Runeberg was not the only Romantic poet to pique Sibelius’s interest. During his years studying in Helsinki, in 1887, he wrote Trånaden (Longing) JS 203, a five-movement suite for piano and recitation, inspired by Stagnelius’s poem “Suckarnas mystär” (Mystery of the Sighs). Erik Johan Stagnelius (1793–1823) was one of the early Romantics in Sweden. The details of his life are rather obscure. His father was a priest in a small congregation on the island of Oland, where Erik Johan and his five siblings were born. After his father was appointed Bishop of Kalmar in 1807, the family followed him there in 1810. Erik Johan started writing poems in his youth. He began studying theology and law, first in Lund and later in Uppsala with poor results, partly due to his poor health. A clerk’s job as copyist in a central ecclesiastical office in Stockholm from 1815 gave him time to study, write poems and get to know the capitol. His models were Sweden’s Romantic poets: Esaias Tegner, Per Daniel Atterbom and Carl Jonas Love Almqvist. Despite his salaried position, he remained dependent on financial support from his father. Stagnelius’s health was fragile, his manners were bohemian, and he suffered from both alcohol and drug abuse. Gradually he became a reviled outsider and died at the age of thirty. He published a few books during his lifetime, but his breakthrough as a poet came only posthumously, when his complete works were published in 1824–26.

Stagnelius’s early poetry has been said to reflect three different currents, which his biographer Fredrik Böök called “Thule, Zion and Athens.” Thule stands for the Norse sagas. Zion bespeaks his Christian faith and the Biblical symbolic tradition that he had inherited from his early life. Athens stands for the Latin and Greek poetry that he translated (Horace, Propertius). This last bestowed on him the sensuality and hedonism that his puritanical Christian beliefs restricted, and he disguised strong erotic yearning through symbols from classical mythology: “Early on he was attracted to erotic motifs, which he filled with a characteristically sensual, morbid longing and contrasted with loneliness and nocturnal anxiety.

Prologue: The Grand Duchy and the Bilingual Nation

The cultural panorama of nineteenth-century Finland is, to a great extent, shaped by the national awakening, particularly toward the end of the century. And Sibelius played a significant role at this critical moment in the political history of Finland. Russian rule, beginning in 1809, was a relatively recent development: Finland had been under Swedish rule since the Middle Ages.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the redrawing of the map of Europe, the 1809 Peace Treaty of Hamina (Fredrikshamn) confirmed the outcome of the war between Sweden and Russia in 1808–9 as well as the new borders, with the result that Finland fell within the Russian empire. In his opening speech at the Porvoo (Borgå) Diet in 1809 immediately after the war, Czar Alexander I promised to preserve the country’s religion and constitution and raise Finland to “a nation among nations”, called the Grand Duchy of Finland. This was a new formulation: the concept of a Finnish nation had been irrelevant so long as its union with Sweden was taken for granted. The declaration of the new ruler lacked any constitutional basis; it was simply his confirmation of the Swedish Instrument of Government from 1772, a personally guaranteed continuation of social structures, legislation, administration and common rights. This granting of autonomy has been seen as the reason the Finns remained an obedient part of the Russian empire throughout the nineteenth century. Self-evidently, the new situation brought about an adaptive process for the inhabitants of Finland in relation to St. Petersburg, as well as a catalyst for the formation of the nation. A frequently quoted statement, “we are Swedes no more, we don’t want to become Russians, let us be Finns”, reflected a common sentiment.

An interest in the Finnish language, specific Finnish roots and a Finnish nationality had begun before the autonomy declared in 1809. During the 1770s the scholar Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1736–1804) established a group of intellectuals called the Aurora Society, at The Royal Academy of Åbo (Turku). Porthan was the publisher of the first newspaper in Finland (1771) and he also became a professor of literature, paving the way for later national heritage research, and rector at the academy; he would later be known as the “father of Finnish History.”

Out of approximately one hundred songs published during Sibelius’s lifetime, twenty-six were set to texts by Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877). It is only natural to begin the presentation of Sibelius’s poets with this giant among nineteenth- century writers in Finland. Runeberg had been the Latin teacher of Sibelius’s father, and the poet was held in high esteem in Sibelius’s home in Hameenlinna (Tavastehus). Sibelius’s biographer Erik Tawaststjerna describes the six-year-old Janne’s visit with his mother to Porvoo (Borgå) and the old bard, who had been paralyzed by a stroke in 1863. After Runeberg’s death in 1877, Sibelius again visited Porvoo, laying flowers on the poet’s newly dug grave.

