1887–1947 · Finland
Leevi Madetoja (1887–1947) was a Finnish composer, conductor and teacher who studied with Jean Sibelius. His music draws on Finnish folk melodies, the example of Sibelius and French tradition. The site offers pianists seven of his pieces at the Intermediate+ level: a lullaby, romances, An Old Memory and four pieces from Op. 34.
Leevi Antti Madetoja was born in Oulu on 17 February 1887 into a seafaring family. His father, who served as first mate on a trading vessel, went to the United States to earn money and died there of tuberculosis in 1888, never having seen his son. His mother, Anna Hyttinne, raised Leevi and his brother Yrjö. The family was poor and sometimes went hungry, and as a boy Leevi worked as a street cleaner and at a sawmill.
He was no child prodigy. He first tried composing at the age of eight and taught himself the violin and piano. The instrument he handled best was the kantele: he was given a ten-string one when he turned ten, and at the Oulu Lyceum he moved on to a thirty-string model. At the Lyceum he sang in the school choirs and in time came to lead them.
Madetoja entered the University of Helsinki and the Music Institute in 1906, where under Armas Järnefelt and Erik Furuhjelm he studied piano, composition and music theory. The following summer, 1907, a grant from the Finnish Literature Society sent him to Inkeri, in Russia, to gather folk songs.
In 1908 Jean Sibelius, the best-known composer in Finland, agreed to teach him privately. The lessons at Ainola were irregular and unsystematic, yet Madetoja prized them and took on part of his teacher's distinctive musical language. The lessons went on until 1910.
The first of his works to be heard were given at student concerts of the Music Institute: the Op. 2 songs in December 1908 and two movements of the Piano Trio, Op. 1, on 29 May 1909. He reached a wider audience in January 1910, when Robert Kajanus, who led the Helsinki Orchestral Society, conducted the Elegia taken from his Symphonic Suite, Op. 4; it was a considerable success.
In 1910 Madetoja graduated from both the institute and the university and became a music critic, writing essays and reviews first for the magazine Säveletär and then for the newspaper Päivä. His first concert of his own works in Helsinki took place on 26 September 1910: under his baton came the Trio, extracts from the Symphonic Suite, and the music he had written for Eino Leino's play Chess, Op. 5.
What drew Madetoja to Paris were the enthusiastic reports of his friend, the composer Toivo Kuula, who had studied there earlier. Funded by the Finnish state and carrying a letter from Sibelius, he applied to Vincent d'Indy, whose school followed the symphonic ideas of César Franck. They had just one lesson before d'Indy fell ill and the plan fell apart. For the rest of his stay in Paris Madetoja had no teacher and worked on his own music, and the Concert Overture, Op. 7, came out of this.
In the autumn of 1911 Madetoja set out for Vienna and Berlin. Sibelius helped once more, arranging for the young composer to study with Robert Fuchs, a former teacher of his own. In Vienna Madetoja audited the conservatoire's courses in composition and conducting and wrote Dance Vision, Op. 11.
Madetoja and Kuula returned from Berlin to Helsinki together, and in 1912 Kajanus made both of them assistant conductors of the Helsinki Orchestral Society; Madetoja kept the job until 1914. It let him perform his own music: Dance Vision was first heard under his baton on 12 October 1912, and at his second concert of his own works, on 14 October 1913, he presented the Concert Overture and the symphonic poem Kullervo, Op. 15, about the tragic hero of the Kalevala. The pay was small, so he supplemented it as a critic for the newspaper Uusi Suometar, where he became known for his articles on French musical life.
The First World War began in July 1914, and that ended the rivalry between Helsinki's two orchestras: a single joint orchestra took their place, and Madetoja found himself surplus to requirements, even pawning his metronome to make ends meet. In September 1914 he left for Viipuri to conduct the local orchestra, a post he held until 1916. The orchestra was in a sorry state: he managed to gather only 19 players.
