String quartet no. 1

The first composer to warrant a place in the musical history of Finland, Erik Tulindberg (1761-1814) was an excellent violinist, and he also played the cello. His musical reputation spread all the way to Stockholm (Finland was at that time part of the Kingdom of Sweden), and in 1797 was there admitted as a member of the Royal Academy of Music. The I violin, viola and cello parts of Tulindberg’s String Quartets were discovered in 1923 in the collections of Helsinki University Library. They were copies of the instrumental parts presumably made by Tulindberg himself, though they were possibly never used during his lifetime. Not only is the whole of the II violin part missing; the first movement of the viola part of the fifth Quartet stops in the middle of a phrase, and the last 60 bars or so of the movement’s manuscript page are just empty staves. In the early 2000s, the Rantatie Quartet asked Anssi Mattila whether he would like to reconstruct the missing II violin part. The job was finished in 2004 and the Rantatie Quartet released a Classical Emma-winning disc of the Quartets in 2006. This product includes the full score and the set of parts.