nlandia has its origins in the turbulence and bleakness of Imperial Russia's stranglehold on Finland.
For nearly the entire 1800s Finland had been merely another state in the vast Russian empire, who kept trying to make the Finnish population more Russian. The dominating empire forced poor Finns into its army and censored the press and free speech.
But in the last decade of the century the oppressed Finns began to assert their independence. Finnish nationalism became a powerful movement, a tidal wave threatening Russia's tyranny.
In October 1899, in the middle of this frenzy of nationalism, Sibelius wrote a musical work to accompany a dramatically patriotic poem (The Melting of the Ice on the Ulea River by Zachria Topelius).
A bit later, a group of patriotic members of the Finnish press organized a fund-raiser for "newspaper pension funds". But it was really a trick.
It was a front for promoting and financing a free press for the Finns to voice themselves, to combat Russia's free speech censorship.
Sibelius took the some of the music from his recent poetic piece for a concert marking the end of the fundraiser. Calling it 'Music for Press Ceremony', it contained the seed of what would become Finlandia. The piece captured the mood of the times so brilliantly that Sibelius reworked it into a seperate symphonic poem in 1900.
It became immensely popular and a symbol of Finland's struggle for independence.
Because the title Finlandia was a bit too suspicious to censors trying to beat down nationalism, the piece was often performed under disguised names. Impromptu was one of the covers, although my favorite has to be the tongue-in-cheek Happy Feelings at the Awakening of Finnish Spring.