ADDRESS IN HONOR OF ARMAS LAUNIS, HÄMEENLINNA
OCTOBER 19, 2009
Ladies and Gentlemen! Dear friends!
Armas Launis was born in Hämeenlinna 125 years ago, on April 22, 1884, as has been mentioned several times in recent days. This date cannot be repeated often enough during this year of celebrations so that it is not forgotten in the future.
At the University of Helsinki Library, where the Armas Launis archives are available to researchers, an exhibition entitled “Armas Launis, the Forgotten: Composer, Writer, Researcher, and Professor” opened last week. This title is fitting, even though Launis’s various roles have been overlooked in different ways. At the same time, this list of roles—composer, writer, researcher, teacher—testifies to a multi-talented individual, a man of many talents.
Perhaps the most unusual of all his forgotten achievements is the creation of the Finnish Folk Conservatories. During his extensive travels, Launis had become familiar with the music school systems in Russia, Germany, and France. Inspired by these examples, he founded the Helsinki Folk Conservatory in 1922, and in the following years, Folk Conservatories were established in Turku, Tampere, Pori, Vaasa, Kotka, Oulu, and Uusikaupunki. These conservatories were intended for families of modest means, for people of all ages, without professional aspirations, with the primary goal of awakening and nurturing an interest in music. The Helsinki Conservatory welcomed 250 students in its first year. Three years later, there were 550 students, taught by eighteen instructors. Their professions were incredibly diverse, ranging from electrical fitter to stationmaster, and including trades such as upholsterer, tailor’s assistant, tinsmith, typesetter, filer, errand boy, metalworker, goldsmith, telephone operator, instrument maker, sausage maker, accountant, wife, bachelor, and schoolboy. Since Launis often spent his winters abroad at that time, the activities of the institutions in other cities gradually ceased, but in Helsinki they continued and still continue today under the name of the Helsinki Conservatory of Music.
Launis was also a writer and, as such, is among the many great authors from the city of Hämeenlinna. Launis composed the poetic libretti for his operas, wrote two travel books—one on Lapland, the other on North Africa—as well as hundreds of short essays and travelogues, published in Finnish magazines and newspapers. Finnish readers knew Launis primarily for his travelogues about the North, Europe, and North Africa.
He also wrote his autobiography, Taival, jonka vaelsin (The Path I Traveled), but it failed to attract the interest of Finnish publishers and consequently remained unpublished. However, it can be accessed in the Armas Launis archives. The autobiography was written in the 1940s, and the text was completed at the beginning of the following decade. Launis incorporated 102 of his newspaper articles, which, in his own words, made the work “colored by travel memories.”
Launis was a born cosmopolitan, a European citizen to begin with, and then a true citizen of the world, driven by curiosity and open-minded towards foreign living conditions, populations, cultures, and music. Gifted with a remarkable capacity for understanding, the young graduate quickly grasped the essence of even the most complex songs. How could such a person have grown up in the house in Lukiokatu and the surrounding neighborhoods 120 years ago? It’s difficult to comprehend. To explain it, the parents’ diverse family histories and multicultural roots have been cited. The father, a Swedish speaker, came from the Turku archipelago, the son of an old seafaring family from Korppoo; the mother, on the other hand, descended from an old Finnish-speaking farming family from Sääksmäki. During his youth, Armas Launis’s mother had sung in the Pentecost procession to Helkavuori during the village festivities in Ritvala. Furthermore, Launis recalls in his writings that his mother possessed a “considerable talent for clairvoyance”; she sometimes had premonitory dreams and was able to foresee events before they occurred.
The citizen of the world that Launis became devoted a significant number of pages of his autobiography to descriptions of his childhood home, Hämeenlinna. The memories of a man who settled in Nice in 1930 are vivid, concrete, and precise. They contain the atmosphere, sounds, smells, tastes, and sights captured from the window of the family home. “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” he writes. You can hear the sounds of the street; the coachman passes by with his horse-drawn carriage. Someone comes up the steps of the glass veranda; it’s Iita, the housekeeper who still comes from time to time, makes me French toast (“jästileipä”), and hands me a mug of curdled milk. The bells of the Russian church begin to ring: Usakoff, Patanoff, Novosiloff, Kostus. “Give me two rubles, / I’ll pay you back someday…” Usakoff, Patanoff… night is beginning to fall. Usakoff, Patanoff, Novosiloff, the bells have been ringing since the evening darkness… two rubles… sleep is overtaking the young man.
