The Maiden in the Tower (in Swedish: Jungfrun i tornet; in Finnish: Neito tornissa; occasionally translated to English as The Maid in the Tower), JS 101, is an opera ("dramatized Finnish ballad") in one act—comprising an overture and eight scenes—written in 1896 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece was a collaboration with the Finnish author Rafael Hertzberg, the Swedish-language libretto of whom tells a "simple tale of chivalry" that may nonetheless have had allegorical ambitions: the Bailiff (Imperial Russia) abducts and imprisons the Maiden (the Grand Duchy of Finland); although she endures hardship, she remains true to herself and is freed subsequently (Finland's independence) by her Lover (Finnish nationalists) and the Chatelaine of the castle (social reformers).

The opera premiered on 7 November 1896 at a lottery soirée to benefit the Helsinki Philharmonic Society, which Sibelius conducted, and its music school; the Finnish baritone Abraham Ojanperä and the Finnish soprano Ida Flodin [fi] sang the roles of the Bailiff and the Maiden, respectively. Although the critics praised Sibelius's music, they thought it was wasted on Hertzberg's lifeless libretto. After three performances, Sibelius withdrew the opera, saying he wanted to revise it. He never did, and with one exception (in 1900, he conducted a 12-minute concert overture that incorporated material from five of the opera's numbers), he suppressed the work. (In 1914, for example, he quashed the Finnish soprano Aino Ackté's plans for a revival in Mikkeli.) The Maiden in the Tower would not receive its next complete performance until 28 January 1981, when Sibelius's son-in-law Jussi Jalas and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra resurrected it for a radio concert.

In the intervening decades, The Maiden in the Tower has entered neither the Finnish nor the international repertories, and its significance is therefore primarily as a historical curiosity: Sibelius's lone opera. Accordingly, it has been recorded only a few times, with Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra having made the world premiere studio recording in 1983. A typical performance lasts about 36 minutes.

On 25 April 1896 Sibelius promised the Finnish mezzo-soprano Emmy Achté that he would write a one-act stage work for a lottery soirée to benefit Robert Kajanus's Helsinki Philharmonic Society and music school. It was a curious moment in his career for Sibelius to agree to an opera-like project: since August 1894, he had labored to convert his abandoned, Finnish-language grand opera The Building of the Boat (Veneen luominen) into the tone poems The Wood Nymph (Skogsrået, Op. 15) and the four-movement The Lemminkäinen Suite (Op. 22); their respective premieres on 17 April 1895 and 13 April 1896 were the culmination of his metamorphosis from Wagner acolyte to "tone painter" in the tradition of Liszt. But Sibelius probably thought the lottery soirée was a good cause, and moreover, a critical tool of the Finnish resistance. The musicologist and Sibelius biographer Glenda Dawn Goss describes these evenings as follows:

The faintly distasteful act of giving money to gamble for prizes was masked by the elaborate spectacle ... which proved to be an ideal device for raising money in support of national causes and ... promoting social cohesion and Finnish identity in a guise that the imperial censors would approve ... These entertainments ... with music, drama, dancing, drinking, and eating mingled with the fund-raising ... [comprised] lavish tableaux vivants in which key events from Finland's myths, landscapes, and history were colorfully dramatized ... Choruses, orchestras, and other musicians were brought to sing, play dance music, and perform new works, which the country's composers were prevailed upon to compose ... The very spectacle was enough to take one's breath away.

Achté had earlier contracted the Finnish author Rafael Hertzberg to serve as librettist. Although little is known about Hertzberg's writing process, he produced a Swedish-language libretto based on a popular, traditional Karelian, Finnish-language folk ballad, Neitsyt kammiossa (In a Maiden's Bower), which he described as "the oldest known Finnish drama—or rather an opera, because everything is sung". Sibelius began composing in August, and met Hertzberg on 24 September—a month that found Sibelius overworked, as he had taken on teaching responsibilities at the Imperial Alexander's University of Finland following the retirement of Richard Faltin [fi]. According to Achté, by the time rehearsals began a fortnight before the premiere, Sibelius had not yet finished the finale: "I constantly have to ... give him a very necessary reminder that we can't guess what his music is; we need the notes on the page".

Sibelius met his deadline, and The Maiden in the Tower premiered on 7 November 1896 at a sold-out concert in the ballroom of the Helsinki Society Hall [sv]. Ironically given Sibelius's repudiation of Wagner, the soirée began with the Helsinki Philharmonic Society—in the stands and directed by Kajanus—playing the march from the overture to Tannhäuser. Afterwards, Sibelius assumed conducting duties, with the twenty-person orchestra now positioned in the pit and, for dramatic effect, the amateur chorus behind the stage. The four soloists, who sang before a "striking" backdrop of a towered castle to the right of a springtime birch forest, were: the soprano Ida Flodin [fi] as the Maiden, the baritone Abraham Ojanperä as the Bailiff, the tenor E. Eklund as the Lover, and Achté as the Chatelaine. At the end of the opera, the audience cheered Sibelius and the soloists to several curtain calls; the evening continued with the lottery as well as additional tableaux. The Maiden in the Tower was repeated on 9 and 16 November—the former for the benefit of the orchestra and music school, while the latter raised funds for Sibelius.

