Suomalainen Rukous

In the autumn of 1939, with war already visible on the horizon, the Finnish composer Taneli Kuusisto set a poem by Uuno Kailas for mixed choir. Suomalainen rukous, A Finnish Prayer, was premiered in Helsinki shortly before the Soviet invasion that opened the Winter War, and its plain, humble wish for finding the right path found an audience bracing for something it could not yet name.

Kuusisto was not an outside observer of Finnish church life. He had earned his diploma from the Helsinki Institute of Church Music in 1931, served for years as organist of Töölö Church in Helsinki, and later spent more than a decade as head of the church music department and then director of what is now the Sibelius Academy. His best known composition came out of the same career, and its tune stayed with the country long after the war it was written before had ended.

That popularity eventually became something more formal. In 1986, forty seven years after its wartime premiere, Suomalainen rukous was taken into the Virsikirja, the official hymnal of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, a body that does not add hymns lightly. It sits there today alongside the church's older repertoire, not as an outside composer's tribute to Finnish faith but as a working piece of the church's own worship, written by one of its own musicians and sung, decades on, as its own prayer.