Opposite was the Henrikson family home. A little further up, along Lukiokatu Street, on the left, was the Helin residence. In the house next to the Helins lived the Östfelts. Seen through a child’s eyes, this family, composed entirely of adults, seemed to belong to a fairytale world, so much did they resemble creatures from the world of elves.
On the corner of the street lived the Stalhammars, and a little further down Lukiokatu Street lived the Skutnabbs, who had frequent visitors. Old Skutnabb was a former builder of the Saimaa Canal and signed his documents Slussbyggmästar Skutnabb. His daughter had married the master painter Steffan Hägg. They lived a little further down the same street. The family included children of the same age: Eero, Anna, and Sylvi. The same house was inhabited by the headmistress of the traveling elementary school, Mrs. Tuhkanen. Aunt Tuhkanen knitted young Armas woolen socks every Christmas. The boys Toivo (“Topi”), a future artist, and Usko, the future pastor of Kangasala, gave him the very strong feeling that he would always be one of the inhabitants of Hämeenlinna.
In the courtyard of the house also lived Hugo Hällfors, a former tax collector for the Crown. In the other building, a teacher and a composer named Emil Genetz resided for several years. He was later replaced by another tax collector who had several children our age. One of the apartments was inhabited by a noblewoman whom everyone called “La Grace.” It was later occupied, from time to time, by my father, a lifelong resident of Hämeenlinna, who never truly felt at home in Helsinki.
In 1893, when Launis was nine years old, the family moved to Helsinki. Launis wrote in his later years: “I made that all-day journey with my brother in the third-class carriage, attached to a freight train.” “I didn’t know it yet, but I had just embarked on a long journey, a very long journey, which continues to this day…”
In the autumn of 1901, Launis began his studies at both the university and the Helsinki Philharmonic Society Orchestra School. For several years, Jean Sibelius was his composition professor there. Without a doubt, Hämeenlinna was often discussed during these classes.
From his very first summer of study, Armas Launis couldn’t resist the urge to travel. He spent the next five summers collecting folk songs. First in the Kainuu region in 1902, then in Ingria, south of the Gulf of Finland, in 1903 and 1906, as well as in Lapland, among the Northern Sami, in 1904 and 1905. In 1905, he also traveled to Karelia to meet renowned singers of Karelian folk poems, including Jehkin Iivana, the most celebrated kantele player. All these journeys resonate in Launis’s operas.
During these years, Launis had become a researcher of international standing. This was quite remarkable, as musicology was still in its infancy in Finland, as in other countries, and Launis was forging his own path. He first went to Lapland at the age of twenty. He had no idea what he would discover there; one of Europe’s most original musical traditions, the joik of the Northern Sami, was one of them. At Lake Menesjärvi in Inari, he met Juhani Jomppanen, who wasn’t very good at the joik, but who knew its history and meaning well. Launis got along surprisingly well with the inhabitants of the Lappish mountains, as his numerous writings indicate. Juhani Jomppanen kept a map of Europe in his summer house, and in the evenings, by the fireplace, Launis, who, like Jomppanen, had never been abroad, was called upon, thanks to his school knowledge, to describe each country Jomppanen pointed out. When the conversation turned to Turkey and Jomppanen learned that a Turk could have up to one hundred wives, the audience suddenly fell silent and Jomppanen cast a discreet glance at his wife.
According to Jomppanen, the best joik singer was indeed Kaapin Jouni, who lived in Hammastunturi, and to introduce his friend, he sang Kaapin Jouni’s joik.
