There are some later songs but, to all intents and purposes, his contribution to the romans repertoire begins over a decade before the first Symphony and ends just before the third and final version of the fifth-well before his last four major works, the sixth and seventh Symphonies, Tapiola and The tempest. The Seven Songs, Op 13, date from the early 1890s, and the last, the six Runeberg songs, Op 90, are from 1917 when Sibelius was still struggling with the fifth Symphony and Finland was poised on the brink of civil war. (See Robert Keane: ‘Höstkväll-two versions?’, Finnish Musical Quarterly, 1990.) Other songs from the same period include Näcken (‘The watersprite’) to an accompaniment of violin, cello and piano (1888), completely unconnected with the Op 57 No 8 setting on this recording Skogsrået (‘The wood nymph’, 1888/9) to words of Viktor Rydberg, and another Rydberg setting, Höstkväll (‘Autumn evening’), completely different from his 1903 setting, Op 38 No 1. His very earliest song is a Runeberg setting, Serenad (‘Serenade’, 1888). The sketches, incidentally, include more than one attempt at setting the same poem.
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But in his hundred or so songs, plus the sketches for some three dozen more, all but a handful are to texts by Swedish poets. Sibelius’s school allowed lessons to be conducted in the vernacular and not just in Swedish and Latin, and so he first encountered the Finnish folk-poetry which was to inspire so much of his orchestral music. And so Swedish remained the language of government, alongside Russian itself, and was the preserve of the educated classes, while Finnish was the language of the masses. The Treaty of Tilsit had brought Finland into the Tsarist empire, but the Russians continued to administer the ‘Grand Duchy of Finland’, as it became, through the existing civil service set up during the six hundred or so years of Swedish rule. Indeed, he did not begin to learn Finnish until he was eight years old, in preparation for entrance to the first Finnish-speaking grammar school in the country, the Hämeenlinna Soumalainen Normaalilyseo.
The vast majority of them are in Swedish, the language with which Sibelius grew up as a child. The songs are among the best-kept secrets of the repertoire and an enormous treasure.
Apart from his lifelong fascination for the symphonic challenge, there are three sources of inspiration running through Sibelius’s art: first, the Nordic landscape which one can glimpse in almost all genres he touched secondly, the rich heritage of Finnish mythology enshrined in the Kalevala which fertilized his imagination, from The swan of Tuonela at the beginning of his career to Tapiola at the very end and thirdly, the music of the Swedish-language nature poetry to which he was drawn for so much of his life.