Leevi Antti Madetoja (; 17 February 1887 – 6 October 1947) was a Finnish composer, music critic, conductor, and teacher of the late-Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant Finnish contemporaries of Jean Sibelius, under whom he studied privately from 1908 to 1910.
The core of Madetoja's oeuvre consists of a set of three symphonies (1916, 1918, and 1926), arguably the finest early-twentieth century additions to the symphonic canon of any Finnish composer, Sibelius excepted. As central to Madetoja's legacy is Pohjalaisia (The Ostrobothnians, 1923), proclaimed Finland's "national opera" following its successful 1924 premiere and, even today, a stalwart of the country's repertoire. Other notable works include an Elegia for strings (1909); Kuoleman puutarha (The Garden of Death, 1918–21), a three-movement suite for solo piano; the Japanisme ballet-pantomime, Okon Fuoko (1927); and, a second opera, Juha (1935). Madetoja's fourth symphony, purportedly lost in 1938 at a Paris railway station, never materialized.
Acclaimed during his lifetime, Madetoja today is seldom heard outside the Nordic countries, although his music has in recent decades enjoyed a renaissance, as the recording projects of a number of Nordic orchestras and conductors evidence. His idiom is notably introverted for a national Romantic composer, a blend of Finnish melancholy, folk melodies from his native region of Ostrobothnia, and the elegance and clarity of the French symphonic tradition, founded on César Franck and guided by Vincent d'Indy. His music also reveals Sibelius's influence.
Madetoja was also an influential music critic, primarily with the newspaper Helsingin sanomat (1916–32), in which he reviewed the music scenes of France and Finland, praising Sibelius in particular. In 1918, he married the Finnish poet L. Onerva; their marriage was tempestuous and remained childless. His health failing due to alcoholism, Madetoja died from a heart attack on 6 October 1947 in Helsinki.
Life and career
Early years (1887–1915) Childhood Madetoja was born in Oulu, Finland, on 17 February 1887, the third son of Anders Antinpoika Madetoja (1855–1888) and Anna Elisabeth, née Hyttinne (1858–1934). To provide for his family, Madetoja's father, a first mate on a merchant ship, had earlier emigrated in 1886 to the United States, only to die in 1888 of tuberculosis along the Mississippi River. Leevi thus never met his father, and his mother raised him and his brother, Yrjö (1885–1918). (Madetoja's oldest brother, Hjalmar, had died as an infant in 1883.) The family lived in poverty and struggled with hunger, and as a boy Leevi worked variously as a street cleaner and as a laborer at a sawmill.
Although his first attempts at composition were at the age of eight, Madetoja was by no means a musical prodigy. He studied the violin and piano on his own and played the mouth organ as a boy. Additionally, Madetoja became a skilled kantele player: he received a 10-string kantele on his tenth birthday, and in secondary school at the Oulu Lyceum, he upgraded to a 30-string version. (Madetoja is certainly the only notable classical composer in history whose primary instrument was the kantele.) At the Lyceum, Leevi sang in, and eventually directed, the school's male and mixed choirs.
Student years In 1906, Madetoja enrolled at the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Music Institute, where he studied music theory, composition, and piano under Armas Järnefelt and Erik Furuhjelm. A year later, in the summer of 1907, the Finnish Literature Society sponsored Madetoja's trip to the Inkeri region in Russia so that he could collect folk songs. Additional good fortune arrived in 1908, when Jean Sibelius, Finland's most famous composer, accepted Leevi for private instruction. Although his lessons with Sibelius at Ainola were unstructured and sporadic, Madetoja valued his time with the master and assimilated some of Sibelius's unique idiom. The two studied together until 1910. (For more see: Madetoja and Sibelius.)
At the Music Institute, Madetoja's premiered his first compositions at student concerts: in December 1908, the Op. 2 songs, Yksin and Lähdettyäs; and on 29 May 1909, the Piano Trio, Op. 1 (second and third movements only). His public introduction arrived in January 1910 when Robert Kajanus, chief conductor of the Helsinki Orchestral Society, conducted Madetoja's Elegia (from the four-movement Symphonic Suite, Op. 4) to great success; critics described the Elegia as the "first master work" of a budding "natural orchestral composer".
After graduating from the Music Institute and the University of Helsinki in 1910, Madetoja took up a career as a music critic, penning essays and reviews for the Säveletär magazine and, later, the . Additional praise followed Madetoja's first composition concert in Helsinki on 26 September 1910, at which he conducted the Piano Trio and excerpts from the Symphonic Suite and Chess, Op. 5 (excerpted from incidental music Madetoja had composed for Eino Leino's play). The positive reviews did, however, contain a note of concern: given Madetoja's plans to travel to Paris for additional education, the critic of Uusi Suometar worried about the negative influence "French modern atonal composition" could have on "this fresh northern nature [Madetoja]".
