Rakastava—accent on the first syllable, in English The Beloved—underwent three transformations before Sibelius arrived at the form best known ever since, when it's heard, that is. This is a neglected work of uncommon tenderness and intimacy from Sibelius' inherent reserve. The three-movement form for strings, with tympani in the outer sections and discreet triangle beats at the end of the middle one, was created in 1911 during the same period as the Symphony No. 4, a work of unexampled desolation in his canon. However, the listing of Rakastava as Op. 14 goes back to the second version, published in 1895 for men's chorus with string accompaniment. (Sibelian opus numbers can be as treacherously unreliable as the conventional numbering of Mozart's or Mendelssohn's symphonies.) In 1893, contemporaneously with the Karelia Overture and Karelia Suite, Sibelius set a text from Elias Lönnrot's 1840 collection of folk verse, Kanteletar, for chorus. After the 1895 revision, he made a third one in 1898 for mixed-chorus a cappella. Thirteen years passed before the brief suite for strings and percussion eventuated, whose movements are entitled "The Beloved," "The Way (or Path) of the Lover," and "Good Night, My Beloved—Farewell." The opening section has a lyrical, D minor main theme that recalls a genre commonly down-played as Scandinavian elegiac—Grieg was a prime exponent—yet transcends the genre by eschewing harmonic cliché and conventional rhythmic scansion. Sibelius' structural integration makes a whole of the three sections, while idiomatic string writing belies Rakastava's choral origin. That said, the prize is a swift, brief middle movement with pulsating triplets that ends almost as soon as it has begun. This leads to a finale of remarkable sweetness that harkens back to the opening section, albeit tinged with the sweet sorrow of parting at the end. If the troubled, stripped-down, life-and-death drama of the Symphony No. 4 plumbed the depths of private despair, it proved to be cathartic, in witness whereof Rakastava—-a trysting suite that might be called the garden scene in a Finnish Romeo and Juliet.

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