And so, they finally found this man living on Mount Hammastunturi: “a sprite only a few centimeters tall, with immense knowledge, the best joik singer I have ever met.” Launis managed to collect more than 200 joiks, and on the very first evening, he transcribed the terrible joik of Kautokeino onto sheet music.
Launis also listened to stories about the 1852 revolt of Kautokeino and its hero, Aslak Hetta. Later, he wrote and composed an opera on the same subject, with Kaapin Jouni’s joik of Kautokeino as its central theme. When Launis and Kaapin Jouni met three decades later, Jouni composed the joik based on the melody of his own: “Oh! Doctor Launis, jo nunnu, what a pleasure, nunnu nuu!”
There are many such captured moments that evoke the relationship between the singer and the composer. Launis respected joik singers and spoke in his articles and operas about the Sami people and their homeland. He was thus sixty years ahead of his time, as it wasn’t until the 1970s that the Lapps officially became Sami. Aslak Hetta sings in Launis’s opera, in the Sami National Opera: “No, my eye will not grow accustomed to the oppressor; the future of Lapland will dawn!” In 1922, Launis published a heartfelt work entitled Kaupakseni Maa (The Land of My Desires).
At the age of 24, Launis rose to prominence in European comparative musicology with the publication of his scholarly collection, Lappische Juoigos-Melodien, where he presented the results of his two travels: 824 joiks. Until then, only a few joiks had been published. Even today, Launis’s collection remains one of the most substantial collections of North Sami joiks in existence. Moreover, it represents such significant scientific research on the musical structures of the joik that since its publication, no one has yet been able to surpass it. How did this budding researcher of only 24 achieve such a feat? – It was in 1909, at an international musicological congress in Vienna, that Launis presented his greatest discovery: the pentatonic scale of the joik without semitones. At the time, he was studying opera composition in Weimar.
Then came the time to write his doctoral thesis. Published in 1910, Armas Launis’s thesis was of international standing, both in terms of its analysis and classification of Estonian, Ingrian, Karelian, and Finnish folk melodies. Yet, almost as suddenly as he had begun, Launis brought his scientific career to an end, a career whose progress had been fueled by his impetuous energy. Launis decided to become an opera composer: a pursuit that captivated him until the end of his days.
At the time, it wasn’t easy to become familiar with operatic literature. One had to travel to major cities with a musical tradition to examine scores firsthand. Launis worked on his dissertation in Saint Petersburg in 1910, where he was accompanied by his young wife, Aïno Vairinen. “In Saint Petersburg,” he wrote, “I had the unexpected opportunity to become acquainted with a large number of the best operas—something that was still impossible in my own country at the time. In the libraries, I was also able to learn about the scores of the most famous Russian operas.”
His first opera was Seitsemän Veljestä (The Seven Brothers). The libretto was completed first, as was generally the case with Launis’s operas. To finish the composition, the cosmopolitan man had to travel to Paris to hear the latest operas. The piano score was completed in Munich, the orchestral score in Rome, and the premiere took place, in quick succession, at the Finnish National Theatre in April 1913. The opera was a success. Next came Kullervo, which would become Armas Launis’s second most frequently performed opera. Since he was already familiar with the lands of Ingria and Karelia, he no longer had to seek inspiration in Koli, as the Karelianists had. To create a suitable atmosphere for this second opera, Launis traveled to the great imperial city of Moscow and to Crimea, where he and his wife were able to attend breathtaking performances of Tatar dances. On their return journey, they spent another month in Moscow, after which only the finalization of the Kullervo score remained. This was completed in Launisto, at the Leppävaara house. The first performance took place in 1917. Launis received the State Prize for each of his two operas and, from 1920 onward, was entitled to an artist’s pension, in other words, a lifetime artist’s pension.
