If yes, then why?

If not, then what is it?

I haven't heard this. Where does it fall in timeline with his other works? Is it choral or solo voice, and I 'm assuming with orchestra.

Luonnotar is for Soprano and orchestra, about 7 - 8 minutes in length.

--- Edit ---

Sorry, Ainola, I just re-read your post, you were asking about Sibelius' time-line, not the length of the piece. "My bad", as the Americans would say.

Luonnotar is Opus 70, written in 1913, in between The Bard and Aallottaret.

What does Luonnotar mean?

Luonnotar is the Goddess of the Air from the Kalevala. She is also the mother of Vainamoinen (i.e. The Bard) and Lemminkainen (but not Kullervo).

The piece by Sibelius recounts the creation of the Earth and the Sky. The legend has it that a bird nested on her knees. When the eggs fell from the nest, the broken shells became the Earth and the Sky.

Absolutely a tone poem. I wont even vote

Fair enough, but the reason I asked was in comparison to Mahler. His orchestral songs, like the Wunderhorn cycle or the Kindertotenlider are definitely not considered tone poems, as they stem from the Germanic Lieder tradition of Schubert and Schumann.

So to rephrase my question, how is Luonnotar different from these songs? That is what I'm not sure about. I know Luonnotar quite well and have at least a "listening familiarity" with the Schuber-Schumann-Mahler tradition. On a philosophical level, I cannot put Luonnotar in the same category as these Lieder, and yet I cannot wholly seperate them either.

So perhaps to rephrase the question yet again, why is Luonnotar a tone poem while Schubert's Wintereise, Schumann's Dichterliebe and Mahler's Des Knaben Wunderhorn or even Das Lied von der Erde are not?

On balance I agree with arenan,of course it has aspects of song in it as well. But when the music is so glorious, do we need to pigeon-hole it?
Concerning lieder, it is often said that the majority of Sibelius's songs build on the Nordic 'romans' tradition rather than the German Lied as such. I find it odd that many of his song opus groups do, however, contain one piece that is much more , well, Schubertian than the others. I think of Jägargossen in Op. 13, Rosenlied in Op. 50, and so on.
P.S. Hazaah! My 10th post!

I copped out and clicked the not sure button.

I am sure of one thing. Even though I've just spend a happy half hour or so claiming, on various threads, that the 4th symphony is as good as it gets with Sibelius, I must also say, for the record, that Luonnotar is my very favorite piece of Sibelius. And that, for me, is saying quite a lot. This is just such a gorgeous piece of music. I'm tempted to say, as people have said about Ives and his General William Booth Enters Heaven, that Sibelius would be a famous composer had he written nothing else.

A recording by Isokoski/Segerstam/HPO.
Try it. It is far beyond driven!

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Agreed! Her voice is ideal for this work.

Wow. Consider it done.

(While I esteem Luonnator highly, I also, oddly enough, have never heard a recording I unequivocally like. So that jumps to the top of my list. Well, maybe number two. I have to get Luc Ferrari's Didascalies first. Fair's fair.)

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Woo hoo! Quote of the moment!!

I have no idea. It could probably be seen as a mixture of the two... I just don't know. It has elements of both, from the little I've heard of it. I'll come back to this...

Now that I've actually listened to Luonnotar in its entirety a couple of times, I think it's a bit of both, though really a bit like a spoken narrative in its way, also... just how the orchestra is always so soft and such, and everything is so equalized. Also, according to what I've read (thanks Andrew B ), his narrated music often has the sort of thing where the actual music is alternated with only spoken words, maybe with a soft accompaniment... it's just a random thought.

Out of the choices, though, it's both tone poem and song.