While working in Viipuri, Madetoja was writing his First Symphony, one of his first major works. It was premiered in Helsinki on 10 February 1916 under his own baton; it is dedicated to Kajanus. Critics, some of whom noticed the influence of Sibelius, received it warmly. Encouraged by this success, the composer moved to Helsinki and began his Second Symphony that summer.
To make a living he became the music critic of the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (1916–1932) and taught the theory and history of music at the Music Institute (1916–1939). In 1917 the state awarded him an artist's pension for three years so that he could compose more, and in 1918 it made the pension lifelong.
In 1918 a civil war was fought in Finland (27 January to 15 May). During May Day celebrations Madetoja's friend Kuula fell out with some White Army officers, and one of them shot him dead.
The Second Symphony was premiered on 17 December 1918 under Kajanus and was received with exceptional warmth. Around that time the composer published a piece for solo piano in the magazine Lumikukkia, and in 1919 he expanded it into a three-movement suite, The Garden of Death, Op. 41; the suite and the Second Symphony have some melodic motifs in common. In 1934, after his mother died, Madetoja dedicated the Second Symphony to her.
In the 1920s Madetoja was financially secure but stretched thin. By June 1928 a post teaching music at the University of Helsinki had been added to his work at the Music Institute and his reviews for Helsingin Sanomat; it paid little but carried great prestige, and its duties included leading the Academic Orchestra. He also did administrative work for the profession: in 1917 he helped found the Finnish Composers' League, acting as secretary and afterwards as president, and in 1928 he helped set up Teosto, the composers' copyright society, which he chaired from 1937 to 1947.
The commission for an opera drawn from a well-liked 1914 play by Artturi Järviluoma, an Ostrobothnian journalist and writer, was offered first to Kuula, in November 1917. He declined, because the realism of the play clashed with his taste for fairy-tale and legendary subjects. The commission passed to Madetoja, who had shown interest in the project too. Composition, which started in the last days of December 1917, dragged on, and the opera The Ostrobothnians (Pohjalaisia), Op. 45, was finished in September 1923.
The first full staging took place at the Finnish National Opera on 25 October 1924 and was arguably the biggest triumph of the composer's career. For a country with no operatic tradition of its own it was a landmark: The Ostrobothnians went straight into the repertoire and has stayed there ever since. The opera was also staged abroad in Madetoja's lifetime: in Kiel in 1926, in Stockholm in 1927, in Gothenburg in 1930 and in Copenhagen in 1938.
After the success of the opera Madetoja went to France for six months, to the small town of Houilles outside Paris, where he began the Third Symphony, Op. 55. It was first heard in Helsinki on 8 April 1926. Listeners and critics were perplexed: the monumental, elegiac Second Symphony had raised expectations, and the cheerfulness and restraint of the Third caught them off guard. Today the Third Symphony is regarded as Madetoja's masterpiece.
Alongside the Third Symphony, Madetoja was composing a ballet-pantomime on exotic Japanese themes, Okon Fuoko, Op. 58. Its libretto was by the Danish playwright Poul Knudsen, whom the Copenhagen music publisher Wilhelm Hansen introduced to the composer in 1925. Madetoja finished the score in late 1927, but the Danish premiere never took place: the work was first staged in February 1930 in Helsinki, at the Finnish National Opera. Critics were unanimous in praising the music but judged the libretto a dramatic failure, and only three performances were given. From the music he assembled Suite No. 1 in six numbers, which was a success.
The 1930s brought Madetoja hardship and disappointment. He was working on a second opera, Juha, based on Juhani Aho's novel of 1911, with a libretto by the well-known Finnish soprano Aino Ackté. His mother died on 26 March 1934, which interrupted the work; he was so shaken that he became ill and was unable to go to Oulu for her funeral. The opera was completed before 1934 ended and was premiered on 17 February 1935, his birthday, at the Finnish National Opera. Critics called it a brilliant success, but it did not match the fame of The Ostrobothnians and is rarely staged today.