The critics penned mixed reviews, skewering Hertzberg's libretto but mostly complimenting Sibelius's music. Hufvudstadsbladet printed an unsigned review that found the opera had a "genuinely Sibelian mood" and "virtuoso instrumentation", especially for the woodwinds. In Nya Pressen [fi], 'Felicien' wrote that the "beautiful" music was "interesting ... and finely orchestrated", if "wasted" on such an underwhelming story. In the same paper, Karl Flodin [fi] faulted Hertzberg's "uncomplicated" libretto as "too naive to captivate", but praised Sibelius's "glowing ... peculiar" music for having transformed the opera into an "outstanding work of domestic musical art". In particular, Flodin described Scene 1 as "poignant", with vocal writing for the Bailiff that "breathes insistent, hot longing" and for the Maiden that shows "disgust and trembling fear". He also enjoyed Scene 3's "utterly captivating" and "master[fully] paint[ed]" spring music, as well the "tender, erotic mood" of Scene 5's duet for the Maiden and the Lover; nevertheless, the Overture was "rather long" and the Maiden's prayer was "probably too drawn out", given that the balcony limited Ida Flodin's acting.

In Päivälehti, Oskar Merikanto echoed Flodin: Hertzberg's libretto was "monotonous" and lacking in action, and Sibelius's music—though "masterful[ly]" orchestrated—exacerbated this "dull[ness]" with "interludes that were too long ... [leaving] the stage completely empty". Nevertheless, he found the arias for the Maiden and for the Lover "very successful and beautiful", although each could have benefited from concision. "It is natural that the first attempt is not always the best, and so it is here," Merikanto concluded. "[But] may [Sibelius] soon follow this work with a new, bigger opera in Finnish soon!" Uusi Suometar ran an anonymous column that also noted The Maiden in the Tower's "Finnish stamp", before proclaiming its "pan-Europeanness", which the reviewer thought would be to the work's "great advantage ... because it has the opportunity to become a sensation even beyond our borders". However, like Merikanto, Uusi Suometar hoped that Sibelius would write a Finnish opera next. Finally, in terms of the four soloists, all critics wrote glowingly of their singing (if not always their acting), although there was a sense that the production was under-rehearsed.

Sibelius withdrew The Maiden in the Tower after three performances, claiming that he wanted to revise the score. As a result, several near-term productions of the opera had to be abandoned, the first of which was a probable performance at the Royal Swedish Opera at the end of 1896 or beginning of 1897. Second, at the behest of Achté, Sibelius and the vocalists had agreed to mount The Maiden in the Tower for the Mikkeli (S:t Michel) Song Festival in the summer of 1897. This too was cancelled, as Sibelius had not yet finished his revisions—indeed, there is no evidence he ever began reworking the piece. Additionally, Hertzberg was unavailable to overhaul his libretto, having died on 5 December 1896. In a sketchbook, Sibelius jotted a sad waltz in F minor below the inscription: "Now Rafael is dead".

Sibelius's thoughts returned to The Maiden in the Tower on several occasions. In 1900, he arranged a 12-minute concert overture that incorporated material from five of the opera's nine numbers and conducted it twice in Turku (Åbo) in early April. A few years later, in June 1905 and October 1906, the Finnish writer Jalmari Finne [fi]—who was then director of the Viipuri (Vyborg) rural theatre—wrote to Sibelius with a two-part plan to program The Maiden in the Tower: first for 1907, Scene 3 as a stand-alone piece at the Viipuri Song Festival; and second for February 1908, the entire opera. Finne would translate the libretto into Finnish. Sibelius agreed to the proposal, but for unknown reasons Finne's efforts never came to fruition.

Sibelius had not given up on The Maiden in the Tower, however. First, his diary from the beginning of 1910, lists the opera—and parenthetically singles out the chorus's spring music from Scene 3—under the title "Old Pieces to be Revised". Second, Sibelius's opus list from August 1911 places the overture to The Maiden in the Tower next to Kullervo (Op. 7, 1892) and connects the two with the inscription "reworkable". Sibelius may have considered uniting them into one piece, with the opera's concert overture from 1900 joining Kullervo's Movements II–V. Yet, Sibelius never overhauled any part of the opera—as he put it later in life, "The maiden may remain in her tower". When Emmy's daughter, the soprano Aino Ackté, wrote to him in November 1913 requesting to program The Maiden in the Tower in Finnish for the 1914 Mikkeli Song Festival, Sibelius refused to budge: "With all my soul, I would like to be at your service ... But—it is absolutely impossible! ...The text!! As for the music, it should be reworked. But, I'm sorry, there is no time for that".