Early childhood influences were certainly not the only reason for the composer’s affection for the poet. Runeberg’s iconic patriotism and his strong connection to nature harmonized with the composer’s basic worldview. His first song, Serenad, was set to a Runeberg poem and published when he was still a student at the Helsingfors Musikinstitut (Helsinki Music Institute), and in 1889, when Sibelius was leaving to study in Berlin, his teacher Martin Wegelius gave him an edition of Runeberg’s poems. We have already quoted his early letter to Aino from Vienna in November 1890: “I think his poems are more real than any others I have read so far.”

The Runeberg poems were at hand in Vienna and easily consulted, resulting in fifteen attempts at setting music to Runeberg texts (in addition to the published ones) between 1889 and 1894. Runeberg became Sibelius’s pre-eminent poet, mirroring the Goethe-Schubert and Morike-Wolf pairings and obliterating the hoary old maxim that only second-class poetry is apt for setting music. The poems’ classical heritage – restraint, balance and concentration – and folk poetry simplicity attracted Sibelius, and, in his last song opuses (opp. 88 and 90), he once again turned to Runeberg poems. Valerie Siren writes: “The twenty-seven [sic] poems by Runeberg used by Sibelius in the solo songs demonstrate the poet’s predilection for tragedy and pathos, although it is interesting to see how Sibelius’s flair for the dramatic modifies these sentiments.”

Tavaststjerna — Prince and Prisoner

Sibelius set ten poems by the contemporary writer Karl August Tavaststjerna (1860–1898); here we step into the epoch of realism, in many ways remote from the worlds of Runeberg, Topelius, Wecksell and Rydberg. Tavaststjerna published his first collection of poems, För morgonbris (For Morning Breeze), in 1883, just six years after Runeberg’s death. Tavaststjerna was well aware of Runeberg and Topelius, the two great literary figures of the century, but he represented an aesthetic position that distanced itself from the idealistic and nationalistic heritage of the Romantics. Unlike these romanticists, Tavaststjerna’s most famous novel, Hårda tider (Hard Times, 1891), was a ruthless description of the famine years of the 1860s, and it was revelatory of the abyss between the social classes. He “poked a hole in the national myths of misery nobly and patiently borne and of a caring upper class.”

Tavaststjerna has been called the first modern writer in Finland. He spent several years in Sweden, Switzerland, Italy and Germany and brought both a cosmopolitan and urban perspective to Finnish poetry. His restless traveling generated an oscillation between Europeanism and Finnishness, and he felt at home nowhere. His poem “Hemåt” (Homeward) from his collection Dikter i väntan (Poems in Waiting, 1890), exhibits a new approach:

Tavaststjerna belonged to the first generation of poets who wrote of the growing language tensions. Writing in Swedish, he registered that he belonged to a minority, whereas Runeberg, although also writing in Swedish, had been the poet of the whole (literate) nation. In light of the emerging language conflict of the 1880s and 1890s, such a broad embrace was no longer possible: the two languages had begun to generate separate cultures, and the position of the Finnish language was clearly changing.

Greater awareness also developed between the diverging lingual variants of Finland’s Swedish language and the Swedish in Sweden. This tendency occasionally gave Tavaststjerna’s editor in Sweden reason to correct his texts, as some of the words he chose were not used in Sweden. The scenery and poetic themes also changed: Runeberg had praised the idyllic beauty of inland Finland and its lakes. Tavaststjerna, himself a sailor, was more familiar with the coastal archipelago area and its powerful sea, storms, and perils.

Tavaststjerna was born in a manor house in Hame (Tavastland).

Songs lie at the heart of Jean Sibelius’s creative world. Yet for many listeners outside the Nordic countries, he remains an exclusively orchestral composer, whose musical contribution resides solely in his symphonies, tone poems and the violin concerto. This is a poor reflection of the true content of Sibelius’s work and of the role that song played in his artistic life. Sibelius in fact composed songs throughout his professional career: his first published work was a setting of “Serenad” (Serenade) by his favourite poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, and among his very final manuscript drafts was an orchestration of “Kom nu hit, död” (Come away, come away, death) from his music for William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The stylistic diversity and range of his songs is remarkable, from the childlike innocence and naivety of the Christmas songs (to texts by Zacharias Topelius), which Sibelius designated his opus 1, to the windswept grandeur and expansiveness of his response to Viktor Rydberg’s visionary “Höstkväll” (Autumn evening), op. 38 no. 1. Sibelius’s songs can express comforting familiarity, as in “Demanten på marssnön” (The Diamond upon the March Snow), op. 36 no. 6, or the deepest erotic longing and desire, as in “Till Frigga” (To Frigga), op. 13 no. 6. They can offer a penetrating insight into psychological angst and inner turmoil, such as “Aus Banger Brust” (From the anxious heart), op. 50 no. 4, or a glittering, ethereal beauty, such as “Norden” (The North), op. 90 no. 1. Songs hence encompass the full emotional spectrum of Sibelius’s expressive range as intensively as his purely instrumental works.

