folk - duke university
TRANSCRIPT
Concepts of Folk in Nineteenth-Century Swedish Art Music
by
Kirsten Santos Rutschman
Department of Music Duke University
Date:_______________________ Approved:
___________________________
R. Larry Todd, Supervisor
___________________________ Thomas Brothers
___________________________
Philip Rupprecht
___________________________ Bertil van Boer
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of Music in the Graduate School
of Duke University
2018
ABSTRACT
Concepts of Folk in Nineteenth-Century Swedish Art Music
by
Kirsten Santos Rutschman
Department of Music Duke University
Date:_______________________ Approved:
___________________________
R. Larry Todd, Supervisor
___________________________ Thomas Brothers
___________________________
Philip Rupprecht
___________________________ Bertil van Boer
An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
Music in the Graduate School of Duke University
2018
Copyright by Kirsten Santos Rutschman
2018
iv
Abstract Art music and folk music are all too often perceived as opposing concepts. The
educated, elite practitioners of a notated art seem to have little in common with
musically illiterate commoners who weave an oral tradition. However, these two modes
have much to say to each other when brought together in dialogue. This dissertation
traces the use of Swedish folk themes in nineteenth-century art music—the era of a
widespread interest in folk culture that quickly enthralled much of Europe, thanks to
Johann Gottfried von Herder’s many disciples such as the Brothers Grimm—and
provides a framework through which to understand the musical expression of a culture
that has thus far been rendered largely invisible to non-Swedish-speaking scholars.
Though Sweden’s modern sovereignty dates back to 1523, the kingdom’s
boundaries shifted dramatically early in the 1800s, as the eastern territory of Finland
was lost to Russia in 1809 and the western land of Norway became linked with Sweden
via union in 1814. Correspondingly, the question of what it meant to be “Swedish”
demanded reevaluation. One response was to transcribe, edit, and publish collections of
traditional songs and instrumental tunes as supposed treasure troves of cultural history.
These arrangements, which were filtered through musical notation and given newly
composed harmonic accompaniments, say more about educated perceptions of folk
music and expectations of acceptable performance than they do about actual folk
performance practices. Through the medium of print, these “cleaned-up” songs found
wide circulation in print and formed the basis for many later compositions. I take a
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genre-based approach and analyze stages of development of the use of folk melodies in
piano-vocal arrangements, male choral settings, theatrical works, piano literature, and
chamber and orchestral music.
The political scientist Benedict Anderson writes of “imagined communities,” in
which people who never meet nevertheless imagine themselves as part of a single group
due to a deep sense of innate comradeship. I argue that, in Sweden, shared knowledge
of the most popular traditional songs, and the recognition of the use of these songs in
other compositions, helped facilitate the “re-imagination” of the Swedish nation-
community during a time when cultural and political allegiances were in flux.
Similar phenomena have been widely observed with respect to other European
countries, but Swedish music has not yet been studied in equal depth, likely because
there was no figurehead composer of national and international prominence. To date, no
systematic investigation of compositions based on Swedish folksong has been carried
out. This dissertation draws on extensive research of little-known archival sources,
including manuscript and rare published scores, letters, and contemporary newspaper
reviews. In addition, it contributes to the field by entering into dialogue with existing
Swedish-language scholarship, which has hitherto been inaccessible to most scholars
outside Scandinavia. With this dissertation, I join a scholarly community spanning both
sides of the Atlantic.
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Dedication
To my parents, Edward and Carla,
and my brother, Phillip,
for modeling an intrinsic love of learning.
And to my wife, Ana,
for walking every step of this dissertation—and my life—with me.
Obrigada.
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Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv
List of musical examples ......................................................................................................... xiii
List of tables ............................................................................................................................. xvii
List of figures ............................................................................................................................. xix
Translations ................................................................................................................................. xx
Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. xxi
1 Introduction: “Weep for what you have lost, but protect what you yet possess”: Seeking Svea’s heritage in folksong ........................................................................................ 1
Political roots of the nineteenth-century folksong movement in Sweden ..................... 3
The Gothic League ........................................................................................................... 7
Ballad-style folksong ..................................................................................................... 10
Theoretical approaches to nationalism .............................................................................. 13
Musics and nations: Styles ............................................................................................ 17
Musics and nations: Scholarship ................................................................................. 23
Musical nationalism and nationhood (or lack thereof) ............................................ 31
Methodology ................................................................................................................... 34
Overview ............................................................................................................................... 40
2 Folksong collections and collected folksongs: Ideologies and characteristics of piano-vocal settings ................................................................................................................... 45
Primary collections ............................................................................................................... 46
Secondary collections ........................................................................................................... 50
Adolf Fredrik Lindblad: Der Norden-Saal ................................................................... 51
Collections of Swedish folksong published in America ........................................... 56
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Collections of pan-Nordic folksong published in Sweden ...................................... 57
Folksong in Swedish education ................................................................................... 58
Prefaces and other writings ................................................................................................. 60
Conflicting interpretations of the omkväde (refrain) .................................................. 62
Characteristics of Swedish folksong as notated in the early 1800s ............................... 66
Repertoire: Piano-vocal arrangements of Swedish folksong ................................... 67
“Old” vs. “New” layers ................................................................................................. 69
Piano accompaniments ................................................................................................. 73
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 77
3 Swedish perspectives on Scandinavianism: Folksongs for male chorus ................. 79
Background: History of student song ................................................................................ 86
European models of male choral singing ................................................................... 87
Uppsala University: The first secular student choir ................................................. 93
Choruses at other Nordic universities ........................................................................ 99
An early experiment: Hæffner’s setting of “Sir Tynne” ......................................... 101
Sources: Folksong arrangements for male chorus ......................................................... 107
Extant manuscript collections .................................................................................... 108
Extant printed collections ........................................................................................... 118
Manuscript and print volumes, compared ............................................................... 136
Establishing the chronology of the repertoire ......................................................... 136
Reprinting and copyright ........................................................................................... 139
Folksongs in the repertoire ................................................................................................ 143
Overview and song types ........................................................................................... 143
Typical characteristics of folksong arrangements for male chorus ...................... 152
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Performing politics: From nationalism to pan-nationalism ......................................... 161
Initial establishment: National identity (1808–1840s) ............................................. 164
Choral Scandinavianism (late 1830s–1875) .............................................................. 167
Formal performances (1845–1900) ............................................................................. 192
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 203
4 Taking center stage: The theatricalization of folk music ........................................... 206
Eighteenth-century precursors: Gustaf III, Swedish-language opera, and the “national music” of Carl Envallsson ................................................................................ 211
Swedish musical theater: An overview ........................................................................... 226
Terminology: Genres and types ................................................................................. 228
National opera in nineteenth-century Europe ............................................................... 234
Institutional nationalization ....................................................................................... 234
Linguistic nationalization ........................................................................................... 241
Musical nationalization ............................................................................................... 248
National and royal anthems ....................................................................................... 249
Linguistic features ........................................................................................................ 252
Folk music ..................................................................................................................... 254
Folk-style music: Writing in folkton ........................................................................... 257
Folksong as auditory prop ................................................................................................ 261
Music for the people and by the people in The Union (1815) ................................. 262
Signaling location: Oklahoma! (1943) vs. The Värmlanders (1846) and The Girl from Värmland (1821) ............................................................................................................. 268
Country folk and city folk in Korp-Kirsti (1863) ....................................................... 288
Hyperrealism in The Games of the House of Folkung (1864) ...................................... 296
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An indispensible, interchangeable folk melody in The Fisherman’s Cottage (1844)......................................................................................................................................... 298
Folksong as central organizing principle ........................................................................ 307
The unfulfilled promise of The Mermaid (1806) ....................................................... 310
The Water Sprite (Necken, 1844) reconsidered ........................................................... 311
Two steps forward, one to the side: Engelbrekt (1846), Urdur (1851), and Duke Magnus and the Mermaid (1867) ................................................................................... 318
Lady Elisif (1870) as intermediate stage ..................................................................... 324
Creative impulse in The Bride of the Mountain King (Den bergtagna, 1874) ........... 326
Little Karin (1896) caught between history and legend ........................................... 333
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 338
5 Abstractions: Variations and fantasies for piano ........................................................ 341
Elaborate treatments of folk melodies for solo piano .................................................... 344
Nineteenth-century variations for piano .................................................................. 348
Variations on “Little Karin” .............................................................................................. 366
Variation score .............................................................................................................. 369
Berens: “Little Karin” from Klænge aus Norden ........................................................ 371
Kuhlau: Variations on the Old Swedish Song “Little Karin,” op. 91 .......................... 372
Hallström: Variations on “Little Karin” ....................................................................... 375
Van Boom: Introduction and Variations on the Swedish Air “Little Karin” ............... 378
Fantasies on “Little Karin” ................................................................................................ 384
Passy: Grande Fantaisie Followed by a Rondo Allegretto vivace for Piano on Swedish National Airs, op. 6 ........................................................................................................ 386
Norman: Fantasy on the Folksong “Little Karin” ........................................................ 391
Lönngren: Fantasy on Swedish Folksongs .................................................................... 392
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Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 395
6 Dancing in the chamber: Instrumental music for small ensembles ........................ 397
Contexts for performance .................................................................................................. 400
Chamber repertoire ............................................................................................................ 403
Trios: Hallberg, Norman (and Schubert) .................................................................. 407
Quartets: Byström (and Stenhammar and Graener) ............................................... 413
Quintets: Romberg, Hallberg, and Berens ................................................................ 422
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 428
7 Magnifying folk music for the orchestral stage ........................................................... 431
Orchestral repertoire in Richard Dybeck’s evening entertainment concerts ............. 434
Ahlström (four concerts, 1844–52) ............................................................................. 445
Höijer (four concerts, 1847–57) ................................................................................... 452
Söderman (two concerts, 1859–60) ............................................................................ 457
Gille (ten concerts, 1857–70) ....................................................................................... 460
Overview of non-Dybeck orchestral repertoire ............................................................. 466
Symphonies ......................................................................................................................... 470
Eggert: Symphony in C Major (ca. 1805–09) ............................................................ 471
Gille: Midsummer Celebration (1850) ........................................................................... 474
Rubenson: Symphonic Intermezzo (1860) ................................................................ 476
Hugo Alfvén: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor (1897) .................................................. 478
Looking ahead to the twentieth century: Peterson-Berger, Atterberg, and Stenhammar .................................................................................................................. 480
Overtures ............................................................................................................................. 486
Foroni: Overture No. 3 (1850) ..................................................................................... 486
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Rubenson: Festival March (1878), and Norman: Festival Overture (1882) .............. 491
Tone-paintings and Rhapsodies ....................................................................................... 495
Kjellstrand: Dance of the House Fairies (Tomtelek, 1880) ............................................ 496
Hallén: Swedish Rhapsody No. 2 (1882) ...................................................................... 501
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 506
8 Conclusion: Reflections .................................................................................................... 509
Appendices ................................................................................................................................ 517
Appendix A: Glossary of Swedish terms ........................................................................ 517
Appendix B: Folksong titles in English translation ....................................................... 521
Appendix C: List of arrangements of folksong for male chorus to 1900 ................... 525
Appendix D: Correspondence between the publishers Abraham Hirsch and Abraham Bohlin, April–September 1872 ........................................................................ 528
Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 540
Biography ................................................................................................................................... 579
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List of musical examples Example 2.1: Grønland, “The Bride of the Mountain King” (“Den bergtagna”) ............... 63
Example 2.2: Hæffner, “The Bride of the Mountain King” ................................................... 65
Example 2.3: “Little Karin” ballad, eight settings of the first phrase .................................. 75
Example 3.1: Hæffner, “Sir Tynne” for two groups of three male voices ......................... 102
Example 3.2: Hæffner, “Sir Tynne,” both melodic variants ................................................ 104
Example 3.3: “Hæffner” and Cronhamn, “Skadi’s Lament,” overlapping pitches ......... 123
Example 3.4: “Little Kerstin’s Wedding and Burial,” three harmonizations ................... 124
Example 3.5: Matthison-Hansen, “Roeskilde,” version more commonly sung by Swedish choirs, including in Roskilde Cathedral in 1862 ................................................................... 182
Example 3.6: Matthison-Hansen, “Roeskilde,” “corrected” version published by Lewerth in 1872 ......................................................................................................................................... 183
Example 3.7: “What clamor arises on the banks of the Fyris,” reconstructed choral version ........................................................................................................................................ 187
Example 4.1: Similar gestures in polskas from The Union (Du Puy) and Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances ([Afzelius & Åhlström]) ........................................................................ 267
Example 4.2: Fryxell, The Girl from Värmland, “Send Word to Anna” ............................... 274
Example 4.3: Ballad melody, “Unexpected Wedding-Guest,” strophes 1–3 .................... 281
Example 4.4: Ballad melody, “Revenge,” strophes 1–3 ....................................................... 282
Example 4.5: Randel/Dahlgren, The Värmlanders, “For Days I Have Been Singing” ....... 285
Example 4.6: Source melody, “Tu – Lu! Is He Still Asleep?” .............................................. 295
Example 4.7: Berens, Korp-Kirsti, Orchestral introduction, mm. 1–22, reduction ............ 295
Example 4.8: Säfström/Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, “In the Green Forest of the North,” mm. 1–22, reduction ................................................................................................... 299
Example 4.9: Säfström/Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Recitative: “Alas, the Fire that Consumes Me,” mm. 8–24, reduction .................................................................................... 301
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Example 4.10: Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Overture, Theme 1 and its source melody ...................................................................................................................................................... 305
Example 4.11: Säfström, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Text from crossed-out romans (no. 5) applied to the ballad melody “Duke Fröjdenborg and Miss Adelin” ............................... 306
Example 4.12: Weser/Torssell, Old Man Hoberg, “A Farmer Lived in Destitution,” strophe 1 .................................................................................................................................................... 309
Example 4.13: “Necken’s Polska” melody ............................................................................. 314
Example 4.14: Van Boom, The Water Sprite (Necken), Overture, reduction, mm. 1–16 .... 314
Example 4.15: Meijersson/Van Boom, The Water Sprite, “Like Lightning Blazes the Glaive of Revenge,” Act I, Scene 4, excerpt ....................................................................................... 317
Example 4.16: Granberg/Ahlström, Urdur, Finale – Melodrama ....................................... 321
Example 4.17: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King (Den bergtagna), Overture, piano score, mm. 1–16 ......................................................................................................................... 328
Example 4.18: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King, Act II, Scene 5, altered version of the first half of the ballad melody in the orchestral postlude ........................................ 330
Example 4.19: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King, Act III, Scene 4, piano score, excerpt ......................................................................................................................................... 331
Example 4.20: Hallström, Little Karin, Act I: Choral setting of the ballad by the same name ............................................................................................................................................ 335
Example 5.1: Beethoven, “Air Autrichien” (op. 105, no. 3), mm. 1–4 of theme and each variation ...................................................................................................................................... 354
Example 5.2: Beethoven, “Dursli und Babeli” Variations (WoO 64), mm. 1–3 of theme and Variation 1 .......................................................................................................................... 356
Example 5.3: Mendelssohn, Variations in E-flat Major, op. 82, last 10 mm. ..................... 360
Example 5.4: Liszt, Trois morceaux suisses, “Ranz des vaches,” beginning of theme and last 15 mm. of piece ................................................................................................................... 362
Example 5.5: Brahms, Variations on a Hungarian Song, ends of the Tema and vars. VIII-XIII ...................................................................................................................................................... 365
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Example 5.6: “Little Karin” melody as transposed for major-mode variations, with brackets indicating substantial deviations from simplest major transposition ............... 367
Example 5.7: Berens, “Klein Käthchen,” Andante, mm. 1–16 ............................................ 372
Example 5.8: Kuhlau, Variations sur l’ancien air suédois: “Och liten Karin tjente . . .” Var. 10, Larghetto con anima, mm. 18–31 ............................................................................................ 375
Example 5.9: Hallström, Variationer öfver “Liten Karin,” [Coda], Andante ....................... 377
Example 5.10: Van Boom, Introduction & variations . . . “Och lilla Karin tjente . . .” Fugue after restatement of var. 8 on subject of ornamented var. 8 theme, mm. 1–16 ................. 382
Example 5.11: Passy, Grande fantasie suivie d’un rondo sur des airs nationaux suédois (op. 6), Introduction, mm. 17–39 .......................................................................................................... 389
Example 5.12: Lönngren, Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor, 5r, systems 5–6 ........................... 394
Example 6.1: Berg, “See, the Sun Is Setting,” and the folksong “Thus I Take my Rifle” 409
Example 6.2: Hallberg, “Little Karin” for piano trio, no. 2 in [Folksongs, Arranged] .... 411
Example 6.3: Norman, Dalvisa (1863) for string trio, mm. 1–10 ......................................... 413
Example 6.4: Byström, Quartetto Svedese, iii. Intermezzo, mm. 1–7, and a similar folksong melody from Geijer-Afzelius ................................................................................................... 416
Example 6.5: Two fiddle tunes from Traditions, vol. 1 ......................................................... 424
Example 6.6: Berens, Fantasy for Quintet, section based on Traditions, mm. 1–28 ............ 427
Example 7.1: Ahlström, Svenska polskor (1844), Introduction, mm. 1–7 ............................ 448
Example 7.2: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes for orchestra (1847), transition between first two tunes, mm. 41–55 ....................................................................................... 455
Example 7.3: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes, Coda based on Orsa-March ...................................................................................................................................................... 462
Example 7.4: Gille, Nordic Ceremonial Music, Walking-Tunes and Marches, Coda based on Höijer’s coda based on Orsa-March ....................................................................................... 464
Example 7.5: Eggert, Symphony in C Major, iv. Allegro vivace, mm. 487–502: Simultaneous layering of primary and secondary themes ................................................. 473
Example 7.6: Gille, Midsommarfesten, ii. Tempo di menuetto, Coda, mm. 12–45 ............. 475
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Example 7.7: Rubenson, Symphonic Intermezzo (1860), i. Allegro moderato, mm. 1–10 ...................................................................................................................................................... 477
Example 7.8: Alfvén, Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, op. 7, i. Grave, mm. 1–4, reduction 479
Example 7.9: Alfvén, Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, op. 7, i, Primary theme and similar melody ........................................................................................................................................ 480
Example 7.10: Foroni, Overture No. 3, mm. 43–50, compared with folk source ............... 488
Example 7.11: Foroni, Overture No. 3, mm. 76–80, “Peter Swineherd” quotation, reduction .................................................................................................................................... 490
Example 7.12: Dybeck, “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (“Du gamla, du friska”) ................. 492
Example 7.13: Rubenson, Festival March, mm. 12–17, strings only .................................... 493
Example 7.14: Norman, Festival Overture, mm. 50–57, strings only ................................... 495
Example 7.15: Kjellstrand, Dance of the House Fairies (Tomtelek), polska-like themes Nos. 1 & 2 ............................................................................................................................................... 500
Example 7.16: Hallén, Swedish Rhapsody (No. 2), two polska themes ................................. 504
Example 7.17: Hallén, Swedish Rhapsody, mm. 1-24 .............................................................. 505
Example 8.1: Rydberg and Bach, Violin Concerto in E Major (BWV 1042), iii. Allegro assai, mm. 1–16 .......................................................................................................................... 516
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List of tables Table 2.1: Primary published collections based on field transcriptions .............................. 47
Table 2.2: Major manuscript collections of folksong transcriptions .................................... 49
Table 2.3: Secondary collections based largely or entirely on melodies in prior published collections ..................................................................................................................................... 50
Table 2.4: Folksongs with musical settings in at least seven published collections, 1814–99 .................................................................................................................................................... 68
Table 2.5: Structural elements of “old” and “new” published folksongs ........................... 71
Table 2.6: Tonal-modal characteristics of “old” and “new” published folksongs ............. 73
Table 3.1: Manuscript collections containing arrangements of folksong for TTBB chorus ...................................................................................................................................................... 112
Table 3.2: Underlined categories, including folkvisa, in Kallenberg’s indices .................. 115
Table 3.3: Published collections consisting entirely of Swedish folksongs for four-part male chorus ................................................................................................................................ 120
Table 3.4: Printed mixed collections of four-part song for male voices containing at least one Swedish folksong arrangement ....................................................................................... 132
Table 3.5: Folksongs with five or more different arrangements for male chorus ............ 145
Table 3.6: Folksongs found in ten or more sources for male chorus ................................. 146
Table 3.7: Sources of initial publication of folksongs later arranged for male chorus .... 147
Table 3.8: Refrains in piano-vocal settings and male choral arrangements ..................... 155
Table 3.9: Tonality/Modality in piano-vocal arrangements and male choral settings .... 155
Table 3.10: Nordic student meetings ...................................................................................... 173
Table 3.11: Scandinavian folksongs performed by Swedish choirs ................................... 197
Table 3.12: Number of Scandinavian folksongs performed by the Uppsala Student Singing Society and Lund Student Singing Society, 1849–1900 ......................................... 199
Table 4.1: Theatrical works in Swedish containing musical quotations of or other direct connections with folk music .................................................................................................... 229
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Table 4.2: Vernacular operas in several European languages ............................................ 243
Table 4.3: Most-performed works by the Royal Swedish Opera, 1773–1972 ................... 270
Table 4.4: Tunes in the Overture to The Värmlanders ............................................................ 279
Table 4.5: Randel, The Värmlanders, Overture, structure ..................................................... 302
Table 4.6: Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Overture, structure ......................................... 303
Table 4.7: Appearances of the melody “The Bride of the Mountain King” in Hallström and Hedberg’s opera ................................................................................................................ 327
Table 4.8: Little Karin, ballad vs. opera .................................................................................. 336
Table 5.1: Extended treatments of Swedish folksongs for solo piano ............................... 347
Table 5.2: Representative variation sets by European composers on folk and other themes ......................................................................................................................................... 350
Table 5.3: Variation sets in order of increasing complexity ................................................ 370
Table 6.1: Chamber works based on Swedish folktunes ..................................................... 406
Table 6.2: Works using a pair of fiddle tunes from Traditions, vol. 1 ................................ 424
Table 7.1: Richard Dybeck’s folk-music concerts ................................................................. 438
Table 7.2: Orchestral pieces performed at Dybeck’s folk-music concerts, 1844–70 ......... 440
Table 7.3: Ahlström’s four sets of orchestral folksong arrangements, 1844 ..................... 446
Table 7.4: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes for orchestra (1847), individual melodies borrowed ................................................................................................................... 453
Table 7.5: Comparison of orchestral sets arranged by Söderman for performance in 1859/60 and publication in 1870 .............................................................................................. 459
Table 7.6: Orchestral works based in folksong not commissioned for Dybeck’s folk-music concerts ....................................................................................................................................... 466
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List of figures Figure 1.1: Stages of expansion and contraction of the Swedish Empire ............................. 5
Figure 2.1: Lindblad, Der Norden-Saal (1826), Title page ....................................................... 53
Figure 3.1: Number of performances of settings of known and unknown authorship .. 150
Figure 4.1: Royal Opera, total performances of all operas and Swedish operas per season, 1773–1820 .................................................................................................................................... 219
Figure 4.2: Royal Opera, number of total operas and Swedish operas performed per season, 1773–1820 ...................................................................................................................... 220
Figure 4.3: Royal Opera, percentage of performances and individual titles of Swedish works, 1773–1820 ....................................................................................................................... 221
Figure 5.1: Variation types and relative complexity ............................................................ 352
Figure 5.2: Schubert, “Hüttenbrenner” Variations, D. 576, structure ................................ 357
Figure 5.3: Van Boom, Introduction & variations . . . “Och lilla Karin tjente . . .”, structure ...................................................................................................................................................... 381
Figure 6.1: Chamber works on Swedish folk melodies for two to five players ............... 404
Figure 6.2: Zorn, Midsummer-Dance (1897) ............................................................................ 429
Figure 6.3: A folkdance group poses for a photograph at the Spring Festival, Skansen outdoor folk museum, Stockholm (1904) .............................................................................. 430
Figure 7.1: Foroni, Overture No. 3, three levels of order reversal ....................................... 489
Figure 7.2: Foroni, Overture No. 3, four methods of altering 3-beat polska melody to fit common time ............................................................................................................................. 491
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Translations
All translations, unless otherwise acknowledged, are my own. When quoting sources
using nineteenth-century orthography, original spellings have been maintained.
xxi
Acknowledgements
I dare to renew my appeal to you, that you choose for your thesis defense some topic related to folksong [———] ‘On Swedish Folk Music’s Utility for the Theater,’ for example. Something like this is needed at this time — greatly needed.1
-Richard Dybeck to Oscar Meijerberg, 1844
Almost exactly 170 years after the antiquarian Richard Dybeck implored his friend Oscar
Meijerberg to write a thesis related to Swedish folk music, I took up the same challenge.
There is a saying “Ingen nämnd, ingen glömd,” which translates as “Nobody named,
nobody forgotten.” Although this space is too short to properly thank everybody who
has helped me bring this project to fruition, I will nevertheless attempt to convey my
gratitude.
