"Not a Penny"

Finland's 84-year-old Jean Sibelius need not worry about dying in the poverty which has closed the eyes of many another famed composer.* Since the turn of the century, the Finnish government has guaranteed his board & keep. But this week Composer Sibelius let it be known (through Music Critic Olin Downes of the New York Times) that he has received "not a penny" in royalties from the U.S., a country whose performances of his music should have made him rich.

Some of Sibelius' troubles arose from the fact that, like Mozart and Schubert before him, he was "wholly uninitiated in the mysteries of finance." As a young man, he had sold the rights to his popular Valse Triste, which made his publishers a fortune, for "2,000 marks [about $400] and a box of cigars." But the main difficulty seemed to be that Sibelius' publishers had never copyrighted many of his works in the U.S., had not kept copyrights in force on much of the rest.

Wrote indignant Critic Downes: "If the technicalities of ... law divert profits from the works of genius into other pockets, surely it is high time to do something about correcting such abuses."

*Most recent: Hungarian Bela Bartok, who died broke in Manhattan in 1945, was buried by ASCAP.

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