Although Sibelius wrote around a hundred songs over a period of more than thirty years � mainly settings of Swedish texts, with eight in German and only a handful in Finnish � they have suffered comparative neglect alongside his larger-scale orchestral and choral music. The best of the songs are essentially nature pieces, dark-hued, vividly characterized, intensely melancholic and vocally demanding. Sibelius considered them to represent his �innermost self�.