First of all, heartfelt thanks go out to my dissertation committee at Duke
University. My advisor, Dr. R. Larry Todd, provided valuable guidance from the outset
on all aspects of this work since its inception; his close reading and his unwavering
encouragement have meant the world to me. Dr. Philip Rupprecht pushed me to
consider music and nationalism from new angles, which greatly strengthened my
argument. Likewise, Dr. Thomas Brothers brought important questions about theoretical
1 “Jag dristar förnya min upmaning till dig, att du för din disputation väljer något ämne hörande till folkvisan [———] ‘Om svenska folkmusikens användbarhet för Skådeplatsen’ t.ex. En sådan vore just nu af nöden — af största nöd.” Emphasis original. Richard Dybeck to Oscar Meijerberg, December 16, 1844; quoted in Anna Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” in Studier och essäer tillägnade Hans Eppstein, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie 31 (Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien, 1981), 119.
xxii
foundations to the table, for which I am grateful. External committee member Dr. Bertil
van Boer of Western Washington University was always at the ready to answer
questions pertaining to Swedish music history.
A stort tack (huge thanks!) is due to Dr. Owe Ander of Stockholm University.
Owe has shared generously of his time with me, supervising my research year in
Sweden and providing extensive commentary on chapter drafts. Likewise, Dr. Janis
Kreslins was an invaluable contact at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, as
well as an excellent conversation partner during our coffee breaks (fikapauser). The
Fulbright Commission of Sweden, directed by Erik Jönsson; the American-Scandinavian
Foundation; and the Lois Roth Endowment provided much-appreciated financial and
cultural support. The Musicology faculty of Stockholm University warmly welcomed
me as a visiting doctoral student, encouraging me to participate in research colloquia
there and at Uppsala University, from which I—an outsider studying a topic related to
the folk heritage and national identity of a country to which I have no familial ties—
learned much. Since my return to the United States, Tess and Victoria have very
helpfully sent some photographs of sources. Thank you!
My heartfelt thanks go to Laura Williams of Duke Music Library and Marina
Demina of the Music and Theater Library in Stockholm, and to so many unsung hero-
librarians and pages who have pulled and reshelved material for me. Anonymous
angels at ILL who have scanned so many book chapters and articles, sometimes within
as few as twelve hours: you’re amazing. This project simply could not have been
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completed without your timely assistance.
Through the years, Duke University and The Graduate School have generously
supported my scholarship. I thank all of my professors in the Music, German, History
and Theater departments for taking an interest in my work—and Dr. Louise Meintjes in
particular, for first encouraging me to develop a term paper into a conference
presentation. The wonderful staff of the Music Department, including Cathy Puckett
and Christy Reuss, kept me on track as I progressed through the program. My fellow
musgrads, and especially my cohort—Drs. Sarah Bereza, D. Edward Davis, and Paul
Sommerfeld—kept me sane, as did my communities at First Presbyterian Church and
Dr. Kerry McCarthy’s Sunday Vespers choir.
Vore det möjligt, skulle jag så gärna tacka var och en som någon gång har pratat
på svenska med mig, och som utan undantag har svarat med tålamod (i stället för att
genast ge upp och byta till engelska), särskilt under tiden när det kan ha varit en
utmaning att tolka mina ord. De största gissningar (vad är det som hon försöker säga?!)
har säkerligen Zita, Tomas och Kalle i Linköping fått möta, alltsedan vi lärde känna
varandra första gången jag pluggade i Sverige 2005.2
Finally, I thank Bev for introducing me to Carol, who kindled my interest in
Swedish fiddling and folk-dancing: an interest that began long before this dissertation
was even dreamt of, and will continue long after it has been defended.
2 Were it possible, I would like to thank every single person who has ever conversed with me på svenska, and who has invariably responded with patience (instead of immediately giving up and switching to English), especially at times when it might have been challenging to understand me. The lion’s share of guesswork (what is she trying to say?!) has doubtless fallen upon Zita, Tomas and Kalle of Linköping, friends since I first studied in Sweden in 2005.
1
1 Introduction: “Weep for what you have lost, but protect what you yet possess”: Seeking Svea’s heritage in folksong
Sweden, unlike its Nordic neighbors, has not produced a composer whose name is
universally identified with the country itself. In Norway and Finland, the highest
periods of musical attention occurred in the decades leading to each country’s
independence from another power (in 1905 and 1917, respectively), with the result that
their leading composers, Edvard Grieg and Jean Sibelius, became bound up in ideologies
of nationalism both inside and beyond national borders. However, as an independent
kingdom with medieval roots that became consolidated in a more modern national
sense through Gustaf Vasa‘s rise to power in 1523, Sweden did not have the same
politically motivated need for a figurehead national composer during the age of
romanticism as did its eastern and western neighbors.1 Instead, musical culture reached
an early high point already in the last decades of the eighteenth century with Gustaf III’s
intense interest in and support for the Royal Opera, over a hundred years before the
“golden ages” of Grieg and Sibelius.2
In contrast, the nineteenth century is typically portrayed as a time of provincial
1 A similar situation occurred in Denmark which, like Sweden, also dates its sovereignty to medieval times. The country did gain international musical prominence through the orchestral works of Niels Gade that were heavily programmed in continental Europe during his lifetime, although his fame was later eclipsed by that of Carl Nielsen. 2 For a well-rounded introduction to Gustavian opera, see Inger Mattsson, ed., Gustavian Opera: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Swedish Opera, Dance and Theatre 1771–1809 (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 1991).
2
musical activity at best, with little in the way of a serious academic musical education
available in Stockholm until the second half of the century and only one professional
orchestra active in the country until the early 1900s.3 However, actual conditions were
not as dire as they have later been characterized, and a great deal of music-making did
take place, from the intimate space of the home and the semi-public salon to the theater
and concert stage, the church service, and the military parade. Across this varied
musical landscape, a single thread joins disparate genres by virtue of compositional
source material: the use of folk music themes in art music compositions.4
Two primary questions arise: How did composers inscribe musical conceptions
of “folk” into their works? And how did audiences and critics hear and interpret these
statements? Through a close study of ways in which composers used folk and folk-like
melodies in arrangements and other compositions for solo song, male chorus, musical
theater, and various instrumental ensembles, the present study examines the aftermath
of the enthusiasm for folksong collection that began in German lands with Johann
3 See, for example, Jan Ling, “Musik och brödrafolk: Om solosång i Norge och Sverige under unionstiden,” in “Hemländsk hundraårig sång”: 1800-talets musik och det nationella: Föredrag och musikanalyser presenterade vid ett symposium i Göteborg 7–9 maj 1993, ed. Henrik Karlsson (Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien, 1994), 93. However, accounts of the “lack” of orchestras in the country usually do not consider that, relative to population size, Sweden was on par with other European entities; rural areas and small towns could not be expected to support professional orchestra activity, and in the middle of the 1800s, Sweden-Norway had only one city (Stockholm) with a population over 50,000. See Owe Ander, “‘Svenska sinfoni-författares karaktäristiska orkester-egendomligheter’: Aspekter på instrumentations-, orkestrerings- och satstekniken i Berwalds, Lindblads och Normans symfonier,” PhD diss. (Stockholm University, 2000), 29. 4 Musical nationalism is a common point of departure for “peripheral” European countries. This phenomenon has long been noted within Swedish musicology; for example, it forms an important point of departure for Carl-Allan Moberg’s influential article, “Från kämpevisa till locklåt: En översikt över det folkmusikaliska uppteckningsarbetet i Sverige,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 33 (1951): 5–52. However, no overarching, multi-genre study of the use of Swedish folk melodies in art music compositions has yet been undertaken, and English-language scholarship on this topic is very limited.
3
Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) late in the eighteenth century and spread to Sweden early
in the nineteenth century, heralding a new era in musical thought.
Political roots of the nineteenth-century folksong movement in Sweden
In addition to Herderian influence, regional politics also spurred the deep interest in
Swedish folksong that began early in the 1800s and continued unabated through the
century’s end. Around the same time that Herder’s concept of the folksong as the voice
of the soul of a people was arriving in Sweden, the geographical definition of that nation
was very much in flux. Within the first decade and a half, the country underwent three
significant territorial changes as Finland and Swedish Pomerania were lost and Norway
was gained, the last substantial alterations to the boundaries of a kingdom that had
variously won and lost a great deal of land over time.
While the earliest origins of the kingdom predate reliable historical record, small
clans and kingdoms gradually consolidated into a single Swedish kingdom under Olof
Skötkonung around the year 1000 C.E.5 At the end of the fourteenth century, Sweden
joined Denmark and Norway in the Kalmar Union, a common political entity
engineered by Queen Margareta of Denmark. However, within a few decades, factions
shifted and allegiances split. When Gustaf Vasa famously led the country to
independence in 1523, Swedish territory consisted of much of present-day Sweden (with
the notable exception of southwestern coastal regions and much of the northern part of
5 On the history of early Sweden, see Sten Carlsson and Jerker Rosén, Svensk historia 1, Tiden före 1718 (Stockholm: Esselte studium, 1978), 81–86.
4
the Scandinavian peninsula) and southwestern Finland. At the zenith of territorial
expansion in 1658, the kingdom included not only almost the entirety of present-day
Sweden and Finland, but also portions of what are now Norway, Russia, Estonia, Latvia
and Germany (Figure 1.1).6 The “Great Power Era” (stormaktstiden) was short-lived,
however; following an extended period of war, the terms of the Peace of Nystad (1721)
collapsed much of the Swedish Empire. Russia took control of the Baltic territories and
southeastern Finland, and by 1800, after a few smaller losses, the Swedish kingdom
consisted of approximately the territory covered today by Sweden and Finland and a
small coastal region in Germany.
6 “File:Swedish Empire (1560-1815) en2.png,” Wikimedia Commons, accessed February 1, 2018, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swedish_Empire_(1560-1815)_en2.png. This image is licenced under CC BY 3.0.
5
Figure 1.1: Stages of expansion and contraction of the Swedish Empire
In 1809, Finland was conquered by Russia in the Finnish War; the loss of this
territory, which had been connected with Sweden since at least the twelfth century, sent
6
shockwaves through Swedish society.7 In urban settings and along much of the western
and southern Finnish coast, Swedish speakers outnumbered Finnish speakers, and the
Swedish language predominated for everything from high culture to discussions among
members of the upper class about how to cultivate a Finnish nationality.8 The national
poet of Finland, Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–77)—one of the aforementioned native
speakers of Swedish—treats the painful retreat by the Swedish army towards the
northern border in his classic work The Tales of Ensign Stål (Fänrik Ståls sägner, 2 vols.,
1848 & 1860), which spoke to contemporary generations of the bitterness of the loss and
to subsequent generations of the need to rally for Finnish independence.9
After this defeat, which reduced the size of the Swedish kingdom by one third,
the initial political motivation to seek revenge soon gave way to a more introspective
desire not merely to imagine, but to re-imagine the national heritage according to the
newly drawn reduced boundaries. Esaias Tegnér’s (1782–1846) famous poem, Svea,
reflects this shift: a vengeful tone sustains the first version (1811), which gives way in the
final version (1812) to a resigned acceptance of the defeat, coupled with a fervent desire
to make the best of the new situation. In the poem, the lyrical voice compels the goddess 7 For an account of the consequences of this loss on Swedish politics and identity, see Åke Sandström, “Sverige 1809–1864,” in Det nya Norden efter Napoleon: 25:e Nordiska historikermötet, Stockholm den 4–8 augusti 2004, ed. Max Engman and Åke Sandström, Stockholm Studies in History 73 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2004), 121–27. 8 On the place of Swedish-speakers within the Fennoman movements promoting the Finnish language, culture and nation, see Liisamaija Hautsalo, “Strategic Nationalism Towards the Imagined Community: The Rise and Success Story of Finnish Opera,” in The Business of Opera, ed. Anastasia Belina-Johnson and Derek B. Scott (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 176–80. 9 For more on the significance of Runeberg’s work within Finnish culture and the formation of national identity, see Arto Mutanen, “About the Notion of Identity,” LIMES: Cultural Regionalistics 3, no. 1 (2010): 28–38. While the army was a Swedish institution, most soldiers came from families living in Finland; hence, the “retreat” to Sweden was both a military defeat and a journey, for many, away from familiar territory.
7
Svea (Sweden) to “weep for what you have lost, but protect what you yet possess.”10 If
Finland, the “protector of Svea” and “land of heroes” to the east, has truly been lost,
then it is Svea’s duty to love and protect the remaining core of the kingdom, and in so
doing, to rediscover and lay claim to the values believed to have been lost in defeat.11
Ultimately, the lyrical voice implores Svea to take action: “within the borders of Sweden,
reconquer Finland.”12 The poem dates from the brief period between 1809 and 1814, after
the loss of Finland but before Norway joined in union with Sweden. During these
interim years, intellectuals engaged in what might be called de-imagination—the removal
of the element of Finland from the concept of Swedishness. This forcible shift prepared
the way for the subsequent re-imagination of Sweden to include Norway. Historian Åke
Sandström rightly points out that, to the average Swede living on the Scandinavian
Peninsula, it made little difference whether the country extended eastwards or
westwards; nevertheless, to the relatively small group of authors, academics, politicians,
businessmen and military figures that set the tone for discussions of Swedish identity, it
mattered a great deal.13
The Gothic League
One influential group that informed national opinion was the Gothic League (Götiska
förbundet). Founded in Stockholm in 1811, the League brought together a circle of
10 “Gråt, Svea, vad du mist; men skydda vad du äger.” From Svea, in Esaias Tegnér, Samlade dikter, ed. Fredrik Böök and Åke K. G. Lundquist (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1964), II:66. 11 “Farväl, du Sveas värn, du hjältars land!” Ibid. 12 “. . . inom Sveriges gräns erövra Finland åter.” Ibid. 13 See Sandström, “Sverige 1809–1864,” 129.
8
thinkers and doers eager to rediscover and reassert the place of ancient Nordic ways in
modern Swedish life.14 Prior to the formation of the League, a major manifestation of
interest in Gothic history had played out in the late 1600s, centered largely around the
scientist Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702) and his view that Sweden was not only the home of
the ancient Goths who had sacked Rome and caused its downfall, but also the site of
mythical Atlantis. The grandiose claims of Rudbeckianism soon fell out of favor,
however, and the interest in antiquarian research spawned in Rudbeck’s wake fell
drastically in the eighteenth century. When the Gothic League brought about a second
wave of interest in Nordic history, the focal point was entirely situated on the north as
the source of all history and culture, rather than purported connections with or influence
upon southern lands. During the height of the League’s activity during the first two
decades of its existence, approximately one hundred members were elected, all of whom
pledged to support the restoration of “ancient” ways.15 In addition to adopting ancient
Gothic names for use in League meetings, members engaged to varying degrees in
activities such as excavating artifacts, interpreting runic inscriptions, translating Old
Norse sagas, and collecting regional folktales and dialect words.
In the nurturing atmosphere of the Gothic League, folksong collection came into
14 Rudolf Hjärne’s account of the history and nature of the Gothic League, while dated, provides a useful overview; see Götiska Förbundet: Erik Gustaf Geijer, vol. 1 of Götiska förbundet och dess hufvudmän: Fosterländska teckningar (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1878). 15 The supposed restoration of “ancient” ways corresponds to the concept of invented tradition, which Eric Hobsbawm defines as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past at length.” See Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.
9
vogue in earnest.16 The author and later member of parliament Leonard Fredrik Rääf
(1786–1872) enlisted the help of music theorist and composer Erik Drake (1788–1870), a
fellow member of the Gothic League, in notating and arranging Swedish folksongs in
the 1810s. However, their material was slow to come out in print; some of their work
eventually made its way into the second major folksong collection published in Sweden,
Arwid Arwidsson’s Ancient Swedish Songs (Svenska fornsånger, 3 vols., 1834–42).
Instead, the first published collection of Swedish folksongs was edited by two
other members of the Gothic League. Arvid August Afzelius (1785–1871) was the
driving force behind the project, with some assistance from Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–
1847). Together, they created the monumental three-volume Swedish Folksongs from
Ancient Times (Svenska folk-visor från forntiden, 1814–18; hereafter Geijer-Afzelius).17
Unlike its kindred volumes in Germany, such as the collections by Herder and by Achim
von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Geijer-Afzelius included the music for many of its
entries in the form of an appendix with simple arrangements for solo voice and piano by
Johann Christian Friedrich Hæffner (1759–1833).18 Originally, Afzelius wanted the
16 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a few individuals compiled collections of medieval Swedish ballads—most notably Johannes Messenius, Johannes Bureus, Martin Aschaneus and Johan Hadorph—but these collections remained unpublished. See Bengt R. Jonsson, ed., Sveriges medeltida ballader (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1983), 1:6. An account of the early folksong collection movement and its connections with the Gothic League is found in Anna Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Upptäckten av folkmusiken,” in Musiken i Sverige III: Den nationella identiteten 1810–1920, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie 74 (Stockholm: Fischer, 1992), 55–62. 17 Erik Gustaf Geijer and Arvid August Afzelius, eds., Svenska folk-visor från forntiden, 3 vols. (Stockholm: Strinnholm och Häggström, 1814–18). Although the second and third volumes are dated 1816 and 1817, they were not actually issued until 1818; see Jonsson, Sveriges medeltida ballader, 1:1. 18 Music was a topic of some contention early on in the Gothic League. In 1812, the suitability of publishing a notated folk melody in the organization’s journal, Iduna, alongside a newly composed poem set to the melody in question, was heartily debated before general opinion decided in favor of including the melody
10
Danish composer Peter Grønland (1761–1825) to prepare the musical settings; Geijer’s
preference for Hæffner ultimately prevailed, but Grønland’s work was not in vain.19 In
1818, the same year as Hæffner’s final supplement to Geijer-Afzelius, Grønland
published his settings separately as Old Swedish Folk-Melodies.20 Geijer-Afzelius was long
considered the standard Swedish folksong collection, notwithstanding its scholarly
deficiencies when compared to the groundbreaking Danish collection Ancient Danish
Folksongs (Danmarks gamle folkeviser, 1853–1976) begun by Nikolaj Frederik Severin
Grundtvig (1783–1872) and continued by other scholars through much of the twentieth
century. Revised and expanded editions of Geijer-Afzelius appeared in 1880 and again
in the 1950s.21
Ballad-style folksong
The Nordic roots of medieval Swedish ballads fascinated folksong enthusiasts early in
in a hitherto strictly literary organ. Jakob Adlerbeth (1785–1844), the Gothic League’s founder, won approval with his declaration “that music, just like every other expression of feelings, could characterize Gothic strength” (“att musik, lika så väl som hvarje annat uttryck af känslor, kunde utmärka götisk kraft”); quoted in Hjärne, Götiska förbundet, 1:39. 19 Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Upptäckten av folkmusiken,” 60; and Jonsson, Sveriges medeltida ballader, 1:1. Margareta Jersild states that Afzelius wanted Olof Åhlström to make the settings; see “Melodierna till Geijer & Afzelius’ utgåva — en ‘En alldeles egen och förträfflig National-Musik,’” in “En alldeles egen och förträfflig National-Musik”: Nio författare om Svenska folk-visor från forntiden (1814–1818), ed. Märta Ramsten and Gunnar Ternhag, Acta academiae regiae Gustavi Adolphi 139 (Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, 2015), 71. 20 Sometimes, as in this collection, the German/Swedish “Grönland” is used instead of the Danish “Grønland”: Peter Grönland, Alte schwedische Volks-Melodien (Copenhagen: C. C. Lose, 1818). 21 A new edition of Geijer-Afzelius from 1880 published by folklorist and librarian Richard Bergström includes additional musical arrangements by Leonard Höijer, filling in the gaps for most entries that lacked music in the earlier edition. A third edition, with extensive musical commentary by Sten Bergel, appeared in the 1950s. In addition, a German-language version was also published: Schwedische Volkslieder der Vorzeit, trans. Rosa Warrens (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1857).
11
the nineteenth century; the many “ancient” ballads still in circulation in or known by
elderly members of rural communities formed a significant component of the folk
material collected for preservation in songbooks.22 The ballad as literature in
Scandinavia dates to late-sixteenth-century manuscripts, long before the form began to
appear in British sources in the middle of the eighteenth century and captured the
attention of Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).23 In the Scandinavian
poems of unknown authorship, a narrative unfolds over many stanzas; medieval origins
are often assumed, although folklorist Edson W. Richmond finds it unlikely that the oral
genre precedes its literary preservation by such a wide margin of time.24 The editors of
the modern critical edition Sweden’s Medieval Ballads (Sveriges medeltida ballader, 5 vols. in
7 fascicles, 1983–2001), maintain that most ballad types date from the (late) medieval
period, while certain ballad types—and most, if not all, melodies—are of somewhat
more recent origin.25 Regardless of the length of time during which the oral tradition
developed, it left a strong impression upon the ballad, as individual singers consciously
22 Magnus Gustafsson discusses the history of the term “ballad” and other genre names that have been applied to these songs in “Från kämpavisa till ballad: En begreppshistorisk översikt,” in Gamla visor, ballader och rap: Från muntlig förmedling till publicering på nätet, ed. Boel Lindberg (Möklinta: Gidlund, 2013), 14–93. 23 Jonsson, ed., Sveriges medeltida ballader, 1: 1. Not surprisingly, many folksongs and melodies have been, and continue to be, known by people across the arbitrary lines of political borders, and quite a few texts exist in variants in more than one Scandinavian language; any song for which a text exists in the Swedish language is considered to be “Swedish,” regardless of whether it is also, by that logic, Danish, Norwegian, or part of the tradition of any other national, linguistic or cultural group. See ibid., 1:4. 24 The first known collection of Swedish ballads dates from approximately 1591. See W. Edson Richmond, “Esse est percipi: A Poetic Genre Created by Perceptions,” in Inte bara visor: Studier kring folklig diktning och musik tillägnade Bengt R. Jonsson den 19 mars 1990, ed. Eva Danielson and Bengt R. Jonsson, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska visarkiv 11 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1990), 313. 25 Jonsson, Sveriges medeltida ballader, 1:6.
12
and unconsciously altered, forgot, and recomposed words and melodies.26 Two variants
of a single ballad may have different modes, meters, stanza structures, line lengths, and
even completely different melodies; in short, they may have little in common other than
sharing the same basic narrative. Collectors recognized this reality early on; for example,
Hæffner includes two distinct though related melodies for the text “Peter Tyrson’s
Daughters in Vänge” (“Pehr Tyrsons döttrar i Vänge”) in Geijer-Afzelius.27
Herder’s conceptions of nationality and nationhood spoke directly to denizens of
nineteenth-century Europe, Sweden included. An imagined past laid the foundation for
modern identity and charted directions for future developments in what was purported
to be a natural progression. Historical circumstances engendered different variants of
national awakening; in some regions, separate political units merged under the auspices
of a common cultural heritage, while in others, subnational regions claimed the power of
independent statehood. In essence, nineteenth-century Sweden charted a “third way,” to
repurpose a term from twentieth-century politics: it was neither a fractured
conglomeration of independent states moving towards unity nor an oppressed people
struggling against foreign oppression. Sweden did not need to develop a transregional
drive to rally around cultural nationalism towards Swedes in other lands,28 as with
26 For more on processes of variation within oral traditions, see Ingrid Åkesson, “Variation som röd tråd—en överblick,” in Tradisjonell sang som levende prosess: Nordiske studier i stabilitet og forandring, gjentagelse og variasjon, ed. Lene Halskov Hansen, Astrid Nora Ressem, and Ingrid Åkesson, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska visarkiv 26 (Oslo: Novus, 2009), 5–21. 27 Johann Christian Friedrich Hæffner, Musik-Bilagor till de af Geijer och Afzelius utgifna Svenska folkvisor med sina gamla melodier (Stockholm: P. A. Norstedt, 1846), 57–58. Hereafter, Musik-Bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius. 28 If some Swedes wanted to reach out to Swedish-speaking Finns, the feeling was not necessarily mutual. A famous statement usually attributed to the Swedish Finn Adolf Iwar Arwidsson (who will return later in his
13
Germany and Italy, or against an outside force, as in Poland, Norway and Finland.29
Rather, Swedish nationalism in the nineteenth century manifested itself as an
introspective process that entailed coming to terms with past losses (Finland and
Pomerania) and re-casting cultural-historical narratives to embrace the formerly other
(Norway) as a close relative.
