Raitio, Merikanto and Klami, along with Pingoud, were the main representatives of what is known as the ‘1920s modernism’ in the history of Finnish music and, as Pingoud remarked, they tended to be regarded as a group. He has been characterised as a Finnish Hugo Wolf, and, according to Seppo Nummi (1932–1981), a composer of lieder himself, he is the most coherent neo-classicist in Finnish music. Kilpinen was a composer of lieder, of which he wrote more than seven hundred. The composers of the new Finnish music that Pingoud had in mind were Yrjö Kilpinen (1892–1959) on the one hand, and Väinö Raitio (1891–1945), Aarre Merikanto (1893–1958) and Uuno Klami (1900–1961) on the other. In an essay on national music from 1922 he used the word Heimatkunst-first applied to Sibelius’s music by the German music historian Walter Niemann in 1906 -to denote an art for which it is enough simply to satisfy the needs of the artist’s own nation this kind of art has a strange attraction to others as well, but its appeal is superficial, as is its impact on the recipient. He sympathised with it from the outside, as revealed in an article on Sibelius from 1909 in which he described the tone poem Finlandia, ‘the most national of Sibelius’s works,’ as ‘radiating a deep sorrow for his enslaved fatherland.’ But in principle he was against national art since, according to him, it belonged to a nation’s infancy and, in fact, represented only the infancy of art. Nationalism, the fundamental generating force in Finnish culture at the turn of the century, was none of his concern. Although well integrated into the society of his patrie choisie ten years later, he remained an outsider in one important respect. Pingoud was of Russian origin and had immigrated to Finland from St Petersburg in 1918, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

The consequences did not fail to reveal themselves, and new life emerged: new Finnish music, more or less independent from Sibelius, was born. A new phenomenon, nevertheless, showed up: the mountainous overall shape of Sibelius’s output came to be seen in a new light, or perhaps from a different perspective, and where its shadow had once fallen, new curious searchlights begun to play their games. Sibelius’s output, cherished and tended by reverent hands, did not lose a tad of its value on the contrary, it secured an officially-sanctioned eternal value and still flourishes in all its beauty. In an essay on ‘the youngest Finnish music’ from 1928, the composer Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942) refers to the ‘reappraisal of certain values’ during the First World War, notably to the ‘bankruptcy of Romanticism’ in the field of aesthetics. It is difficult to establish who was the first to mention ‘Sibelius’s shadow.’ The idea pops up in the 1920s at the latest.

Sibelius ultimate is it worth it