Cori Ellison started off his piece on the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Northern Lights Festival with this appetizing paragraph:
You may not think you know a thing about the "Kalevala," but if you're acquainted with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the heavy-metal band Amorphis, or Don Rosa's Donald Duck cartoon books, you've got a running start.
January 7, 2005
An Epic Gave Finns a Lot to Sing About
By CORI ELLISON
You may not think you know a thing about the "Kalevala," but if you're acquainted with Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, the heavy-metal band Amorphis, or Don Rosa's Donald Duck cartoon books, you've got a running start.
And if you want to dig deeper, check out the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra's Northern Lights Festival, featuring several works by Sibelius and running through Jan. 23, or any of the several other Finnish musical events taking place around New York this month. If you do, you'll also learn a lot about why Finland's artistic clout so far exceeds its size.
The "Kalevala" is Finland's national epic, a hefty volume full of voyages, battles and magic, very much like the Scandinavian "Edda," the Anglo-Saxon "Beowulf," the German "Nibelungenlied" or the Indian "Mahabharata." But unlike those tomes, it is basically a reworking by a single individual - and a modern one - rather than a rough-and-ready collection of unvarnished folk poetry.
It was Elias Lonnrot (1802-84), a country doctor and folklore scholar who, by sheer force of will, created the "Kalevala." Beginning in 1828, he made 11 expeditions, ranging as far south as Estonia, as far north as Finnish Lapland, as far west as the Tampere area (100 miles northwest of Helsinki) and as far east as Russian Karelia, in search of the ancient sung poetry, or "runo," tradition then alive in the Eastern Orthodox regions of Finland, though long banned in the Lutheran areas.
Lonnrot sought out accomplished runo singers, the best of whom could remember thousands of lines. He could not read or write music, but notated the runos he heard by numbering the strings of his kantele, the five-stringed zither that is the national musical instrument of Finland.
Lonnrot then organized the material into a unified body of poetry, as Homer had with the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey." Lonnrot selected the best variants of each story and assembled them into a coherent whole, writing his own connective passages where necessary and imposing his own timeline to create a logically flowing chain of events.
He conflated characters to streamline the action and transformed dialect passages into newly minted literary Finnish. On Feb. 28, 1835, Lonnrot completed the first phase of his work on the "Kalevala," and ever since, Feb. 28 has been celebrated as Kalevala Day, the birthday of Finnish culture.
Such a freakishly wonderful event could have happened only at that precise split second of history. The German poet Johann Gottfried von Herder was urging Europeans to seek their cultural identity in their ancient folklore, which he termed "the mirror of the soul of the people." Finland, a province of Sweden since 1155, had been annexed as an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire in 1809 and was beginning to hatch dreams of nationhood.
But Finland in 1809 was a far cry from the sleekly sophisticated, Nokia-obsessed nation we know today. The country's educated elite then spoke Swedish, while Finnish was the tongue of servants and peasants.
Longfellow's Source
During the first millennium A.D. the animistic tribes living near the Gulf of Finland, and speaking an exotic, non-Indo-European language nothing like that of their Scandinavian and Slavic neighbors, laid the foundation of "Kalevala" poetry. This poetry, sung in a narrow, five-note melodic range, lacked both rhyme and stanza structure, but it hewed to a single, all-purpose metric formula that served as a memory aid, so that the unlettered Finns could easily remember old poems and improvise new ones.
This "Kalevala meter" is trochaic tetrameter, or four two-syllable feet, in a long-short pattern, similar to Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha":
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.
Longfellow, a contemporary of Lonnrot, had co-opted the Finnish epic's meter, alliteration and even some plot points, trying, as he wrote, "to do for the old Indian legends what the unknown Finnish poets had done for theirs."
The "Kalevala," the epic of the people of Kaleva, is dominated by the character of Vainamoinen, a shaman and sorcerer who can charm wild beasts with his kantele and use words as weapons. He is the Gandalf-like "eternal sage" who establishes the land of Kaleva and leads and teaches its people.
Promise of Prosperity
The "Lord of the Rings" parallels don't end there. Tolkien fashioned Quenya, the lyrical lingo of Middle Earth's elves, after the click and lilt of spoken Finnish. Both the "Kalevala" and Tolkien's saga, modeled after it, outline a hero's journey in pursuit of a powerful sacred object, replete with shape-shifting, demons and magical plants and animals.
The "Kalevala" depicts the continuing struggle between the good Kaleva (read the Finns), from whose perspective the story is told, and the bad Pohjola from the foggy north (perhaps the Sami people of Lapland). On a deeper, more esoteric level, the "Kalevala" may be read as a contest between light and darkness, good and evil.
The central myth of the "Kalevala" is the story of the Sampo, a mysterious object forged by Vainamoinen's brother, the blacksmith Ilmarinen. We are never told what the Sampo actually is, but it has often been imagined as a sort of magic mill that churns out salt, grain and gold. The Sampo's metaphorical meaning is clear enough: it is the source of prosperity and good fortune.
The "Kalevala" swiftly became the de facto collective memory of the Finns, a boost to their national self-esteem, a rallying point for Finnish independence and, eventually, a wellspring of artistic inspiration. It brought a small, obscure nation to the world's attention, raising the Finns to a historical status alongside other old European peoples, while highlighting their uniqueness.