Theoretical approaches to nationalism
As is the case with so many “isms,” the term “nationalism” has resisted precise
definition, and this resistance has bedeviled if not plagued scholars who would study
musical nationalism.30 Because nationalism has been expressed in different forms in
different circumstances, no single definition has emerged as both comprehensive and
authoritative.31 In the early twentieth century, an important typological distinction was
capacity as the editor of a major collection of Swedish folksong) in the face of the Russian occupation shows little desire for reunification with Sweden: “Swedes we are no longer, Russians we shall never be, therefore let us be Finns!” See H. Arnold Barton, Essays on Scandinavian History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 170. 29 In this respect, the low profile of musical nationalism in Sweden is similar to that of Britain during this period; see Alain Frogley, “Constructing Englishess in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams,” in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–22. Other countries with long-term histories of political independence include Denmark and France. 30 For a concise survey of theories of nationalism and musicological scholarship in this field, see Michael Murphy’s introduction to Michael Murphy and Harry White, eds., Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 1–10. 31 John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith discuss the difficulty of defining the terms “nation” (as different from other types of collective identity) and “nationalism” (which is variously viewed as a sentiment, an idology, and a movement) in their Introduction to Nationalism, ed. Hutchinson and Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4. Daniel M. Grimley discusses the term in the closely related context of Norwegian music, even as he questions whether that country holds status as a special case study or exists more generally as “part of a broader European phenomenon,” in Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity
14
introduced, according to which two categories were discerned: the political nation or
nation-state, which is a product of a people’s shared political history and constitution,
and the cultural nation, which comes into being through a shared cultural heritage.32
According to this model, the political nation is largely imposed from above by ruling
powers or other political bodies, though it may also come into being through grassroots
revolutionary efforts. While aspects of the cultural nation can also be forced upon a
group of people, it is more commonly experienced from the bottom up through shared
features such as a common language and religion. The political state and the cultural
state need not align; consider, for example, the patchwork of German territories prior to
1871, united by language yet divided by politics, or the Kingdoms of Sweden and
Norway, linked in political union from 1814 to 1905 while maintaining distinct cultural
differences throughout that period. Swedish musical nationalism of the nineteenth
century is intimately bound up in both aspects of the nation-state, as geopolitical
borders and cultural identity were in flux from the time of the coronation of Karl XIII in
1809 to the death of Oscar II in 1907.
According to the traditional nationalist narrative underpinning much nineteenth-
century thought, nation-states arise from deep wells of national sentiment that, having
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 11. Philip Rupprecht wrestles with the concept of the nation with respect to twentieth-century Britain, invoking Homi K. Bhabha’s placement of the nation in the discursive tension between present action and past pedagogical wisdom. See British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24, 55. 32 Friedrich Meinecke coined the concepts Staatsnation and Kulturnation in Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat (Munich: Oldenburg, 1908); see Murphy’s introduction to Murphy and White, Musical Constructions of Nationalism, 3.
15
lain dormant in a people, are suddenly awakened and lead, almost spontaneously, to the
formation of a nation-state. The very name of one such movement, the Italian
Risorgimento (“resurgence”) in the decades leading to unification in 1871, posits a
supposed re-surgence to a unified Italy that had never actually existed before, other than
as a mythologized idea in the minds of a growing number of its inhabitants.33 In the past
fifty years, however, scholars of nationalism have thoroughly discredited this long-held
idea of nationalism as a teleologically necessary development.
The historian Elie Kedourie disputed the logic of the natural emergence of
nationalism and thereby laid the foundation for the “‘invented’ turn” by declaring in
1960 that “nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the
nineteenth century.”34 By situating nationalism as a conscious invention from around the
year 1800, Kedourie essentially erased the perceived history of nation-forming from any
period prior to start of the French Revolution in 1789. In the next generation of academic
critique, the philosopher Ernest Gellner extended this argument and denounced the
received myth of nationalism: “nationalism,” Gellner insisted, “is not the awakening of
an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does indeed present itself.”35 With the
recognition that nationalism did not arise spontaneously, but rather was a product of
calculated human thought and action, studies of nationalism continued to turn to
sociological and cultural methodologies.
33 See ibid., 4. 34 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1. 35 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 46.
16
In 1983, the same year as Gellner’s myth-destroying declaration, Benedict
Anderson proposed his influential conception of the nation as “imagined community,”
in which the residents of a bounded space are joined in “deep, horizontal comradeship”
that stretches across social classes to unite all inhabitants into a community.36 Although
any two members of the community may never meet, or even become aware of each
other’s existence, they are nevertheless joined through the bonds of imagination, such
that if a meeting were to occur, each would recognize the other as a fellow member of
the national community. Anderson’s descriptor of the imagined community proves
uncannily apt for the case of nineteenth-century Sweden, where the processes of coming
to terms with losing Finland in 1809 and inventing cultural rationale for the union with
Norway in 1814 led citizens to envision national heritage and identity in previously
inconceivable ways.
A decade later, Homi K. Bhabha introduced new theoretical complexities to the
concept of nation by applying his notion of hybridity, positing the nation as an in-
between space marked by “double-time” at the juncture of the “everyday” (life as it is
lived by citizens today) and the “epochal” (significant historical moments).37
Furthermore, he describes a paradox in which a nation’s citizens are collectively obliged
to forget certain epochal events as they carry forward with the momentum of their
36 Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 7. 37 Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” in Nation and Narration, edited by Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 293–94.
17
everyday lives.38 In nineteenth-century Sweden, significant “epochal” moments were up
for revisionist discussion, as Finland was partially effaced from the nation’s history and
Norway was pencilled in. Society was obliged to forget past alliances and enmities in
order to forge ahead in the new everyday.
Musics and nations: Styles
Although musicological inquiry into nationalism is a fairly recent phenomenon, the
topic of music and nations was already well established in the early eighteenth century,
with Italian, French and German styles widely recognized as the major entities.
Musicians, critics, and arbiters of taste in various times and places emphasized the
divisions for purposes of prestige;39 denounced such divisions as meaningless while
pleading for the appreciation of the “essential beauty” in music, regardless of origin;40
and issued calls to blend elements of each type into a universal style.41
Nations also figure as topics in both dramatic and instrumental music. For
38 Ibid., 310–311. 39 In the pamphlet war known as the Querelle des Bouffons, political debates erupted under the guise of divisions between supporters of French tragédie lyrique and Italian opera buffa in Paris. The underlying quarrel predated the arrival of the Bouffons in 1752, who served as catalyst rather than cause; for a narrative account of the debate, see Alfred Richard Oliver, The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), 89–100. 40 The essayist and critic Rémond de Saint-Mard (1682–1757) failed to see the purpose of quarrels over differences between French and Italian style, asking, “Why this mutual hatred? Why scratch each other’s eyes out all day over so slight a difference, over a kind of accent, over something which in the end detracts in no way from the essential beauty, the fundamental beauty of music?” Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l’opéra (1741), quoted in David Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 163. 41 J. J. Quantz makes a well-known case for combining what he views as the best, most “reasonable” features of Italian and French style into “a good style—that is universal,” pleasing to many peoples because each recognizes itself in the mixture; nevertheless, Quantz maintains national distinctions by appropriating this superior hybrid music as the German style. See Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, ed. Edward R. Reilly (Northeastern University Press, 1985), 341–42. For writings about a blended Italian-French style earlier in the eighteenth century, see Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, 181.
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example, the foreign locale of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes
(1735–36) serves purely to exoticize the storyline and thus increase its entertainment
value; Rameau made no attempt to incorporate indigenous musical styles of native
peoples of Persia, Peru, Illinois, or a Turkish island into the French Classical idiom he
had inherited. Even the initial “Entrée des 4 nations,” in which youthful French,
Spanish, Italian and Polish troupes enter with graceful dances, is nothing more than a
standard binary minuet in E minor, bereft of any inklings of national characteristics or
musical features that would later come to be associated with these peoples.
At first glance, nationality appears to be reflected more clearly in Georg Philipp
Telemann’s overture-suite Ouverture des nations ancien[ne]s et modernes (TWV 55:G4,
before 1723), as the titles of individual movements specifically refer to ancient and
modern Germans, Swedes and Danes. However, Steven Zohn points out that the work’s
title most likely stems from a copyist rather than Telemann himself, although the titles of
individual movements do lend credence to the idea of a suite of nations.42 Following an
overture (unattributed, though in the French style) and pair of menuets, three so-called
ancient German, Swedish and Danish dances correspond to the allemand, sarabande
and gavotte. That the Swedish entry is written in triple time, a hallmark of Swedish
instrumental folkdance music as it came to be notated in the nineteenth century, is
purely coincidental, as the rhythm alternates between placing the beat of secondary
importance variously on the second or third beat of the bar, an irregular pattern not
42 Steven David Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69.
19
native to Swedish folkdance.43 The origins of Telemann’s sarabande lie further afield, in
a sixteenth-century dance imported to Europe from Latin America that gradually
developed into a stately Franco-German variant. Standardized Baroque courtly dances,
rather than a variety of region-specific musical styles, underpin the suite.
When folk and folk-like music do appear in art music, as is commonly the case
with opera buffa and its vernacular derivatives outside Italy, the primary function is as a
signifier of class rather than nationality.44 Volkstümliche music of local origin is reserved
for peasants, while higher-born characters are treated in cosmopolitan style. The opera
Gustaf Adolphus and Ebba Brahe (Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe, 1788), the last of the Swedish
operas completed during the brief flowering of the genre under Gustaf III (r. 1771–92),
provides a clear example of the use of folk material as a marker of social class. Librettist
Johan Henric Kellgren (1751–95) wrote a new text to fit an older folksong melody, which
is sung in the opera by a peasant character in a setting composed by Abbé Vogler (1749–
1814) during his Stockholm period. The melody, which contemporary Stockholm
audiences immediately recognized, accentuates the rustic nature of the fishing village in
which the central act takes place, far removed from the courtly milieu of the outer acts.45
43 The polska, the most widespread standard dance type of the nineteenth century, typically displays one of the following rhythmic organizations: stress on first and third beat; relatively equal stress on all three beats; pulse-based pieces with irregular meters that use groupings of both two and three beats; and asymmetrical patterns in which one beat is consistently lengthened and another correspondingly shortened. See Dan Lundberg and Gunnar Ternhag, Folkmusik i Sverige, 2nd ed. (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2005), 111–13. 44 See Richard Taruskin, “Nationalism,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2001, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/50846. 45 For a discussion of the use of the folksong “The Poultry Woman’s Song” (“Hönsgummans visan”) in Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe, see Kirsten Rutschman, “Swedish Opera in Translation: Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe,” Ars Lyrica 22 (2013): 114–16.
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Kellgren’s newly written text may include references to Kalmar Castle and the prince,
but the song is placed into the mouth of a commoner.
During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the national characteristics of
different peoples became a matter of great philosophical discussion, led by Charles-
Louis de Secondat Montesquieu’s assertion in his anonymous treatise De l’esprit des lois
(1748) that people are conditioned by climate and geography. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78) carried this idea further through his theory that the very development of
languages is guided by climate-induced differences in cultural practices of northern and
southern countries.46 Viewing social development as the antithesis of humanity,
Rousseau argued that nobility resides in people blessedly unspoiled by the ruinous
march of progress. In so doing, he helped prepare European intellectuals for one of
history’s greatest literary falsifications: James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760) located the
noble savage not halfway around the world, but in the fringes of Europe itself.47
According to prevalent nineteenth-century thought, the wild moors of Scotland
harbored a people supposedly unsullied by the ills of more developed lands, who lived
according to ancient ways “as a remnant of the rural past preserved within modern
46 See especially “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (published posthumously, 1781), reprinted in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music, ed. John T. Scott (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998), 289–332. 47 Macpherson’s debt to Nordic culture is less widely discussed. Key plot elements of Ossian are derived from an earlier epic by Macpherson, The Highlander (1758), in which a Scottish chieftain gains the upper hand against invading Vikings of Dano-Norwegian origin, according to Julian Meldon D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Linton, East Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1996), 19. See also Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James MacPherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 61–76.
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Western civilization,” as Matthew Gelbart has demonstrated.48 Similar ideas were
current in Sweden as well. In the preface to the first published collection of Swedish
folksong, issued in 1814, Erik Gustaf Geijer refers to the Scottish highlanders, alongside
Finns and Latvians, as having created a larger body of folk poetry than is found in
nations with a strongly developed tradition of educated poets.49
Over the course of the next several decades, writers and composers embraced the
idea of the wild purity of Scotland and the songs of her people, from Johann Gottfried
Herder’s “Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker”
(1771, pub. 1773) to Beethoven’s numerous arrangements of Scottish songs, op. 108
(1818) and WoO 12, to Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (1830) and the Symphony
No. 3 in A minor, op. 56 (1829–42). Even though Ossian never gained the level of
popularity in Sweden that it reached in German-speaking countries, the reputation of
Scotland as a hotbed of folk poetry was firmly established among literati such as Geijer.50
48 Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11; in this volume, Gelbart gives a thorough account of the influence of Scottish (musical) culture on pan-European music of the nineteenth century. Roger Fiske makes the valuable observation that although the origins of Macpherson’s “translations” were soon questioned by writers in England, his popularity in German-speaking regions endured for over half a century; see Roger Fiske, Scotland in Music: A European Enthusiasm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 33. 49 Geijer, preface to Svenska folk-visor från forntiden, ed. Geijer and Afzelius, 1:vii–viii. 50 For a detailed look at the musical afterlife of Ossian in Denmark, see Anna H. Harwell Celenza, “Efterklange af Ossian: The Reception of James Macpherson’s ‘Poems of Ossian’ in Denmark’s Literature, Art, and Music,” Scandinavian Studies 70, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 359–96. The first complete Swedish translation of Macpherson’s Ossian was completed by Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz (1754–1821) in 1777; however, to the best of my knowledge, this poetry had little impact on musical life in that country. For example, the most complete account of Swedish music history, Musiken i Sverige, mentions Ossian in a European context but does not include any examples of Swedish musical works inspired by Ossianic poetry; see Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Upptäckten av folkmusiken,” 45. One of the few musical references is Otto Lindblad’s setting of a poem by Nyblaeus titled “Marsch” that begins, “Ur Ossians dunkla Sagoverld”; see Axel Ivar Ståhl, Vald samling af student-sånger (Stockholm: J. L. Brudin, 1855), 134–35.
22
As Herder widened his view beyond the Scottish bard Ossian to encompass songs from
Germany and from distant corners of Europe, he essentially created a new map whose
borders, as Philip Bohlman puts it, “were charted by folk song,” and in which “people
without history were drawn into history.”51 In so doing, Herder established the
academic study of folksong, minus one key component: the music. Grounded in a
literary perspective, the object of Herder’s interest may be more accurately described as
Volksdichtung rather than the Volkslied proper since his editions, like many of the major
German collections that followed in their wake, contained no melodies.52
When Herder began his great folksong-collection project, his pupil and
designated collector, Goethe, encountered what would prove to be a perennial issue in
folksong research: young, urbanized people preferred modern popular styles, and only
“the oldest mothers” maintained the kind of tradition that folksong collectors valued.53
Beginning with the preface to Herder’s first volume of Alte Volkslieder (1774), the study
of folksong has been portrayed as a race to capture and preserve a tradition gravely
threatened by encroaching modernization, particularly the uprooting of the agricultural
51 Philip V. Bohlman, “Herder’s Nineteenth Century,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 7, no. 1 (June 1, 2010): 3. 52 George Pullen Jackson distinguishes between Volksdichtung (“folk-poetry”) and Volkslied (“folksong”) in “The Rhythmic Form of the German Folk-Songs: I,” Modern Philology 13, no. 10 (February 1916): 562. The magnum folksong opus of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–08), likewise contains no melodies; Mahler created his own tunes for his settings of individual poems from this collection. The earliest German collections with musical examples were published in the late 1830s and early 1840s; see Cecelia Hopkins Porter, “The Rheinlieder Critics: A Case of Musical Nationalism,” The Musical Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 1977): 76. 53 Ulrich Gaier reports that Goethe was only able to notate fourteen suitably old songs, sung by “den ältesten Mütterchen,” to send to Herder. See Johann Gottfried Herder, Volkslieder Übertragungen Dichtungen, vol. 3 of Werke, ed. Ulrich Gaier, Bibliothekdeutscher Klassiker 60 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), 3:893.
23
system and its concomitant village-based ways of life by the unstoppable force of urban
industrialization. Herder warns, “We stand at the outermost rim of the precipice: half a
century more, and it will be too late,” a cry echoed again and again by subsequent
collectors of folksong, including those active in Sweden.54 Until the twentieth century,
there was little concern for studying performance practice; efforts centered solely on
collecting pieces in written form.
Swedish folksong occupied a minor position in Herder’s collections of Volkslieder,
which included his translations of several poems of Scandinavian origin, variously listed
under the headings Danish, Greenlandic, Lapplandic, Nordic, and Scaldic. Since early
medieval Nordic poetry predates the formation of individual Scandinavian kingdoms,
Sweden does not appear as a free-standing political or cultural entity, but rather falls
under the scope of the latter three categories: poetry of the northern Sámi people, which
is distinct from Germanic tradition; the anonymous Old Norse Eddas; and non-Eddaic
Old Norse Poetry, poems in a courtly style written by named bards.
Musics and nations: Scholarship
The study of Swedish music and national identity contributes to a larger conversation on
nationalism in music, which has grown since the last quarter of the twentieth-century to
to become a major focal point of research. Once a common topic of discussion in the
1800s, the subject fell out of academic favor during much of the 1900s; when nationalism
54 “Wir sind eben am äußersten Rande des Abhanges: ein halb Jahrhundert noch und es ist zu spät!” Herder, Preface to “Alte Volkslieder I” in ibid., 3:21. Similarly, Geijer warns that, unless songs are captured on paper, they will very soon be lost forever; see Geijer, Svenska folk-visor från forntiden, 1:lxviii.
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arose at all, it was typically dismissed by Anglo-Germanic writers as a minor type of
exoticism.55 Carl Dahlhaus is largely responsible for directing scholarly attention to
nationalism in European musics through the essay “Die Idee des Nationalismus in der
Musik” (1974, translated into English in 1980)56 and, shortly thereafter, in Die Musik des
19. Jahrhunderts (1980, trans. 1989).57 A major contribution to the field is his insistence
that audience reception—not merely the analysis of musical features—must be
considered as a crucial component of study: “The national significance or coloring of a
musical phenomenon is to no small degree a matter of the way it is received by
audiences.”58 The positing of audiences as actors in the development of musical
nationalism parallels the gradual recognition of the central role of human action in
general in the formation of nationalism discussed above. Similarly, Philip Rupprecht
reserves for the historically aware listener the privilege of hearing—even in sometimes
unexpected places—the “something characteristic” that is a national accent in certain
musics of a given time and place.59
Given the prominent position of German-language scholarship within the 55 Introduction to Murphy and White, Musical Constructions of Nationalism, 7. 56 An English translation, “Nationalism in Music,” is found in Carl Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall, California Studies in 19th Century Music 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 79–101. 57 In English, see particularly the section “Nationalism and Universality” in Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 35–40. 58 Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, 87. 59 Here, Rupprecht is speaking specifically of a pop-infused avant-garde in the 1970s; British Musical Modernism, 32. More generally, however, he argues against what he calls a flawed opposition between national music and what is generally perceived as an international avant-garde, demonstrating instead through extensive analysis that elements of “modern” or “abstract” composition can and do draw from “a root-network of archaic national symbols, expressive gestures, and inter-textual allusions”; ibid., 20–21. Listening and reception are recurrent themes in Rupprecht’s study, which devotes considerable attention to stereotypes of nationality and “Britishness” in responses to music in that nation’s press.
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academic study of the science of music (Musikwissenschaft), music by Austro-German
composers was, until recently, typically treated as universal music, while the term
national music was mostly reserved for the music of non-German (European) lands. Celia
Applegate has reappropriated the concept also for application with respect to German
music, arguing that even if anglophone listeners have been taught not to “hear anything
remotely national” in it, Germans historically identified with the supposed universality
of their music as a distinctly national treasure.60
Early in the twenty-first century, the pre-eminent music reference source in the
English language, The (New) Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, included for the
first time an article on “Nationalism” in its most recent print edition (2001), where
Richard Taruskin defines the term as “the doctrine or theory according to which the
primary determinant of human character and destiny, and the primary object of social
and political allegiance, is the particular nation to which an individual belongs.”61
Alongside this definition, which attempts to address both the political and cultural sides
of the term, Taruskin makes the distinction that “nationality is a condition; nationalism
is an attitude.”62 In an analysis of the national musics of Wagner, Smetana and Grieg,
Benjamin Curtis disputes Taruskin’s distinction between condition and attitude. Curtis
points out that nationality and nationalism both exist in the realm of ideas, and that
nationality, rather than a concrete condition, is “simply an idea, an idea of a condition,
60 Celia Applegate, “How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century,” 19th-Century Music 21, no. 3 (April 1998): 22. 61 Taruskin, “Nationalism.” 62 Ibid.
26
perhaps (that condition presumably being a person’s relationship to her communal
group’s culture and history), but nothing more tangible than that.”63 In this reading, it is
only through the Andersonian model of the imagined community that the idea of the
shared condition of nationality becomes common property and can exist at all. As Curtis
rightly argues, it is people (“nationalist intellectuals”), not nations, who build national
theaters; by privileging the people who advance musical-national causes, Curtis directs
inquiry towards the human element in nationalistic movements, which parallels
Dahlhaus’s emphasis on reception.64
As a result of new understandings of nationalism, the study of musical
nationalism in peripheral European national-states (i.e. territories other than modern-
day Germany, Austria, France, and Italy) has moved past the surface of exoticism to
yield more critical evaluations. It is no longer possible to seek the national spirit in a
collection of isolated musical features, as previous generations attempted to do; as
Dahlhaus states on more than one occasion, traits commonly associated with any
number of specific countries should more properly be classified as pan-European rural
characteristics than as belonging to any one nationality. A bagpipe drone and a
sharpened fourth scale degree are just as Norwegian in Grieg’s works as they are Polish
in Chopin’s oeuvre.65 In this vein, any attempt to dissect Swedish folksong into
63 Benjamin W. Curtis, Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 27. 64 Ibid., 21. 65 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 38. See also Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, 95. George Bernhard Shaw’s alter ego Corno di Bassetto colorfully makes a similar observation on the triteness of supposed national characteristics in various folk musics: “I do not cry out ‘How Norwegian!’ whenever I
27
constituent elements should not ask what is inherently “Swedish” about the components
in and of themselves, but rather delve into how and why such elements were perceived
to be representative by people who encountered them during the time period in
question, including composers who repurposed them in new compositions.
Folk-inspired musical nationalism is the gateway through which the music of
peripheral European countries is traditionally brought into conversation with that of the
mainstream. According to the typical narrative, each nation has one or two
representative composers who introduced wider audiences to compositions based in
folksong. Chopin’s Polish mazurkas and polonaises, Liszt’s “Hungarian” rhapsodies,
Grieg’s Norwegian slåtter, Sibelius’s runic-inspired Finnish melodies, and Vaughan
Williams’s English folksong settings give each respective nation a niche in the retelling
of the history of European music.66 Yet the nature of these links with folk material can no
longer be taken at face value; a thorough re-evaluation of sources and output is
necessary in light of the layers upon layers of mythology that have accumulated upon
the reputations of “nationalist” composers.
hear an augmented triad; nor ‘How Bohemian!’ when I hear a tune proceeding by intervals of augmented seconds; nor ‘How Irish!’ when Mr Villiers Stanford plays certain tricks on sub-dominant harmonies; nor ‘How Scotch!’ when somebody goes to the piano and drones away on E flat and B flat with his left hand, meanwhile jigging at random on the other black keys with his right. All good ‘folk music’ is as international as the story of Jack the Killer Giant, or the Ninth Symphony. Grieg is very fond of the augmented triad; but his music does not remind me of Norway, perhaps because I have never been there.” George Bernard Shaw, London Music in 1888–89 as Heard by Corno Di Bassetto (Later Known as Bernard Shaw) with Some Further Autobiographical Particulars (London: Constable and company, 1937), 79. 66 Liszt, like many others, believed “gypsy” music to be representative of Hungarian folk culture; Bartók later observed that this music was not folk music developed through a long oral tradition, but rather a more recent layer of art music composed by upper-middle-class Hungarians. See Béla Bartók, “Gypsy Music or Hungarian Music?,” The Musical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (April 1947): 241.
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Chopin’s status as “the quintessential nationalist composer” is as firmly
entrenched in public imagination as it is in musicological scholarship.67 That he wrote
his “Polish” music in Paris has not diminished perceptions of his identification with
Poland, his homeland that had been partitioned out of existence as a sovereign state in
1795. Jeffrey Kallberg affirms that Chopin’s “Polishness constitutes one of the primary
images through which modern listeners filter his music,” even as he challenges that
model by insisting that the key to studying national expression in music lies in moving
beyond the mere “factual information” provided by the identification of compositional
“devices” to uncover the social phenomena that give rise to musical meaning.68
Barbara Milewski extends this line of argument further to say that not only is the
study of compositional devices inadequate, it can also be downright misleading if
accepted unchecked. In her provocative article “Chopin’s Mazurkas and the Myth of the
Folk,” Milewski dismantles what she characterizes as the enduring myth, established
and enlarged by generations of Chopin scholars, of the composer’s use of folk sources in
the writing of his mazurkas; rather, she contends, the perceived “folkishness” is nothing
other than “a fictional, mythopoetic folk, animated by stock rustic musical tropes” with
little basis in historical musical practice among Polish peasants.69 According to
Milewski’s research, Chopin’s inspiration derives from a synthesis of his limited
67 Adam Zamoyski, Chopin: A Biography (London: Collins, 1979), 295. 68 Jeffrey Kallberg, “Hearing Poland: Chopin and Nationalism,” in Nineteenth-Century Piano Music, ed. R. Larry Todd, 2nd ed., Routledge Studies in Musical Genres (New York: Routledge, 2004), 222. 69 Barbara Milewski, “Chopin’s Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk,” 19th-Century Music 23, no. 2 (October 1, 1999): 121.
29
firsthand experience of rural music with contemporary urban portrayals of rural music
such as he would have seen in Warsaw theaters, a combination that underscores the
constructed nature of urban perceptions of peasant music.
