My first piano quintet “Minna – Pictures from the life of Minna Canth” is also the first quintet out of a trilogy consisting of three large form works with the theme “Woman’s Destiny”. The trilogy is a commission by the Kokonainen Festival. 

As the name says, it is a selection of images from the turbulent and fascinating life of the first famous Finnish feminist Minna Canth (1844-1897).

The first movement “Alku” (“Beginning”) is about Minna Canth’s happy youth – she was a very bright girl full of life. Her father wanted her to get the best education he could afford, and she was one of the first women to begin her studies at Jyväskylä Teachers Seminary, which was the first school in Finland to offer higher education for women. “I could once again dedicate myself to intellectual occupations and did so with great pleasure and joy. It was as though I had begun to live again.” She however interrupted her studies and married her former teacher Johan Ferdinand Canth. Within the next fourteen years she bore seven children while helping the poor, and working as a journalist.

The second movement “Pysähdys” (“Pause”) is about the despair I can imagine Minna felt, when her husband died in 1889 while she was pregnant with their seventh child. She was exhausted both physically and mentally. After the birth of her seventh child she was very depressed and wrote in her memoir “— — an awful force tried to overwin me to kill my youngest child”.

The third movement “Tahto” (“Volition”) is about the inner thrive of Minna. “My biggest joy and sweetest pleasure is writing. I can’t imagine how I could live anymore, if I wouldn’t be allowed to write” Minna wrote in a letter in 1883. Tirelessly she wrote both articles and theatre plays during the whole of her life. She was always a very idealistic woman who fought for the rights of the poor, sick and those in need. She worked for laws to regulate alcohol consumption, and for laws that would permit women to own property even after having got married. She questioned the idea that poor people were poor due to God’s will,  and instead she implied peoples’ obligation to help the ones in need. She was also a very well read woman who kept herself very well informed about the literature of her time. She writes in one letter “What a great war hero I would have been, had I been born a man in a time of war!”. Due to her fighting spirit and her critical texts, she also managed to get many enemies. But her impact on society was probably greater than that of any other woman at any time in Finland.  In 2017 she is the only woman who has an own flag day in Finland – March 19th, the day of equality. (Since the 9th of August 2020 there has been added a flag day for Tove Jansson, the day of Finnish art.)

Minna Canth died due to heart failure on the 12th of May 1897 and the word about her death spread fast around Finland. Her funeral was held three days later and was so well attended that the whole cemetery outside the church was filled with people. The last movement “Muisto” (“Memory”) describes the void she had left in society through her death, but also how she has been the beginning of a new society where people have more equal opportunities. The women’s right activist Lucina Hagman, whom Minna much appreciated, writes about her friend Minna: “You, you taught us to feel humanity, taught us to look for humanity and to find it even there, where the world didn’t want to see it nor recognise it existed. This inexhaustible love is the greatest  gift you could give your people; you fulfilled by your acts the greatest eternal command; love one another.”

My second piano quintet ““Aino – Emotions from the life of Aino Sibelius” Op.60 is the second quintet out of a trilogy consisting of three large form works with the theme “Woman’s Destiny”. The trilogy is a three-year commission by the KokonainenFestival in Finland. 

As the name says, it is a selection of feelings from the turbulent and fascinating life of Aino Sibelius (1871-1969). She was the sister of three artist (the writer Arvid Järnefelt, the painter Eero Järnefelt and the composer Armas Järnefelt) but she is best known for her being the wife of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.

Aino Sibelius was in opposite to Minna Canth very hard for me to understand as a person and also at an emotional level, which means that I have worked very hard on this quintet “Aino”. As Jenni Kirves concludes in her book “Aino Sibelius – Ihmeellinen olento” (freely translated into English by me):

“Aino Sibelius truly was a wondrous being. The secret of her persona will always remain a mystery to us, no matter how hard we try to get to her core. As a human she was of her own class, a special and contradictional woman, who at the same time was modest and strong, but within her strength very sensitive and sometimes soft, even weak. Her personality is hard to categorise. Even in her time she was considered to have a special character, which was hard to understand for many. From today’s perspective it feels even harder. The women of today maybe find it even harder to identify themselves with her persona than the women of her time. In this sense she was a artist in the same way as her husband.