Madetoja's interest in the Paris music scene was a result of the enthusiastic reports of his composer-friend, Toivo Kuula, who had earlier studied in the city. With funding from the Finnish government and a letter of introduction from Sibelius, Madetoja applied to be a student of Vincent d'Indy, who headed a school of thought founded upon the symphonic principles of César Franck. The two only met for one lesson, however, as d'Indy took ill and Madetoja's plans collapsed; he would spend the rest of his time in Paris without a teacher, attending concerts and working on his own compositions (the result was the Concert Overture, Op. 7).
After a brief stay in Oulu (where he composed and premiered on 29 September 1911 a short cantata for mixed choir and piano, Merikoski, Op. 10), Madetoja undertook a second trip abroad, this time to Vienna and Berlin, in the autumn of 1911. Sibelius again aided his pupil, arranging for Madetoja to study under his former teacher, Robert Fuchs. While in Vienna, Madetoja audited composition and conducting courses at the Conservatory, observed Franz Schalk's rehearsals, and composed Dance Vision, Op. 11.
Conductorships In 1912, Kajanus appointed Madetoja and Kuula—who had together returned to Helsinki from Berlin—as assistant conductors of the Helsinki Orchestral Society, Madetoja's term lasting until 1914. The appointment put Madetoja in the middle of Helsinki's "orchestra feud", as Kajanus' Orchestral Society squared off against Georg Schnéevoigt's newly created Helsinki Symphony Orchestra, which consisted mainly of foreign musicians. Madetoja's position with the Orchestral Society provided him the opportunity to perform a number of his compositions: on 12 October 1912, Dance Vision premiered under Madetoja's baton, and even more importantly, he had his second composing concert on 14 October 1913, where he premiered the Concert Overture and Kullervo, Op. 15, a symphonic poem based on the Kalevalic tragic hero of the same name. Madetoja earned little as an assistant conductor and thus supplemented his income as a music critic for Uusi Suometar, becoming well known for his articles on the French music scene and his recurring travels to Paris.
The dawn of the First World War in July 1914 brought an end to the feud between the two rival orchestras: the Helsinki Symphony Orchestra collapsed after the German musicians who formed its backbone were expelled from the country, and Kajanus and Schnéevoigt divided conducting duties for a joint orchestra, the Helsinki City Orchestra, that consisted of forty players surviving on starvation wages. The merger rendered Madetoja (and, a year later, Kuula) superfluous, and Madetoja pawned his metronome to stave off penury. Despite the hostilities, he traveled to Russia in September 1914 to take up the conductorship of the Viipuri Orchestra (1914–1916). Madetoja found the group in a state of devastation: he was able to piece together 19 musicians, a reality that forced him to spend much of his time finding and arranging material for such an undersized ensemble.
Mature career (1916–1930) A new Finnish symphonist While juggling his responsibilities in Viipuri, Madetoja worked on his most first major compositions, the First Symphony in Helsinki (Kajanus the dedicatee), conducting the premiere on 10 February 1916; apparently he completed the finale just before this performance. The critics, some of whom—for example in Hufvudstadsbladet—noted the influence of Sibelius, received the work warmly. Buoyed by this success, Madetoja relocated to Helsinki and began composing a second symphony in the summer. To support himself, he began work as a music critic for the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper (1916–32) and as a teacher of music theory and history at the Music Institute (1916–39). In 1917, the Finnish government granted Madetoja a three-year artist's pension, which allowed him to focus more on composing. (In 1918, the pension was extended for life.)
In 1918, the embers of the First World War ignited into civil war (27 January – 15 May 1918) between socialist Red Guards and the nationalist Whites. The war brought personal tragedy to Madetoja: On 9 April, Red Guards captured and executed Yrjö Madetoja, Leevi's brother, during the Battle of Antrea in Kavantsaari. It fell to Leevi to inform his mother:
A month later, during May Day celebrations, Kuula got into an altercation with a group of White Army officers, one of whom shot him to death. These two losses deeply upset Madetoja and likely found expression in the symphony, a composition in which he had already been contemplating Finland's fate in the wake of world war and a revolution in Russia; the epilogue Madetoja affixed to the work is one of pain and resignation: "I have fought my battle and now withdraw".
The 17 December 1918 premiere of the Second Symphony under Kajanus's baton was extraordinarily well received. Katila, for example, proclaimed Madetoja's latest work to be "the most remarkable achievement in our music since the monumental series of Sibelius". (Upon his mother's death in 1934, Madetoja retroactively dedicated the Second Symphony to her.) Around this time, Madetoja also published in Lumikukkia magazine a piece for solo piano, originally titled Improvisation in Memory of my Brother Yrjö. In 1919, Madetoja expanded the piece into a three-movement suite, renaming it The Garden of Death, Op. 41, and removing the reference to his brother; the suite shares melodic motifs with the Second Symphony.