At the same time he was working on a fourth symphony. In the spring of 1930 he told the newspaper Karjala that he had started a new symphony drawing on Finnish folk song. His fiftieth birthday, 17 February 1937, passed without it being finished, and in July 1937 he retreated to Runni, a spa town in Iisalmi, to work on it. In the spring of 1938, with the symphony nearly done, he set off for Nice, hoping that France would fire his imagination as it had for the Third Symphony. But at a railway station in Paris his suitcase containing the manuscript was stolen, and it was never recovered.
His personal life was not easy either. In February 1910, while writing the music for Chess, Madetoja met the poet Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, known as L. Onerva, who was a friend and lover of Leino. Later they married formally. They had no children, although both wanted them; the couple quarrelled often, and each suffered from chronic alcoholism.
Madetoja made no attempt to reconstruct the lost fourth symphony: his inspiration and memory were fading. By January 1942 he was in hospital because of alcoholism. In the 1940s he struggled with poor health, depression and a collapsing marriage, and his creative energy dwindled. He orchestrated the song cycle Autumn, Op. 68, for soprano and piano to poems by his wife, composed earlier. Otherwise he wrote mostly small-scale works, chiefly for unaccompanied choir. The last piece he finished was Matkamies (Wayfarer), for female choir, composed in the year he died; Olavi Pesonen completed the sketch.
Madetoja died at the Konkordia hospital in Helsinki on 6 October 1947. His funeral was at the Old Church in Helsinki on 11 October, among those who sent wreaths were President Juho Kusti Paasikivi, the education ministry, the city of Oulu and others. The composer is buried at Hietaniemi cemetery, and Onerva was buried beside him in 1972. In 1983 a new concert hall in Oulu, home of the Oulu Symphony Orchestra, was named after Madetoja.
Madetoja's output is varied: it includes vocal and chamber music, symphonies and operas. His style was shaped by Finnish folk music, by the music of his teacher Jean Sibelius and by the French impressionists. For a national-romantic composer his manner is unusually introverted, combining Finnish melancholy, melodies from his native Ostrobothnia, and the grace and lucidity of the French symphonic tradition that descends from César Franck and Vincent d'Indy.
At the centre of his work stand three symphonies (1916, 1918 and 1926), the opera The Ostrobothnians, a second opera, Juha (1935), and the ballet-pantomime Okon Fuoko (1927). His music is seldom played outside the Nordic countries, but in recent decades interest in it has revived, as the recording projects of several Nordic orchestras and conductors show.
Beyond the large genres, Madetoja wrote symphonic poems: Vision in a Dream (1912) and Kullervo, Op. 15 (1913). For choir he wrote, among other things, cantatas to texts from the Kalevala: Sammon ryöstö, Op. 24 (1915), and Väinämöisen kylvö, Op. 46 (1920). He later orchestrated the cycle Autumn, Op. 68, set to poems by his wife L. Onerva. In his last years he turned to small forms, above all unaccompanied choral songs. As a conductor he worked with the orchestras of Helsinki and Viipuri, and he lectured for more than two decades on the theory and history of music at the Helsinki institute; H. Leiviskä was among his pupils.
His chamber music includes the Piano Trio, Op. 1, the Sonatina for violin and piano, Op. 19 (1913), and a lyrical suite for cello and piano, Op. 51 (1922).
For piano Madetoja wrote many small pieces, among them Opp. 12, 21, 31, 34 and 65, as well as the three-movement suite The Garden of Death, Op. 41. The site offers seven of his editions for solo piano, all at the Intermediate+ level: Kehtolaulu (Lullaby), Op. 12; Two Romances, Op. 17; An Old Memory, Op. 31; and four pieces from Op. 34: Morning (Aamu), Caprice, Legend and Valse. Each title suggests a picture: a lullaby, romances, a memory, morning, a caprice, a legend and a waltz. You can start with any of them, as they share the same level. A piano competition also bears Madetoja's name; it is one of the leading classical music competitions in Finland and is held every three years.