The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

To appreciate the impact of the changes that came over Finnish music from the early 20th century onwards, one must delve into the country’s past. From the mid-13th century, the Finnish lands – including Lapland to the north, Ostrobothnia in the west and centre, and Karelia in the east – were under Swedish rule. Thus, while the Christianisation of the region dates back to at least the 11th century (with the first missions there rather earlier), the growing Swedish influence in the 12th century ensured that the form of Christianity was Catholic, with the monastic Dominican order playing a particularly dominant role. The Reformation was embraced during the 16th century in the form of Lutheranism (resulting in a proliferation of chorale books in both Swedish and Finnish). For many years, non-folk music was chiefly practised – as elsewhere across Europe – under the aegis of the church. Professional music first started with the building of church organs during the 17th century, and the need for trained musicians to play them and lead the musical side of the worship.

It was in the 18th century that secular classical music-making really established itself, with the establishment of the collegium musicum at Turku University – Finland’s first orchestra – by the organist of Turku Cathedral, Carl Petter Lenning (1711–1788). During the enlightened rule of Gustav III (r. 1771–1792), the ‘Aurora’ secret society – established for the promotion of science, history and the arts – had its own orchestra which gave Finland’s first public concerts in the mid-1770s, and a further development was the setting up of the Turku Musical Society in 1790 for the express purpose of establishing an orchestra and mounting concerts.

Unsurprisingly, Finland’s first composer of real note – Bernhard Crusell (1775–1838) – was, although a native of south-western Finland, active chiefly in the Swedish capital Stockholm, where he was clarinettist in the court orchestra, and where he died five years after his retirement from playing. Crusell is remembered today for the fine chamber music and concertos he wrote for his own instrument (on which he became a celebrated soloist). Yet his other music includes many songs, an opera (The Little Slave Girl, 1824, fashionably set in the near East), and numerous other vocal works. Among these, the Viking-themed ‘Declamatorium’ The Last Warrior – recently recorded on the Ondine label – is a notable example of the new fashion for looking back to the legendary historical past and the idolisation of ancient times in raising national and cultural awareness. Its narrative elements – in particular the declaimed text – will appeal to anyone who loves the poetry of the Swedish language in, say, the films of Ingmar Bergman.

By the time Crusell wrote both The Little Slave Girl and The Last Warrior, his homeland had changed hands for the first time in nearly 600 years: as a result of Sweden’s defeat in the Finnish War of 1808–09, it was now part of the Russian Empire as the Grand Duchy of Finland. Nothing better illustrates the fluid nature of nations and allegiances of the era than that the anthem for the newly-autonomous Finland than that its eventual national anthem – Vårt land [‘Our country’] in Swedish, Maamme in Finnish – was composed (in the momentous year of 1848) by the Hamburg-born Fredrik Pacius (1809–1891). A pupil of Spohr, since 1834 he had taught at the University of Helsinki, and in 1838 had founded the Academic Male Voice Choir of Helsinki (Helsinki had replaced Turku as the Finnish capital in 1812). In 1852, in the spirit of Romantic nationalism, he composed the opera, Kung Karls jakt (King Charles’s Hunt), which – notwithstanding its Swedish libretto – was hailed as the first ‘Finnish opera’, and Pacius himself as the ‘Father of Finnish music’. Its only modern complete recording – issued on the Marco Polo label in 2004 – would be a welcome candidate for rerelease, if only for curiosity value. Essentially a Singspiel with substantial portions of dialogue (the adolescent king of the title is an exclusively spoken role), it owes much to the early German Romanticism of Weber, as do two further operas by Pacius, The Princess of Cyprus (1860) and Die Loreley (1862–87). The only completed movement of the composer’s Symphony in D minor (1850) is in a similar vein: all are eminent crowd-pleasers, but with little to hint at either a distinctive ‘Finnish’ style or an individual compositional style. Pacius’s choral works, which include a number of folk-song arrangements, are more suggestive, part of the pan-European boom in music for the thriving amateur choral society movement which raised national cultural awareness during the 19th century.

Pacius wasn’t alone in attempting to tackle national-themed subjects in a fundamentally Germanic style. The enticingly titled Kullervo Overture (1860) by Filip von Schantz (1835–1865) is rather slicker than the expectations aroused by its mythical theme; it was written after three years of study in the musical capital of 19th-century Europe, Leipzig, for the opening of a new building for Helsinki’s New Theatre, where Schantz was music director for three years. Yet the (bardic?) harp swirls amid the sombre strings and brass of its slow introduction, which returns to close the piece, hint at a composer of real talent, and one is left wondering how he might have impacted upon the development of Finnish music had lived beyond the age of just 30.

As it is, the composer who dragged Finnish music into the late 19th century was another, rather younger graduate of the Leipzig Conservatoire: Robert Kajanus (1856–1933). It was Kajanus’s fascination with Finnish folk legends – as repackaged in the seminal Kalevala (first published in 1835/36, enlarged 1849) – that in turn fired the imagination of his younger friend Jean Sibelius. As founder of Finland’s first professional orchestra, the Helsinki Orchestral Society (1882), Kajanus occupies a key place in Finnish musical life. Later he would become one of Sibelius’s most significant early champions. His own music lacks that final spark of genius that marks the latter’s works. Yet in pieces like Kullervo’s Funeral March (1880) with its ominously percussive opening and expressive use of the tenor register as well as string tremolandi, and still more the symphonic poem Aino (1885) culminating in the incorporation of a male chorus, he opened up a sense of space that would prove crucial to the Finnish musical revolution, and the voice of nature itself. If one is seeking the roots of modern Finnish music, a strong case can be argued for Kajanus as spiritual father-figure; no-one interested in its subsequent development can afford to ignore him.

Next time: Sibelius!

Recommended recordings:
Crusell - The Last Warrior (Helsinki Baroque Orchestra / Hakkinen) ODE14242
Pacius - Hymn to Finland: Choral Works (Akademiska Sangforeningen / Wikström) BISCD1694
Kajanus - Orchestral Works (Lahti Symphony Orchestra / Vänskä) BISCD1223