Soi vienosti murheeni soitto Op.36, No.3 (1899)

Kun päiva paistaa Op.24, No. 1 (1897)

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.

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 of its most ecstatic.

Unlike Kuula, his colleague Madetoja set comparatively few texts by Eino Leino, presumably because he was a rival for the affections of the poet