One of the reasons for the importance of song in Sibelius’s output, as Gustav Djupsjöbacka’s profoundly thoughtful and reflective survey reveals, is his intimate sympathy for the symbolism and language of his poetic texts. Sibelius was an avid reader: the centrality of literature in his grammar school curriculum as a child stayed with him throughout his life, and as an adult Sibelius immersed himself in both classic poetry and the work of avant-garde writers such as Richard Dehmel.

Emerging Finnish Literature

The bilingual character of Finnish society and culture as it developed during the nineteenth century has been sketched in the previous chapters. Increasing the use of Finnish language in education, administration and ecclesiastic matters was a long and painful process that greatly impacted speakers of both Finnish and Swedish. This chapter will sketch the development of nineteenth-century Finnish-language poetry as part of this larger evolution as well as Sibelius’s relationship thereto, before discussing the specific Finnish texts that he set for solo voice.

The Reformation had shaken the power of the Catholic Church and created a demand for translations of devotional literature into national languages, though Latin continued to be the language of the learned. Mikael Agricola (ca. 1510–1557) laid the foundation for the written Finnish language when he presented a Finnish translation of the Bible in 1548, a feat which earned him the title “the father of Finnish literature.” Over the next few centuries, Agricola had few followers within the clergy, and thus Finnish-language literature remained undeveloped. From the seventeenth century on, priests and civil servants were educated at the Royal Academy of Åbo, founded in 1640, and its language was Latin. Although Henrik Gabriel Porthan, a professor at the Royal Academy in the late eighteenth century, came to be known as “the father of Finnish history” (see chapter 1), it was not until 1851 that the first chair in Finnish language and Finnish literature at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki was established: a prerequisite for the development of the language and culture. The first newspaper to be published in Finnish was Suomalaiset Tieto-Sanomat (Finnish Information News) in 1775, but longer running Finnish-language publications did not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Establishing a Finnish language culture was closely tied to national and political aspirations. “The early Emperors were well aware of the importance of distancing the Finns from their previous Swedish identity and heritage: fostering or promoting an alternative Finnish nationalism was one way of combatting possible revanchism and rebellious sentiments. Consequently, the national university benefited greatly from Russian administrative measures.” The discovery of and interest in folk poetry in the spirit of Porthan strongly supported the development of a Finnish-language culture.

Josephson – Sweden’s Rembrandt and Matisse

The fact that Sibelius set ten poems by Ernst Josephson (1851–1906) (in eleven songs) is remarkable for two reasons. First, the amateur poet Josephson’s output is not extensive: he published only two small collections. Second, the themes of his poems are neither idealistic nor pantheistic, unlike so many of Runeberg’s and Rydberg’s; rather, they are expressionistic, almost grotesque, studies of tormented souls or curious tales with macabre elements. Josephson’s simple but effective strophes have nothing of the refined poetic language of Viktor Rydberg, Carl Snoilsky or Oscar Levertin either; they are more reminiscent of notebook sketches than thoroughly elaborated, polished verses. His rhymes sometimes seem rather forced, even clumsy. Whether Sibelius’s occupation with Josephson’s poetry (1908–9) was a catalyst for his “introverted,” expressionistic period or a result thereof is a chicken-egg dilemma. The fact is that it coincides with his break from the classicistic Third Symphony to the Fourth.

Ernst Josephson’s name is part of Swedish cultural history, but considerably more so in the sphere of painting than poetry. He grew up in a Jewish family in Stockholm with relatives, active in both music and theater. Ernst was ten when his father died, and he had a close relationship with his mother. Still a teenager, he began his studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm. As a youth of twenty, he is reported to have exclaimed: “I am going to be Sweden’s Rembrandt – or die!”

