Marjatta

by Luukas Hiltunen

Trio in einem Satz für Geige, Bratsche und Klavier wahlweise mit Kantele

Description

One might think that the Kalevala, a collection of folk poems and Finnish national epic, compiled and edited by the Finnish poet Elias Lönnröt (1802–1884), would have been musically exhausted both in terms of its characters and its subjects. A closer look reveals that this hasty assumption is false: there are still plenty of characters and subjects that have not been put into musical expression, of which Marjatta, a virgin who becomes pregnant after eating a lingonberry and gives birth to the King of Karelia, is one of the most apparent, the one I am now addressing in the present Trio.

The only other compositions on this topic are Einojuhani Rautavaara's (1928–2016) one-act chamber opera Marjatta the Lowly Maiden (1975) and Erkki Melartin's (1875–1937) Marjatta, op. 79 (1914), a tone poem for soprano and symphony orchestra. Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) and the writer Jalmari Finne (1874–1938) envisaged producing a three-part oratorio titled Marjatta from June the 27th 1905 to the end of October that year, but the composer abandoned these plans; however, the musical material ended up in the Third Symphony in C major, op. 52 (1907), the symphonic poem Pohjola’s Daughter op. 49 (1906) and the orchestral suite Scènes historiques II, op. 66 (1912).

However, in contrast to the works above, my Trio is self-evidently a chamber music work, which indicates that the Kalevala has been virtually ignored in that particular genre. This is an anomaly that needs to be addressed, and that is what the present Trio is contributing to.

Musically, Marjatta follows and thus depicts the original epic poem chronologically from its beginning to its end. In order to make the whole more comprehensible and coherent, I sketched out leitmotifs during the composition to illustrate the central elements of the story: lingonberry, Marjatta, the King of Karelia and kantele. The divisions by instruments were slightly altered from the initial idea, but the actual concept remained intact, including a voluntary performance on the kantele of the musical whole, incorporated in the concluding section of the work.

Instrumentation

vln, vla, pno, kantele

Category

Chamber Works

Commisioned by / dedications

Dedicated to violinist Emi Otogao, violist Gregor Hrabar and pianist Marie-Therese Zahnlecker

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Archive number

MF36013

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