This complication of the traditional Chopin narrative has implications with
respect to contributions of folk music towards conceptions of nationality in general: in
the absence of widespread experience with traditional rural musical practice—the type
of music that was recognized as “folk music” in the nineteenth century—secondhand
perceptions overshadow details of actual music-making. The same situation plays out in
nineteenth-century Sweden, where urban contact with folk music is largely mediated by
printed volumes edited according to the prevailing tastes of the amateur musical public.
Even when Richard Dybeck (1811–77) brings folksong from the field to the stage in
Stockholm through his popular series folk-music concerts between 1844 and 1870, the
music is arranged and performed by Stockholm musicians, not Dybeck’s informants.70
Much has been said in recent years about the lack of scientific rigor of early
folksong collectors, which invariably places their methods at a disadvantage in
comparison with modern scholarship.71 At the skeptical end of the spectrum, David
Harker writes extensively of the mediation of songs and the excessive degree to which
the collectors’ own assumptions, attitudes and preferences guided their choices of types
70 Eva Danielson and Märta Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska: från folkvisa till nationalsång (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2013), 25–30. 71 See, for example, Julian Onderdonk, “Vaughan Williams’s Folksong Transcriptions: A Case of Idealization?,” in Vaughan Williams Studies, ed. Alain Frogley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 118–20.
30
of songs to include and exclude from consideration.72 Nevertheless, other scholarship
still finds value in older collections. In his work on Vaughan Williams, Julian
Onderdonk acknowledges the shortcomings of collection efforts at the beginning of the
English folk music revival; at the same time, however, he proposes that it is useful to
examine a collector’s work on its own merits, rather than automatically condemning the
work of early generations as antiquated. In particular, Onderdonk finds that Vaughan
William’s transcriptions of English folksong around the turn of the twentieth century
follow two distinct methodologies: in some cases, Vaughan Williams “[sought] the
original behind the performance” by attempting to reconstruct an ur-form lying beneath
a particular rendition, while in others, he carefully notated details as he heard them.73
This methodological duality usefully differentiates between idealized form and
actual performance practice: the former corresponds to the Romantic preference for
aesthetically pleasing objects, while the latter is more closely related to more modern
techniques seeking to capture authentic performance details, including audio recording
and the use of nonstandard notation and transcription systems. One seeks to uncover
the beautiful in folksong and restore a perceived underlying logical structure, which is
thought to have been “obscured” through inaccurate transmission, while the other
privileges the authenticity of individual performance(s), warts and all. A study of the
latter lies beyond the scope of this project and falters on a lack of surviving evidence;
72 David Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British “Folksong” 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), xiii. 73 Onderdonk, “Constructing Englishness in Music,” 133–34.
31
with no recordings and few transcriptions attuned to accurate performance details
through most of the nineteenth century, attempts to reconstruct performance practice
will likely be highly colored by shifts in playing style in the intervening years.74 Rather
than taking folksong as practiced by the informants of collectors as its basis, the present
study relies on the same material that most of its featured composers did: published
collections of Swedish folksong transcriptions.
Musical nationalism and nationhood (or lack thereof)
Nationalism in music, including the use of folk themes, becomes a prominent topic with
respect to peoples without a nation in their own right. Chopin’s musical advocacy
invoked a Poland that had ceased to exist after Russia, Prussia and Austria partitioned
the country at the end of the eighteenth century. Norway achieved independence only in
1905, two years before Grieg’s death. Sibelius overtly supported a Finland free from
increasingly oppressive Russian control, leading to the declaration of his country’s
independence in 1917. Dvořák did not live to see Czechoslovakia gain independence
from Austria in 1918 in the aftermath of the Great War, let alone the formation of a
sovereign Czech Republic in 1993.75 But what about the case of Sweden? Although
boundaries have shifted drastically over the centuries, the Swedish kingdom has existed 74 Yngve Laurell and Karl Tirén made the first phonograph recordings of Swedish folk music in 1913; see Gunnar Ternhag, “Om sambandet mellan folkmusikinsamling och tonsättning av folkmusikbaserade verk — Med utgångspunkt i samarbetet mellan Karl Tirén och Wilhelm Peterson-Berger,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 82 (2000): 64, n. 20. 75 A movement to re-name the Czech Republic as Czechia is underway, although it has not yet caught on widely. See Dan Bilefsky, “With Czechia, Czech Republic Hopes Vowels Will Solve Name Puzzle,” New York Times, last modified April 14, 2016, accessed accessed February 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/world/europe/czech-republic-seeking-a-snappier-nameconsiders-a-change.html.
32
for approximately a thousand years; the political conditions that helped propel other
nationalistic composers to prominence in the nineteenth century did not exist in
Sweden. There is no Swedish equivalent to, for example, Kimmo Korhonen’s statement
that “with the Tsarist regime tightening its grip on Finland, there was a niche in the
collective consciousness for a quintessentially Finnish master composer.”76 Neither
Franz Berwald early in the nineteenth century nor the trio of Wilhelm Peterson-Berger,
Wilhelm Stenhammar, and Hugo Alfvén, who came of age during the height of national
romanticism in the 1890s, arrived on the scene during a growing movement for their
nation’s independence. In fact, the latter three witnessed the opposite situation, as
Norway broke away from Sweden.
A similar political configuration obtains in England, the most prominent member
of a royal union with a long history of sovereignty. Leon Plantinga notes that, in the
nineteenth century, “the usual factors in the growth of cultural nationalism – status as a
developing nation, struggle against a foreign oppressor, feelings of cultural inferiority –
were of course lacking in England.”77 Yet the English Folksong Revival (ca. 1890–1914)
became a prominent musical force in that country, as collectors sought to rescue a
disappearing musical heritage and composers arranged and adapted melodies in the
form of folksong collections and hymn tunes for public singing and the concert stage.78
76 Kimmo Korhonen, Inventing Finnish Music: Contemporary Composers from Medieval to Modern, 2nd ed. (Helsinki, Finland: Finnish Music Information Centre, 2007), 41. 77 Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), 400. 78 Richard Sykes demonstrates that revivalists invented more tradition than they restored, although he argues that they operated under a certain intellectual legitimacy according to the paradigms of their era; see
33
In musical terms, the lack of threat-induced nationalism in Sweden may have
hindered the development of widespread interest in musical expressions of
Swedishness: to put it simply, without the politically motivated need to rally around a
composer à la Grieg or Sibelius, no such widely recognized composer emerged.
However, the non-presence of a famous central figure does not mean that little or no
musical activity took place; music was very much a factor in cultural and social life, even
if it has not yet been studied as thoroughly as its counterparts in the neighboring
countries. Without an internationally recognized composer who functioned as
ambassador to the outside world,79 let alone a single most important national composer
from the domestic perspective, Sweden provides the opportunity to study the
phenomenon of musical nationalism largely free from preconceived notions dominated
by the personal style of a single figure.
Out of this empty space in the traditional narrative of western art music, many
previously ignored voices have the opportunity to participate. Collectors and
transcribers of folksong (un)consciously shaped the melodies they introduced to the
Swedish and international public as the country’s musical heritage, setting the tone for
decades to come; composers gravitated towards folk music for concrete material to
“The Evolution of Englishness in the English Folksong Revival, 1890–1914,” Folk Music Journal 6, no. 4 (1993): 446–90. 79 Foreshadowing the success of the singing group ABBA in the 1970s and 1980s, Sweden’s main musical ambassadors of the nineteenth century were opera singers; unlike their contemporary composers, who left behind tangible scores, Christina Nilsson and especially the “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind are survived only by mythologies grounded in descriptions, photographs and letters, sans recordings. Their performances of folksong arrangements helped popularize Swedish folksong both at home and abroad.
34
incorporate into compositions and for more nebulous inspiration; certain critical circles
responded publicly in newspaper entries about ideas of folk and nation underlying
musical pieces; and other citizens shared their thoughts privately in letters and diaries.
In this light, the somewhat vexing absence of a figurehead Swedish composer
becomes an asset that allows the present study to sidestep a question that Dahlhaus has
deemed unanswerable, that of whether a composer’s individual style shapes or derives
from the “musical substance” of a nation. Dahlhaus asks, “Did Chopin and Smetana lay
bare the essence of Polish and Czech music and capture it in art? Or were the hallmarks
of their music declared national property by general acclaim?”80 Instead, the “musical
substance” at the heart of this study—Swedish folk music melodies as published in
nineteenth-century anthologies—becomes a multivalent protagonist that is conceived by
informants, strictly raised into conformity as a member of polite (salon) society by
transcribers and arrangers, and then sent out into the wider world in various conditions
and under various guises by composers, there to encounter audiences, including critics.
The ways in which this protagonist is treated by each of these actors will contribute to a
rich picture of how concepts of folk were written into and heard within art music.
Methodology
Terminology
To begin with the less contested definition, the term “art music” is used broadly to
designate music composed and written down by individuals with at least modest
80 Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, 38.
35
musical training and disseminated primarily via printed copies and performances
thereof.81 In this sense, “art music” is simply a more accurate term for what the
layperson might generally refer to as “classical music.” While this dissertation examines
concepts of “folk” expressed through music, the musical examples under discussion are
largely both conceived and spread through printed notation.82
The term “folk music” has had a varied history in the study of musics of
individual cultures, whether of western or non-western origin. The word Volkslied
(folksong), coined by Herder in 1773, soon appeared in translation in many other
languages. Turning to scholarship, over sixty years have elapsed since the International
Folk Music Council published its landmark definition of folk music as “the product of a
musical tradition that has been evolved through the process of oral transmission”
shaped by continuity with the past, creative variation, and community selection.83 But
increasing awareness of pejorative connotations of the term caused the IFCM to rename
itself the International Council for Traditional Music in 1981, reflecting a preference in
some circles for the phrase traditional music over folk music.84 However, folk music remains
a valid term for historical research, when used with the awareness that the category is
81 This definition is adapted from Richard Taruskin, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxii–xxiii. 82 Matthew Gelbart, among others, has shown that “art music” and “folk music” are much more fluid categories than they might appear; see his monograph, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music.” 83 “Resolutions,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1955): 23. This definition, which was (not unanimously) agreed upon at the Council’s 1954 meeting, followed an unsuccessful attempt to define the term at the previous meeting two years earlier; see Maud Karpeles, “Definition of Folk Music,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 7 (1955): 6–7. 84 Erich Stockmann, “The International Folk Music Council/International Council for Traditional Music: Forty Years,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 1–10.
36
more flexible than it was understood to be during the period in question.
In this study, the term folk music is retained because it was in active use in
Sweden throughout the 1800s. However, its meaning is tempered by the more modern
understanding that the music referred to as folkmusik during that period is only a subset
of the wide variety of traditional Swedish musics and performance practices that
developed largely on the margins of notated central European musical tradition. In this
study, I follow Jan Ling, who uses the terms folk music, folk songs, and folk dances
“primarily [to] mean rural music taught, without being written down, by one generation
to the next.”85 In this sense, folk music is synonymous with traditional music, and the terms
may be used interchangeably. I make no claim that the music referred to as “folk music”
by nineteenth-century sources is the only type of traditional music practiced in that era,
or that the printed sources correspond closely with traditional practices; I proceed under
the knowledge that this limited selection of printed folk music was perceived by those
who handled it to be more representative than it actually was.
Translation, always a delicate process when terms and categories do not fall in
alignment between two languages, presents its own challenges. The Swedish cognate for
“folksong” is not folksång, as it might appear, but rather folkvisa. A folkvisa is an often
anonymous song generally spread by oral tradition—at least until the era of published
collections brought such songs to the attention of wider, disconnected audiences. In
contrast, the term folksång is generally reserved for one of a few specific patriotic songs
85 Jan Ling, A History of European Folk Music (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997), 1.
37
in praise of the king and does not indicate that any material, either text or music, is of
traditional (folk) origin.86
A glossary in Appendix A gives translations and definitions for Swedish terms;
Appendix B lists titles of folksongs in Swedish and in English translation.87
Chronology
While this study pertains to music of the nineteenth century, meaningful starting and
ending dates for historical study rarely align neatly with years that end in round
numbers. One common view is to piece together a “long nineteenth century” (ca. 1789–
1914/1918) initiated by revolutionary activity in France and concluding with the
outbreak or conclusion of World War I. However, in this case, a “short nineteenth
century,” from 1809/1814 to the 1890s, is more appropriate. Culturally and politically,
the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809 and the subsequent union with Norway in 1814 set
a new tone for much of the next century. Musically, the first published volume of
Swedish folksongs comes from precisely this time period (1814), providing an obvious
beginning point to an investigation of uses of folk music in art music. The ending point,
however, is less clear. From a political perspective, the 1905 dissolution of the union
86 Through most of the 1800s, the primary folksång was Bevare Gud vår kung, a translation by Abraham Niclas Edelcrantz (1754–1821) of God Save the King; in the 1860s, Otto Lindblad’s From the Depth of the Swedish Heart (Ur svenska hjärtans djup) gradually took on the role of folksång, though later in the century, the term kungssången (“the king’s song”) took over. Further complicating matters, the national anthem—which derives from a folksong (folkvisa) and was first performed in the 1840s—was, for a time, sometimes called the folksång; see Leif Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt: 1800-talets studentsång utövad som offentlig samhällskonst,” PhD diss. (Uppsala universitet, 1990), 30. Jonsson also points out that certain folksongs (folkvisor) of a heroic character were sometimes called folksånger until the 1830s; ibid. 87 A related item, Appendix C, lists songs settings for male chorus, together with their attributed and anonymous arrangers.
38
with Norway is a prime contender; however, this date is perhaps more relevant for
Norwegian music, with the arrival of the country’s long-desired independence, than for
Swedish music. I have chosen to end slightly earlier, ca. 1890, on the cusp of the rise of
national romanticism (nationalromantiken) and the generation of Wilhelm Peterson-
Berger, Wilhelm Stenhammar and Hugo Alfvén, for the reason that these composers and
the music of this later period already figure more prominently in scholarship. The goal
of the present research is, then, to explain what happened in the generations between
the onset of folksong-inspired romanticism around 1814 through the development of
Swedish national romanticism in the 1890s.
Materials
This research is based heavily on unpublished and rare published archival source
material, including scores, letters, journals, and newspaper articles.88 While every
attempt has been made to identify and locate every surviving use of folk melodies in art
music compositions, this is an impossible task to carry out with one hundred percent
coverage. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the large body of musical material collected and
examined is fairly representative of the totality of music arranged and composed during
the period of study. Much of this primary material is available either in archives in and
88 Transcriptions and translations of several unpublished letters are included in Appendix D, p. 528. Two useful databases of historical Swedish newspapers run by the National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket) are Search Swedish Daily Newspapers (Sök bland svenska dagstidningar), accessed February 1, 2018, http://tidningar.kb.se/ and Digitized Swedish Daily Newspapers (Digitaliserade svenska dagstidningar), accessed February 1, 2018, http://magasin.kb.se:8080/searchinterface/search_newspaper.jsp.
39
around Stockholm or in digital versions from libraries inside and outside Sweden.89
The majority of secondary research on aspects of Swedish music history has been
conducted with reference to sources written in Swedish, with some work in German,
particularly around the middle of the twentieth century, and, more recently, a growing
body of writings in English by both Swedish and international scholars. Many of the
foundational texts are cited directly in this introductory chapter, while the Works cited
list identifies all sources that contribute to this study.
Analysis
The sheer amount of musical material studied lends itself both to quantitative and
qualitative analytical methods. Quantitative analysis is useful for determining the
relative frequency of musical and extramusical features in order to determine what was
and was not typical in a given context. Methods used include the compilation of
extensive spreadsheet tables and statistical analysis of the resulting data and techniques
such as the superimposition of one four-part folksong setting upon another to determine
the degree to which they converge and diverge. Qualitative analysis is usually used for
smaller sub-sets of material, allowing for a closer look at examples that have been
selected either because their representative features speak to that which is typical, or
because they stand out from other items in important and relevant ways.
89 For a list of Swedish libraries and archives visited, including sigla, see Works Cited, p. 540. The web project Levande Musikarv / Swedish Musical Heritage provides downloadable scores and bibliographic information for many Swedish composers; the English version of the site is “Swedish Musical Heritage,” accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/. Another valuable bibliographic source is the comprehensive work lists published by Owe Ander in An Inventory of Swedish Music, Vol. 3: Twenty 19th-Century Composers from Du Puy to Söderman (Stockholm: self-pub., 2013).
40
Overview
Piano-vocal arrangements—the means by which folksongs first became known to the
general educated public, as well as the primary form in which composers throughout
the century accessed folk material—form the starting point for analysis in Chapter Two.
In prefaces such as a lengthy piece by Erik Gustaf Geijer in 1814, some editors and
arrangers reflected on the impossibility of accurately capturing the essence of folksong
with ink and paper, emphasizing the fact that the arrangements made available to the
public at large were heavily mediated by conventions of art music. In addition, a lively
debate over whether ballad refrains were meant to be sung by individuals or in chorus
reached as far as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. In the latter portion of the chapter,
quantitative analysis of older and more recent layers of folksong is applied to show how
the category gradually became more diverse, partly due to influence from instrumental
folk music; both vocal and instrumental music provided composers with “national”
material from which to generate new compositions.
Chapter Three teases out the role that folksong played in university choruses,
organizations whose aims, at various times in the century, included not only
camaraderie and entertainment, but also overt political activism. The university male
chorus is located in its historical context, and extant folk repertoire for this ensemble is
presented in detail. Attention then turns to a synthesis of performance data and
contemporary accounts of concerts, tours, and collaborations with choirs at other Nordic
universities, culminating in the argument that Swedish choirs used folksong not only to
41
bolster feelings of national identity, but also cross-border Scandinavian/Nordic identity.
Students helped initiate a movement for political unity among Sweden, Denmark and
Norway in the middle of the century; even as the movement eventually faltered in the
mid-1860s, active choral repertoire kept the idea alive for much longer.
After gaining a foothold within male choral song shortly before 1830, folk music
next came into vogue in the theater (Chapter Four), especially in the mid-1840s. In the
nineteenth century, music was a component of all theatrical performances; even
primarily spoken plays generally included at least one or two songs, and music was
performed by smaller or larger ensembles before and between acts. Traditional songs
and, especially, onstage dances became a standard way to signal rural characters and
situations portraying idealized moments in peasant life. Folk music fulfills two broad
functions in musical theater. Most often, it serves as an “auditory prop,” much like
costumes and scenery, indicating peasant characters and settings. In some cases, it
functions as the central organizing principle of full evening-length sångspel (operettas)
and operas. Theatrical performances fostered conceptions of national identity rooted in
idealized rural life; primarily urban Swedish audiences could imagine themselves into
community with the singing-and-dancing characters they observed onstage.
Theatrical music, with its un-texted dances and other music before and between
acts, forms a bridge to the analysis of purely instrumental music. In Chapter Five,
variations and fantasies for piano are studied through the lens of “Little Karin,” the
folksong with the widest distribution in multiple genres in the nineteenth century and
42
also the most popular folktune for more extended treatments at the piano. Taking Robert
U. Nelson’s categories of structural vs. free variations as a point of departure, analysis
begins with representative works by Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Robert
and Clara Schumann, Brahms, Grieg and Liszt, which then form a basis for comparison
with works by Swedish composers. To this end, I develop a metric called the “variation
score” that measures the relative degree of complexity of variations across a set.
Collectively, Swedish composers (and Friedrich Kuhlau in Denmark) demonstrate a rich
variety of variation techniques and textures deriving from this one melody—a
microcosm of the general repertoire of art music based on traditional Swedish music.
While folk music was readily incorporated into many genres, chamber music
(Chapter Six) was relatively resistant to this stylistic innovation. Furthermore, the small
body of compositions identified here shows a distinct preference for melodies borrowed
from instrumental dance traditions, rather than the vocal songs that are more commonly
used in music for other forces. In chamber music, the other major collection of folk music
issued in 1814—Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances (hereafter Traditions) published
anonymously by Arvid August Afzelius and Olof Åhlström—comes to the forefront as
the most important primary source, instead of the more famous and widely studied
Geijer-Afzelius folksong collection.90 In general, Swedish music of the 1800s responds to
Continental trends, especially ideas coming from German-speaking lands; however, the
beginning of the peak period for chamber works based in folk music occurred over a
90 For a modern facsimile edition containing all four volumes, see Arvid August Afzelius and Olof Åhlström, Traditioner av svenska folkdansar, ed. Bengt R. Jonsson (Stockholm: Bok och bild, 1972).
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generation earlier in Sweden (1830s) than in Germany (1870s), which relates directly to
the more ready availability of published tunes in the northern kingdom (1810s vs.
1840s).
Chapter Seven, a study of orchestral music, begins with one of Sweden’s most
unique contributions to folk-inspired art music: the evening-length concerts of folk
music organized by the amateur historian Richard Dybeck, which featured traditional
songs and tunes arranged for various constellations of singers and instrumentalists.
With intermittent concerts spread over twenty-four years, Dybeck put folk music firmly
in the spotlight and is directly responsible for introducing audiences to a number of
what would become the most popular songs. Although the concerts, as with all
performances of “folk” music during the era, were heavily mediated by art-music
conventions, Dybeck nevertheless engaged in a major didactic campaign to educate his
audiences and the general reading public through program notes, concert lectures, and
articles on traditional music and other antiquarian topics in his self-published journal,
Runa. The repertoire performed at Dybeck’s concerts has begun to attract scholarly
attention, although much work remains to be done; the present analysis focuses on
pieces for large ensemble (chamber or full orchestra). Among more standard concert hall
repertoire, few symphonies engage directly with folk melodies; more common are
single-movement overtures, tone-paintings and rhapsodies, many of which exemplify
Swedish composers’ efforts to create Swedish-flavored works suitable for performance
abroad.
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In closing, a series of Reflections in Chapter Eight considers the primary
motivations driving the collection of folk music and its dissemination in art-music
channels. Initially, the music was viewed as a tool to teach the Swedish public a crafted
narrative about a supposedly pure, ancient musical heritage informing their national
identity; compositions based thereon include a strong didactic component, in addition to
their intrinsic entertainment value. A third aim turned attention outwards in order to
teach music-lovers elsewhere that Sweden—by the nineteenth century a marginalized
European nation, having lost almost all of its territories around the Baltic—nevertheless
possessed a valuable cultural tradition that deserved international recognition. Around
the turn of the twentieth century, as interest in traditional performance practice
developed (along with audio recording technology), folk music continued to be shaped
by art-music norms in visible and invisible ways, a process that has continued to the
present day when folk music is taught alongside classical music at Swedish
conservatories. Composers still adapt folk tunes for classical compositions, but influence
now flows in both directions, as modern musicians re-interpret concert-hall classics such
as Bach’s stylized Baroque dances according to folk performance practice.
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2 Folksong collections and collected folksongs: Ideologies and characteristics of piano-vocal settings
As the Enlightenment ideal of uniformity gave way to the Romantic craze for the
particular in the first two decades of the 1800s, the idea of what constituted national
music in Sweden changed completely. The older view can still be seen in the first
Swedish musical dictionary, Svenskt musikaliskt lexikon (1802), which sharply
differentiates between “provincial” and “national” musics. Its author, Carl Magnus
Envallsson (1756–1806), was a product of the Gustavian Enlightenment, when the
Swedish court and educated culture closely followed French tastes. Although the
dictionary as a whole owes much to Rousseau, Envallsson charts his own territory in the
entry on “National-Music,” where he departs from Rousseauian rhetoric on the primacy
of linguistic-melodic considerations in favor of purely geographic criteria: in
Envallsson’s taxonomy, “national music” refers to music common to the entire nation,
whereas pieces known to have originated in a specific geographical region are to be
categorized as “provincial melodies.”1 Envallsson also notes that national music tends to
be in the major mode, whereas provincial melodies are often in minor.
A decade after the publication of the dictionary, however, views on national
music underwent a sea change. The essence of the nation—music included—was now
1 An English translation of substantial passages from the entry on “National-Music” is given in James Massengale, “Carl Envallsson and Swedish ‘National Music,’” in Gustavian Opera (see Chapter One, n. 2), 380–81. For the corresponding passage in the original entry for “National-musik” see Carl Magnus Envallsson, Svenskt musikaliskt lexikon, efter grekiska, latinska, italienska och franska språken (Stockholm: Marquard, 1802), 215–16.
46
believed to be found in the Herderian concept of the “folk soul,” which in turn was
thought to exist in the pure spaces as yet unspoiled by the ruinous effects of civilization:
the local, the regional, the rural. Under the inspiration of the Gothic League, attention
turned to the melodies of provincial origin—the very melodies, mostly in minor mode,
which Envallsson had recently excluded from his definition of “national music.”
Primary collections
Published collections of Swedish folk music in the nineteenth century fall into two
categories according to whether the source material is predominantly gathered from the
field by means of transcription or taken from previously published collections. The first
type, primary collections, are more common during the first half of the century, after
which point secondary collections begin to be issued in greater numbers. Many collections
include attributions that indicate the geographical region of origin of each entry, a
feature that reflects the recent shift in views of the concept of “national music.”