In November 1875, he left for Central Europe, studying and copying the art of the great masters, primarily in Paris. In a poem, “Skål för Paris” (A Toast for Paris), he declared:

In 1876 he lived in Holland, mainly in Amsterdam, where he studied and copied paintings by Rembrandt and other Flemish masters. Here he was commissioned to paint a portrait of an eighteen-year-old lady, Ketty Rindskopf, with whom he fell passionately in love. His affection for her was never returned. In the fall of 1877 he continued to Italy, where he spent almost two years in Florence and Rome.

The theme of this book is the corpus and poetic environment of Jean Sibelius’s art songs. Sibelius’s powerful music has found admirers all over the world, but his international reputation is largely based on his symphonies, symphonic poems and violin concerto. The vocal works have remained at the margins, even for art song enthusiasts. In large part, this is due to the language barrier – Sibelius mainly set texts in Swedish and Finnish, both of them marginal European languages – but it is also due to his unconventional aesthetics, breaking away from the nineteenth- century German traditions that dominate the lied canon. In his own way, Sibelius belongs among the innovators of the lied tradition like Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and, finally, Arnold Schoenberg: fin de siècle composers embracing the rise of modernity. Sibelius’s more than one hundred art songs form a significant portion of his musical works, much too important to be neglected.

The literature on Sibelius, his life and his compositions, is extensive, spanning from early personal and anecdotal biographies (Furuhjelm, von Torne, Ekman, Johnson, Levas, Gray, Downes) to more recent books, such as more detailed biographies by Robert Layton, Andrew Barnett, Tomi Mäkelä, Marc Vignal, Ferruccio Tammaro and so forth. Erik Tawaststjerna’s five volumes on Sibelius in Swedish (compressed to three volumes in Robert Layton’s English translation) were groundbreaking when they appeared (1965–88), as he was the first scholar able to gain access to Sibelius’s diaries and other primary sources, and Tawaststjerna’s work has remained foundational to this day. Fabian Dahlström’s comprehensive catalogue Jean Sibelius: Thematisch-bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke (2003) was the first publication of a series of important documents, a goldmine for the Sibelius scholar. It was followed by Sibelius’s diary (2005) and his correspondence with Count Axel Carpelan (2010) and Adolf Paul (2018), all three with extensive commentaries. Sibelius’s correspondence with his wife, Aino, was published in three volumes, the first two in Finnish versions by Suvi-Sirkku Talas (2001, 2003), and the third (2007) including their original mix of languages, Swedish and Finnish. Glenda Dawn Goss’s book Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland (2009) equals Tawaststjerna’s work in its profound descriptions of the political and linguistic context in which Sibelius became a national icon.

Further Runeberg Songs

In 1907, Sibelius returned to Runeberg’s 1845 cycle “A Little Fate,” which had inspired him twice before (I Have Since Stopped Asking and But my Bird Is Nowhere to Be Seen). He now picked the poem “Hundra vägar har min tanke” (A Hundred Ways My Thoughts Will Wander).

“Hundra vägar,” a poem of fourteen lines, is the sixth of ten poems in this Kalevala meter cycle. At this stage in the cycle the young, pious girl confesses that her prayers in church are constantly distracted by her warm feelings for her beloved. Being in love has opened her eyes to the beauty of creation and led her to more fully enjoy its wonders. The sun, the stars, the flowers, the trees – all are signposts showing the way to God, the wellspring of love. Near this source, she realizes the nearness of her lover, too. In Runeberg’s world there is no conflict between God’s love of mankind and worshipping nature, rather they intensify each other. Love is a divine gift, and the experience of love is directly connected to perceiving the beauty of creation (as also described in “Summer Night” later in this chapter). And, as we saw in “The First Kiss,” heaven meets earth in the blissful moment in which love is born.

It is impossible to interpret these lines without taking note of a remarkable literary polemic on religious issues in the newspaper Helsingfors Morgonblad, in 1837–38. Runeberg published in it three allegorical short stories, Den gamle trädgårdsmästarens brev (Letters from the Old Gardener), in which he described the work of a gardener and his young daughter Rosa, who enjoyed tending the garden as part of God’s creation. Having gone through a religious revival, she learned of her sinful character, lost interest in gardening and disrupted the cordial relationship she had had with her father. Concerned only about her salvation, she slowly withered and died. The allegory was directed against the life-changing attitude brought about by strict Pietism.

