Luonnotar (symphonic poem)
Luonnotar is a symphonic poem by Jean Sibelius with the opus number 70 from 1910. It was not performed until 1913 at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival . The playing time is just over nine minutes.
Here Sibelius reverts to the Finnish national poem Kalevala by Elias Lönnrot , as he has done with numerous other works. This time he adds a female soprano voice to the work, which tells how the world was created. The poem says: "It was a maiden, the daughter of heaven, the beautiful Luonnotar." from which a bird comes to her and lays an egg in her lap. This egg spreads a mighty fire within her. When it shatters, the upper half of the shell forms the sky dome, the yolk the sun, the egg white the moon and the splinters the stars.
The soprano solo is epic and expressive at the same time, the orchestral colors are very finely woven. The soprano part is considered to be very demanding, not least because of the large range (b to ces' ''). The dedicatee Aino Ackté sang at the premiere and the Finnish premiere .
literature
- Noël Goodwin (translation: Inge Moore) in the booklet of the Lemminkäinen Suite with the Scottish National Orchestra under Alexander Gibson from 1978, text 1992.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The sung text is a version of rune 1, verses 111–242: Luonnotar, shortened to 43 verses by Sibelius . In: lieder.net - The LiederNet Archive. (Finnish). - German translation of the unabridged Kalevala text template: Kalewala, First Rune .
- ↑ CD booklet for the recording with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Decca 1982. English text by Ben Pateman and a different German text by an unnamed author.