Finnish music

Besides folk music and compositions by foreign musicians living in Finland, there was little Finnish music composed until the generation of Jean Sibelius. His contemporaries include Toivo Kuula (1883-1918), composer of darkly passionate solo songs; the orchestral composer Uuno Klami (1900-1961); Selim Palmgren, who produced sparkling, Debussy-like piano music; and the modernist Leevi Madetoja, whose neglected opera Juha was revived at the 1987 Edinburgh Festival, Scotland. In contemporary Finnish music, opera dominates with works such as Joonas Kokkonen's Viimeiset kiusaukset/The Last Temptations (1977), dealing with the first universal suffrage elections in Finland in 1907, and Aulis Sallinen's popular Punainen viiva/The Red Line (1978) and his abstruse The King Goes Forth to France (1983). Younger composers include the rigorously intellectual Paavo Heininen, the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Magnus Lindberg.