In a response to the published letters, Lars Stenback, an old friend of Runeberg and a gifted poet himself, vehemently attacked Runeberg. Stenback (see also chapter 4) accused the author of the letters of focusing only on the earthly, and, in his eyes, Runeberg’s pantheism was idolatry.

Topelius – Historian and Fairytale-Teller

By general consensus, the three great national figures of nineteenth-century Finland were Snellman, Runeberg and Lönnrot, each predominant in their specific field. However, to these we should add Zacharias Topelius (1818–98), their junior by more than ten years. Topelius had a significant influence on the national movement through his history writing, primarily via the groundbreaking Boken om vårt land (The Book of our Country), published in 1875. This popular textbook’s presentation of Finland’s history, nature and geography, and its illustrations, had an enormous impact (in both Swedish and Finnish) on the many generations of schoolchildren who read it from its publication until the 1950s. Topelius had earlier published Finland framställt i teckningar (Finland Presented in Drawings, 1845–52), which served a similar function. “Topelius was the popularizer, who brought the great fate of Finnishness to the public enlightenment and made the grace of God into a persistent component of public Finnish nationalism.”

Topelius was born in the little town of Uusikaarlepyy (Nykarleby) in Ostrobothnia on the west coast, not far from Runeberg’s birthplace. Like his fellows, he was sent away to school at an early age, first to Oulu (Uleåborg) and then to Helsinki, where the university had been transferred in 1828. For a period in 1832 he even boarded at the Runebergs’ and, as an adolescent, was able to share in the discussions of the Saturday Circle (see chapter 2). He studied history, defending his thesis on ancient Finnish wedding rites in 1847, and was appointed professor of Finnish history at the university in 1854 and finally rector of the Imperial Alexander University (1875–78).

During his studies, Topelius became actively engaged in student organizations known for serving as cradles of political awareness. At the age of twenty-four he became editor of the newspaper Helsingfors Tidningar, which he reformed and developed into a modern journal during his twenty years in the position (1841–60). However, his broad and significant impact on journalism and his social reportage, including political opinion formation, was not fully acknowledged until the twentieth century.

In addition to public education (Volksbildung), journalism and scholarly activities, Topelius was active as a poet. His first collection of poems, called Ljungblommor (Heather Flowers), appeared in 1845, but he had published his first poem in Helsingfors Morgonblad (Runeberg’s journal) in 1838.

Adolf Paul — The Devoted Enemy

Sibelius wrote incidental music throughout his active composing period, despite his increasing annoyance with the restrictions that text imposed on his music. The early Scenic Music for a Festival and Lottery in Aid of Education in the Province of Viipuri (1893) had included vocal parts, but the first incidental music that actually contained songs was the music he composed for King Christian II (1898) by his old study comrade and “contentious brother” Adolf Paul (1863–1943), full name Adolf Georg Wiedersheim-Paul.

Sibelius had known Adolf Paul from their student years in Helsinki in the 1880s. Paul was born in Sweden, moved to the southwest part of Finland and began studying piano at the Helsinki Music Institute in 1886. When Ferruccio Busoni arrived in Helsinki – he taught in Helsinki from 1888 to 1890 – Paul studied with him for one year before moving to Weimar in 1889. Adolf Paul’s musical career soon turned into a writing career, and for the rest of his life he stayed mainly in Berlin. He published about twenty novels, including En bok om en människa (mentioned in chapter 1), twenty plays and some autobiographical stories. Many of his works deal with mental disorders, sexual deviation and spectacular crimes, and his collection of short stories, The Ripper, was banned by the censor.

In these early Helsinki years, Busoni, Adolf Paul, Sibelius and the brothers Armas and Eero Jarnefelt formed a group, calling themselves the Leskovits after the name of Busoni’s dog, Lesko. The friends usually met in a cafe for discussions, improvisations and the critique of compositions. Sibelius dedicated two early piano compositions to Paul: Andantino in E major JS 41 and Florestan JS 82. Despite Paul’s early removal to Germany and his later Nazi sympathies, the two remained in contact throughout their lives. Sibelius often visited the Paul family in Berlin, and their familiar, sincere and revealing correspondence was published in 2016 with a commentary by Fabian Dahlström. The Ainola library contains a seemingly complete collection of Paul’s literary works.

Their most intensive common enterprise was King Christian II. The main character of the play was the contradictory Danish king (1481–1559), in Denmark called “Kristian the Good” and in Sweden “Kristian the Tyrant.”