Malinconia Op.20 (1900)

When Malinconia was first performed – in March 1900 at a concert to raise money for a Helsinki Philharmonic tour that would take the orchestra to the Exposition Universelle in Paris – it bore the title Fantasia. But, in whatever way it is identified, it is impossible not to associate the work with the death of the composer’s youngest daughter Kirsti in a typhoid epidemic a month earlier. If Magnus Enckell’s painting Malinconia has any relevance in this context, as is sometimes claimed, it probably as a source for the new title rather than as the inital inspiration. According to the composer, the score was completed in no more than three hours, which is surely an indication of the intensity of the emotion that produced it.

The cello sets the emotional scene with a brooding soliloquy rising in irregular chromatic steps from a quiet entry near the bottom of its range to a fortissimo climax nearly two octaves higher. The piano, its always outspoken companion, responds with a dramatic flurry of arpeggios leading to the first statement of the main theme – an impassioned outcry on the cello A-string set against emphatic, urgently syncopated B flat major chords on the piano. More keyboard arpeggios precede a quieter statement of the theme in E flat major on the piano and then, in acknowledgement of the inevitable, the cello presents it in D minor. Whatever efforts are made from this point on – whatever the events of the development, including a rare passage of three-part counterpoint and uninhibited displays of both technical and emotional virtuosity from both instruments – the work is going to end tragically, if resignedly perhaps, in D minor.