Latvian national art music emerged in the second half of the 19th century, inspired by three parallel traditions. One was traditional singing, which was beginning to be collected, analysed and performed professionally. Second, there was a flourishing German musical tradition, mainly in country manors and larger cities like Riga. Local composers had already contributed to a “Northern Renaissance”, and elite or bourgeois musical life actively engaged with the wider patterns in the Baltic region and Europe. Cities like Riga and Mitau/Jelgava hosted Richard Wagner (1837-39) and received concert visits from Liszt (1842), Clara Schumann (1844; 1864), and Berlioz (1847). The third tradition was ecclesiastical, and involved Lutheran chorals and singing traditions of the Moravian Brethren. These had become a popular alternative to Lutheranism in Livland – now northern Latvia and southern Estonia – since the 18th century, but discouraged folk-music traditions.

A cultural transfer rendered the German-style Liedertafel a platform for local singing traditions and helped to create a musical scene which was dominated by choral singing and which developed mainly through choral societies and song festivals. When the First Institute of Music (Erste Musik-Institut zu Riga was established in 1864 by Emil Friedrich Wilhelm Siegert (1838–1901), most Latvian composers still acquired their education at Russian imperial centres (St Petersburg or Moscow).  Two organisations central to the development of national music were the Parish Teachers’ Seminar of Livland (Das Ritterschaftliche Parochiallehrer-Seminar zu Livland, 1839-90), from which c. 400 conductors and choirmasters graduated, and the Musical Commission (est. 1889) of the Riga Latvian Society. This latter became the central publisher and promoter of modern Latvian music.

Various musical developments, choral and instrumental, played into the national mobilization efforts, mainly through the huge All-Latvian Song Festivals (est. 1873), which are still among the largest choral gatherings world-wide and have been included on the UNESCO list of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity since 2008.

Four foundational figures illustrate the relationship between the collecting an arrangement of folk music, musical education and the emergence of Latvian national music. Significantly, three of them spent most of their active years pre-1914 in non-Latvian parts of the Russian Empire.

Jānis Cimze (1914–1881) was the first academically educated Latvian composer who arranged folk songs. From 1836 to 1839, Cimze studied music at the Teacher’s Seminar of Weißenfels in Saxony (Lehrerseminar Weißenfels); he had been sent there by the Synod of Livland to prepare his employment at the newly established Parish Teachers’ Seminar, which he was to head until his death in 1881. In 1838, Cimze studied privately under the influential German musicologist, composer and folk-song collector Ludwig Christian Erk (1807–1883), whose influence is noticeable in his folk-music arrangements, which prominently utilized folk tunes and enshrined these in national repertoire of choir music.

Cimze, who belonged to the German-speaking elite of so-called Old Latvians (as opposed to the emerging ethnically-minded Latvian intelligentsia, the “Young Latvians”), produced his major contribution in the 1870s. Some 350 folk-song arrangements for Latvian choirs were collected as Dziesmu rota (“Ornament of songs”, 1872-84) and became a core component of the national song festival repertoire.

While Cimze adapted folk tunes to the musical language of contemporary choral music, the original melodies were of more direct importance to Andrejs Jurjāns (Jurjānu Andrejs, 1856–1922), folklorist and the first Latvian National-Romantic composer. Although Jurjāns lived and worked in Kharkiv (Ukraine) from 1872 until 1918, he collected almost 2700 traditional melodies from most of the Latvian territories through expeditions and correspondence. A selection of these was published in the 6-volume Latviešu tautas mūzikas materiāli (“Materials of Latvian folk music”, 1894-1926). His approach to folk music arrangements was marked by his studies at St Petersburg Conservatory (1875-82) under Rimskij-Korsakov and the influence of the New Russian School (the “Mighty Handful”), which meant that only tones already present in folk melodies should be used in their harmonization. During his studies, Jurjāns had befriended the poet Auseklis (Miķelis Krogzemis) and attended the clandestine literary society “Burtnieks”, that met in the apartment of Baumaņu Kārlis (Kārlis Baumanis), teacher, composer, and future author of the Latvian national anthem.

Besides harmonizing c. 100 folk songs for solo and choirs, Jurjāns marked the beginning of Latvian national symphonic music by composing suites, concertos and cantatas, some thirteen pieces in all. He was an active member of the Musical Commission of the Riga Latvian Society, edited various collections of choral songs, organized concerts and conducted several All-Latvian Song Festivals.

Jurjāns’s successor as composer and folklorist was Emils Melngailis (1874–1954), who collected more than 4000 folk songs and melodies, composed 240 folk-song arrangements for choirs and as many for ensembles. In 1896-97 Melngailis had studied at the Dresden Conservatory in Germany and at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1898-1901. His composition teacher there was Rimskij-Korsakov, too. In the early years of the 20th century, while working as a music critic in St Petersburg, Melngailis published his first folk-song arrangements for choirs and several theoretical publications in the popular press, juxtaposing “national art” and “European cosmopolitanism”. After his involvement in the 1905 revolts he was banished to Tashkent. He would travel to Latvia during the summers, participate in musical life and collect folklore. But most of his activities in this line were undertaken after 1918, extending into the Soviet occupation of Latvia after the Second World War.

His contemporary Jāzeps Vītols (1863–1948) became the central figure bridging National Romanticism and Romantic Nationalism in Latvian music over the turn of the centuries. His work contains more than 300 arrangements of folk songs for choirs, many renditions of folk melodies in instrumental music, and original compositions. Like Cimze, Vītols grew up in German-speaking circles. He became acquainted with Jurjāns’s folk songs while studying at the St Petersburg Conservatory (1880-86), again under Rimskij-Korsakov. After graduating, he remained at the Conservatory to teach composition, eventually becoming Professor in 1901, and counted Nikolai Mjaskovskij and Sergei Prokof’ev among his students. Vītols debuted with folk-inspired symphonic compositions, but his interest in folk music renditions dwindled after the 1920s. Similarly to Baumanis and Jurjāns, his heritage is popular on the Latvian choral repertoire; particularly popular is Gaismas pils (“The castle of light”), with lyrics by Auseklis.