Primary collections of folk music during this period involved a great deal of
transcribing what Envallsson would have called provincial melodies. Afzelius, Geijer,
Arwidsson and other early editors held the region of origin of each song to be of great
importance. This information is typically transmitted to the reading public through brief
comments indicating the approximate location where a song was transcribed or the
region(s) in which it is commonly found.2 Such attributions contributed to the new idea
2 Manuscript collections of transcriptions often include the name or social position of the (usually female) singer, although this information rarely appears in the printed sources. See Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Upptäckten av folkmusiken,” 63.
47
of a national music rooted in local origins, where music originating in a region becomes
the property of all Swedes. The primary nineteenth-century collections of Swedish folk
music, which made melodies available to musicians, composers, academics and
educated general readers, usually in the form of simple arrangements for solo voice (or
instrument) with piano accompaniment, are listed below in Table 2.1.3
Table 2.1: Primary published collections based on field transcriptions
Editor/ Arranger
Title & comments Date # of settings
Geijer & Afzelius
Hæffner
Svenska folk-visor från forntiden [Swedish Folksongs from Ancient Times], 3 text vols.; musical supplement (below)
Musical supplement to Geijer-Afzelius
1814–18
1814–18
texts only
96
Afzelius & Åhlström
Traditioner av Swenska Folk-Dansar [Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances], 4 vols., mostly untexted fiddle melodies arr. for piano
1814–15 142
Grønland
Alte Schwedische Volks-Melodien [Old Swedish Folk-Melodies], arr. of melodies gathered for Geijer-Afzelius
1818 111
Arwidsson & Drake
Svenska fornsånger [Swedish Ancient Songs], 3 vols. of texts for ballads and other genres of folksong; many piano arr.
1834–42 854
Dybeck
Svenska vallvisor och hornlåtar [Swedish Herding Songs and Horn Tunes]
1846 315
Dybeck
Svenska visor [Swedish Folksongs], 2 vols., settings in vol. 2 by Leonard Höijer
1847–48 41
Dybeck & Höijer
Svenska gång-låtar [Swedish Walking-Tunes], stately fiddle tunes, with arrangements by Leonard Höijer; untexted
[1847] 6
Dybeck & Höijer
Svenska folkmelodier [Swedish Folk-Melodies], 5 vols. 1853–56 100
3 Multiple arrangements of a single melody are counted as separate items. 4 This figure does not include the unharmonized melodic lines belonging to many of the over 250 shorter texts of song-games and similar activities. 5 This collection also includes an additional twenty-one short unharmonized melodic lines.
48
The collections listed above form the first level of primary sources for this study,
which takes as its starting point the transmission of folk music through channels
developed for art music, from the first publications of simple piano-vocal arrangements
through more complex compositional intervention in larger genres. It should be
observed, however, that “primary” collections are actually two degrees of separation
from their oral sources. Hand-notated field transcriptions mediate between the music as
it was practiced in its original contexts and the piano arrangements through which it
entered the bourgeoisie salon. However, because the majority of handwritten collections
were never published and had a limited reach during the 1800s (and thus a negligible
impact on later compositions), they have not been consulted as part of the present study.
From the perspective of transmission in printed form, manuscripts can be
viewed as ur-sources from which primary printed sources draw their material. The chart
in Table 2.2 below lists major extant collections of folk music transcriptions in
manuscript form; collections that formed a substantial basis for contemporary
publications are marked with an asterisk (*).6
6 Margareta Jersild has compiled a substantial annotated list of published and unpublished folksong collections from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries based primarily on transcriptions of folksong from oral traditions in Skillingtryck: Studier i svensk folklig vissång före 1800 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1975), 98–122. As some material has moved due to the merging of libraries, see also the website of the Svenskt visarkiv for more accurate locations of several manuscripts, accessed February 1, 2018, http://katalog.visarkiv.se/kort/views/fr/Default.aspx?item=85.
49
Table 2.2: Major manuscript collections of folksong transcriptions
Compiler Library/Archive7 Andersson* S-Skma: N[ils] Andersson Mus. Hist. Mus Arwidsson* S-Sk: Vs 1–3 Croneborg S-Skma: Croneborg MS Mus. Hist. Mus Drake* S-Sk: S 163 [Erik] Drake and Drake lekar Dybeck* S-Skva: Dybeck MS Folklore I-V Enninger S-Skma: Mus. Hist. Mus. Enninger Geijer-Afzelius-Hæffner* S-Sk: Vs 126 and Vs 126 a Göthiska Förbundet S-Skva: Göt. Förb. Hultin S-Skva: Hultin Hyltén-Cavallius S-Sk: Vs 3:3 and VS 4 Musikaliska Akademien S-Skma: Mus. Ak. Folkmel., Handskrift 254 Olsson S-Skma: Erik Olsson Mus. Hist. Mus. Rääf* S-Uu: Rääf 51–52, 58, 60 Södling S-Skma: [Carl Erik] Södling Wallman8 S-Ls Wiede S-Skva: [Levin Christian] Wiede MS and S-Sm
The practice of transcribing melodies sung by singers who grew up learning the
songs of a local area—which formed the backbone of Geijer-Afzelius—or of traveling
widely to different regions, as Dybeck did, to notate songs literally in the field (or in the
cottage),9 did not stop with the primary collections listed above in Table 2.1. Most
prominently, Hugo Alfvén famously transcribed a melody from a rural wedding
celebration and worked it into his orchestral rhapsody Midsummer Vigil, Swedish
7 “Online Directory of RISM Library Sigla,” accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.rism.info/en/sigla.html; for a list of library and archive sigla, see Works Cited, p. 540. 8 For decades, the manuscript prepared by Johan Haqvin Wallman (1792–1853) with ninety-three folksong melodies that was well known to collectors during the nineteenth century was believed to be lost; see Moberg, “Från kämpevisa till locklåt,” 25–26. However, it was later found by Jan Ling in Linköpings stadsbibliotek (S-Ls). 9 Dybeck recalls the breadth of his folksong-collecting journeys in an autobiographical sketch; see Richard Dybeck, “Självbiografiska anteckningar,” Västmanlands fornminnesförenings årsskrift 43, no. 2 (1961): 38.
50
Rhapsody No. 1, op. 19 (Midsommarvaka, 1903).10 However, the large-scale transcription
and publication of melodies during the nineteenth century ended with Dybeck.11
Secondary collections
From the 1840s onwards, secondary collections based largely or entirely on previously
published material became more and more common. A list of major secondary
collections is given in Table 2.3 below.
Table 2.3: Secondary collections based largely or entirely on melodies in prior published collections
Arranger/ Editor
Title & comments Date # settings
Lindblad
Der Norden-Saal [The Hall of the North], 12 Swedish folksongs; German translations by Amalie von Helwig
1826 14
Cronhamn?12
Svenska folk-visor [Swedish Folksongs], 2 vols. 1839 19
Ahlström
220 svenska folkdansar: arrangerade för forte-piano [220 Swedish Folkdances: Arranged for Forte-Piano]; untexted
1840–1842
220
10 For Hugo Alfvén’s account of the transcription and the writing of the rhapsody, see his essay “Bondbröllop på Svartnö,” in I Stockholms skärgård: Prosa och poesi, ed. Mats Rehnberg (Stockholm: Forum, 1956), 63–69. 11 Immediately prior to the last decade of the nineteenth century, Nils Andersson began a monumental collection project resulting in a series of impressive publications of primarily instrumental tunes; a study of their influence on art music in the twentieth century lies beyond the frame of this project. Gunnar Ternhag sketches Andersson’s work and the inception of the 24–volume collection Swedish Tunes (Svenska låtar, 1922–40)—which, unlike most nineteenth-century collections, prints melodies true to the original transcriptions without intensive editorial changes or the addition of piano settings—in his chapter “Det stora insamlingsprojektet,” in Texter om svensk folkmusik: Från Haeffner till Ling, ed. Owe Ronström and Gunnar Ternhag (Stockholm: Kungl. Musikaliska Akademien, 1994), 69–76. 12 The title page of this collection, published in Stockholm by J. C. Hedbom in 1839, does not list an arranger or composer; this potential attribution comes from Tobias Norlind, “Jöns (Johan) Peter Cronhamn,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1931): 9:158, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=15673.
51
Arranger/ Editor
Title & comments Date # settings
Ahlström & Boman
Walda svenska folksånger, folkdansar och folklekar [Selected Swedish Folksongs, Folk Dances and Folk Games], 9 vols.
1845–1848
47
Altin
Svenska folk-wisor från forntiden vid pianoforte [Swedish Folksongs from Ancient Times for Pianoforte], 3 vols.
1846 110
Ahlström
300 nordiska folkvisor [300 Nordic Folk Songs] 1855 300
Ståhl13
Äldre och nyare svenska folkvisor (ord och musik) [Older and Newer Swedish Folksongs (Words & Music)]
1855 57
Josephson
Svenska folkvisor: satta för pianoforte [Swedish Folksongs: Arranged for Pianoforte]14
1860 33pp.
Lundquist
100 svenska folkvisor med ett lätt accompagnement för piano [100 Swedish Folksongs with Easy Accompaniments for Piano]
1860 100
Ekermann15
Från berg och dal: samling af svenska folkvisor och folklekar [From Mountain and Forest: Collection of Swedish Folksongs and Folk Games]
1878 3216
Bergström & Höijer
Svenska folkvisor / utgifna af E. G. Geijer och A. A. Afzelius [Swedish Folksongs / Edited by E. F. Geijer and A A. Afzelius] expanded edition of Geijer-Afzelius
1880 15217
Lundh
20 svenska folkvisor i not- och sifferskrift: Till folkskolornas tjenst [20 Swedish Folksongs in Notation and Figures: For Use in Folk Schools]
1881 20
Berens
Sveriges skönaste folkvisor [Sweden’s Most Beautiful Folksongs]
1892?
33
Adolf Fredrik Lindblad: Der Norden-Saal
The reasons behind the creation and dissemination of secondary collections are many.
13 Axel Ivar Ståhl is a pseudonym for Ludvig Teodor Öberg (1820–60). 14 I was not able to access this volume, which contains an unspecified number of settings on thirty-three pages. 15 While women played a substantial role in the folksong collection movement as informants, editorial work was typically reserved for men. Agnes Ekermann, the only woman in Table 2.1-2.3, published her collection under the initials “A. E.” 16 Six of these settings consist of composed poems set to folk melodies. An additional thirty-one unaccompanied texted melodic lines of singing games are included. 17 In addition, six more settings of texts in German and other Nordic languages are present.
52
From the very beginning, one important task was to export Swedish folksong beyond
national borders. Adolf Fredrik Lindblad (1801–78) made the first contribution with his
two-volume collection The Hall of the North (Der Norden-Saal), published by Schlesinger
in Berlin in 1826. Lindblad had traveled to Berlin the previous year to study composition
with Carl Friedrich Zelter; while there, he became friends with Felix Mendelssohn, and
the two composers maintained an active correspondence until 1847, the year of
Mendelssohn’s death. The title page (Figure 2.1) makes every effort to connect this
foreign body of material with the German public.18
18 This image is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; it was retrieved from a scan of Lindblad’s Der Norden-Saal available for download on “Der Norden-Saal,” IMSLP Petrucci Music Library, April 12, 2017, accessed February 1, 2018, http://imslp.org/wiki/Der_Norden-Saal_(Lindblad%2C_Adolf_Fredrik).
53
THE HALL OF THE NORTH A Collection
OF SWEDISH FOLKSONGS Translated by Amalie v. Helwig, née Freiin v. Imhoff
with Piano Accompaniment
ARRANGED FROM THE OLD SONG-MELODIES
and to his Friend Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Dedicated by
A. F. LINDBLAD 1tes Heft Property of the Publisher Preis: ¾ Rtlr.
Berlin In Schlesinger’s Book and Music Shop. Unter den Linden No. 34
1435,1436,
Figure 2.1: Lindblad, Der Norden-Saal (1826), Title page
The first three lines appeal both to the specific country, Sweden, and to a more
54
general North, potentially increasing the number of interested buyers, especially since
exposure to northern folksong via Herder did not separate Sweden as a separate
category, as has been shown above.19 If Herder predisposed his readers toward a literary
interest in the texts, other late-eighteenth-century authors had been less kind about the
melodic content of Swedish song. One anonymous piece from 1792 on national musics
of northern European peoples flatly denies that such a thing exists in Sweden: “The
Swede has absolutely no national music; his lot is to imitate others.”20 In an essay written
slightly earlier (1784–85) but not published until posthumously in 1806, Christian
Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739–91) claims that the overwhelmingly predominant
outside influence on Swedish music is German. Schubart makes space for the existence
of a separately cultivated Swedish national song but categorically rejects the same as
“insignificant” (“unbedeutend”).21 However, at least one positive piece of writing, a two-
part essay in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (1816) that will be discussed below,
helped prime Lindblad’s potential readership to take an interest in his collection.
Continuing down the title page, Amalie von Helwig’s German translations
remove the language barrier, while the central prominence and large font of the notice
19 Wilhelm Grimm also published a collection of “Old Danish” (i.e. old Scandinavian) heroic songs, ballads and tales in German translation, further increasing potential interest in northern songs, in Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1811). 20 “Der Schwede hat ganz und gar keine National-Musik, sein Loos ist andern nachzuahmen.” See “Ueber die National-Musik einiger nordischen Völker,” Deutsche Monatsschrift 2 (June 1792): 126. 21 Although he claims that a single example would bore the reader, Schubart proceeds to test the limits of his readers’ patience by including an excerpt in any case. He makes the point that nearly all Swedish folksong melodies fit within the span of a perfect fourth (though it must be pointed out that, somehow, later commentators of nineteenth-century folksong have uniformly failed to note this characteristic). See Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, C. F. D. Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst, ed. Ludwig Schubart, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Scheible, 1839), 246–47. The first edition of this volume was published in 1806.
55
about the piano accompaniment signify that the songs have been thoroughly
domesticated for amateur performance in the home, a ready-made product for German
consumers. Finally, the dedication places Mendelssohn’s name in ornate letters more
than twice the height of those in Lindblad’s own name, calling attention to Berlin’s
famous prodigy and implying his endorsement of the volume.22 While Swedish folksong
remained of minor influence in German-speaking lands—the most prominent
torchbearer being Max Bruch, who took up the topic in his Swedish Dances, op. 63 (1892),
the Songs and Dances on Russian and Swedish Folk Melodies, op. 79 (1903), and two
posthumously published works, the Suite No. 2 for Orchestra (Nordland Suite on Swedish
themes) and the Serenade on Swedish Melodies for String Orchestra—this modest collection
of folksongs launched Lindblad’s career both at home and abroad. In Germany, he later
published several collections of original songs (also in German translation) and even a
symphony; in Sweden, where foreign success was valued more highly than domestic
achievements, his German publications increased his standing in a small professional
music community with little opportunity for advancement.23
22 I am currently writing an article on the relationship between Lindblad and Mendelssohn, whose 20-year correspondence begins with brief letters about this folksong collection. While Mendelssohn did not endorse the volume publicly, he conveyed his positive opinion of the pieces in his first extant letter to Lindblad, dated February 7, 1827: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Juliette Laurence Appold et al. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2008–17), 1:196–97. Lindblad’s collection was published by Adolf Martin Schlesinger in Berlin, a firm with which Mendelssohn maintained close ties. Three years earlier, Schlesinger, in collaboration with his son, Maurice, had published Mendelssohn’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, op. 1; see R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109. 23 Just as a prophet is without honor in his own country, Swedish composers had difficulty establishing themselves without accolades from abroad. For example, a review in a Stockholm newspaper of songs by Wilhelm Bauck (1808–77), who engaged in a brief exchange of letters with Felix Mendelssohn in 1841–42, cites a foreign edition of Bauck’s songs as evidence of the composer’s ability: “As a proof that his songs both have value and are well-liked, it should be mentioned that several of them have been translated into
56
Collections of Swedish folksong published in America
Swedish folksong soon found a new export market as nearly three-quarters of a million
Swedes immigrated to the United States between 1851–1900.24 By this time, folksong no
longer held its central position as the bearer of the folk soul, but it retained a priviliged
role as it joined together with other types of song to form a cultural link between
emigrants and homeland.25 Large collections of mixed genres of Swedish song published
in Minneapolis include folksong as an important element, whether by listing it first
among several genres, as in Swedish Strophic Songs and Songs (1888), the subtitle of which
promises “selected folksongs, hunting songs, student songs, theater couplets, ballads,
and patriotic songs,”26 or by including English translations as a link to younger
generations, as in the “33 of Sweden’s most beautiful folksongs with Swedish, English
and German lyrics” included in Songs of the Swedish People (1899).27 These sizable
German and published by Schlesinger’s firm.” “Såsom ett bevis derpå att hans sånger äga både värde och äro omtyckta, torde böra nämnas att flera af dem äro öfversatta på Tyska och utgifna i Berlin på Schlesingers förlag.” See “Sånger vid Piano, komponerade och tillegnade Julius Günther,” Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (July 24, 1845): 1. 24 Statistics for emigration and immigration by decade are listed in Befolkning 1720–1967, vol. 1 of Historisk statistik för Sverige, 2nd ed. (Örebro: Statistiska centralbyrån, 1969), 125. Not all of the 730,000 immigrants to America (including a small number to Canada during the first half of that time period, when statistics are only available for North America as a whole) settled permanently in the new world; between 1871–1920, 153,000 people moved from the United States to Sweden. The vast majority of this group was Swedes returning to their country after living abroad for a time. 25 For more on the role of folksong within Scandinavian-American communities, see Rochelle Wright, “From Emigrant to Immigrant: America and Americanization in Scandinavian Song Tradition,” Scandinavian Studies 57, no. 3 (July 1, 1985): 316. 26 Svenska visor och sånger: utvalda folkvisor, jägarvisor, student-sånger, teaterkupletter, ballader, fosterländska sånger m.m. (Minneapolis: Svenska folkets tidnings förlag, 1888). 27 Svenska folksånger: öfver 700 valda svenska sånger och visor, meddelande sångernas författare och tonsättare: 33 utaf Sveriges skönaste folkvisor med svensk, engelsk och tysk text (Minneapolis: Svenska amerikanska postens förlag, 1899).
57
anthologies assume familiarity with melodies; no notation is included.
Collections of pan-Nordic folksong published in Sweden
Other collections sought to include Sweden as part of a larger pan-Scandinavian or pan-
Nordic region, the politics of which will be discussed in more detail in the following
chapter.28 The selection and arrangement of songs can testify to a particular view of
interplay among neighboring countries. Jacob Niclas Ahlström’s compilation 300 Nordic
Folksongs (1855) presents a thoroughly Swedish-centric version of Nordicness.29 Of the
223 songs attributed to a specific region, a mere twenty-eight hail from outside of
Sweden: twenty-five from Norway, one of which is also said to be found in Finland; two
more from Finland; and a single token Danish melody. Furthermore, the few non-
Swedish songs are poorly integrated into the collection; not a single one is among the
first hundred songs, and the vast majority are clustered toward the end. Denmark comes
in next to last as number 299. The inclusion of many songs from Norway, as opposed to
few from Finland, mirrors the expected re-configuration of Sweden towards the west,
while the minimization of Denmark, the other long-established sovereign Nordic state
and a prime actor in the pan-Scandinavian movement, comes as more of a surprise. Had
this “Nordic” collection been published a decade later, the near-erasure of Denmark
would have aligned with the particularly tenuous relations between the two countries
28 Strictly speaking today, “Scandinavian” refers to three countries—Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—while “Nordic” adds Finland and Iceland to the mix. However, these terms have not always been used consistently, especially in non-Nordic countries where awareness of the region’s geography and history is limited. 29 Jakob Niklas Ahlström, 300 Nordiska folkvisor (Stockholm: Askerberg, 1855).
58
following the political catastrophe of 1864, when Sweden declined to defend Denmark
against Prussia in the Second Schleswig War.30 The subsequent Danish defeat killed any
hopes for a political union between the two dominant Nordic countries.
Folksong in Swedish education
Song in general, and folksong in particular, has historically played a significant role in
education, not least according to the philosophies of Rousseau and Herder.31 Published
collections attest to the use of Swedish folksong in educational environments, both for
the general edification of the public and for specific instructional purposes.32 Songbooks
designed for educational use often contained, and sometimes consisted entirely of,
folksongs. Agnes Ekermann’s collection From Mountain and Forest: Collection of Swedish
Folksongs and Folk Games (1878) is dedicated to the youth of Sweden; the foreword by N.
Linder states that the volume is designed to introduce young people to the “rich treasure
trove of folk poetry” (“folkpoesiens rika skattgömma”), and that music has been
included to allow pupils to reach a proper understanding of the texts.33 Here, music is a
30 For more on Swedish-Danish relations around this period, see Sandström, “Sverige 1809–1864,” 143–45. 31 More recently, Bhabha has written of “pedagogy” as the accumulated layers of history telling a nation what it should be, as opposed to the “performance” of nationhood carried out anew each day by its citizens; Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297. Under this model, folksongs could be considered pedagogical entities deriving from “times immemorial,” according to Herderian principles, yet reawakened through the performative act of reconstitution by modern readers, singers, and audiences. 32 However, the texts of many folksongs, particularly ballads containing violent or sexual themes, were deemed inappropriate for inclusion in songbooks for children; for examples of contrafacta with moralistic themes, see Märta Netterstad, Så sjöng barnen förr: Textmaterialet i de svenska skolsångböckerna 1842–1972, Skrifter utgivna av Svenskt visarkiv 8 (Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1982), 46–53. More recently, Boel Lindberg examines the presence of folksongs in textbooks; see “‘Och liten Karin tjente’: Om den äldre episka folkviseskatten i de tidigaste skolsångböckerna,” in Gamla visor, ballader och rap (see Chapter One, n. 22), 181–254. 33 Agnes Ekermann, Från berg och dal: Samling af svenska folkvisor och folklekar (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1878), [i].
59
means to a literary end, rather than a goal in itself; a broad level of musical competence
is assumed, as the notation is portrayed as transmitting a crucial element of the folksong,
and “easy accompaniments” are included “to increase the book’s usability in the
home.”34 However, the ability to read musical notation was far from universal, which
created an opportunity for alternative methods of transmission. One volume from 1881,
L. August Lundh’s Twenty Swedish Folksongs in Notation and Figures: For Use in Folk-
Schools, makes melodies accessible through scale-degree notation based on Rousseau’s
system which, in combination with the psalmodikon, a monochord popularized by the
priest Johan Dillner in the 1830s, allowed teachers and pupils without knowledge of
traditional notation to read and learn unfamiliar folksongs.35
Folksong published in serial journals or small independent collections
In addition to the larger collections discussed above, folksong arrangements also appear
individually or in smaller publications. Serial publications devoted to folklore in all its
forms, such as Iduna (organ of the Gothic League, 1811–24 and 1845) and Runa (journal
published by Richard Dybeck, 1842–50 and 1865–76) made musical settings accessible to
their readership. In a more purely commercial venture anticipating the days of the
recording, arrangements sung by popular opera singers including Jenny Lind, Mathilda
Enequist and Signe Hebbe were marketed in order to capitalize on the success of some
34 Ibid., [ii]. 35 L. August Lundh, 20 svenska folkvisor i not- och sifferskrift: Till folkskolornas tjenst (Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1881). For more on the use of figure notation in Swedish musical education, see Lennart Reimers, “Musikutbildning och musikundervisning,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 177–78. More on Lundh’s volume is also found in Sondra Wieland Howe and Judy Elizabeth Thönell, “Swedish Textbooks in the Mason-McConathy Collection,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, no. 153/154 (Summer–Fall 2002): 27.
60
of Sweden’s most famous musicians.36 Some of these arrangements hold singers to a
higher standard of technical difficulty, as the previous standard of folk-music-for-all
gave way to the desire of (trained) amateurs to imitate the stars onstage.
Prefaces and other writings
In addition to the song texts and arrangements in their collection, Geijer and Afzelius
provide important essays on the history, nature, and use of folksong from a Herderian
perspective. In the introduction to volume 1, Geijer describes a deep-seated conflict
between a (romanticized) awareness of the proper context of folk music and the
knowledge that transplanting such music for other artistic purposes necessarily and
fundamentally distorts it from its original substance. Because folksong is a living
tradition, he and Afzelius draw largely from oral sources; Geijer believes that the folk
poetry they gather “comes from times when national individuality was the only kind of
individuality that was expressed in education; personal individuality was so
underdeveloped, that an entire people sang as one man.”37 On the literary side, he says,
Sweden lags far behind the English, Scots, and German-speaking peoples in terms of
valuing its folk poetry.38 In one sense, the publication is designed to bring Sweden up to
par with its folksong-conscious neighbors (although the appended musical
arrangements immediately place the collection decades ahead of those of most of its
36 See, for example, W[endela Hebbe], Perlbandet: Folkvisor och romancer sjungne af Jenny Lind, Mathilda Enequist och Signe Hebbe för en röst vid piano (Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1871?). 37 “[D]en härstammar från tider då ännu i bildningen blott den nationella individualiteten var uttryckt, den enskilda ännu så outvicklad, att ett helt folk söng som en man.” Geijer, Introduction to Geijer-Afzelius, I:x. 38 Ibid., I:xxx–xxxi.
61
peers). Paradoxically, at the very time the “value” of folksong is discovered,
modernization threatens its existence; even the effort to “preserve” songs destroys them.
