Although Jean Sibelius is considered to be the wellspring of modern Finnish music, having established his reputation through his symphonic music based on the Finnish folk epic The Kalavela, (including En Saga and Kullervo), he wrote very few of his nearly one hundred songs on Finnish texts. Most are settings of Swedish poetry, the language Sibelius spoke in his youth. Although he produced an output of distinctive orchestral works and a cycle of symphonies with a unique, forward looking approach to structure, the basic tradition from which Sibelius' music comes is that of the German masters—Beethoven, Wagner, and especially Brahms. Sibelius studied for a time in Vienna in the early 1890s with Robert Fuchs, who was teacher to Mahler and Wolf.

Sibelius wrote the five songs, Op. 37, in 1904, about the same time as the Violin Concerto and just before the Third Symphony. All five are in Swedish. The poetic imagery of the set departs from the naturalist metaphors of its immediate predecessor, the Op. 36 songs; the texts of Op. 37 are love songs, of sorts, centered on people. While most of the Op. 36 songs match the strophes of the poems, the structures of Op. 37 are freer, in modified strophic forms that don't follow as closely the verses of the poems.

"The First Kiss" (Den forsta kyssen) is a poem by J. L. Runeberg, one of Sibelius' favorite poets. A girl asks the evening star what heaven thinks of a first kiss. The star replies that heaven sees its joy reflected, that only death weeps. The setting is rapturously romantic. "Little Lasse" (Lasse liten), on a poem by Zachris Topelius, repeats the line "Lasse, Lasse liten" (Lasse, little Lasse) every other line; this nursery-rhyme-like form suggests this lullaby setting, although the piano accompaniment darkens the tone. Tor Hedberg's poem "Sunrise" (Soluppgång) paints the picture of a knight standing at a window, who at the dawn hour blows wildly on a horn. This moment clearly demands the song's dramatic peak, and suggests the horn fifths of the accompaniment. "Was it a dream?" (Var det en dröm?) is a J. J. Weckell poem in which the poet asks if a former love were but a dream. Sibelius spins a melody of appropriate longing. The final song, another Runeberg setting, is "The Tryst" (Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings mote). With "Was it a dream," this is one of Sibelius' most frequently performed songs. "The Tryst" is a far-reaching dramatic setting, with a thick, Romantic piano accompaniment. A girl comes home three times to her mother: with red hands, reddened between her lover's hands; with red lips, reddened with her lover's kiss, and finally with pale cheeks, having caught her lover in infidelity. The dramatic peak comes as the girl asks her mother to carve the story into the headstone on her grave.

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