The easy way out would be to analyse Aino from today’s feminist perspective as a person who sacrificed her own persona for her husband’s music. However she never experienced that she had done so, instead she felt uplifted by her husband’s music and to be part of something infinite and holy, and she saw herself as a privileged person. The persona of Aino Sibelius therefore can’t be put into the context of today’s view of equality. Aino didn’t feel repressed because for her it was self-evident that the woman is a woman and the man is a man, who both live according to their nature. It wasn’t a question of repressing or being repressed, she thought women were meant to use their own strength and men their own, and in this way they would fulfill their own path decided by destiny.”

Even though Aino has been very difficult for me to understand, I still wanted her to be part of my  trilogy “Woman’s Destiny” because without her dedication to her husband and to their family we  would maybe (most likely) not have so many works by Jean Sibelius. Even Jean Sibelius  acknowledged how lucky he had been to marry Aino and said in his speech on Aino’s 75th  Birthday “You might have been happier and better off marrying another man, but I could never have been happier with anyone than with you”. 

The first movement “Rakkaus” (Love) is what kept their marriage together even through very turbulent times and the severe alcoholism, which Jean Sibelius suffered from. Aino and Jean felt that they had found a soulmate in each other and loved each other deeply. Even after having been married for years they seemed to be newly in love and Aino has also been called “the genius of love”.  She wrote about their marriage “I am happy that I have been able to live by his side. I feel that I have not lived for nothing. I do not say that it has always been easy – one has had to repress and control one’s own wishes – but I am very happy. I bless my destiny and see it as a gift from heaven. To me my husband’s music is the word of God – its source is noble, and it is wonderful to live close to such a source.”

Repressing her own needs was a great part of Aino Sibelius’ life, even if she saw it as her duty to do so. The second movement “Höyry” (Steam) is about repressing and controlling herself, while “steam was coming out from her ears”. Having six daughters with a man who suffered from alcoholism, and his travelling a lot for his work, and his spending a lot of nights away from home drinking, it must have been such a strain on their marriage that it is hard to imagine how Aino made it through those times. But when Aino was angry at her husband she would not shout at him, she would sulk in silence for days or even weeks at a time. 

But even during hard the times of their marriage, Aino Sibelius always missed her husband very much when he wasn’t at home, which the third movement “Kaipaus” (Longing) is about. When the Sibelius family got a radio set at home,  she got some comfort from hearing his music and concerts being broadcasted, she felt closer to Jean through his music. After his death she lived for another 12 years in which she missed him tremendously. Aino would every evening read his scores in bed, just to feel that he was a bit closer to her, for a little while.

“Rautaa” means iron and I feel that was what this woman, Aino Sibelius, was made of. The small and fragile woman Aino had so much willpower and dedication to her life task and destiny that all I can do is admire her. Aino Sibelius’ life was anything but easy: being the wife of an alcoholic artist who is supposed to have said “I’m a poor man with a rich man’s habits”, which would lead to financial distress. Moreover their third child Kirsti died from typhoid fever at the age of two (in 1900), Aino’s sister Ellen committed suicide one year later. Aino lived through both of the world wars and the Finnish civil war. All of this is more than most people could endure in a lifetime, but Aino did.

My third piano quintet “Helene – Nuances from the Life of Helene Schjerfbeck” Op.74  is the last quintet out of a trilogy consisting of three large form works with the theme “Woman’s Destiny”. The trilogy is a three-year commission by the Kokonainen Festival in Finland. 

As the name says, it is a selection of nuances and feelings from the life of the painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Schjerfbeck is one of Finland’s most famous modernists.

The art of Helene Schjerfbeck has been dear to me since I was a child and I painted my first copy (for own use) at the age of 12. In addition to loving her art I also felt a strong understanding and belonging to her as a person, as she throughout her life suffered from health problems and partly therefore was mostly melancholic and depressed. She never married, painted all her life and finished her last painting just one week before her death.

Schjerfbeck grew up under hard circumstances in a Swedish-speaking family in Helsinki. She got a hip injury at the age of four which contributed to that she would sit still a lot of the time, and probably therefore she dedicated a lot of her time to drawing. She was accepted to the Finnish Art Societies Drawing School at the mere age of 11 years and was granted a free place at the school. After she had completed her studies in Finland she continued with the help of grants her studies in Paris and England. She often recollects in her later letters that these years were the happiest of her life. In a letter from 1918 to Einar Reuter she writes “In my youth there was hope and love towards the work, it was fun to paint, the only fun thing at all – the time in Paris and the first year in England. Then in Finland there was no hope anymore, no joy, all that contributed to that I won’t say here.” In the first movement “Balskorna” (“Dancing Shoes”), named after a painting with the same name from 1882, I try to catch that joy of life. She returns to the motive of “dancing shoes” several times during her life, as she does to the happy memories from her time in Paris and England.

