Väinö Raitio was born in Sortavala, Eastern Finland 15. April 1891. His father Kosti Raitio (1855–1924) was lecturer in Finnish language and literature and an avid supporter of the Finnish culture and arts. Raitio’s mother Elli (née Eriksson; 1860–1954) was pianist and piano teacher. Raitio was eight years old when his mother started to teach him to play the piano. He recalled his eagerness to learn:
“I was so enthusiastic that I followed her around the house crying and begging for a lesson if she couldn’t give it at the appointed time. We were eleven children, and because almost everyone played, the piano wasn’t always at my disposal. When I was in lyceum [secondary school], I remember walking back and forth in our drawing room reading my homework, so that I would be ready when the piano became vacant.”
As a pianist Väinö Raitio advanced swiftly; he intended to become a professional pianist and kept on concentrating on music more passionately than his school work. Gradually he started to become more interested in composing, and after failing his matriculation exam in mathematics he got his father’s permission to move to Helsinki and start studying in the Helsinki Music Institute (now the Sibelius Academy).
Raitio received a thorough and diverse training as a composer. He studied with Erkki Melartin (1875–1937) and Erik Furuhjelm (1883–1964) at the Helsinki Music Institute from 1911 to 1915. The syllabus of the Institute was remarkably broad even in the 1910s, and Melartin in particular is known to have been a widely educated and broad-minded teacher. Raitio also had the opportunity to attend exceptionally many orchestral concerts; as a result of political maneuvering there were two competing symphony orchestras in Helsinki during 1912–1914. Although the repertoire of the orchestras were heavy on Sibelius and Beethoven, it was also possible to hear works by composers such as Scriabin and Debussy in Helsinki as early as in the 1910s.
Finding his own voice
After finishing his studies and organizing a successful début concert as a composer in Helsinki in 1916, Raitio traveled to Moscow to continue his studies, although he had to return after less than half a year because of the Russian Revolution and the disorder relating to it. During the process that led to Finland becoming independent in 1917, and the civil war that followed, Raitio continued composing and studying of his own accord. On his other trips abroad – Berlin in 1920 and Paris in 1925–1926 – he concentrated on going to concerts and opera.
Raitio’s own musical language first began to emerge in the orchestral work Joutsenet [Swans] (1919), premiered in 1920. The piece was unanimously praised in reviews; Raitio was regarded as a promising young composer, and his orchestration skills in particular were admired. His other early orchestral works were likewise positively received.
The premiere of the tripartite orchestral work Antigone (1921–1922) in 1922 proved to be a turning point in the reception of Raitio’s music. His style was now denounced as “cacophonic, that is, evil-sounding”. It was deemed inaccessible even for professional musicians and “to the untrained ear, little short of torture”. With Antigone, Raitio seems to have cemented his reputation as a barbed-wire modernist. However, despite the colleagues and critics couldn’t understand the aesthetic principles of Raitio’s colorful Scriabin- and Debussy-influenced style, his craftmanship and imagination were esteemed.
One of the main reasons for the negative feedback Raitio’s orchestral works received in the 1920s, is a practical one. Raitio had written his scores with a central European 100-musician-orchestra in mind, but the Helsinki Philharmonic was small – 69 musicians in the 1920s. Even with hired extras the balance between heavy brass section and the strings must have been less than ideal. The instrumental parts are also complicated and technically difficult, so with the orchestra’s tight rehearsal and performance schedule it probably was not possible for the musicians to learn the works well enough.
Operas and commissions
Raitio was a great admirer of French music and language, but he was able to visit Paris rather late, in 1925–1926. In an interview after his return to Helsinki he named the composers and works that had pleased him the most: Florent Schmitt, Maurice Ravel and Jacques Ibert. Later Raitio mentioned that the Paris trip had been a turning point on his career; he started to head towards the opera.
From the late 1920s until his death Raitio wrote almost exclusively two kinds of music: large stage works and small commissioned pieces for the newly established ensemble of the Finnish Radio Broadcasting Company. The Radio ensemble commissions are stylistically and structurally simple works, with titles referring to nature or customary classical composition forms, whereas the operas and ballets continue Raitio’s modernist idiom.
Historical topics popular at the time, almost Wagnerian endless recitative melodies, and colorful orchestration are characteristic for Raitio’s operas. Compared to the uniform Scriabin- and Debussy-influenced orchestral works of the early 1920s, the idiom in the operas is diverse, even eclectic; from Stravinsky-like crisply dissonant rhythmic passages to conventionally beautiful and pious tonal hymns. Particularly Raitio’s full-length operas – Prinsessa Cecilia [Princess Cecilia] (1933) and Kaksi kuningatarta [Two queens] (1937–1940) – were praised by the critics, and by the 1940s Raitio was considered a prominent opera composer.
Eccentric and aloof
Not very much is known about Raitio’s private life or opinions. In the few interviews made with him, Raitio comes across as extremely reserved and introverted, but also uncompromising and determined. Not much is known about how Raitio composed either. No sketchbooks have been preserved, so either he never used them or they were lost or destroyed. However, several people close to him claimed that he wrote score directly.
Like Ravel and Debussy, also Väinö Raitio loved cats. He even dedicated one of his finest orchestral works, Kuutamo Jupiterissa (1922–1923), to his cat. The dedication has been read as misanthropic disdain towards the people around him or a declaration of eccentric independence. Raitio himself, however, said he simply wished to honour the memory of a beloved family member.
According to his correspondence, Raitio had always suffered from insomnia and anxiety, which led to overindulgence of sedatives, especially during the Second World War. In 1944 he got bone cancer – which first was diagnosed as rheumatism and treated accordingly. Raitio died in a hospital in Helsinki on the 10th of September, 1945.
In the narrative of Finnish music history, Raitio’s fate as a neglected composer was established as early as in his obituaries, which declared that the value of his work would only be truly understood in the future. However, during his lifetime Raitio’s music was, if not understood, at least appreciated. The performances, recordings and research of his music has increased steadily, and today Raitio is considered one of the most important composers in the Finnish music history.
This text was originally published on the leaflet of Väinö Raitio – Œuvres pour piano CD, played by Jean Dubé. (Syrius SYR 141491) Read a review of the album here. Read more about Raitio here.
c) Hanna Isolammi 2019