The rich variety of a genre that is “improvisation in its very nature” disappears when
notated in one or just a few versions, transforming the flexible into the fixed.39 In typical
romantic language, Geijer laments of the published songs:
To tell the truth, it hurts me deeply to see them. Their substance is not paper, but rather the fresh air, the forests and the Nordic nature.40 For centuries they have lived only in the melodic waves of song; in their simple tones, generation after generation has found expression for their feelings; and when [the songs] are publicly placed right in front of the art-connoisseur’s nose, they become stranded on dry ground. But even this is better, than that they should sink into the oblivion that otherwise cannot be far away.41
Just as the entomologist must kill a beetle in order to add it to her collection, the
folksong transcriber removes the specimen from its natural habitat, pinning its notes to
the page with staff lines. This practice cannot restore traditional song to the level of
ubiquity which collectors imagined it formerly enjoyed; but the printed score facilitated
the mass migration of folk musical material towards art music composition on a much
39 “Folkvisan är till sin natur improvisation.” Ibid., I:lxiv. 40 This early expression of the innate link between Swedish folksong and nature sets the tone for future impressions of Nordic music as a whole being intrinsically connected with the relatively uninhabited, “unspoiled” nature of the region, a deep-seated idea that has continued to inform domestic and international audiences hear music by northern composers. As Martin Knust has suggested, the “northern tone” in a piece of music is closely tied up with the knowledge (or suspicion) that its composer is geographically or culturally connected to the North; see his chapter “Gibt es einen schwedischen Ton?,” in Musikvetenskapliga texter: Fextskrift Holger Larsen 2011, Studier i Musikvetenskap 21 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet Institutionen för musik- och teatervetenskap, 2011), 45. 41 “[F]ör att säga sanningen, det gör mig hjerteligen ondt att se dem. Deras element är ej papperet, utan friska luften, skogarne och den Nordiska naturen. I århundraden hafva de blott lefvat i Sångens melodiska vågor: Slägten efter Slägten hafva i deras enfalldiga toner funnit ett uttryck för sina känslor; och deras offentliga framställande för Konstkännarens näsa är egentligen en strandning på det torra. Emellertid bättre så, än att de skulle nedsjunka i en förgätenhet, som eljest för dem nu mera kunde vara långt borta.” Geijer, Introduction to Geijer-Afzelius, I:lxviii.
62
larger and more transparent scale than had previously occurred.
Conflicting interpretations of the omkväde (refrain)
One of the most characteristic elements of Scandinavian ballads, the first genre of folk
music to capture the attention of collectors, was also the most controversial for early
arrangers. Nearly every ballad includes a brief refrain, or omkväde, at the end of each
strophe. Some ballads have a double omkväde, with one recurring in the middle of each
strophe (as in the recurring “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” in one familiar variant
of the English ballad Scarborough Fair), and another at the strophe’s end. The distinct
character of the omkväde —which often operates under a different rhythmic or metrical
scheme from the rest of the strophe—led to heated questions about whether it ought to
be sung by the same voice as the rest of the strophe (as advocated by Geijer and
practiced by Hæffner) or by the audience standing in as a quasi Greek chorus (an ideal
promoted by the Danish composer Peter Grønland, whom Afzelius had wanted to
engage as arranger for Geijer-Afzelius). The latter view came to press in Grønland’s
unsigned article “Alte Volksmelodien des Nordens” in the Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung (1816), which in no uncertain terms calls the omkväde something “opposed to the
song” (“dem Liede Entgegengesetztes”) that must be sung by a second singer or a
chorus of listeners.42 This structure becomes apparent in the majority of Grønland’s
42 [Peter Grønland], “Alte Volksmelodien des Nordens,” Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, no. 35 (August 28, 1816): 596. Although the article is unsigned, Grønland is known to have contributed articles to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, and the examples of Swedish song included in the appendices use arrangements from his as-yet-unpublished volume, Alte schwedische Volks-Melodien. Grønland also refers to this article in his preface to the same.
63
settings of Swedish folksongs, such as “The Bride of the Mountain King” (“Den
bergtagna”) in Example 2.1 below, which sets up a recurring opposition between solo
and tutti passages.43 In addition, “The Bride of the Mountain King” is an example of a
double omkväde, with the first half of the tutti refrain occurring mid-strophe and the
second half falling at the end.
The maiden was supposed to go to matins. / Time moves slowly for me. So [instead] she took the road toward the tall mountain. / But I know that grief is heavy.
Example 2.1: Grønland, “The Bride of the Mountain King” (“Den bergtagna”)
The texture of a solo voice supported by piano gives way to four-part texted
harmony during the intermediate and final omkväden as the chorus provides collective
commentary. In keeping with Grønland’s understanding of the ballad, where the poet-
singer is never alone, but rather surrounded by witnesses and companions, the chorus is
not only participatory, but also multiple, requiring an “audience” of at least three or four
43 Grönland, Alte schwedische Volks-Melodien, 1.
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64
members.44 The structure gives tangible reference to an imagined community
surrounding a bard, an interpretation that met with vocal opposition from ballad
collectors on the Swedish side.
Geijer directly attacks Grønland’s practice in the essay “On the Refrain in the
Ancient Scandinavian Songs” appended to vol. 3 of Geijer-Afzelius (1818). His argument
is twofold: in theory, the refrain is the singer’s own commentary, and in practice, neither
Geijer nor his circle had ever encountered evidence of choral omkväden during the
collecting process.45 Hæffner also speaks out from a practical standpoint against the
choral refrain, observing that he has only ever heard certain ring-dances sung in
harmony, never ballads.46 His own arrangement of “The Bride of the Mountain King,”
shown here in Example 2.2, takes for given that a single voice functions alternately in a
narrative and an introspective capacity.47
44 [Grønland], “Alte Volksmelodien des Nordens,” 597. 45 Erik Gustaf Geijer, “Om omqvädet i de gamla skandinaviska visorna,” in Geijer-Afzelius (see Chapter One, n. 17), 3:245–246. 46 Johann Christian Friedrich Hæffner, “Anmärkningar öfver gamla nordiska sången,” 104. The article has been reprinted: “Anmärkningar öfver gamla nordiska sången,” in Texter om svensk folkmusik, 37–44 (see Chapter Two, n. 11). 47 Geijer and Afzelius, Svenska folk-visor från forntiden, 1:1.
65
Example 2.2: Hæffner, “The Bride of the Mountain King”
Although this arrangement could theoretically be sung chorally with relatively few
adjustments, that is clearly not the intent. If anything, it is the narrative portions of
Hæffner’s setting that would lend themselves more naturally to part-singing, with the
alto closely supporting the soprano (mm. 1–2 and 7–9). Nothing in the two refrains (mm.
5–6, mm. 11–14) calls for ensemble singing; the two lower voices move at half-speed
rhythmically compared to the melody, and the bass leaps down an octave and back up
on the final syllable, a most un-vocal gesture.
Subsequent arrangements by other composers follow Hæffner’s model as
Grønland’s choral refrain failed to establish itself as the norm. Nevertheless, even
Hæffner relaxes his standards on one occasion and admits to breaking his own rule in
his setting of the ballad “Sir Tynne” (“Riddar Tynne”). Citing doubts about the
authenticity of the melodic variant at his disposal and noting its canon-like properties,
he justifies setting the tune in three vocal parts “for his own enjoyment” (“för ros
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66
skull”).48 Like Grønland, he calls upon different forces for the narrative and refrain
portions of the strophe, but here, the forces are balanced, with two equal choirs of two
tenors and a bass.49 But Hæffner created this arrangement before Grønland’s article and
settings were published; rather than a conscious attempt to adapt a portion of
Grønland’s philosophy, it can more properly be understood in the context of Hæffner’s
position as director musices at Uppsala University, where he established male choral song
as a vital element of student life, which will be taken up in more detail early in Chapter
Three.50 Although Hæffner’s work for Geijer-Afzelius earned a scathing review in the
premier issue of the short-lived music journal Euterpe (1823), the reviewer and editor, W.
F. Holmgren, tacitly approves of the lack of tutti refrains, as the copious criticisms are all
directed towards Hæffner’s harmonic language.51
Characteristics of Swedish folksong as notated in the early 1800s
The most thorough musical analysis of nineteenth-century Swedish folksong has been
48 Hæffner refers to the setting as having four-part harmony, but only three voices are present; Hæffner, “Anmärkningar öfver gamla nordiska sången,” 104. The arrangement is found in Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 6. 49 For a more detailed analysis of Hæffner’s “Sir Tynne,” see Chapter Three, pp. 101ff. 50 Leif Jonsson states that Hæffner “consciously avoided” (undvek medvetet) making choral folksong arrangements in the 1810s in Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 106. However, I have been unable to confirm Jonsson’s claim that Hæffner likened choral arrangements of folksong to an “old Nordic warrior – dressed in a tuxedo” (“gammal Nordisk Kämpe – klädd i frack,” quoted in ibid.) This phrase is attributed to Hæffner 1818, but no page number is given and I cannot find it in the source in question. I see no reason to doubt that Hæffner likely had his choir at least theoretically in mind when writing this three-part arrangement, even if it differs substantially from the four-part arrangement he later published in Johann Christian Friedrich Hæffner, Svenska folk-wisor satte för fyra mans-röster (Upsala: Palmblad, 1832). 51 W. F. Holmgren, “Recension: Svenska folkmelodier, harmoniskt bearbetade af f. d. Kongl. Capellmästaren J. C. F. Haeffner,” Euterpe 1 (1823): 10–17.
67
carried out by Axel Helmer in his extensive study Swedish Solo Song 1850–1890.52 As a
starting point for investigating the presence of folkton (German: Volkston, “folk-like
style”) in art song during the second half of the century, Helmer analyzes two printed
folksong collections—Leonard Höijer’s revised and expanded edition of Geijer-Afzelius
(1880), and Johan Niclas Ahlström’s 300 Nordic Folksongs (1855)—as a baseline for
contemporary understandings of folk style in comparison with certain types of solo
song. In terms of tonality and modality of folksongs, Helmer notes that minor keys
outnumber major keys in both collections and that the percentage of modal (usually
minor-sounding modes such as Dorian) songs is much higher in the revised Geijer-
Afzelius (36 percent) than in Ahlström (9 percent).53 After a close look at tonality,
however, the rest of his analysis turns to the solo art songs.
Repertoire: Piano-vocal arrangements of Swedish folksong
In the present study, eighteen published folksong collections for voice and piano from
throughout the nineteenth century have been examined in order to give a
comprehensive view of printed sources available to composers during this era.54 Of the
52 Axel Helmer, Svensk solosång 1850–1890 (Stockholm: Svenska samfundet för musikforskning och Svenskt musikhistoriskt arkiv, 1972), 126–43. 53 “Modal” is used to denote modes not common to the tonal system. Helmer calls attention to Moberg’s criticism of Ahlström’s 300 nordiska folkvisor as the first of many commercialized folk music editions, where popularity, not authenticity, is the guiding editorial factor. See ibid., 129. Helmer explains the low percentage of modal songs in Ahlström’s collection as a product of his familiarity with folksongs used in the art-music milieu of sångspel (Singspiel) productions. This line of analysis can be extended to note that urban audiences—listeners at the aforementioned productions and consumers of “commercial” collections alike—were much more likely to encounter folksongs using the typical harmonic minor scale; modal melodies, including Dorian, are significantly rarer. 54 This sample includes all of the main published collections and as many of the smaller volumes as I have been able to find. Volumes examined include all items in Table 2.1 and Table 2.3 with the exception of
68
1293 arrangements of Swedish folksongs in these volumes,55 436 unique titles are
represented: approximately 224 of these titles are found in multiple collections, while as
many as 212 occur in only a single publication.56 The three most widely published
folksongs are the ballads “Little Karin,” “Sven in the Rose Garden,” and “The Bride of
the Mountain King” (“Liten Karin,” “Sven i rosengård,” and “Den bergtagna”) which
appear in thirteen, twelve and eleven of the eighteen collections, respectively. The most
prevalent songs—those which appeared in at least seven different publications of
musical arrangements—are listed in Table 2.4 below.57
Table 2.4: Folksongs with musical settings in at least seven published collections, 1814–99
# of collections Titles
13 collections Liten Karin
12 collections Sven i rosengård
11 collections Den bergtagna
10 collections Konungabarnen Liten Kerstins bröllop och begrafning
9 collections Hafsfrun Pröfningen Herr Peders sjöresa Riddar Olle Hertig Silfverdal Vedergällningen Oväntad bröllopsgäst
Josephson (1860), which I was unable to access. The sample also excludes Ahlström’s 220 svenska folkdansar (1840–42), which was published without texts, and serials including songs, such as Iduna and Runa, as many if not most of the songs were republished in folksong anthologies. 55 Fewer than 100 of these items are solo melodic lines; the vast majority are piano-vocal arrangements. 56 The presence of musical and textual variants makes exact quantification difficult; nevertheless, approximations still provide insight on the scope of this material. The largest source of material found in no more than one collection comes from Ahlström (1855), where as many as twenty-five percent of the 300 “Nordic” folksongs do not appear in other collections referenced here, including eighteen of the twenty-eight tunes of Norwegian or Finnish heritage mentioned earlier. 57 For translations of folksong titles, see Appendix B, pp. 521ff.
69
# of collections Titles
8 collections De två systrarna Hillebrand Den underbara harpan Inga liten kvarnpiga Grefvens döttrar vid Elfvabolid Lindormen Harpans kraft Per Tyrssons döttrar i Vänge Herr Helmer Sorgens makt Herr Peder och Malfred Sven Svanehvit
7 collections Allt under himmelens fäste Konung Eric och spåqvinnan Dalvisa (“Om sommaren sköna”) Lilla Rosa De två konungadöttrarna Liten Kerstin befriar sin broder Den lillas testamente Liten vallpiga Den öfvergifne (“Jag ser uppå dina
ögen”) Och minns du, hvad du lofvade
Dufvans sång på liljeqvist Skön Anna Glädjens blomster Stige Lilles bjudning Hönsgummans visa Stolts Botelid stalldräng Jungfrun i blå skogen Tofva lilla
“Old” vs. “New” layers
For purposes of analysis, folksongs can be divided into two categories: older songs and
newer songs. The older layer consists of the ballads that first interested collectors such as
Afzelius and Geijer, while the newer layer encompasses other varied styles that begin to
appear widely in print beginning in the 1840s. Folksong enthusiasts from mid-century
onward were aware of this division; as discussed earlier, ballads were believed to be an
old, quickly disappearing genre, distinct from more recent popular songs treating more
urban subjects. In this new layer, knights and virgins give way to sailors and
sweethearts.58 About three-quarters of titles that appear more than once in this corpus of
fourteen publications were published prior to the 1840s, while about one quarter (60 of
58 Ludvig Teodor Öberg’s volume Older and Newer Swedish Folksongs (Äldre och nyare svenska folkvisor, 1855), published under the pseudonym Axel Ivar Ståhl, calls attention in its title to the sea change of the widening of the concept of “folksong.”
70
219) were printed in book form for the first time in or after 1845.59 Songs in this latter
group can generally be called “new,” with the reservation that new examples of older
song continued to enter songbooks throughout the century as well; nevertheless, many
of these newly published songs are quite distinct from previous ballad styles. The
following musical analysis uses a representative selection of two collections: Hæffner’s
musical supplement to Geijer-Afzelius (1814–18), with ninety-five songs, and the newer
collection Selected Swedish Folksongs, Folk Dances, and Folk Games (1845–48) by Ahlström
and Boman, with sixty songs.60
Influence of instrumental dance music on vocal music
Both in terms of sheer numbers and historical perspective, the ballad maintains primacy
of place in the folksong canon; yet the songs forming a new layer later in the century
demonstrate significant cross-pollination with instrumental dance music. Table 2.5
below shows the percentage of old and new songs with certain structural elements.
59 Songs appearing in only one collection likely had limited influence on composers and general consumers. 60 Johan Niclas Ahlström and Per Conrad Boman, Walda svenska folksånger, folkdansar och folklekar, 9 vols. (Stockholm: Abr. Hirsch, 1845–48).
71
Table 2.5: Structural elements of “old” and “new” published folksongs
OLD SONGS NEW SONGS METER simple duple 68% 52% simple triple 19% 38% compound/ 10% 10% combination PICK-UP yes 77% 68% NOTES no 23% 32% OMKVÄDE double 48% 3% (REFRAIN) final only 35% 20% middle only 1% — none 16% 77%
In the older layer, simple duple meters predominate; in the newer layer, however, the
proportion of songs in simple triple meter increases twofold. Many of the newer entries
are texted instrumental dances, especially polskas with melodies of the type in Åhlström
and Afzelius’s substantial four-volume set of fiddle dance music arranged for piano,
Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances (1814).61 Whether this type of texted song occurred only
rarely in earlier decades, or whether collectors were simply not interested in this genre
at the time, is unclear; later collections sometimes explicitly credit existing dance
melodies, while other tunes demonstrate obvious fiddle characteristics without external
commentary.
61 Over ninety-nine percent of the tunes in Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances are in simple triple time. Traditions remained the only major published collection of Swedish instrumental folk tunes for almost a century; Afzelius and Åhlström, Traditioner av svenska folkdansar. The polska was one of the most popular folk dances in the nineteenth century and remains so today; for a history of the polska and a discussion of its place today, see Mats Nilsson, The Swedish Polska, trans. Eivor Cormack and Jill Ann Johnson (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv/Musikverket, 2017).
72
Further supporting this “instrumental turn” in newer folksong is a decrease in
the presence of pick-up notes, from three-quarters of old songs to just two-thirds of new
songs.62 In contrast, fewer than eight percent of Afzelius’s dance tunes in Traditions have
upbeats—including all three of the texted ring-games and ring-dances that are included.
In addition, the near-disappearance of the omkväde (refrain) in the newer songs
fits together with the increasing influence of dance music. The typical format of the
polska and similar instrumental dances is a closed binary structure with even phrase-
lengths; there is no counterpart to the often unbalanced structure of the omkväde.
Relatively few newer songs have omkväden, and the ones that do are typically examples
of older ballads making their way into print for the first time; songs set to instrumental
dance tunes do not use the ballad format.
As Axel Helmer predicted, the use of modal tone palettes decreases sharply, and
in fact becomes almost nonexistent among the newer entries, as seen below in Table 2.6.
62 On the ease with which up-beats fit into the Swedish language—and the difficulty this caused when the text for the Finnish national anthem was translated from its original Swedish into Finnish, a language whose prosody is not naturally compatible with up-beats—see Lisa S. de Gorog and Ralph Paul de Gorog, From Sibelius to Sallinen: Finnish Nationalism and the Music of Finland (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 17.
73
Table 2.6: Tonal-modal characteristics of “old” and “new” published folksongs
TONALITY/MODALITY OLD NEW
minor 29% 60% major 15% 30% modal 38% 3% OLD NEW mixed63 18% 7% ⟶ Mm 12% 5% mm 3% — mM 2% 2% MM 1% —
Given that the most of the older modal songs use minor-flavored scales, one might
expect an even higher proportion of (harmonic) minor songs among the newer
additions, and this is exactly what happens as modal harmonies (primarily Dorian) are
replaced by tonal minor keys. In this case, instrumental dances—at least those
transcribed by Afzelius—cannot explain why pieces in major keys become twice as
prevalent in the newer layer, as the majority of arrangements in Traditions of Swedish
Folk-Dances are also in minor keys.
Piano accompaniments
Of course, influence from instrumental music is hardly restricted to the later layer; from
Hæffner (1814–18) onwards, monophonic vocal lines were not thought to be audience-
appropriate or commercially viable, and piano settings were the means by which
traditional melodies were made available to the musical public. As a rule, piano parts in
anthologies are simple and shadow the vocal line in uncomplicated textures with little
63 In the lower-right corner of the chart, “mixed” modal pieces are separated into their constituent categories, in which a piece variously begins or ends in a different major (M) or minor (m) key.
74
pianistic independence and few harmonic surprises. Returning to the most commonly
printed song, “Little Karin” provides a full set of examples of typical settings arranged
approximately in order of increasing complexity (Example 2.3 below).64
Apart from the single vocal line with pitch figures in Lundh (1881; Example
2.3a), which was particularly aimed at non-musicians who would not have been able to
decode a piano setting, Hæffner (1818; Example 2.3b) gives the simplest setting, a
consistently three-voiced texture in which a middle voice harmonizes the melody in
thirds and sixths while a bass line adds tonal stability. Höijer, evidently dissatisfied with
Hæffner’s arrangement in the original edition of Geijer-Afzelius, writes his own setting
with a thicker, four-voiced texture for the revised 1880 edition (Example 2.3c). Lundqvist
(1860; Example 2.3d) adds pianistic dexterity to the right hand while remaining well
within the capabilities of an amateur player; unlike most other simple settings, this one
doubles the melody in the right-hand of the piano only most, rather than all, of the time.
Grønland (1818; Example 2.3e) and Berens (1890s; Example 2.3f) add brief
preludes, while Ahlström and Boman (1845; Example 2.3g) provide both prelude and
postlude. Lindblad (1826; Example 2.3h) brings the song closer to the style of the lied,
giving more weight to the accompaniment through incessant sixteenth-note motion,
variation in how the voice is doubled (by changing to a lower octave on the piano or
64 For more on “Little Karin” as opera and inspiration for piano variations and fantasies, see pp. 333ff and 366ff.
75
adding passing notes) and the interpolation of contrapuntal interludes.65
2.3a) Lundh, 20 svenska folkvisor i not- och sifferskrift (1881), 19
2.3b) Haeffner, Musikbilaga [Musical Appendix] to Geijer-Afzelius (1814–18), 2
2.3c) Höijer, Revised edition of Geijer-Afzelius (1880), 3:6
2.3d) Lundqvist, 100 svenska folkvisor med ett lätt accompagnement för piano (1860), 66
Example 2.3: “Little Karin” ballad, eight settings of the first phrase
65 The interludes also function as quadruple wordless refrains, an expansion of the concept of the double omkväde. The use of an interlude in this manner is particularly interesting considering that “Little Karin” is one of the relatively rare refrain-less ballads.
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77
the length of the narrative unit from the half-stanza to the full stanza in what can
otherwise quickly become a repetitive piece when written as ||:A:|| ||:B:||. Others
arrangers are less creative; Altin (1846) copies Grønland (1818) exactly, minus the
prelude, while Ekermann (1878) is very nearly identical to Hæffner (1818).
Conclusion
Taken together, these small-scale settings of “Little Karin” show a variety of
interpretations stemming from a single traditional melody. When composers worked on
a larger scale—with multiple vocal parts and instruments, with the freedom to choose
any traditional melody, or the freedom to write in the style of without quoting any exact
tune—what sort of pieces emerged, and how did audiences hear and interpret the folk
elements? Printed collections of folksongs provided Swedish composers with “national”
material from which to generate new compositions. In general, the prevailing musical
models were German, other than in musical theater, which continued to follow
predominantly French trends, alongside developments from Italy; Swedish composers
turned to folksong to provide a local imprint, whether outwardly in texted genres or
implicitly in nontexted music.
Hæffner, who published the first folksong arrangements in 1814 and who largely
initiated the student chorus at Uppsala University in 1808, provides a direct link to the
next genre under consideration, folksongs for four-part male chorus. Not only have
choral arrangements proven the most accessible and enduring format for traditional
Swedish song, with some settings still in common use nearly two centuries after they
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were written, but they also played a key role in the burgeoning pan-Scandinavian
movement at Nordic universities beginning in the 1840s. For the first time, folksong was
deployed across borders as a means of building and promoting a common identity
among university students and citizens of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.
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3 Swedish perspectives on Scandinavianism: Folksongs for male chorus
In conclusion, a few words about the nature of the songs that are usually performed by the student choir. First of all we name folksongs, which are characteristic both for their folk character and the basic temperament of song itself. This temperament is innately solemn and melancholic, yet without becoming heavy or monotonous, since alongside the deep and somber, the light and comic run into the daylight even in folksongs.
— Carl Rupert Nyblom, 18781
When the choir from Uppsala University traveled to Paris on the occasion of the 1878
World’s Fair, its reputation already ran large. Previously, the choir had won first prize in
a singing competition arranged in conjunction with the earlier Parisian World’s Fair in
1867 and had earned the honor of singing during intermission at a performance of Il
Trovatore at the Paris Opera, a performance that won them great acclaim.2 A glowing
review in the weekly newspaper l’Illustration mentioned that it was above all the
“melodies, so fresh, so original, so poetic” that captured the audience’s attention, while
also admitting a practical linguistic problem: the French audience did not understand a
word of Swedish, and the reviewer did not even know the titles of some of the songs
1 “Slutligen några ord om arten af de sånger, som af studentkören bruka presteras. I första rummet sätta vi här folkvisorna, såsom kännetecknande både för folkkarakter och sångens eget grundlynne. Detta är nämligen i botten allvarligt och melankoliskt, men utan att dock blifva nedtyngande och enformigt, ty vid sidan af det djupa och dystra springer ofta det lätta och lustiga fram i dagen äfven i folkvisan.” Quoted in “Den svenska och norska studentsången,” Aftonbladet (July 30, 1878): 3. 2 Måns Hultin, writing under the pseudonym Måns Månsson, published an account of the choir’s first Paris journey; for details of the prize and the concert at the Paris opera, see Måns Månsson, Upsalasångarnes Pariserfärd (Esaias Edquist, 1868), 63–73.
