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Erkki Melartin Traumgesicht • Marjatta the Blue Pearl

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Erkki Melartin Traumgesicht • Marjatta the Blue Pearl ERKKI MELARTIN TRAUMGESICHT • MARJATTA THE BLUE PEARL SOILE ISOKOSKI FINNISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA HANNU LINTU 1 ERKKI MELARTIN 2 ERKKI MELARTIN (1875–1937) 1 Traumgesicht, Op. 70 (1910) 16:37 Symphonische Musik 2 Marjatta, Op. 79 (1914) 13:35 A Legend from Kalevala for Soprano and Orchestra Music from the ballet The Blue Pearl (Sininen helmi), Op. 160 (1928–30) 26:10 Adapted by Hannu Lintu and Jani Kyllönen 3 II Entrée avec pantomime 4:00 4 XI Danse de Nénuphares 5:23 5 VIII Scène (Tempête) 2:32 6 XIV Pas de deux 3:07 7 XVI Variation II 2:05 8 XVII Coda 1:26 9 XX Poissons à voile 3:46 10 XVI Finale (II acte), tempo di mazurka 3:51 SOILE ISOKOSKI, soprano (2) FINNISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Petri Aarnio, leader Tuomas Lehto, principal cello HANNU LINTU, conductor 3 Erkki (Erik Gustaf) Melartin (1875–1937) was a key figure in Finnish music for four decades, beginning with his début as a composer. He initially studied with Martin Wegelius in Finland (1892– 1899) and then went to Vienna to study composition with Robert Fuchs for two years (1899–1901). Fuchs was an eminent teacher whose pupils had included Gustav Mahler, Jean Sibelius and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Composing was Melartin’s life’s blood. It was his source of energy amidst setbacks in his private life and recurring chronic illness. “Then came this project, where I had only a few weeks to complete a task for which I would normally have allowed a few months. And I was fired with enthusiasm, overjoyed to be alive! I believe that this has actually improved my health, even though I have been writing at least 10 hours a day,” he wrote in 1907, after an extended convalescence at a tuberculosis sanatorium. In addition to his vocation as a composer, Melartin held many prominent positions in Finnish musical circles. He was trained as a conductor and almost always conducted the premieres of his own works. As conductor of the Viipuri Orchestra from 1908 to 1911, he transformed the musical life of the entire city. For a quarter century of his professional life (1911–1936) he was the Rector and composition teacher at the Helsinki Music Institute, which was renamed the Helsinki Conservatory during his tenure and would go on to become the Sibelius Academy in 1939. He was an exceptional manager, educator and personality: encouraging and always striving for the common good. It was thanks to his efforts – in the middle of the 1930s depression, no less – that a purpose-built building for the Conservatory, the first of its kind, was completed in 1932. It remains in the use of the Sibelius Academy to this day. Melartin’s music is rooted in the Germanic musical tradition. The major items in his prolific output, with opus numbers extending to 189, are the six symphonies (1903–1924), the Violin Concerto (1913), the opera Aino (1909), the four string quartets (1896–1910) and the Third Lyrical Suite, Impressions de Belgique (1916). The 21st century has brought a revival of interest in Melartin’s music and his importance in the field of Finnish music. Long-forgotten masterpieces have again seen the light of day, works of which no recordings at all had previously been available. One of the most significant of these is the tone poem Traumgesicht Op. 70, written in 1910. 4 This work achieved a significant international breakthrough for Melartin: it marked his first appearance abroad as an orchestral composer and a conductor. Its premiere in St Petersburg made it the second Finnish orchestral work, after Jean Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter (1906), to be performed in the concert series of Alexander Siloti, one of the big names in the musical life of the city. Melartin had initially offered his Third Symphony to be performed in St Petersburg. There was no room for it on the programme of the coming season, but Siloti promised to programme a shorter piece. Melartin, however, had nothing suitable available, and thus he set to work immediately to write a new piece. Only six weeks later, he completed a tone poem with the working title Yökuva [Night image, roughly equivalent to the final title in German]. He wrote to a friend in late August 1910: “I have been working terribly hard. The night before last I completed Traumgesicht after 15 hours of work that day. Siloti lit such a fire under me by telegraphing and writing me every so often. When I had told him what I was doing, he wanted to see the beginning, and then he urged me to send ‘täglich mehr, täglich mehr’ [daily more, daily more]! He is very delighted. It is a terribly difficult piece, and such orchestral writing has never before been attempted in this country.” The