Oskar Merikanto

Oskar Merikanto was a Finnish composer, music critic, pianist, and organist.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article on Oskar Merikanto.

From the period sources

Oskar Merikanto, born in Helsingfors in 1868, was an “Able Finnish organist and composer,” according to The New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1924). His training took him through Helsingfors, Leipzig, and Berlin. From around 1890, Merikanto served as organist at St. John’s in Helsingfors and also conducted at the National Opera there. His compositional output includes the operas The Girl of Pohja (1899) and The Death of Elina, alongside pieces for organ, piano, and violin, and numerous songs. He also edited a collection of folk-songs. Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1908, 1922) places Merikanto among a “younger generation” of Finnish song-writers, noting him as “a very popular but somewhat shallow writer” whose music, while incorporating Finnish folk-songs and poetry, nonetheless “practically belongs to the German Mendelssohn-Spohr period, and cannot in any sense be called racial.”