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that moved listeners so deeply.3
Upon the choir’s return visit in 1878 together with the choir from the Royal
Frederick University in Christiania (as the city presently called Oslo was then known),
they were invited to sing at the home of the president himself, Marie-Edme-Patrice-
Maurice, count de Mac-Mahon. When his wife, Élisabeth de MacMahon, asked a small
ensemble from the Uppsala choir to repeat the folksong “Neckens polska” (“Dance of
the Water Sprite”) with cries of “It’s lovely, it’s delightful,” (“C’est charmant, c’est
ravissant”), she more than likely could not understand any of the song’s famous
Swedish text, which begins as follows: “Deep in the sea, on diamond rocks / The water-
king rests in his green hall.”4
In the concert hall, however, little books with song texts in translation helped
French audiences bridge the language gap. To further edify the public, a literature
professor from Uppsala, Carl Rupert Nyblom (1832–1907), wrote a brief introduction in
French on the history of male choral song in Uppsala, which several newspapers
reprinted in Swedish translation for the benefit of readers at home who avidly followed
the details of choir’s journey. In this introduction, an excerpt from which is quoted
above as the epigraph to this chapter, Nyblom names folksong as the first category of
song cultivated by the students. These songs are important, he says, because they reflect
something of the nature of the Swedish people, and because they get at the heart of
3 “. . . dessa melodier, så friska, så originella, så poetiska . . .” An excerpt from the review is quoted in Swedish translation in ibid., 71. 4 “Pariskören,” Aftonbladet (July 30, 1878): 3. The first lines of the text, by Arvid August Afzelius, are “Djupt i hafvet på demantehällen / Necken hvilar i grönan sal.”
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song-as-life: predominantly solemn, yet on occasion lively and lighthearted, a proper
balance.
The French press picked up on the significance of folksongs, as shown in an
essay by the critic Edmund Hippeau (1849 – 1921) in L’Événement. After praising a
number of Nordic musicians (including Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and, the most celebrated of
all, the soprano Christina Nilsson), Hippeau wrote, “But nothing is more interesting in
Scandinavian art than the ancient songs that students from Uppsala and Christiania will
let us hear.”5 Even if arrangements of traditional song made up only a relatively small
portion of the overall repertoire for male chorus, they occupied a large place in the
critical and public imagination.
Folksongs arranged for male chorus derive in large part from the published
settings for voice and piano discussed in the previous chapter.6 While the magnitude of
efforts by Erik Gustaf Geijer, Arvid August Afzelius and Johann Christian Friedrich
Hæffner toward bringing ballad-style folksong into a central position within nineteenth-
century Swedish culture can hardly be overstated, their greatest impact came in the form
of later publications and performed works based on material originally made available
in Geijer-Afzelius (1814–18). Gunnar Ternhag points out that secondary dissemination
5 Excerpts from Hippeau’s essay (originally printed in L’Événement, July 24 or 25, 1878) are quoted in Swedish translation in Carl Otto Montan and Karl Warburg, Sångarfärden till Paris 1878: Ett stycke studentlif, skildradt i resebref (Stockholm: Skoglund, 1878), 102–3. 6 This dissertation examines folk material in secular contexts. For a brief look at sacred chorales set for male chorus in comparison with a newly composed chorale-like quartet in folk style by August Söderman, see Folke Bohlin, “En ‘folklig’ manskörskoral från 1800-talet,” in Koral i norden: 10 koralexperter från ett symposium i anslutning till Harald Göranssons disputation om 1697 års koralpsalmbok söndagen den 17 maj 1992, ed. Harald Göransson and Gregor Andersson (Uppsala: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, 1993), 19–26.
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was even more influential in spreading knowledge of the songs than were the original
volumes themselves, as those who did not have direct access to Hæffner’s arrangements
encountered music elsewhere based on his work.7
If piano-vocal settings of traditional song were the primary medium through
which musical material framed as being of folk origin entered the private sphere of the
middle-to-upper-class home, the most widespread medium for mass consumption in
public settings was the four-part arrangement for male chorus or quartet as sung by
university students or, beginning in the second half of the century, choirs formed by
worker’s associations and other organizations. Singers and audiences became especially
familiar with a small subset of the repertoire that was repeatedly programmed in local
performances and on domestic and international tours; in a sense, choirs continually
singing the same settings served as precursors to the radio, giving mass audiences a
standardized impression of folksong in a performance context while conveying certain
political leanings of the student movement associated with the most prominent choirs,
which will be explored later in this chapter.
Organized student song, as practiced by choirs and quartets in the academic
communities of Uppsala and Lund, quickly became a publicly recognizable symbol of
student life; studentsång bridged the gap between university and civilian life, allowing
members of the general public to witness the formation and development of academic
musical ritual through ceremonial parades, informal serenades in the streets, and public
7 See Gunnar Ternhag, “När folkvisor blev sånger för manskör,” in “En alldeles egen och förträfflig National-Musik” (see Chapter One, n. 19), 95.
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concerts.8 From the late 1820s, folksong arrangements entered the academic repertoire
and soon spread to other regions, including Stockholm, as graduates finished their
degrees and moved away from the universities, bringing with them their songbooks and
their interest in singing, and as student ensembles performed on domestic and
international tours. In time, non-academic groups, such as the fraternal organization Par
Bricole, formed their own choruses.9 Furthermore, by mid-century, piano arrangements
of male choral songs were popular among amateur pianists, providing another audience
for the genre even in cities and towns far from the two academic centers.10
Near the century’s end, the musicologist and critic Adolf Lindgren (1846–1905)
recognized the importance of male quartet song in Sweden and claimed that “quartet-
singing has, with us, played a role that has possibly been larger and in comparison with
other musical genres, more wide-reaching than in any other place (except possibly
Switzerland).”11 Lindgren went so far as to predict that a future account of the history of
art would find that
8 Leif Jonsson examines the public role of collective student song in civil society in “Ljusets riddarvakt.” 9 For a history of the fraternal organization Par Bricole, see Sällskapet Par Bricole 200 år: En jubileumsskrift (Stockholm: Sällskapet Par Bricole, 1978). 10 Martin Tegen, “Tonernas vågor” eller Vilken musik var populär på 1860-talet?, Skrifter från Musikvetenskapliga institutionen (Stockholm: Musikvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet, 1982), 13. Two such collections are the four-volume set Echo af Upsala-Sången: Studentqvartetter arrangerade för Piano (Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1860–68) which includes one strophe’s worth of text for each entry, and the textless volume 100 studentsånger satte för piano (Stockholm: Lundquist, [1879]). In both cases, the majority of arrangements are conceived pianistically; accompanimental arpeggiation and other textures ensure that any singing along would be in unison. The latter collection does include some mostly homophonic settings as well, which lend themselves better to choral singing in the home, although the complete lack of song texts in this volume would require that every participant either already knew or had access to the texts. 11 “Qvartettsången har hos oss spelat en rol, kanske större och i jämförelse med andra musikgrenar mera vidtgripande än på något annat håll (utom möjligen Schweiz).” Adolf Lindgren, “Studentsången,” Aftonbladet (September 29, 1885): 2.
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the quartet for male voices, this peculiar creature of the nineteenth century, was of much more importance for the spiritual culture of that century, on the whole—that is to say, democratically and popularly—than, for example, its older and more distinguished brother, the string quartet, or any other of the ‘more learned’ forms.12
Given the widespread practice of choral and quartet singing in Sweden, Lindgren’s
claim may not be as much of an exaggeration as it appears.13 Speaking more generally of
Europe, Celia Applegate has characterized the 1800s as “the choral century par
excellence,” while Barbara Eichner reminds us that choral music, not purely
instrumental music, was the means through which most people were able to hear large-
scale works in performance during that era.14 Ryan Minor reflects on a disciplinary shift
that has created more space for the recognition of choral music within music history:
as musicologists have begun to focus more on the social and political world of music-making (both amateur and professional), and simultaneously have questioned the very possibility of the ‘purely musical,’ anecdotes such as [the excursion of a choir to a forest, which was described in a previous paragraph] begin to look more like the substance of music history, rather than a merely charming supplement to it.15
In Sweden, choral singing—particularly male choral song—transcended the expected
12 “. . . att qvartetten för mansröster, denna nittonde århundradets egendomliga skapelse, haft en vida större betydelse för samma århundrades andliga kultur, sedd i stort, d. v. s. demokratiskt och populärt, än t. ex. dess äldre och förnämare broder, qvartetten för stråkinstrument, eller någon annan af de ‘lärdare’ formerna.” Ibid., 2. 13 Lindgren has partly been validated in modern research, as several scholars have recognized the historical bias towards the study of instrumental, absolute music in the nineteenth century and have argued persuasively for recognizing choral music of that era as the major, participatory force it was during its time. Ryan Minor reflects directly on this musicological shift in “Choral Music and Choral Singing in Germany and Austria,” in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, ed. Donna Marie Di Grazia, Routledge Studies in Musical Genres (New York: Routledge, 2012), 115–16. 14 Celia Applegate, “The Building of Community Through Choral Singing,” in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (see n. 13 above), 3. See also Barbara Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds: Musical Constructions of German National Identity, 1848–1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 163. 15 Minor, “Choral Music and Choral Singing in Germany and Austria,” 115.
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arenas of music and social fellowship in the middle of the nineteenth century to become
a political tool.16 As part of this transformation, male choruses began to use folksongs in
a way that came to be particular to this genre: rather than reinforcing national identity,
traditional song—often in the form of contrafacta on traditional melodies—was used to
construct common identities across Scandinavian borders.
Another border (or, rather, network of borders) to the south is also of
significance: many Swedish composers turned to German conservatories in the 1800s for
advanced training. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising to find musical links with trends
emerging from musical centers in Leipzig, Vienna and Berlin. However, organized
choral singing also mirrors a political similarity between Sweden and Germany that is
not necessarily apparent at first glance: just as group singing invites individual voices to
join into a larger mass of sound, it also served on a larger scale in the nineteenth century
to help unite regions into larger political entities. In German territories, the development
of feelings of cultural unity among citizens of different states eventually culminated in
the creation of a German empire joined by federal bonds among constituent states in
1871. While singing was not directly part of the political process, it assisted by creating
opportunities for choristers from disparate states to travel to singing festivals in which
they not only personally met other Germans, but performed a common repertoire
16 A recent book celebrating the sesquicentennial of Orphei Drängar (Sons of Orpheus), a male chorus founded in Uppsala in 1853, characterizes the choir as “a working organization with major and minor, concerts and caprices, with celebrations and everyday life, drudgery, groaning and moaning, with lip movements, abdominal support and gnashing of teeth” (“en arbetande apparat med dur och moll, konserter och capricer, med fest och vardag, slit och släp, stön och stånk, med läpprörelser, magstöd och tandagnissel”). Then as now, choruses have fulfilled a variety of functions. Christer Åsberg, En orkester av röster: Orphei drängar 150 år (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2003), 11.
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celebrating German musical and cultural achievement. In Sweden, certain circles
supported the idea of a united Scandinavia, in which Sweden, Denmark and Norway—
and, ideally, Finland—would merge into a single state, an idea that ultimately never
came to pass. The outcomes may have been different, but male choral song fulfilled
similar functions of cultural cooperation in both regions.
After sketching the origins of student song in Sweden, a phenomenon not widely
known outside of the Nordic countries, this chapter explores two main questions: what
body of folksong repertoire was arranged and sung, and in which contexts was it
performed? More specifically with respect to the latter question, how did male choral
folksong fit into the largely student-driven movement of Scandinavianism, as the
preoccupation with redefining Swedish identity in the wake of territorial changes early
in the century gave way to new discussions of pan-Scandinavian fraternity in the middle
of the century?
Background: History of student song
From the beginning, J. C. F. Hæffner’s piano settings of folksongs in Geijer-Afzelius
sparked a contentious debate, as outlined in Chapter Two.17 At stake was the nature of
traditional song as it was presented to educated, mostly urban publics: was the essence
of folksong encapsulated in the single melodic line? Or was there an inherent dialogue
between an individual poet and a community of listeners who joined in during the
omkväde (refrain) following the remnants of a practice supposedly inherited from the
17 See Chapter Two, p. 62.
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ancient Greeks? The controversy reached as far as the German press.18 In practice, the
solo model won out over the choral omkväde, so that collections with tutti choral refrains
by Peter Grønland (1818) and Andreas Peter Berggreen (1861)—two Danes who
published volumes of Swedish folksongs—were the exception, rather than the rule. But
by the later 1820s, a new form of folksong arrangement emerged: the four-part a cappella
setting for male quartet or male chorus (manskör). While traditional song has long been
recognized as a notable element of manskör repertoire, particularly by Leif Jonsson and,
more recently, Gunnar Ternhag, the history of the development of this sub-genre during
the nineteenth century, prior to the age of Hugo Alfvén in the first decades of the
twentieth century, has not yet been fully explored.19
European models of male choral singing
Male choral singing in Sweden is indebted to currents from Germany.20 To be sure, the
first impulse towards organizing a male chorus at Uppsala University in 1808 slightly
18 See Chapter Two, n. 42. 19 For Jonsson and Ternhag, see Chapter One, n. 86 and the present chapter, n. 7, respectively. Moving ahead in time to Alfvén, whose settings date from the first half of the 1900s, Ternhag treats the histories of several of Alfvén’s choral arrangements in “‘Jag har varit både självständig och slav inför mina visor.’ Några anteckningar om Hugo Alfvéns folkvisearrangemang,” in Allt under linden den gröna: Studier i folkmusik och folklore tillägnade Ann-Mari Häggman, Publikationer utgivna av Finlands svenska folkmusikinstitut 31 (Vasa, Finland: Finlands svenska folkmusikinstitut, 2001), 107–20. Jörgen Grundström discusses arrangements for both male chorus and mixed chorus in “Alfvén och folkvisan,” Alfvéniana, no. 3/4 (3–9): 2004. More recently, Nathan Leaf gives an overview in English of Alfvén’s arrangements in “Swedish Soul: Hugo Alfvén and His Folk-Song Arrangements,” Choral Journal 50, no. 1 (2009): 18–29. 20 For an overview of male choral song in Germany, see James M. Brinkman, “The German Male Chorus of the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Research in Music Education 18, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 16–24. The earlier English tradition of singing part-songs in organizations like the Noblemen and Gentleman’s Catch Club and Glee Club, both founded in the early 1760s, did not have any influence in Sweden. On the position of these groups within choral singing in England, see Chester L. Alwes, “Choral Music in the Culture of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Choral Music, ed. André de Quadros (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 38.
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preceded the founding of continental organizations usually cited as European models of
part-singing. For example, Carl Friedrich Zelter held the first meeting of his Liedertafel in
Berlin early in 1809, a private group limited to a small number of invited members who
were singers, poets or composers between the ages of twenty-five and thirty.21 The idea
of men gathering for song and social fellowship caught on, and Liedertafeln were soon
established in many German cities, particularly in the north and the Rheinland.22
A few years earlier, Hans Georg Nägeli had begun his pedagogical choral
activity in Switzerland, founding the Zürcherische Singinstitut in 1805, which included a
mixed adult chorus and a children’s chorus. In 1810, he added a male chorus to the
institute’s activities.23 Nägeli’s initiative spawned numerous other choruses, primarily
but not only in southern German regions.24 Soon, singing societies, variously called
Liedertafeln, Liederkränze, and Männergesangvereine, convened throughout the German-
speaking regions. Regional federations began to develop between individual choirs,
variously growing in size until a “nationwide meta-federative league” was in place by
the 1860s, offering a musical model for the subsequent political unification process of
1870.25
21 On the founding of Zelter’s Liedertafel in Berlin, including its association with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, see Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Carl Friedrich Zelter und das Berliner Musikleben seiner Zeit: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Nicolai, 1997), 95–97. 22 Joep Leerssen, “German Influences: Choirs, Repertoires, Nationalities,” in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe, ed. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 28. 23 For more on Hans Georg Nägeli and his early choral activity, see Martin Staehelin, Hans Georg Nägeli und Ludwig van Beethoven: Der Zürcher Musiker, Musikverleger und Musikschriftsteller in seinen Beziehungen zu dem grossen Komponisten (Zürich: Hug, 1982), 9–16. 24 Leerssen, “German Influences,” 28–29. 25 Ibid., 29.
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A visible manifestation of growing musical nationalism in German regions was
the large-scale music festival, of which the Lower Rhine Festivals that began in 1818
became the most prominent. The performance of choral and symphonic works by
German composers at these festivals amounted to, as Celia Applegate puts it, “a cultural
declaration of national independence,” in which singers—as few as 200 or as many as
900—from disparate regions experienced shared ownership of repertoire and a common
nationality with fellow singers.26 The national spirit of these festivals is not merely a
construct viewed in hindsight from the perspective of post-1871 unification, but was
recognized by contemporary press accounts as well.27
In Sweden, the mass music festival did not develop until much later, in 1897,
when two different events in Stockholm highlighted contrasting political ideals: a
Nordic Music Festival (the second of its kind, after an earlier such festival in
Copenhagen in 1888) highlighting performances of works by composers from across
Scandinavia, and the First Swedish Public Singing Festival (Första allmänna svenska
sångarfesten), which was modeled primarily on singing festivals in Norway and
Swedish-speaking Finland.28 Similarly, Sweden lagged behind continental Germany in
26 Applegate, “The Building of Community Through Choral Singing,” 8. 27 For instance, in her thorough discussion of the Lower Rhine Music Festivals, Cecelia Hopkins Porter quotes an article from the Kölner Zeitung (May 16, 1841) calling the twenty-third festival, which was held that month in Cologne, “a true national festival.” See Cecelia Hopkins Porter, “The New Public and the Reordering of the Musical Establishment: The Lower Rhine Music Festivals, 1818–67,” 19th-Century Music 3, no. 3 (1980): 212. “The Building of Community Through Choral Singing,” 212. 28 The 1897 singing festival was also based on the idea of the Olympics, which had been revived in Athens the previous year; the Second Swedish Public Singing Festival of 1912 was held in conjunction with the Stockholm Olympics of that year. On these first two Swedish Public Singing Festivals, see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 325–30.
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terms of a nationwide singing organization: the Deutscher Sängerbund was established
already in 1862, whereas its Swedish counterpart, the Svenska sångarförbundet, did not
come into being until 1909.29
In Germany, the most concentrated period of political song took place in 1840
and immediately afterward, as France threatened to take control of the Rhine river, long
a symbol of German identity.30 Cecilia Hopkins Porter has identified nearly 400 songs
(Rheinlieder) about the river and its symbols and associations that were either newly
written or republished during the 1840s.31 Many of these songs were set for four-part
male chorus. Because so few German folk melodies were available either in print or
circulating widely in manuscript form, Rheinlieder had melodies that were either newly
written or were borrowed from other songs of known origin; folksong emerged only in
the form of symbols lifted from folksong texts and other legends that were used to create
associations between the German people of a mythical past and the political present. A
different situation obtained in Sweden, where the most overtly political type of male
choral song—song promoting cooperation and even unity across all of Scandinavia—
also emerged in the 1840s. There, the ready availability of folk melodies allowed poets to
write new texts for tunes that were believed, in Herderian fashion, to have originated
29 Applegate discusses the founding of the Deutscher Sängerbund in “The Building of Community Through Choral Singing,” 9. For the establishment of the Svenska sångarförbundet, see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 327–30. 30 For more on the causes of the Rhine Crisis and views of nationalism expressed through the lens of one of the many Rheinlieder it spawned, see especially James M. Brophy, “The Rhine Crisis of 1840 and German Nationalism: Chauvinism, Skepticism, and Regional Reception,” The Journal of Modern History 85, no. 1 (March 2013): 1–14. 31 Porter, “The Rheinlieder Critics,” 79–82.
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from the “people” and passed unselfconsciously through the generations. In this layer of
contrafacta beginning in the 1840s, the pairing of modern texts with traditional melodies
legitimized new political ideas by making them appear to be older than they were.
Origin stories and different performance traditions notwithstanding, male chorus
activity developed more or less simultaneously in German- and Swedish-speaking
regions, and a one-directional repertoire exchange quickly ensued.32 As part-singing
became increasingly popular in Uppsala and Lund, German songs—often though not
always in Swedish translation—were central to the expanding repertoire. To begin with,
names such as Conradin Kreutzer (1780–1849), Weber, and Spohr appear frequently in
early manuscript and print collections. Slightly later, Mendelssohn became popular as
well, and to a lesser extent, Schumann and Schubert. The musicologist Jürgen Heidrich
has identified the most-sung partsong in Germany as the Horacian ode Integer vitae set
to music by Friedrich Ferdinand Flemming (1778–1813), a student of Zelter and
founding member of the Berlin Liedertafel; this song occurs widely in Swedish sources as
well, showing an awareness of repertoire tendencies in the south.33
Looking at one specific subset of academic choral singing, Alvar Modin studied
32 Academic choruses came into being at some German universities as early as the 1820s, with the Akademischen Liedertafel in Tübingen (1829) among the first. By this time in Sweden, choral and/or quartet activity was prominent in Uppsala and Lund, although each university’s official choruses were not established until the early 1830s. Two of the most prominent German-speaking academic choirs date from slightly later: the Akademischen Liedertafel Berlin was founded in 1855, while the Akademische Gesangverein in Munich dates from 1861. 33 Jürgen Heidrich’s research on Zelter’s Liedertafel is summarized in Frederik Wittenberg, “Berlin, 11. März 2011: ‘Integer vitae. Die Zeltersche Liedertafel als kulturgeschichtliches Phänomen (1809–1832),’” Die Musikforschung 64, no. 3 (September 2011): 272.
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in detail the actively sung repertoire (bruksrepertoar) of the first decade and a half of the
Lund Student Singing Society, 1831–46. 34 One point of his analysis shows the origins of
songs as determined by the nationality (or primary residence, in the case of immigrants)
of their composers.35 Modin found that just over half of the songs were Swedish in
origin. German songs made up slightly more than thirty percent, to which could be
added an additional one percent from Austria; the only other group of any size was
Danish songs, which comprised eight percent of the total.36 These numbers correspond
remarkably closely with a much older study attempting to determine certain
characteristics of the entire known male choral repertoire in Sweden to the year 1883. Of
the 1019 songs surveyed in that project, half were determined to be of Swedish origin,
and thirty-five percent came from Germany, a share that rises by two percentage points
if songs by Austrian composers are included.37 Even as the Swedish choirs developed
largely native traditions of when and where (and how) to sing, they welcomed and
relied on German songs for a substantial portion of their overall repertoire.38
34 Alvar Modin defines the actively sung repertoire as those songs for which proof of performance is extant, as well as those songs found in partbooks in multiple identical manuscript copies such that the entire choir could learn and perform them; see “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid: En studie av den äldsta lundensiska studentsångens repertoar 1831–1846” (Lunds universitet, 1985), 40. 35 Modin’s analysis refers to repertoire by known composers. 36 The remaining nationalities listed include Italian (2 songs out of 170) and Norwegian, Czech and French (one song each). Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 44. Modin groups German-speaking lands together as “Germany.” 37 Adolf Lindgren, “Kvartettsången i Sverige,” in Musikaliska studier (Stockholm: Carl Gehrmans Musikförlag, 1896), 203. 38 During the latter half of the nineteenth century, an age of increasing industrialism in Sweden, male choral song became closely associated with a strong type of singing often labeled stålklang (“steel-sound”) or malmklang (“ore-sound”). Characteristics of this sound include a massive bass line (achieved through having a proportionally high number of second basses) and the use of chest voices, not falsetto, even in the upper registers of first tenor parts; see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 20–21.
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For folksong specifically, Germany was both the single most important and also
almost a trivial source. The folksong collection movement owes its origins largely to
Herder and his followers, so in one sense, the entire genre leads back to Germany.
However, of the 102 folksongs in the known male choral literature as of 1883, only three
are of Austro-German origin (listed separately as coming from Kärnthen, Steijermark,
and Thüringen); Norway, Denmark, and Finland, which provided thirteen, nine, and six
songs, respectively, were more important direct sources of folksong.39 Following
Herder’s definition of folksong as the musical soul of a people, nineteenth-century
Swedish students constructed a close kinship with neighboring Nordic nations, and the
exchange of folksongs became an outward manifestation of cooperative sentiment. No
such metaphysical ties existed with German-speaking regions. Yet one further
connection does remain: Hæffner, who was so involved with the early stages of secular
choral singing in Uppsala, and who was instrumental in shaping the genre of choral
folksong in Sweden, was German.40
Uppsala University: The first secular student choir
Hæffner, who created the piano-vocal arrangements published in Geijer-Afzelius, is
typically credited with introducing organized ensemble singing into student life at
39 Lindgren, “Kvartettsången i Sverige,” 203. My research has uncovered several more, but the total number of folksongs of Austro-German origin is still relatively small, no more than twelve. Philipp Friderich Silcher (1789–1860) is the most common arranger. Several of Silcher’s folksong arrangements for various choral configurations were so popular in German-speaking lands that they circulated widely there without attribution; see Eichner, History in Mighty Sounds, 205–6. 40 Hæffner was born in Thüringen and moved to Stockholm at age 22.
