big Berlin unveiling. The Berlin concert was indeed an important event for Sibelius: not only would it mark just the second time he had conducted abroad, but it would also give him the opportunity to present personally his art to a discerning Central European audience. Finnish critics sought to buoy Sibelius by writing that, in their opinion, En saga was worthy of performance abroad, while the Finnish newspapers promoted the forthcoming concert heavily. A few days later, the stakes became even clearer: the Berlin critics savaged the first of Busoni's concerts on 8 November, the program of which included selections from Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, the Overture to Camille Saint-Saëns's opera Les Barbares, and Christian Sinding's Rondo Infinito. This was the environment into which Sibelius stepped as second on Busoni's 15 November program, which also included Frederick Delius's orchestral nocturne Paris, Théophile Ysaÿe's Piano Concerto, and Ödön Mihalovich's ballad The Death of Pan ("my fellow competitors", as Sibelius referred to them in a 12–13 November letter to his wife, Aino). Sibelius was under constant stress: during the journey to Germany, he labored over the orchestral parts, many of which contained copy errors; upon arrival, he fumed over being second on the program and was annoyed that the promised rehearsals had both been scheduled for 13 November. Nevertheless, the rehearsals went well and the players reacted favorably to the tone poem: as Sibelius told Aino, "It is so beautiful... Busoni even embraced me". The Berlin critics' reaction to the second concert, however, was hostile. Otto Lessmann of Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung described the performance as "painful", noting acerbically, "If steps forward in art should be illustrated in such works, the muse would viel her head"; while, Rudolph Buck opined in Berliner Neueste Nachrichten, "After the complete fiasco of the second concert, the announcement that these orchestral concerts would be continued in the autumn of 1903 sounded little short of blasphemous". Nonetheless, it appears as though Sibelius emerged more or less unscathed; indeed, the consensus opinion was that En saga was "the only valuable work" on the program. The positive reviews in the wake of the concert clearly lifted Sibelius's spirits. Following the concert, a confident Sibelius recounted for his wife the quality of both his art and his conducting: As Tawaststjerna notes, thanks to En saga, at last the "ice had been broken for Sibelius in Germany", a success for which