Paimenet Op.29a No.3 (1915)

Suutelo Op.8 No.1 (1907–8)

While it is to be regretted that Sibelius wrote so few songs to Finnish texts – he preferred to work in Swedish, his first language – the consolation is that his work did not dominate that area of the Finnish repertoire as it did most others. It was his younger contemporaries, not least his pupils Toivo Kuula and Leevi Madetoja, who were responsible for the early development of Finnish song. Like Madetoja, Kuula was a native of Ostrobothnia and a keen collector of the folk song of that province, which inevitably had a profound influence on his style as a composer. That is clear enough from Paimenet which begins with a piano monody no doubt representing the sound of the herdsmen’s horns as they take their cattle into the wood. At the same time it is an anticipation of the music of the woodmaidens who dance to the same tune but with a more pronounced rhythm as they take the younger herdsman into the forest. A variant is heard at the beginning of the next stanza, as the other herdsman plays a lamenting horn tune, and again at the end where, after a passionate climax, it so eloquently shapes the vocal line.

Sibelius’s first pupil, Kuula was still studying with him when he wrote one of the most admired of his songs, Suutelo. Struggling to come to terms with Aarni Kouta’s enigmatic symbolist text, he actually wrote the first half of the song a year after the other, completing a setting which imposes no musical unity on the text but which reacts to the changing moods

Suutelo Op.8 No.1 (1907–8)

While it is to be regretted that Sibelius wrote so few songs to Finnish texts – he preferred to set Swedish, his first language – the consolation is that his work did not dominate that area of the Finnish repertoire as it did most others. It was his younger contemporaries, not least his pupils Toivo Kuula and Leevi Madetoja, who were responsible for the early development of Finnish song. Like Madetoja, Kuula was a native of Ostrobothnia and a keen collector of the folk song of that province, which inevitably had a profound influence on his style as a composer. That is clear enough from Paimenet which begins with a piano monody no doubt representing the sound of the herdsmen’s horns as they take their cattle into the wood. At the same time it is an anticipation of the music of the woodmaidens who dance to the same tune but with a more pronounced rhythm as they take the younger herdsman into the forest. A variant is heard at the beginning of the next stanza, as the other herdsman plays a lamenting horn tune, and again at the end where, after a passionate climax, it so eloquently shapes the vocal line.

Written a year after Kuula’s marriage to the singer Alma Silventoinen, Paimenet is one of the many songs inspired by a partnership tragically cut short by the composer’s death in a shooting incident in the aftermath of the Finnish civil war in 1918. Suutelo is a comparatively early work started shortly after he became Sibelius’s first pupil. Struggling to come to terms with Aarni Kouta’s enigmatic symbolist text, he apparently wrote the first half of the song a year after the other, completing a setting which courageously imposes no musical pattern on the text. After the first few lines with their regular rhythmic figure in the accompaniment and the beseeching “Suuta anna”, where it reappears in the piano part, there is little apart from the lily motif to unify a setting which reacts so sensitively and so truthfully to the changing emotions.