Erkki Melartin

Who was Erkki Melartin?

Erkki Melartin was a Finnish composer and pupil of Martin Wegelius from 1892 to 1899 in Helsinki, and Robert Fuchs from 1899 to 1901 in Vienna. He shares birth and death years with the composer Maurice Ravel.

As well as composing, Melartin also taught and directed music at the Helsinki Music College, later the Helsinki Conservatory. As conductor of the Vyborg Orchestra in 1908–11, and despite chronic health problems, Melartin toured extensively, conducting the first performance of Gustav Mahler's music in Scandinavia, a movement of the Resurrection symphony in 1909

Although Melartin was chiefly a lyricist, the symphony was central to his musical output. He wrote six symphonies and was the first Finnish composer to bear Mahler's influence. The fourth symphony uses a vocalise like that of Carl Nielsen's Sinfonia Espansiva. The fifth is a Sinfonia brevis ending in a fugue and chorale, while the sixth, harmonically more advanced than the other five, advances stepwise from a C minor first movement – with evocations of Mahler's second symphony – to an E-flat major finale. His musical output also includes an opera, Aino, a violin concerto, four string quartets, and many piano pieces.