2 Songs

Men min Fågel märks dock icke Op.37 No.2 (1899)

Sommarnatten Op.90 No.5 (1917)

Sibelius’s first language, like that of many Finns of his generation, was Swedish. Although he started learning Finnish when he went to school at the age of eight and although the rhythms of the Kalevala echo unmistakably through much of his instrumental music, as a song composer he was far happier with Swedish poetry than with Finnish. Indeed, he wrote only five songs in Finnish and not far short of ninety in Swedish - many of them settings of poems by a Swede-Finn of an earlier generation, Johan Ludvig Runeberg. It is clear from the Runeberg setting Men min Fågel märks dock icke, for example, that Swedish verse translated easily into melodic terms for Sibelius.

With such even rhythms and such a modest piano part, which doubles the voice for much of the first stanza, the musical interest of Men min Fågel märks dock icke rests largely in the simple but inevitable shape of a melodic line intimately linked to the inflections of the first two lines. While it is clear from the sombre harmonies that there is to be no happy ending, the denial of structural expectations in the second stanza – where the opening melody is recalled only to be diverted into a searing climax on “sommerdagen” and quietly dissolved in a despairing last line – is no less moving for that. Sommarnatten, one of the six Runeberg settings that make up Sibelius’ last set of songs, is a contrastingly light-hearted observation of summer bird life. It is flexible enough to suggest the rippling of water in the piano part, to make a sly reference fo Wagner’s Wood Bird as the thrush speaks, to inflate both the voice and the accompaniment with quasi-religious solemnity and promptly to puncture them before the last lines recall the beginning of the song.

Jean Sibelius

Rêverie for piano Op.58 No.1 (1909)

Although Sibelius wrote effective accompaniments for many of his songs, he did not much enjoy writing for piano and produced few thoroughly idiomatic solo works for the instrument. Exceptionally interesting ideas are to be found in most of his piano collections even so – not least the Ten Pieces Op.58 which (ending with a harmonically imposing Summer Song that would not have been out of place in this programme) begins with a Rêverie far from the salon product one might expect from its title. The oblique, impressionistic harmonies of the opening section of Rêverie suggest that the dream is too fragile to grasp. Then, after one of the more poetic of Sibelius’s keyboard cadenzas, the vision is firmly captured in handfuls of sonorously arpeggiated chords, but only to elude the grasp again in the closing bars.