Kyllikki, three lyric pieces, Op.41 (1904)

Commodo

Kyllikki was the unfortunate maiden of Saari abducted by Lemminkäinen - hero of Sibelius’s Four Legends for orchestra - and then married to him and finally abandoned by him. Given that these three lyric pieces for piano bear her name, it is tempting to try to follow her story, as told in the Kalevala, through the events of the music. But it is not easy and, anyway, we do not know whether Sibelius was thinking in narrative terms here. What we do know is that the three pieces are intended to form a continuity which is not complete until the end of the last one. That much is clear from the fact that the first piece begins in B flat minor but is left harmonically open-ended in C sharp major, so that the conclusion remains in the air until the third piece finally comes down in favour of B flat major. It could be a purely musical strategy, with the Kyllikki title meant to suggest nothing more specific than an epic atmosphere. Or, as so many apparently illustrative sounds and gestures seem to confirm, it could be a story told in three parts.

The first piece is shaped like a ballade with a Largamente introduction featuring a grimly authoritative theme in emphatic octaves. It plunges dramatically into the main Allegro, which turns out to be a ternary construction with passionately melodious outer sections and a massively sonorous coda. To that extent it has much in common with the ballades of Chopin or - more to the point, bearing in mind the apparent model for the piano writing - Liszt. But that is without taking into account the nature of the extraordinary middle section which, beginning with an accelerated recall of the Largamente theme, is a dramatically articulated adventure: an episode for a plaintive voice high in the right hand is followed by a struggle between two themes moving in contrary motion and reaching a violent climax at the point where one prevails over the other.

In an effort to associate it with the marriage of Lemminkäinen and Kyllikki, the Andantino has been described as a love scene. It takes a considerable stretch of the imagination, however, to hear the sombre opening in B flat minor in that light, still more when it returns at the end over a syncopated ostinato tolling low in the left hand. Apart from that - at the end of the first section, at the end of the rather less lugubrious middle section in B flat major, and at the end of the piece itself - there is an inescapably harsh tremolando figure which, if it means anything at all, can only be a warning of disaster.

Paradoxically, the closing Commodo in B flat major shows no sign of disaster. Its flighty rhythms might be taken to represent Kyllikki at the village dance, as a consequence of which Lemminkäinen rejects her, but the ending is just as happy as the beginning, the Tranquillo middle section in G flat major scarcely less so. The most idiomatic example of piano writing in the three lyric pieces, it is, as Glenn Gould so accurately remarked, “a slightly giddy mix of Chopin and Chabrier.” Sibelius at the piano - an instrument he did not like and which he used more for making money than anything else - is rarely himself.