in poverty and struggled with hunger, and as a boy Leevi worked variously as a street cleaner and as a laborer at a sawmill. Although his first attempts at composition were at the age of eight, Madetoja was by no means a musical prodigy. He studied the violin and piano on his own and played the mouth organ as a boy. Additionally, Madetoja became a skilled kantele player: he received a 10-string kantele on his tenth birthday, and in secondary school at the Oulu Lyceum, he upgraded to a 30-string version. (Madetoja is certainly the only notable classical composer in history whose primary instrument was the kantele.) At the Lyceum, Leevi sang in, and eventually directed, the school's male and mixed choirs. Student years In 1906, Madetoja enrolled at the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Music Institute, where he studied music theory, composition, and piano under Armas Järnefelt and . A year later, in the summer of 1907, the Finnish Literature Society sponsored Madetoja's trip to the Inkeri region in Russia so that he could collect folk songs. Additional good fortune arrived in 1908, when Jean Sibelius, Finland's most famous composer, accepted Leevi for private instruction. Although his lessons with Sibelius at Ainola were unstructured and sporadic, Madetoja valued his time with the master and assimilated some of Sibelius's unique idiom. The two studied together until 1910. (For more see: Madetoja and Sibelius.) At the Music Institute, Madetoja's premiered his first compositions at student concerts: in December 1908, the Op. 2 songs, Yksin and Lähdettyäs; and on 29 May 1909, the Piano Trio, Op. 1 (second and third movements only). His public introduction arrived in January 1910 when Robert Kajanus, chief conductor of the Helsinki Orchestral Society, conducted Madetoja's Elegia (from the four-movement Symphonic Suite, Op. 4) to great success; critics described the Elegia as the "first master work" of a budding "natural orchestral composer". After graduating from the Music Institute and the University of Helsinki in 1910, Madetoja took up a career as a music critic, penning essays and reviews for the Säveletär magazine and, later, the . Additional praise followed Madetoja's first composition concert in Helsinki on 26 September 1910, at which he conducted the Piano Trio and excerpts from the Symphonic Suite and the Chess Suite, Op. 5 (excerpted from incidental music Madetoja had composed for Eino Leino's play). The positive reviews did, however, contain a