The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

The extent to which national identities overlap with broader regional trends is nowhere more apparent than in the Nordic countries: the Scandinavian trio of Denmark, Sweden and Norway plus Finland and Iceland. While each has managed to forge a separate musical identity – the distinctiveness of which varies from composer to composer – they share characteristics rooted in the region’s political and religious history and, more recently, in the shared Nordic models of social democracy. In his brilliant recent study of Nordic music in the context of broader social and cultural trends, music journalist Andrew Mellor highlights several areas in which shared values manifest themselves in different ways. The earlier dominance of the Danish and Swedish royal houses has endowed these countries with aspects of a common history which is still evident today. The importance of shared maritime heritage – most obvious in the way in which towns and cities cleave to the cost against a backdrop of often geographically challenging interiors – manifests itself in the concert halls and opera houses which look out over harbours, fjords and coastlines.

In Finland, which until the early 19th century was ruled by the kingdom of Sweden, there remains a small but significant Swedish-speaking minority, concentrated in the south and west of the country. In much the same way that the founding father of Czech musical nationalism, Bedřich Smetana, grew up as a German speaker in Habsburg-dominated Bohemia, composers like Sibelius and his brother-in-law and fellow composer Armas Järnefelt (1869–1958) were sons of the Swedish-speaking ‘elite’ although Järnefelt – for many years was director of the Royal Swedish Opera in ultra-conservative Stockholm – never embraced Finnish nationalism to the extent that Sibelius did. To this day, Finland remains officially bilingual: Finnish and Swedish, the latter closely related to the other Scandinavian tongues, while Finnish is a Uralic outlier, most closely related to far-away Hungarian.

Points of close contact and sharp difference rub shoulders in the Nordic countries with extraordinary frequency. If the region’s dominant symphonist, Sibelius, managed to forge from Tchaikovskian beginnings and underlying Germanic models a genre that was deeply evocative of the northern landscape, climate and atmosphere of his native land as well as totemic of the region as a whole for international audiences, the other great Nordic symphonist, Denmark’s Carl Nielsen, was altogether more cosmopolitan. Nielsen’s symphonies, even at their most serious, have a glint of playfulness and even irony which can wrongfoot anyone expecting something more iconically Scandinavian.

For Mellor, the symphony – and the proliferation during the 20th century of the world’s highest per capita number of professional symphony orchestras as well as state-of-the-art concert halls – is a manifestation of the region’s deeply ingrained social democracy, the result of high-income, high-taxation socio-economic models which prioritise lifelong learning and exposure to culture as a manifestation of communality. (The further roots of this sense of communality in the inhospitable climate and landscape are also examined in illuminating detail by Mellor.) Away from the high art of the symphony orchestra and opera house, similarities and differences are evident in the region’s still highly-valued folk culture, from Norway’s Hardanger fiddle and Sweden’s nyckelharpa to Finland’s bardic, cimbalom-like folk zither, the kantele, the evocation of whose distinctive sound became a key part of Sibelius’s mature musical language.

Another instance of the ‘democratic’ nature of the region’s folk music is its choral music. This phenomenon is not unique to Nordic Europe: across the continent, from Victorian Britain via Germany to the countries of east-central Europe, amateur choruses played an important role in the development of national identities as well as civic pride. Nevertheless, the choral traditions of the north are particularly rich, with foundations in its rich folk culture and literary poetry. In recent years, more and more of this repertoire has found its way onto disc. A particularly wide-ranging selection of Finnish choral music is presented on the BIS recording ‘Spring will come: Choral rarities from the Grand Duchy of Finland’. Although the Grand Duchy only existed for the little more than a century until Finland gained independence from Russia in 1917, this anthology stretches from the medieval Piae cantiones well into the 20th century, and is particularly useful for setting works by Sibelius’s contemporaries and immediate successors – including Järnefelt, Erkki Melartin (1875–1937) and Ilmari Hannikainen (1892–1955) – in a broader context. Their music will be the focus of our next instalment.

Recommended reading:
Andrew Mellor, The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press, 2022)

Recommended recording: