Luulit, ma katselin sua Op.68 No.3 (c 1930)

Tule kanssani Op.9 No.3 (1911)

Though a great Finnish song-composer, Sibelius was not a great composer of Finnish song. Of all his songs, not far short of ninety are in Swedish, which was his first language, and only a handful are in Finnish. So, while he dominated most of areas of Finnish music in the early years of the twentieth century, it was his younger contemporaries - not least his pupils Toivo Kuula and Leevi Madetoja - who were responsible for the early development of the Finnish song repertoire.

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 Aamulaulu, one of the earliest of his many settings of words by the Finnish national poet Eino Leino: apart from the change of harmony and melodic material in the second of the three stanzas, it could almost be a folk song. Another Leino setting from the same set, Syystunnelma is a more sophisticated composition in both its emotively coloured piano part and its liberated construction. Sadly, because of his early death at the end of the Finnish Civil war, he was unable to fulfill his obvious potential.

The two Mirjamin songs, both to words by Leino, were originally written for the stage and in such a way that an actor could sing them. That no doubt explains why, technically, they are among the least ambitious of Melartin’s 300 or so songs. In their artful blend of folk-song and salon styles,they are no less attractive for that.

Oskar Merikanto (father of the better-known Aarre Merikanto) was only a year younger than Sibelius and, like him, was born of Swedish parents. Interestingly, however, his father changed the family name from Mattsson to Merikanto to make it sound more Finnish, which suggests that Finnish culture was taken more seriously in his childhood home than it was in Sibelius’s. Certainly, Oskar Merikanto wrote the first opera in Finnish, Pohjan neiti (1889) and some of the earliest Finnish songs, many of which are so idiomatic that they have frequently been mistaken for genuine folk tunes. Soi vienosti murheeni soitto has a characteristic, immediately attractive melodic line, overcoloured though it might be by its uninhibited piano scoring. Kun päiva paistaa, the earliest song in this group, must be one of the first of Finnish song’s many anticipations of Spring as well as being one of the most ecstatic of its kind.

Unlike Kuula, his colleague Madetoja set comparatively few texts by Eino Leino, presumably because the poet was a rival for the affections of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, who wrote under the name of L. Onerva and who later became the composer’s wife. The late Syksy cycle (like most of his songs, settings of words by Onerva) represents Madetoja at a stage of development far beyond that which the unfortunate Kuula was able to reach. Luuit, ma katselin sua is, indeed, one of the most sophisticated of Finnish “art” songs – not so far from folk song that melody in a stable tonality is not a paramount consideration but at the same time infinitely subtle in its changes of harmony and piano colour. It is evident from the delightful Tule kanssani, one of the earliest of his Orneva settings, that a crucial factor in his development was an encounter in 1910 with the music of Debussy, whose Spanish-guitar keyboard figuration is clearly (if a little incongruously) echoed in the second stanza.