Sibelius composed this short Romance in C, op. 42, which lasts only five minutes, in 1903; the work received its premiere in March 1904 in Turku. Sibelius later changed the originally rather neutral title “Andante for Strings” to a character designation that better captures the essence of the piece. It was composed at the same time as the Symphony No. 2, op. 43, and—like many of his short piano pieces—can be understood as a sort of byproduct, to which Sibelius applied different compositional s...