Jean Sibelius' The Dryad (1910) was completed while the composer was in the process of writing his Symphony No. 4, and indeed, it shares some of the famous symphony's adventuresome formal and harmonic characteristics. Sibelius was in a state of transition at this time; accordingly, the piece seems to be a part of the composer's exploration of the new artistic possibilities being devised by his contemporaries in Paris and Vienna. Still, it was a direction that Sibelius would abandon in short order.

While most often thought of as a tone poem, The Dryad retains something of the dance characteristics of its sister piece, the Dance Intermezzo, Op. 45/2, though the latter work is generally regarded as the more successful effort. The Dryad is one of the most restless pieces in the repertory: a new tempo indication appears every few measures, all traditional ideas of phrase length and interrelationship are thrown out, and groups of one, three, or six bars are just as common as more typical four- or eight-bar units. The harmonic language is chromatic to a degree that surpasses anything in the composer's output save the Fourth Symphony. Although the work is scored for relatively large forces (by the composer's standard), Sibelius takes the unusual step of omitting the timpani—the creative use of which is a hallmark of his style. Experimentation and change permeate every musical layer of The Dryad.

Much is made of the monumentally different approaches, both technical and aesthetic, taken by Sibelius and his contemporary, Gustav Mahler. The Dryad, however, suggests that the two composers were headed in some of the same compositional directions. The searchingly chromatic quality of The Dryad's opening cannot but remind the listener of countless passages in Mahler's Symphony No. 9, and the frequent omission of middle-register harmonic support is a technique discovered and exploited by both composers in the few years before Mahler's death in 1911.

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