Creating an Identity
Lonnrot published an expanded "New Kalevala" in 1849, but it would be years before any of it was set to music. Finland was then a political and economic backwater, and Finnish classical music was in its infancy. It slavishly imitated the music of central Europe, the only model it knew. So even the first "Kalevala"-based concert works, like the "Kullervo Overture" (1860) by Filip von Schantz, merely stuffed the epic's sprawling subject matter into a tidy Western musical matrix.
Enter the Karelianists, a group of young Finnish artists who revered the "Kalevala" as the cornerstone of Finnish culture.
The Karelianist movement peaked in the 1890's and continued until shortly after Finland achieved its independence, in 1917. Its ranks included the poet Eino Leino, the architect Eliel Saarinen and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, whose vivid images of "Kalevala" scenes are still the ones etched in most Finns' minds.
These Karelianists also gave the world Jean Sibelius (1865-1957), who, through his embrace of the "Kalevala," would become as great a national symbol and source of pride as the epic itself. His music, the composer Erkki Salmenhaara said, "was stylistically influenced to a great extent by the modality, endless repetition and narrow compass of ancient Finnish folk music and the rhythm of 'Kalevala' poetry - much like primitive Russian folk music was later to influence the music of Stravinsky."
A National Music
Sibelius was a Swedish speaker by birth, unable to speak a word of Finnish until he was about 8. His mother enrolled him in one of the first schools in Finland to use Finnish as the teaching language, which opened up to him the world of the "Kalevala."
Like many Finnish composers before and since, Sibelius felt humbled at the thought of setting the "Kalevala" to music. But he tamed his fears enough to write the symphonic poem "Kullervo" (1892), which put him on the international musical map and, more important, planted the seeds of a national musical language. Rather than idealizing the subject matter, Sibelius took an archaic-flavored, musically radical approach that embraced both the tale's ancient nature and its modern guise.
After "Kullervo" Sibelius planned a "Kalevala" opera, "Building of the Boat," with Vainamoinen as the main character. When this project was scuttled, its musical materials were absorbed into the "Lemminkainen Suite" (1896), four tone poems on the exploits of the epic's Don Juan figure.
Sibelius had gone on a poetry-collecting jaunt to eastern Karelia in 1892, but he rarely used direct quotes from folk songs or runo tunes, and disparaged their significance in his works, probably for fear of being branded provincial.
Though digging for traces of runo tunes in Sibelius's works has been frowned upon in Finland, the folk song scholar A. O. Vaisanen found numerous runo tunes in his work. In the first tableau of "Karelia" (1893), the composer used direct folk music quotes and brought actual runo singers on stage to perform them.
More significant than Sibelius's quotations of folk songs is the way that the musical heritage of the "Kalevala" merged seamlessly with his personal musical voice. The narrow melodic range of the runo themes gave birth to his distinctive brand of symphonic motifs, and the endless repetition of "Kalevala" tunes sparked his new ornamental variation technique.
The modality of "Kalevala" music helped Sibelius distance himself from the constricting major-minor tonality of Western music. In 1896, Sibelius wrote: "I had to yield to the tonality stemming from ancient folk songs. Now it is apparent that our present system of tonality is crumbling."
As the 20th century wore on, enthusiasm for the "Kalevala" waxed and waned, and Karelianism was sometimes stereotyped as conservative jingoism or a retreat from reality. Modernists saw the "Kalevala" culture as a hindrance to the universal aspirations of their art. When the "Kalevala" did influence 20th-century music, it tended to do so more generally, as an emphasis on ancient, mythical sensibilities.
The youngest generation of Finnish classical composers has taken scant interest in the "Kalevala," but the epic seems to intrigue young musicians of a more popular stripe. In the 1980's, the folk music band Vrttina began with pure runo singing but more recently has raised hackles among purists for its fusion work.
Edward Vesala, a powerful, shamanlike jazz musician, recorded two "Kalevala"-flavored discs, "Snow" (1987) and "Ode to the Death of Jazz" (1990), before his death in 1999. The progressive rock band Kalevala recently released a triple CD, "Kalevala - A Finnish Progressive Rock Epic," on which 30 international bands explore themes and tunes inspired by the "Kalevala."
Made for Heavy Metal
Of all popular musical styles, heavy metal would seem perfectly matched to the moody Goth fantasy of the "Kalevala." In 1994, Amorphis, Finland's best-known metal band, began exploring the "Kalevala" in its album "Tales From the Thousand Lakes."
Clearly, the impact of the "Kalevala" has been extraordinary, both within and outside Finland. Beyond the realm of high art, Finland's streets, businesses and merchandise (including Kalevala-Koru's imposing replicas of Iron Age jewelry) bear names drawn from the epic, and "Kalevala" tarot decks, video games and comic books abound, including Don Rosa's "Tale of the Sampo," featuring Donald Duck.
The epic has been translated into 51 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Esperanto, Greek, Hindi, Swahili - and even Yiddish.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the "Kalevala," however, is the fact that the heroism it celebrates is accomplished not through physical strength or violence, but through magical songs. If that's not the key to Finland's success story, what is?
Cori Ellison is the dramaturge at the New York City Opera.