The payments Sibelius received for the sales of his works varied. The Vyborg Students’ Association bought the Karelia incidental music for 500 marks (1,720 euros) in 1893, and Åbo Akademi bought the cantata Jordens sång for 6,000 marks (1,850 euros) in 1919.

On the other hand, one of Sibelius’s close friends bartered a leg of mutton for a small piece, and according to one story Axel Lindgren bought Sibelius’s piano impromptus for one kilo of burbot roe.

By such means Sibelius obtained occasional pocket money, but transactions and contracts with large publishers were an entirely different matter. Over a lifetime, Sibelius had more than 50 different publishers.

This figure is arrived at by including all the products that were printed and published, ranging from the scores of the symphonies to a Christmas album in Päivälehti. Before the year 1905 Sibelius sold his works to Finnish publishers such as Helsingfors Nya Musikhandel, Karl Fredrik Wasenius, R. E. Westerlund and Axel E. Lindgren. All of these collaborated with the German publishers Breitkopf & Härtel. Eventually, Sibelius’s output prior to 1905 fell almost exclusively into the hands of Helsingfors Nya Musikhandel and its owner K. G. Fazer. All these works were sold to Breitkopf & Härtel in June 1905. Fazer gained a profit of 30,000 marks (104,000 euros today) by the deal, but Sibelius got nothing at all. The deal included the second symphony, for which Fazer had paid 5,000 euros.

Sibelius usually made bad bargains. In the spring of 1904 Sibelius sold Valse triste at a low price due to his financial difficulties. A year later this precious item ended up in the possession of Breitkopf & Härtel.

In February 1905 Sibelius signed a lucrative publishing contract with the German publisher Robert Lienau in Berlin. For the very substantial annual remuneration of 34,000 euros he committed himself to writing four major works per year for the period of the contract, 1905-08. Nevertheless, Sibelius’s financial situation did not improve during these years. Added together, Sibelius’s pension, the proceeds from a couple of concerts in Finland and the remuneration from Lienau amounted to an annual income of over 50,000 euros – a sum which taxes (national tax and a poll tax) reduced by 3 per cent. Sibelius was really not very good at managing his finances. However, from the year 1909 until the First World War he had a loose connection with Breitkopf & Härtel, who also sent him remunerations for the sales of his scores.

At home business was booming, and he was able to make use of ideas conceived in previous years. He received 2,400 euros for his Arioso opus 3. There were also many commissions. For Uusmaalaisten laulu and The Bell Melody of Kallio Church Sibelius received 1,500 euros each. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was a heavy blow for the composer. His contacts with foreign publishers were cut off for five years. He now had to try to manage by writing small pieces for Finnish publishers.

R.E. Westerlund was in charge of Sibelius’s financial transactions with foreign publishers after the war.

Remunerations from publishers were Sibelius’s principal source of income at the start of the 1920s. On his tax return for 1925 Sibelius entered the following:

After peace was declared Germany remained in a state of chaos for a long time. Sibelius’s main publisher became Wilhelm Hansen in Copenhagen. However, Breitkopf & Härtel recovered in due course and were the publishers of Sibelius’s last orchestral work, Tapiola, in 1926. By a strange coincidence, Sibelius’s financial worries ended in the same year that Tapiola was published. But looked at over decades, it almost seems as if Sibelius’s motto, “Music is made from sorrow,” had a practical meaning in his case. One could imagine that the sorrow in question related to his financial worries.