjerna to write a more balanced account of the life of the composer. Drawing on his background as a pianist and pedagogue ==References==