Madetoja in his first symphony had fulfilled the prophecy of his teacher Jean Sibelius that he had the makings of a symphony composer. In many ways this second symphony, an epic at about three-quarters of an hour, confirms the breadth of this talent by standing in contrast to the much shorter first symphony. The new symphony is a work that mourns the deaths of the composer's brother and his friend Toiivo Kuula (also a composer) who was killed by the Communist side in the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

Erkki Salmenhaara describes the four movements of this symphony as representing "beauty, nature, war, and resignation." Each of the first three movements is a major musical statement of from ten to fifteen minutes length. The Epilogue is much briefer. There is a main theme arching over a held chord. At its end is added a four-measure extension: a long held E-flat which suddenly oscilates around that note for two beats, and then is held again. This turns out to be the main motive of the work. The movement is beautiful, but unsettling, more like the memory of a beautiful experience then the actual things. It moves without pause into the second movement, a pastoral movement with lovely offstage horn and oboe melodies.

The middle movement fills the formal place of a scherzo and finale, but it is a scherzo-march with hard, frightening dissonances, anticipating similar movements in later Shostakovich works. It flows into the short Andantino that ends the work, dissolving the material of the symphony into resigned silence.

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