Sibelius and the rabbi’s daughter

From our Finland correspondent:

Sibelius wrote many songs including ‘Was it a Dream?’ and ‘The girl returned from meeting her lover’ for the soprano Ida Ekman who, on several accounts, he considered as the only ‘true’ interpreter of his songs.

Ida Ekman toured, among others, with Edvard Grieg, and also performed for Richard Strauss and Johannes Brahms – receiving a fatherly kiss on the brow from the latter.

Few knew that Ida Ekman was born Ida Paulina Morduch in Helsinki, the daughter of rabbi Isak Murdoch. At 16 she tried to enter the St Petersburg Conservatory but, as a Jew, she could not obtain a residence permit in the city. She married the conductor Karl Ekman, a student of Ferruccio Busoni. In 1900 she accompanied Sibelius and Robert Kajanus on a European tour. Her son, Karl Ekman junior, wrote an early biography of Sibelius. The manuscripts of four Sibelius songs dedicated to her were discovered in 2003 in a Helsinki bank vault.

The exact nature of her relationship with Sibelius remains enigmatic but it was clearly very close.

Now a portrait of Ida by Sibelius’s close friend Albert Edelfelt – has showed up at auction, with a very low starting bid here.