Illalla (c 1920)

Kesäyö (c 1927)

Rannalta I (c 1927)

Maassa marjani makaavi (1948-50)

Few composers have suffered such a drastic decline in reputation as Yrö Kilpinen. In the 1920s and 1930s he was greeted not only as the greatest Finnish composer after Sibelius but also as the natural successor to Hugo Wolf. Now his music is rarely performed, except for a handful of his 790 songs, even in Finland. It has counted against him that much of the early admiration came from Nazi Germany, where he was proclaimed “the greatest lyricist of his age,” but it is worth recalling that he had his supporters in this country too, notably Ernest Newman and Walter Legge who were so impressed by his settings of German poetry that they promoted the Kilpinen Society on HMV in the 1930s. His reputation dwindled after the war, however, and in spite of a brief revival of interest round the centenary of his birth, which was marked by a number of concerts and recordings, it has not recovered.

One problem faced by Kilpinen’s music today is that there is so little of it apart from those 790 songs: even Hugo Wolf would be a lesser figure without Der Corregidor and the Italian Serenade. Another is the nature of songs themselves. Far from setting out to charm, seduce or overhwelm with romantic emotion, they are distinguished rather by a severity of style which, though admirable in its way, is not calculated to win a wide public or to persuade publishers to issue a complete edition. If the “arctic puritan” description applied to him by his pupil Seppo Nummi is an overstatement, Kilpinen himself has been quoted as saying, somewhat forbiddingly, that “colour is the element of music that is most likely to fade” and, for him, colour included harmony.

A characteristic example of Kilpinen’art is Illalla (set to a different text, incidentally, from that of the Sibelius song of the same name) where the piano part not only avoids cuckoo imitations but is also restricted largely to spare arpeggios and bare octaves. The vocal line, on the other hand, is sensitively inflected and not unmoving in its understatement. While discreet colouring – an allusion to the accordion mentioned in the first stanza – is a feature of Kesäyö, it is as bleak in effect as the hurdy-gurdy of Der Leiermann in Wintereise. Rannalta I has won popularity in Finland without making colourful concessions to its wild duck. The wide and desolate shore is evoked by the simple means of the opening wide-spaced piano line, the rhythm of which is accelerated as the emotion intensifies in the second stanza and which, after being displaced by unyielding chords in the third, is recalled in the no less desolate last stanza.

Maassa marjani makaavi, one of Kilpinen’s 64 songs to words from the Kantelatar, is not the severe setting it seems destined, from its sparsely modal beginning, to be. A dramatic emotional surge in the middle of the song is supported by piano figuration of positively Lisztian expressive dimensions. A (for Kilpinen) exceptional piano interlude is followed by an ending from which pathos is not excluded.