Muinainen Kalevala: Act I Scene iv “Väinämöinen creates the Kantele“

THE ANCIENT KALEVALA: Lönnrot’s 1849 compilation of Rune Poems abridged & adapted, and set to traditional Rune Melodies by Andrew Lawrence-King. The Finnish Kalevala, mythological poetry set in an ancient but timeless world of heroes, witches and epic journeys, of ritual, music and magic, needs no introduction. Since the 1850s, scholarship has focussed on original sources, assembling an immense archive of verses and melodies in the characteristic Kalevala metre, in order to understand better the traditional songs, fragments and variants which Lönnrot wove together into a single tapestry. Andrew Lawrence-King brings together the classic Kalevala text, traditional folk-melodies from Karelia and Ingria, and early music improvisation, to imagine how those epic verses might have sounded in medieval times. This is the Kalevala presented as a medieval opera, or (in Monteverdi’s words) as ’favola in musica’, story-telling in music. Andrew followed the ancient bards’ and Lönnrot’s footsteps, selecting episodes and