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In his opinion column this month, Richard Morrison describes how composers’ houses (with reference to the recent Ravel house debacle) can give some treasured insight into the great masterpieces. As someone who has visited a few composer homes over the years, I would add that it’s the smaller details in those houses that contribute, too, to our view of a composer’s life and mindset.

Sibelius’s home, Ainola, just outside Helsinki, is preserved, as far as possible, in the state it was when the Finn was writing some of his finest work. His desk chair has been charmingly placed at a slight angle, as if the composer has pushed it back and stepped out to make himself a cup of tea. Or indeed a stiff vodka. In some small way it humanises Sibelius – a man who may have found it as distracting to work from home as the rest of us. Richard mentions Mendelssohn’s mansion in Leipzig, but despite its considerable size and comfort, the bedroom in which he died aged 38 from a series of devastating strokes is, in contrast, tiny, with barely the space to walk round the bed. It has an intimacy and privacy that the composer of some of music’s most beautiful, personal miniatures maybe craved at the end of a long day.

And if the printed score gives an impression of a composer writing feverishly, quill or pencil in hand, manuscript filling up with wave after wave of inspiration, you only have to visit the Louis Vierne museum in Paris to see the inch-thick spectacles, huge-scale manuscript and thick crayons with which the organist-composer struggled as his eyesight failed towards the end of his life.

Performance practice involves more than poring over scores, treatises and contemporary accounts – composers’ surroundings and possessions are equally valuable in our search for that elusive ‘informed’ interpretation.

Finally, do turn to p33 where you’ll find a 12-page special, in association with the World Federation of International Music Competitions, looking at the art of competing in some of the world’s fiercest musical arenas.

Composers’ surroundings are valuable in our search for an interpretation