5 Songs

Illalle Op. 17 No. 6 (1898)

Vänskapens blomma Op. 57 No. 7 (1909)

Demanten på marssnön Op.36 No.6 (1900)

Våren flyktar hastigt Op.13 No.4 (1891)

Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte Op.37 No.5 (1901)

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.

Two of the Finnish songs, Illalle and Lastu lainehilla, were published along with settings of Swedish texts by Runeberg and Tavaststjerna in a comparatively early collection, the Seven Songs Op.17. Written for the poet’s fiancée Ilta Bergroth, whose first name means “evening”, Koskimies’s Illalle inspired in Sibelius a quite different kind of vocal rhythm, and to such thrilling effect that it seems a pity that he turned to Finnish so rarely – even if it had meant less time to devote to such Swedish verse as Vänskapens blomma, the staunch sentiment of which is so faithfully reflected in the Op.57 Josephson set, where solid major harmonies and common-time rhythms are judiciously offset by a few bars of harmonic and rhythmic uncertainty at the beginning of the second stanza. The two Wecksell settings that come at the end of the Six Songs Op.36, Marsnön and Demanten på marssnön are both set amid March snow, but only the latter song reflects, in a comparatively picturesque piano part, the sparkling imagery common to the two poems.

It is clear from one of the earliest of the Runeberg settings, Våren flyktar hastigt, that his verse translated easily into melodic terms for Sibelius – whose characterisation here, incidentally, is even more imaginative in the orchestral version he made 24 years later. The last song in this group, Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte, is a particularly impressive illustration of the inspiration the composer found in Runeberg’s verse: the ballad style of the first two stanzas is perfectly matched in a setting that hints at the truth of the situation from the piano’s passionate opening bars; the explicit reversal of fortune in the third stanza is registered by chilling changes in harmony and keyboard figuration; the closing account of the events leading up to it is reflected in an even more passionate recall of the opening.