Twenty-three years after Sibelius's death, The Maiden in the Tower received its twentieth-century premiere on 28 January 1981, when the composer's son-in-law Jussi Jalas conducted the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra at Finlandia Hall; the four soloists were: MariAnn Häggander [sv] as the Maiden, Jorma Hynninen as the Bailiff, Peter Lindroos as the Lover, and Pia-Gunn Anckar as the Chatelaine. The opera, performed as a concert item rather than staged, was broadcast live over Finnish radio. According to Jalas, a proper historical contextualization of The Maiden in the Tower was important to Sibelius: he instructed that it should only be performed if accompanied by a presentation recounting its background, a wish that the musicologist and Sibelius biographer Erik Tawaststjerna's lecture—printed in the program and given by him over the radio—fulfilled. Moreover, to resurrect the opera, Jalas commissioned new fair copies of the score, using Sibelius's autograph manuscript and the original orchestral parts by copyist Ernst Röllig. In 1983, Edition Wilhelm Hansen published Jalas's sheet music; an updated edition arrived in 2014.

In 2019, the musicologist and conductor Tuomas Hannikainen [fi] deciphered the markings Sibelius had written in blue pencil over the opera's original sheet music. Collectively, they constituted a hidden concert overture lasting about 12 minutes. Sibelius arranged the piece in 1900 for concerts in Turku. He conducted the Turku Musical Society [fi] for its premiere at the Fire Brigade Hall [fi] on 7 April; also on the program was the five-movement King Christian II Suite (Op. 27), excerpts from the Music for the Press Celebrations Days (JS 137), and The Song of the Athenians (Op. 31/3). The next day, Sibelius repeated this program at the Old Academy Building. Finally, on 10 April at the Fire Brigade Hall, José Eibenschütz [fi] conducted a third performance of the Concert Overture. The critical reviews were brief but positive. Uusi Aura [fi] and Åbo Underrättelser observed that the Concert Overture was received with, respectively, "great pleasure" and "sympathetic applause". Åbo Tidning [fi] wrote that the Overture numbered among "Sibelius’s minor works" despite its "originality and richness of ... invention".

Before Hannikainen's research, scholars had assumed that Sibelius had conducted in Turku the opera's original overture, despite the fact that it would have made an ineffective concert piece due to its short duration and inconclusive ending. In 2019, Fennica Gehrman published as the Concert Overture, reconstructed and edited by Hannikainen. The piece received its world premiere on 23 May 2021, with Hannikainen conducting the chamber orchestra Avanti! at the Finnish House of Nobility. Structurally, the piece incorporates elements from five of the opera's nine numbers, ordered as follows: the Overture (bars 1–238 in the Concert Overture), Scene 4 (bars 239–349), Scene 6 (bars 350–443), Scene 7 (bars 444–500), and Scene 8 (bars 501–639). Of these five numbers, all but Scene 4 are taken from the opera almost in their entirety. While the scoring of the Concert Overture is identical to the opera, the vocal lines are absent—except in their essential moments, when they are replaced with instruments.

The Maiden in the Tower is in one act, comprising an overture and eight scenes. It features four vocal soloists, two arias, and three duets. A typical performance lasts about 36 minutes.

Roles		Appearances	Voice type	Premiere cast (7 November 1896)
in English	in Swedish
The Maiden	Jungfrun	Scenes 1–3, 5, 8	soprano	Ida Flodin [fi]
The Chatelaine	Slottsfrun	Scenes 7–8	contralto	Emmy Achté
The Lover	Älskaren	Scenes 4–8	tenor	E. Eklund
The Bailiff	Fogden	Scenes 1, 6–8	baritone	Abraham Ojanperä
Chorus [peasants, servants]	Kören	Scenes 3, 7–8	mixed choir	local amateurs

• Overture: Allegro molto
• Scene 1: Allegro molto. A duet for the Maiden and the Bailiff that ends with the first orchestral interlude.
• Scene 2: Molto sostenuto. The Maiden's aria "Sancta Maria, mild och nåderik" ("Holy Mary, gracious and mild").
• Scene 3: Allegro. Ends with the second orchestral interlude.
• Scene 4: Allegro moderato The Lover's aria "Ack, när jag ser hennes drag" ("Ah, when I see her face").
• Scene 5: Largamente. A duet for the Maiden and the Lover.
• Scene 6: Allegro molto A duet for the Lover and the Bailiff.
• Scene 7: Meno mosso
• Scene 8: [Meno mosso]

† Included, all or in part, in the concert overture Sibelius arranged in 1900.