Melartin: Aino.

* Korhonen, Paasikivi, Freund; Tiilikainen, Alamikkotervo; Dominante Choir, Lahti Symphony Soderblom. Finnish libretto only. BIS 1193/94 (2) (Qualiton, dist.)

Given the limited facilities for opera production in Finland at the time, it isn't surprising that neither the prolific, Karelian-born composer Erkki Melartin (1875-1937) nor Jean Sibelius, his more famous contemporary, attempted only one such work apiece. Sibelius's Jungfrun i Tornet, briefly heard in 1896, is set to a text in Swedish, then still considered the language of the intelligentsia and privileged classes, rather like the case of German in the Bohemia of the Austro--Hungarian Empire. Melartin's use of Finnish for Aino made a distinct cultural statement with political resonance. Finnish, after all, was the language of the Kalevala, the ancient national epic, from which the story and symbolism of Aino were derived. Struggles lay just ahead for Finland's independence from tsarist rule, to be achieved in 1920.

Melartin's work, to a libretto by Jalmari Finne, deals with the courtship of Aino, a young girl, by the older Vainamoinen (here shortened to Vaino), the major hero of the Kalevala. At length he overcomes her hesitancy and the disapproval of her brother, Jouno, whom he defeats in a song contest. Aino's mother and sister, Taina and Ainikki, favor the marriage. After it takes place, Vaino fashions a kantele--the Finnish national folk instrument, a type of zither--from a birch tree, with which Aino is identified; and he translates her, as it were, into song. Meanwhile, however, Aino has disappeared. After singing an ecstatic, pantheistic hymn, she jumps into the ocean, where she is united with nature.

Anyone expecting a simplistic, folksy, "first try" score by a provincial talent is in for a surprise. Like the idiom of Sibelius, Melartin's style belongs to National Romanticism (a sort of Nordic Art Nouveau), but it also lies close to the late Romanticism of the European Continent. Aino could be a cousin to Schoenberg's Gurrelieder, though with more a French than a German accent, and it points straight ahead toward ...