Suite from  Karelia, Op. 11, Jean Sibelius

Sibelius often composed incidental music to accompany stage works and pageants.  The first commission to do so came in 1892, soon after the successful premier of Kullervo, a large-scale symphony-like tone poem for  solo vocalists, chorus and orchestra.  The commission for incidental music came from a group pf students at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki.  The students were all from Vilpuri, a city in the eastern Finnish province of Karelia.  They were planning a patriotic soiree, the stage portion of which would consist of scenes from the province's turbulent history.  The intent was to bolster  Finnish, and specifically Karelian, patriotism, in the face of ominous political posturing from fFnland's powerful and belligerent neighbor, Russia.

Sibelius began work on the score in the summer of 1893.  It consists of an overture and music to be played during, and at times between, the eight tableaux of the pageant.  The soiree took place in Helsinki  on November 13, 1893.  It was sold-out and  considered a great success.  The loud conversation of the audience , however, made much of Sibelius' music inaudible.

Before the month was out, Sibelius was conducting extracts from the score at concerts.  His friend Robert Kajanus, a conductor, assembled the three-movement suite that you will hear at these performances, and conducted its premier in 1899.  It consists of music from the third, fourth, and fifth tableaux.

The Karelia Suite opens with an atmospheric and exciting Intermezzo.  It depicts fourteenth-century Karelian woodsmen passing in procession, proudly and defiantly, on their way to p[ay taxes to a Lithuanian duke.  The secong movement, is a melancholy Ballade, originally a vocal piece.  The tableaux showed a deposed fifteenth-century king, Charles Knutsson Bonde, sitting in his castle, listening to a minstrel.  The suite concludes with a festive march.  It followed a call to battle issued by Pontus de la Gardie, a French-born. Sixteenth century soldier who became Swedish high commander in a war against Russia.