While abroad Schjerfbeck got engaged to an English painter,  They was engaged for two years before her fiancé broke up the engagement, probably because of her poor health. She burnt all his letters and she also asked her friends to burn all of her letters that considered him. Therefore we don’t know today who her fiancé actually was. The burning of all letters can also be heard in the first movement. In the 1920s she comments that through the broken engagement she knew what pain was, but that she was happy about that she had been able to choose art over all the duties she would have had as a wife.

Although she didn’t have to fulfil any duties as a wife, she still had to fulfil her duties of housekeeping. A lot of time and energy went to sweeping and washing the floors, cutting wood, lighting the fire, washing clothes, cooking and washing the dishes. As she was weak and sick most of her life, these duties robbed even more of her energy and limited the time she had left for painting. In a letter to Einar Reuter from 1932 she writes “They laugh at me when I say I have had a lot to do – I clean up, wash the dishes, cook food at times, sew clothes, mend all the clothes, and that is a lot, and every now and then I correct a painting — If I sit down to paint there will come bills, never a calm moment. If only I could be free from the household!”

In general everything that is considered to have to do with women’s daily lives has been classified as unimportant and uninteresting. Therefore it is not surprising that a female artist would make a painting such as Schjerfbeck´s “Byktork” (“Drying Laundry”) from 1883. It is a motive that probably no male artist would have chosen. In the same way as Schjerbeck illustrates the female everyday life with her art, I feel that as householding took such a large part of her time and energy, it is essential to dedicate a quarter of this piece exactly to laundry. In a letter from 1922 to Reuter she summarizes her wishes with the words “I am not looking for fame but for money – because with money I get the possibility to paint more, and that is more than fame and honour to me.”

Schjerfbeck is maybe best known for her around 40 self-portraits. She writes in a letter to Ada Thilén in 1921: “When I now so seldom have energy to paint, I have begun with a self-portrait. You always have the model at hands, it is just not at all fun to see yourself.” She was also encouraged by the art dealer Gösta Stenman, who was her patron and made sure to both sell her paintings and create a financial independence for her. In two different letters from 1937 to her friend Reuter she comments on this “I am weak – but I am beginning on the self-portrait that Stenman wants to have.” and “Isn’t it strange that he still keeps on wanting to have self-portraits!”. She liked to investigate the different options she had and writes in a letter to Dora Estlander in 1944 “I’m looking at a book with painters self-portraits. They who embellish themselves are boring – Dürer and also others.” In 1921 she writes to Reuter “I drew in front of the mirror, after 5 minutes the face falls together tired. It will be continued tomorrow… This is the one life, an other hidden current is one’s own real one.” This own real one she always seemed to look for in all of her art. The third movement “Sjelvporträtt” (“Self-portraits”) is a passacaglia consisting of 12 chords. Everytime the chord progression is repeated it is instrumented slightly differently, with different nuances. The first four chords are also the main ingredient in the first and last movements and parts from self-portraits can be heard in the second movement, when she is longing to paint

The last movement “Konvalescenten” is named after one of her famous painting “The Convalescent” from 1888 which is also often called  “The Pearl of Ateneum” (the Finnish National Art Gallery). The motive is one of Schjerfbeck´s most used motives (in addition to her self-portraits). The painting was exhibited at the Paris Exhibition in 1889 (that time with the name “The first greenery”) and won a bronze medal of first class. The Convalescent can be seen as a contribution to the public debate, a tribute to Louis Pasteur’s discoveries of infectious diseases and their cures. The original title however seems to refer to an awakening after a winter or a disease and appears to be a belief in the future. The paining has also been interpreted by many as a sort of self-portrait, an insight and introduction to a new phase in her painting and that she finally felt liberated from the broken engagement. It is also speculated if she returned to the motive so often due to suffering a lot from her hip injury, and also her being ill during a large part of her life, and thus being a convalescent herself. But since she was a shy person and has not spoken about this topic, all this remains only as speculations.