premiere at the St Petersburg Nobility Club in December 1910 was well received, and the work was described as atmospheric. It took some months for Traumgesicht to be performed in Finland, in Helsinki in March and at a concert of Melartin’s works in Viipuri in April 1911. In 1912, the composer conducted the work twice in Riga, and in May 1921 he conducted it at the Nordic Music Days in Helsinki. Georg Schnéevoigt conducted the work one last time in 1932 (under the title Symphonische Musik) at a concert of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, but then this impressive poem of nocturnal visions disappeared from view for 81 years. Hannu Lintu brought it out of the shadows at a concert of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2013. Traumgesicht is made up of two broad arcs that may with some license be considered the exposition and recapitulation sections of a sonata-form structure. Both open with the same motif but develop in different directions. The latter arc is abruptly interrupted by a Mahlerian funeral march. Recent Melartin research has shown that Traumgesicht is based on incidental music written by Melartin to a Symbolist play by Gabriele d’Annunzio named Un sogna d’una mattina primavera (The Dream of a Spring Morning) in 1905. In adapting this music scored for a small ensemble into a work for large orchestra, Melartin thoroughly revised it. Some elements of the original incidental music remain identifiable, for instance the A major theme on the oboe against a background of harp and string tremolos that follows the dreamy introduction. 5 Traumgesicht differs from the National Romantic image generally associated with Melartin. It could be described as progressive: the composer was obviously up to date with recent trends, since influences from composers such as Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Scriabin may be detected. It is also conceivable that the young Stravinsky is lurking in the background, considering the St Petersburg connection. The way in which Melartin uses the orchestra in Traumgesicht is completely different from the orchestral writing of any other Finnish composer of his day. Melartin was clearly well aware of the calibre of musicians in St Petersburg for whom he was writing. Lyrical and sensitive, the work is nevertheless written with a virtuoso flair and draws inventively on the sonorous potential of a large string section: at the opening, Melartin plays on rapid shifts between muted and unmuted strings. Traumgesicht is a wholly new aspect of Melartin’s output and demonstrates that Melartin was foremost among Finnish composers in embracing cutting-edge international trends such as Impressionism. The Impressionist streak is even more prominently displayed in the grand tone poem Marjatta Op. 79 for soprano and orchestra, written on the eve of the First World War in 1914. Melartin himself described it as a “legend”, perhaps as a reference to Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen, the orchestral legends of Dvořák or the mythological text. He dedicated the work to the soloist at the premiere, Aino Ackté. In June in that year, Ackté had asked Melartin to write her an expansive orchestral solo song that she might perform in concerts in Finland and abroad. She had similarly approached Sibelius in May in the previous year for a new work to be performed in England. Sibelius duly obliged with Luonnotar Op. 70 (1913), with a text describing the creation of the world taken from the first poem of the Kalevala; Melartin’s choice of text a year later was from the last poem of the epic, describing the arrival of Christianity in Finland in mythological terms. Luonnotar and Marjatta can with good reason be regarded as parallel works or siblings, even though they are very dissimilar in musical style. The choice of a topic from the Kalevala was also a product of the political situation of the day. Finland’s status as an autonomous Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire was under threat, and Melartin’s aim – by his own account – was to defend the Finnish identity and ancient Finnish culture as enshrined in the Kalevala “now that we are being downtrodden and Russianised in all quarters”. Melartin adapted the text, cutting it down to less than a third of the original poem. 6 Melartin worked at his typically rapid pace: he completed the orchestral score within less than a month and a half of starting. Aino Ackté performed Marjatta to piano accompaniment in Viipuri in early November, and the orchestra version was premiered in Helsinki in January 1915. Newspaper critics commended the work for its elegantly translucent orchestration and noted that the evocation of a Karelian landscape in spring was eminently suited to Melartin’s composer personality. Ackté also performed Marjatta at a grand concert she gave in Stockholm a few weeks later.
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