Axel Gabriel Ingelius

Axel Gabriel Ingelius was a Finnish composer, writer and critic, born in Säkylä in 1822 and died near Uusikaupunki in 1868. His work belongs to the dawn of Finnish national Romanticism, a movement that sought to assert a distinctive musical identity for the country.

Trained in classical philology and literature at the University of Helsinki, he worked as a teacher in Turku from 1847. There he taught the history of music and wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as music reviews for several newspapers in Turku and Helsinki. His training as a composer was self-taught.

In 1847 he composed what is considered the first symphony written in Finland. Its third movement, titled 'Scherzo finnico', is in 5/4 time, a feature associated with Finnish runic singing, although the melody does not reproduce the characteristic traits of those traditions. He also wrote the opera Junkerns förmyndare, premiered in 1853 and based on an episode from sixteenth-century Finnish history, and around one hundred choral pieces and songs set to Finnish poems and some German texts.

Today he is remembered as one of the earliest representatives of Finnish national Romanticism and as a pioneer of music criticism in the country. His compositional output apparently shows technical limitations, but his place in Finnish music history is recognised.