Classical Music | Baritone

Recorded on 08/03/2011, uploaded on 12/13/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Today, Jean Sibelius’s fame resets almost entirely upon his symphonic and orchestral compositions, despite the numerous smaller chamber, piano, and vocal works that he composed. Furthermore, it is curious that while he is considered the father of Finnish classical music, very few of the plentiful number of songs he composed are actually based on Finnish texts. Instead, many are based on Swedish poetry, the language of Sibelius’s youth.

The five songs of opus 37 were composed in 1904, making them roughly contemporaneous with the Violin Concerto and the Symphony No. 3. Each based on a Swedish poem, the collection is, in essence, a set of love songs. While much of Sibelius’s music was characterized by his native Finland and its folk music, the Germanic tradition he encountered and learned while studying in Vienna during the early 1890s under Robert Fuchs (the teacher of Mahler and Wolf) left its mark, particularly upon the style of his opus 37 songs.

“Var det en dröm” (“Was it a dream?”) is the fourth and penultimate song of the set. The anxious heart of the poet recounts the pleasant memories of an all too brief love, wondering to himself if it was but all a dream. Sibelius provides a lush Romantic piano accompaniment to the poesy of Josef Wecksell. In B major, rushing broken chords in the right hand of the piano accompaniment are set against a slower moving left hand, essentially juxtaposing the indicated 6/4 meter against 12/8, and thereby giving musical expression to the anxiety of the poet’s heart. Atop this unsettled accompaniment, which breaks only during the poem’s third stanza, the voice gives utterance to a passionate melody that likewise moves freely between the conflicting meters.          Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.