To compose his next opera, based on themes of Sami culture and titled Aslak Hetta, Launis traveled to the impressive mountainous region of Southern Bavaria. He bought a piano in Berlin, which he had transported, with considerable difficulty, across Germany, before finally managing to install it in the small annex (originally intended for livestock) of his alpine cabin. The composition work was delayed, however, and in the meantime, Armas and Aino Launis, both captivated by North Africa, spent two winters in Algeria. The score for Aslak Hetta was completed in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1928. Two years later, Asta was born, and the Launis family settled permanently in the South of France. Their passionate work of composition continued, and several operas were completed in the 1930s. Jehudith, an opera inspired by their travels in North Africa, was finished in 1940. Fragments were presented in France in 1954. When the 1954 recording was played last Friday (October 16, 2009) at the symposium held at the University of Helsinki Library, the audience was delighted: this was Armas Launis’s absolute masterpiece as a composer.
As we know, not all of Armas Launis’s operas have yet to be performed. Aslak Hetta premiered in 2004 in a concert version, and was later released on CD. The surprise was widespread: why only now? Among the other operas awaiting their turn are The Witch’s Song, The Karelian Magic Scarf, and Jehudith – all remarkable operas. On this occasion, I cannot help but ask the following question: when will the Finnish Opera finally embrace its responsibility towards the history of Finnish opera, while also taking pride in its heritage?
During the centenary of Armas Launis’s birth, it was hardly possible to speak of a year of celebrations, as it was rather a profound silence. Finnish Radio did indeed broadcast a program that explored the reasons why Launis had been forgotten and sidelined. Similarly, one could ask why history books persist in using the same stereotypical and reductive descriptions of Launis.
This question is of interest to many, and no doubt a rational answer will be offered one day. But what matters is that the silence is broken. For, let us not forget, there have always been people who remembered Armas Launis. Among the archived documents is a letter that was clearly very important to its recipient. When Finnish Radio broadcast the recording of the opera Kullervo, produced by Radio Monte Carlo, at the end of 1947, Launis received a letter in Nice from Tauno Pylkkänen, a Finnish composer of the new generation. Inspired by the radio broadcast of Launis’s opera, Pylkkänen took up his pen to share his profound impressions with him. His first opera had just been well received, and Pylkkänen acknowledged the impact that Launis’s work, which he considered his model, had had on his own. Attending the premiere of Kullervo in the spring of 1934 was a turning point in the life of the young schoolboy interested in composition. The piano score was as important to him as the catechism and the Bible—in short, his most cherished book. Pylkkänen emphasized above all how, in Launis’s work, “dramatic and lyrical elements are combined against a purely Finnish background,” which, according to Pylkkänen, corresponded to the ideal of Finnish opera. “Listening to Kullervo on the radio,” Pylkkänen continued, “I realized how much I owe to your work.” “Please allow me to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks for Kullervo—the Finnish opera among Finnish operas!”
As the 75th anniversary of Armas Launis’s birth approached fifty years ago, it was decided to stage the opera Kullervo in Hämeenlinna in honor of its composer. The project had been initiated by Aino Kurki-Suonio, a close friend of the Launis family and a member of the city’s Music Council. Everything had been planned, except for the lack of funds, as is so often the case. The composer Tauno Marttinen, musical director of the event, wrote the following to Nice: “Your Kullervo would be the first opera ever performed in the town of Hämeenlinna, a landmark event in itself.” Singers and musicians were found, some adjustments were made for the small orchestra, and a particularly talented singer was selected for the role of Kullervo – Harri Nikkonen. Upon familiarizing himself with the score, Marttinen found it strange that it had received so little attention in Finland. The letter concluded: “I would like to get to know you better – I suppose you are a rather unusual character who has unfortunately not been understood here… At the same time, I want you to know that you have not been forgotten in Finland, and you will not be forgotten. I hope we will have the opportunity to hear your music and operas more often.” “
It’s easy to agree with Tauno Marttinen’s opinion, even though Kullervo wasn’t staged at the time. But now, fifty years later, the day has come. Even with the change of plans, The Seven Brothers is an especially interesting debut, as it’s Launis’s first opera. The situation is similar to that of Armas Launis 105 years ago, when he was rowing upstream along the Teno River. We don’t know what will happen, but we know we are in the company of a remarkable, original, personal, profound, and captivating composer. Armas Launis is on his way home.”
Original text in Finnish
