It is difficult to establish who was the first to mention ‘Sibelius's shadow’. The idea pops up in the 1920s at the latest. In an essay on ‘the youngest Finnish music’ from 1928, the composer Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942) refers to the ‘reappraisal of certain values’ during the First World War, notably to the ‘bankruptcy of Romanticism’ in the field of aesthetics.

Pingoud was of Russian origin and had emigrated to Finland from St Petersburg in 1918, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Although well integrated into the society of his patrie choisie ten years later, he remained an outsider in one important respect. Nationalism, the fundamental generating force in Finnish culture at the turn of the century, was none of his concern. He sympathised with it from the outside, as revealed in an article on Sibelius from 1909 in which he described the tone poem Finlandia, ‘the most national of Sibelius's works’, as ‘radiating a deep sorrow for his enslaved fatherland’.