Early in 1928 Sibelius made one of his regular visits to Berlin, to imbibe the city's musical life and to compose. He sent positive work-in-progress reports to Aino: the symphony, he said, will be "wonderful". Back home in Ainola in September, he told his sister that he was "writing a new work, which will be sent to America. It will still need time. But it will turn out well." In December 1928, however, when his Danish publisher Wilhelm Hansen asked him how the work was developing, Sibelius was less forthcoming; the symphony existed, he said, only in his head. Thereafter Sibelius's reports of the symphony's progress became equivocal, sometimes contradictory, and difficult to follow.
