In the early 1890s Sibelius was forced to content himself with teaching and composing small trifles to get by, leaving little time for more substantial compositional pursuits. Among the larger works which he did manage to complete during this time, Rakastava, a three-movement work for chorus a capella is perhaps the most notable. The composer had hopes of winning a local competition with the piece, but that honor was instead bestowed upon a former teacher of his, and Sibelius had to be content with second prize. The work is much better known in a transcription made by the composer in 1911 for strings and a small percussion section of timpani and triangle.

The texts of Rakastava (The Beloved) are drawn from a collection of Finnish lyrical folk poetry called the Kantelalter, and remind us that Sibelius was not always the cool, withdrawn persona of his later years—here instead is a youthful extroversion, an earthy tribute to love. Of the three movements, the somber first most strongly reflects the work's folk origin. The choral writing is largely homophonic, and there are fewer of the chromatic difficulties so prevalent in the following movements. Sibelius uses repetition of the syllables "ei-laa" to create a poignant, magical background for the second movement, above which the main melodic voices sing in longer note-values. This kind of choral writing, much exploited by later composers, is rather ahead of its time in 1893. The cumulative effect of the movement is one of bittersweet happiness—the remembrance of an absent lover. A solo tenor sings of the two lovers' sorrowful parting in the concluding movement, "Goodnight-Farewell," a Renaissance-inspired piece with modal (specifically dorian) shadings, and a constantly changing metrical scheme using measures of five and seven beats. This is quite atypical for the nineteenth century, and exactly follows the syllabic rhythm of the text.

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