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Uppsala University, the oldest Nordic university.41 Shortly after taking up the post of
director musices at Uppsala in 1808, the former hovkapellmästare began to organize
students for purposes of communal song.42 Traditionally, the “birth” of student song has
been dated to 1808, when, under Hæffner’s direction, a group of students premiered the
march Under the Banner of Svea (Under Svea banér).43 However, Leif Jonsson has
demonstrated convincingly that, while Hæffner did play an important role in
developing student song, the magnitude of his legend has outstripped historical
record.44
To begin with, Hæffner did not introduce students to the practice of singing
altogether. Two decades before his arrival in Uppsala, unison protest song emerged
there as a means for students to voice opposition against government restrictions on
freedom in the wake of the French revolution and, more directly, the assassination of
Gustaf III in 1792.45 However, this protest singing was entirely student led; according to
41 Uppsala University (1477) was founded two decades after Greifswald University (1456), which, during the period of Swedish control from 1631–1815, temporarily counted as the oldest university in the Swedish Empire. For an account of the first 500 years of Uppsala University, see Sten Lindroth, A History of Uppsala University 1477–1977 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1976). 42 Bernhard von Beskow colorfully describes how Hæffner first gathered together a group of students interested in singing; see von Beskow’s memoirs, Levnadsminnen (1857; repr., Stockholm: Norstedt, 1928), 62–64. 43 The text for Under the Banner of Svea was newly composed by inspector musices Samuel Ödmann (1750–1829), who, like Hæffner, had recently acquired his post at Uppsala University. Hæffner borrowed the music from a chorus in his own opera Renaud (1801). For a discussion of evidence supporting an 1808 premiere of this march, see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 54–55. Folke Bohlin goes into more detail in “Fyrstämmig studentsång: Ett 200-årsminne,” in Doktorspromotionen fredag 23 januari 2009, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Skrifter rörande Uppsala universitet, B 157 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2009), 7–16. 44 See especially Leif Jonsson, “Uppfostran till patriotismen: En idéhistorisk exposé över manskörsångens århundrade ur ett upsaliensiskt perspektiv,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 65 (1983): 26–29. 45 See Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 49. Students were particularly angered by the revocation of a short-lived period of relative freedom of the press; see Ronny Ambjörnsson, “Franska revolutionen i Uppsala,” in Frihetens former: En vänbok till Sven-Eric Liedman, ed. Tomas Forser et al. (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 1989), 10–11.
95
university policy, instrumental music provided by the University Orchestra (Akademiska
kapellet) was the primary focus of university musical activity, and official singing was
limited to sacred music and cantatas in celebration of university events.46 Another
revolution-oriented antecedent to choral singing from the generation before Hæffner
was a short-lived series of meetings called “conventions” (convent) held during the first
four months of 1792, in which students originally from different regions of Sweden
gathered to discuss issues of the day.47 Given the importance of the “nations”
(nationerna)—academic and social organizations to which students were obliged to
belong based on their province of origin within Sweden—the open doors of the
conventions to students of all nations presaged the open membership of the general
university choir a few decades later.48
For a discussion of this wave of censorship, see Karl Erik Gustafsson et al., I begynnelsen (tiden före 1830), vol. 1 of Den svenska pressens historia (Stockholm: Ekerlid, 2000), 189–95. 46 As director musices, Hæffner’s primary duty was to lead the Akademiska kapellet. For a history of the University Orchestra from its beginnings through Hæffner’s time, including its gradual change from a primarily vocal to a primarily instrumental ensemble during the 17th century, see chapters by Bengt Kyhlberg, Ingmar Bengtsson and Folke Bohlin in Anna Johnson, ed., Akademiska kapellet i Uppsala under 350 år: En översikt - från “chorus musicus” till symfonisk samverkan, Uppsala university 500 years 13 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1977). Furthermore, Hæffner’s suitability as a candidate for the position of director musices was questioned because he could play no instrument other than organ, which was thought to limit his effectiveness as an instructor of instrumental music at large; see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 52. 47 The convent gatherings reflect, on a smaller scale, a new norm in French politics, in which separate provincial loyalties shifted to the unified republic (res publica, common good), with Paris, the city of debates and speeches, at its center; see Ambjörnsson, “Franska revolutionen i Uppsala,” 7. 48 Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 49. It is important to note that the word “nations” in this sense refers to domestic regions within Sweden, not international borders. For an introduction to student life in Uppsala in the nineteenth century, including the role of student nations, see Lindroth, A History of Uppsala University 1477–1977, 179–90. Membership in a student nation was obligatory for students in Uppsala and Lund until 2010; see Anna Lundh, “Kårobligatoriet – en kartläggning” (Högskoleverket: Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, 2010), 7. Nations continue to exist as optional social organizations at many Swedish universities today.
96
Even the practice of quartet song was not unknown prior to Hæffner. Bernhard
von Beskow’s oft-quoted assertion that, before 1808, “nobody [in Uppsala] had any
conception of part-singing” and that forming a quartet would have been impossible
cannot be entirely accurate, as Leif Jonsson provides concrete evidence of quartet
singing in the immediately preceding years.49 Furthermore, the singing of sällskapsvisor
(“social songs”) in three parts, borrowing from French tradition, was a common practice
during the late eighteenth century that continued well into the nineteenth century,
especially within fraternal organizations.50 On the concert stage, mixed instrumental
concerts around 1800 sometimes included opera choruses.51 Even if only a small subset
of students enrolled at Uppsala University in 1808 had direct experience with singing in
harmony, this background would have contributed to the apparent success of Under the
Banner of Svea—as judged by its popularity in successive years—especially considering
that the ensemble had received less than two months of singing instruction under
Hæffner before premiering the march in public.52
Even in his revised role of transformer rather than initiator, Hæffner contributed
49 “[I]ngen hade ens begrepp om en flerstämmig sång.” Beskow, Levnadsminnen, 64. For details about documented quartet performances between 1799 and 1806, see Jonsson, “Uppfostran till patriotismen,” 26. 50 For more on sällskapsvisor, see Martin Tegen, “Åhlström, musikförlagen och sällskapsvisan,” in Musiken i Sverige II: Frihetstid och gustaviansk tid 1720–1810, ed. Leif Jonsson and Anna Ivarsdotter-Johnson, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie, 74:2 (Stockholm: Fischer, 1993), 367–82. 51 Unlike the social songs mentioned above and the student songs on the whole, opera choruses typically required accompaniment and were not suitable for performance a cappella; see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 58. 52 Leif Jonsson finds Beskow’s account of singing this march in honor of Field marshal Klingspor’s Uppsala visit on October 24, 1808, to be questionable, given that Beskow would have been only twelve years old at the time and that his memoirs date from much later in his life; the other likely date for the premiere is a concert on November 16, 1808, which would have allowed up to three more weeks of rehearsal time. See ibid., 54–55.
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to the development of robust song activity that, in turn, facilitated the spread of folk
music settings to public audiences both domestically and internationally. His arrival in
Uppsala coincided with the Finnish War (1808–09) and the accompanying wave of
national sentiment discussed in Chapter One. The march Under the Banner of Svea
marked an important ideological change, as politically motivated student song moved
away from its origins in opposition to the government and became a vehicle for
expressing positive patriotic fervor.53 Simultaneously, it brought about a musical
transformation through the presence of supporting harmonic vocal lines, initiating an a
cappella choral tradition that continues, albeit under different conditions, through the
present day.54
Absent the founding-father myth, starting dates for various types of choral
activity have been difficult to establish because of limited historical evidence.55 In a
detailed study of public expressions of student song, Leif Jonsson discerns three phases
in the nineteenth century: an initial establishment (1808–45), an era of political
Scandinavianism (1845–64), and a period marked by increasing industrialism (post-
53 The Finnish war also precipitated musical action elsewhere in the academy. Gustaf Regnér (1748–1819)—a graduate of Uppsala university, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters (Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien) and longtime editor of the Stockholms post newspaper—published an impassioned piece in that paper in 1808 calling for young poets to return to the longstanding tradition, which he says was practiced successfully by ancient Greek and Nordic peoples, of writing poetry to be sung as encouragement on the battlefield. The article is reprinted in Gustaf Regnér, Vitterhets-Nöjen, vol. 2 (Stockholm: Grahn, 1817), 272–78. 54 While the Uppsala Student Singing Society (Allmänna sången) transitioned to a mixed chorus in 1963, the Lund Student Singing Society has remained an all-male ensemble. So, too, has Sons of Orpheus (Sons of Orpheus Singing Society, Sångsällskapet Orphei Drängar), a male chorus founded in Uppsala in 1853, whose membership overlapped with that of Allmänna sången; on the founding of OD, including its Decameron-like origin story as a distraction for students whose social lives had been curtailed due to an outbreak of cholera, see Åsberg, En orkester av röster, 13–24. 55 See especially Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 96–97.
98
1864). Within these broad periods, a brief overview of developments in student song
provides additional time-points of relevance to the dissemination of folksong. In the
decades after 1808 in Uppsala, song was cultivated in oratorios performed by the
Akademiska kapellet; during festive academic occasions and royalist celebrations; and,
informally, in the town streets, where contemporary participants noted a marked
improvement thanks to Hæffner’s singing instruction—at least, that is, when the singers
were sober.56 Quartet-singing gained in popularity especially in the 1820s, when it was
cultivated within individual nationer in the style of the German Liedertafel. However,
official choral rehearsals remained sporadic until Otto Fredrik Tullberg (1802–53) took
up leadership in 1830 of the choir that had recently become known as Allmänna Sången
(Uppsala Student Singing Society).57 Approximately 250 students, nearly one-third of the
student body, showed up to the first rehearsal in 1830.58 According to one
comprehensive review of the history of Uppsala University, choral song became so
popular that it was obligatory at all university events, especially by 1850, and it was
student song, more than any other phenomenon, that “gave 19th-century Uppsala its
distinctive character.”59 Organized song spread from Uppsala to become a defining
feature at the other Nordic universities as well.
56 See ibid., 55. 57 Jonsson argues that Tullberg’s founding role has also been mythologized, and that his primary function lay in organizing, rather than founding, the ensemble. See ibid., 97. The name of the choir, Allmänna Sången, does not translate readily into English; it means something along the lines of “Public Song” or “General Song,” in the sense that all students—not just students from a particular region—were welcome to participate. In this study, I will refer to the ensemble as the “Uppsala Student Singing Society.” 58 [Georg] Gottfrid Kallstenius, Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1913), 53. 59 Lindroth, A History of Uppsala University 1477–1977, 183–84.
99
Choruses at other Nordic universities
Shortly after the Uppsala Student Singing Society came into being, a graduate of
Uppsala brought organized choral activity to Lund University, founding the Lund
Student Singing Society (Lunds Studentsångförening) in 1831.60 Since changes in
leadership bring the possibility of different approaches to repertoire, it bears noting that,
after a series of short-term directorships, the Uppsala Student Singing Society was
shaped by just two long-term directors in the second half of the century, Oscar Arpi (dir.
1852–72) and Ivar Hedenblad (1875–1901, 1907–09). In contrast, leadership in Lund
changed hands more often; following Otto Lindblad’s important early contributions (dir.
1830s–46), the two most influential directors were Henrik Möller (1876–85, 1890–91) and
Alfred Berg (1891–94, 1896–1925).61
Following Sweden’s lead, the remaining Nordic universities organized choral
associations. Finland was first with the Academic Singing Society (Akademiska
Sångföreningen) in Helsingfors, founded in 1838; as elsewhere, this was preceded by a
period of male choral singing in informal capacities, which in this case has been traced
60 Similarly to the situation in Uppsala, a period of informal quartet singing preceded the founding of the larger ensemble. Alvar Modin relates the early history of choral singing in Lund, including Sven Lovén’s initiative in starting first a quartet and then a larger male choral ensemble, in “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 8–9. Folke Bohlin clarifies the question of the starting date in his chapter, “När grundades Lunds Studentsångförening?” in Studentsångarna i Lund 150 år, ed. Anders W. Mårtensson, Gamla Lund 63 (Lund: Förening Gamla Lund, 1981), 17–30. 61 While all five directors mentioned here programmed folksongs in performance, none seems to have been particularly active as an arranger of folksong for their respective ensembles, unless their pieces are found among the settings surviving anonymously. Only Otto Lindblad’s oft-performed “Necken’s Polska” can be attributed securely; a setting of “Thus I Take My Rifle” (“Så tager jag min bössa”) is attributed to Lindblad in one published volume, but as I have found that the other folksong setting attributed to Lindblad in that volume (“The Bride of the Mountain King,” “Den bergtagna”) is really by Hæffner, doubt is also cast upon the origin of “Thus I Take My Rifle.” See Sånger för mansröster X (1896): 25–27.
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to the previous university in Åbo as early as 1819.62 In Copenhagen, the Student Singing
Society (Studenter-Sangforeningen) was founded in 1839.63 The Norwegian Student
Singing Society (Den norske Studentersangforening) followed suit in Christiania in 1845.64
Joint choral activity between choirs at the five Nordic universities (Uppsala,
Lund, Copenhagen, Christiania [Oslo], and Helsingfors [Helsinki]),65 which increased
the sharing of repertoire between ensembles, began with a meeting between students
from Lund and Copenhagen in 1839, continued with a gathering of representatives from
four of the five universities in Uppsala in 1845, and transformed into a series of joint
concert performances called Fælleskonsert (Danish: “joint concert”) by two or more
Nordic choirs, beginning with a cooperative venture between Lund and Copenhagen in
1856.66 Appearances of the Uppsala Student Singing Society at the Paris Exhibition in
1867 and 1878 that highlighted Swedish folksongs, together with continental concert
62 Barbro Kvist Dahlstedt gives a detailed account of student song in Finland; see “Suomis sång: Kollektiva identiteter i den finländska studentsången 1819–1917” (Göteborgs universitet, 2001). Åbo is the Swedish name for the city also known as Turku. 63 For a history of Danish student song, see Anne Ørbæk Jensen, Hellige flamme: Studentersang i Danmark i 1800-tallet (København: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1996). 64 On the history of student song in Norway, see Anne Jorunn Kydland Lysdahl, Sangen har lysning: Studentersang i Norge på 1800-tallet, Studentersangen i Norden 2 (Oslo: Solum, 1995). 65 From 1624–1925, the city now known as Oslo was called Christiania/Kristiania. The Swedish name for Helsinki is Helsingfors. Through most of the nineteenth century, Swedish was the majority language in Finland, and also the primary language of instruction at the university, where the majority of incoming first-year students were native speakers of Swedish until as late as 1889; see Jason Edward Lavery, The History of Finland (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006), 61–62. In 1863, Tsar Alexander II issued an edict stating that, within twenty years, the Finnish language would achieve equal status with Swedish, but Finnish did not become common across large swaths of official life until late in the century; see Osmo Jussila, Seppo Hentilä, and Jukka Nevakivi, From Grand Duchy to Modern State: A Political History of Finland since 1809 (London: Hurst & Co., 1999), 57. 66 For more on choral activity at the meetings between students of multiple Nordic universities, see Harald Herresthal, “The Nordic World,” in Nineteenth-Century Choral Music (see n. 13 above), 369–70. Bert Möller treats several of the faelleskonserter, including repertoire, in Lundensisk studentsång under ett sekel (Lund: Gleerup, 1931), 175–81.
101
tours by the full choirs and smaller ensembles from Uppsala and Lund, helped establish
Nordic choral song as an elite phenomenon among European choirs.67
An early experiment: Hæffner’s setting of “Sir Tynne”
During its first two decades, student song developed independently of the “discovery”
of folk music within academic circles, a separation all the more surprising because of
Hæffner’s central role in both areas. Hæffner’s firm conviction that folksong (by which
he meant almost exclusively the repertoire known today as ballads) was only sung in
unison, including the refrains, caused him to delay introducing folksong repertoire into
his choral activities.68 As the exception that proves the rule, he did compose one three-
part setting for male chorus in the first volume of Geijer-Afzelius (1814), a decision for
which he subsequently excused himself as follows:
I set it like this for my own pleasure because in this manner it resembled an old Rundgesang, and because the melody itself, in my opinion, is not one of the proper and genuine ones, and will still require additional analysis and corrections before it can be determined with certainty.69
This setting of “Sir Tynne” calls for not one, but two TTB choirs, with one choir 67 Carl Otto Montan and Karl Warburg describe the 1878 tour the Uppsala Student Singing Society to Paris, including indications of repertoire, in Sångarfärden till Paris 1878. With respect to the choirs’ elite status, in 1892, a small ensemble from the Lund Student Singing Society explicitly marketed itself as Lunds Student-Gesangvereins Elite-Chor on tour in Flensburg, Germany (July 5) and Lunds Studentersangforenings Elite-Kor in Haderslev/Hadersleben (July 6); see concert programs in Lunds Studentsångförenings deposition (hereafter LSS archive), FIa 1, Konsertprogr. 1856–1899, S-L. Haderslev/Hadersleben has been on both sides of the changing Danish/German border. During this performance of 1892, Hadersleben was part of Germany, but since 1920, Haderslev has been Danish territory. The Lund Student Singing Society printed two versions of the program for July 6, one in Danish and one in German. Issues of language and border remain relevant to today. In 2015, a new sign at the town’s entrance states both names, Haderslev and Hadersleben; see Ray W[eaver], “Haderslev Town Sign Now Also in German,” The Copenhagen Post (April 22, 2015). 68 See n. 46 above. 69 “Jag behandlade den så för ros skull, emedan den på detta sätt liknade en gammal, hvad man kallar Rundgesang, och emedan sjelfva melodien, enligt min övertygelse, är ej en af de rätta och äkta, och behöfver ännu, efter flere undersökningar, rättelser, innan den med säkerhet kan bestämmas.” Ibid.
102
supplying the verses and the other taking over in the omkväde (refrain), as shown in
Example 3.1 below.70
And there was Sir Tynne, He was a silent knight. Wherever he went on foot or by horse, he is a brave knight.
Interpret the runes carefully.71
Example 3.1: Hæffner, “Sir Tynne” for two groups of three male voices
In his explanation, Hæffner acknowledges the Rundgesang (“circle song”), a form
of German social song in which individuals successively sing verses and everybody
present joins in on the chorus; if his arrangement is intended to form a close parallel
with the German song structure, the first choir would need to consist of three soloists—a
three-dimensional counterpart to the solo portion of a Rundgesang—while the omkväde
would be sung by a second, larger choir-as-community. However, the score does not
provide conclusive evidence of this format, as the marking för 3:ne röster (“for three
voices”) can mean either three solo voices or three choral voice parts.
70 This arrangement of “Riddar Tynne” is from Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 6. 71 Archaic vocabulary makes this ballad difficult to translate. This is one possible interpretation.
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103
“Sir Tynne” also provides a rare opportunity to observe variations in the musical
line, a process usually rendered invisible by the selection and publication of a single
version of a melody, which itself may vary from the performance of a given variant at
the time of transcription due to the transcriber’s preconceptions about melody and
meter and the presence of elements of pitch and rhythm that defy standard notational
practice.72 On the page before Hæffner’s choral version in Geijer-Afzelius, a melody line
is printed “as it is sung by country people in Västergötland,” implying a certain
standardization of the melody among that population.73 The choral arrangement is then
introduced with additional commentary: “Transcribed by Hæffner like this.”74 Example
3.2 below gives both melodic variants, with the solo version as sung in Västergötland on
the upper staff and the melody line of Hæffner’s choral version on the lower staff.75
72 For more on ways in which melodies were altered before appearing in print in Hæffner’s supplement to Geijer-Afzelius, see Jersild, “Melodierna till Geijer & Afzelius’ utgåva,” 79–80. 73 “Melodien, sådan den af Allmogen i Westergöthland sjunges.” Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 5–6. 74 “Af Capellm. Hæffner sålunda upptecknad.” Ibid., 7. 75 Hæffner, “Riddar Tynne,” supplement to Geijer-Afzelius, 6–7.
104
Example 3.2: Hæffner, “Sir Tynne,” both melodic variants
Since Hæffner admits to setting the tune in three voices for his own amusement, his
“transcription” cannot refer to the harmonized piece as a whole; at most, it signals that
the composer might have worked from his own transcription of a different variant of the
melody.76 An alternative reading is that the choral version incorporates deliberate
changes Hæffner made to the melodic line. If this is the case, then one important
editorial principle would be the introduction of consistency; the choral version erases
the melodic differences between m. 2 and m. 6 (marked here in Example 3.2 with dashed
brackets above the staff) so that the first two four-measure phrases are melodically
identical, and it adds a half-measure’s worth of pick-up notes to the beginnings of both
76 According to Bengt R. Jonsson, Hæffner likely transcribed his variant from an elderly drummer in the town of Uppsala; see excerpts of letters printed in Svensk balladtradition I. Balladkällor och balladtyper, Svenskt visarkivs handlingar (Stockholm: Svenskt Visarkiv, 1967), 426.
Och det var Rid der- Tyn ne,- Han var en Rid da- re- så ty ster.-
1 2 3 4
Och det var Rid der- Tyn ne- Han var en Rid da- re- så ty ster.-
Hvart det bär till fot el ler- häst, Han är en Rid da- re- så trö ster.-
5 6 7 8
Hvart det bär till fot el ler- häst, han är en Rid da- re- så trö ster.-
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105
the second and the third systems to match the pattern established by first phrase
(indicated here with dotted brackets below the staff). Simplicity would also be a factor,
as in the altered pitch on the first eighth-note of beat four in mm. 3 and 7 (“var en Rid-
da-re så”), which changes a fast arpeggiated leap in the solo version to an easier-to-sing
descending octave leap in the choral setting.
The more likely scenario, however, is that these alterations are byproducts of the
natural variation that occurs through oral transmission, rather than direct emendations
on Hæffner’s part. The presence of an entirely different melody for the omkväde in the
choral version (bottom system), now clustered around G minor, affirms that the song
likely came from a different informant than the melody-only version, which ends openly
on a half-cadence circling back to a tonic in B-flat major. The E-natural in mm. 3 and 7 of
Hæffner’s transcription (bottom staff), which might appear to be a raised fourth scale
degree in the context of B-flat major in the first version, becomes instead a raised sixth in
the context of a G-centered Dorian collection, a typical example of Hæffner’s “old
Nordic scale” in practice.77
Hæffner’s early TTB experiment in choral folksong did not make a durable
impression on the overall repertoire for male chorus. A reworked version for double
four-part chorus does appear in his collection of Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices
(Svenska Folk-Wisor satte för fyra mans-röster, 1832), the first published volume of
77 Hæffner explains his understanding of the old Nordic scale, a minor scale with a raised 6th and also a slightly sharpened 7th, in “Anmärkningar öfver gamla nordiska sången,” 100.
106
folksongs for male chorus.78 Given the small number of songs in that volume and
Hæffner’s position of director musices, even if he was not involved in directing choral
activities, “Sir Tynne” must at least have been read through by the Uppsala Student
Singing Society, and perhaps sung on informal or private occasions. In the public
sphere, however, the 1832 TTBB version leaves little trace; it was copied into a score and
set of partbooks originally owned by P. G. Kihlstedt, a student at Uppsala near the end
of Hæffner’s life, but the presence of this item in the book says little about performance
practice, especially considering that the set opens with all of Hæffner’s known folksong
arrangements, published and unpublished alike.79 According to detailed records
compiled by Gottfried Kallstenius of public performances by the Uppsala Student
Singing Society from 1845 through 1900, no performance of “Sir Tynne” is
documented.80 While the possibility exists that the song could have been performed as
an unnamed “Swedish folksong” in the few programs that do not specify titles, the more
likely scenario is that its presence in the repertoire did not significantly outlive Hæffner,
who died in 1833.
78 At least some of the eight arrangements were likely written by the late 1820s; Leif Jonsson proposes that the “Sw. folkwisor” performed at the salon of the restaurant Gillet on November 27, 1828 may have been some of Hæffner’s settings for male quartet; see Leif Jonsson, Offentlig musik i Uppsala 1747–1854: Från representativ till borgerlig konsert, Musik i Sverige 10 (Stockholm: Statens musikbibliotek, 1998), 202. 79 In addition to the eight arrangements published in 1832, six other arrangements by Hæffner exist in autograph versions; see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 109. The student P. G. Kihlstedt came to Uppsala in 1826 and began to copy out his collection in 1832 at the earliest; see Georg Wellanders efterlämnade musikalier, NC 11, Wellander 1:1–5, S-Uu. 80 Repertoire performed by the Uppsala Student Singing Society in concerts during this period is listed in Kallstenius, Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia, 228–68.
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Sources: Folksong arrangements for male chorus
Folksong may have comprised a relatively small proportion of the overall repertoire for
male chorus in the nineteenth century, but it gained widespread public exposure over a
long period of time. The first choral settings were written by Hæffner, who sourced his
melodies mostly from his own arrangements for solo voice published in his supplement
to Geijer-Afzelius; similarly, choral arrangements by other composers later in the
century often reach back to that same melodic source, either directly or via other
publications based heavily on his work, including school songbooks. In addition,
melodies culled from other collections also made their way into choral settings, as did,
on at least a few occasions, new transcriptions of previously unpublished folksongs. In
addition, some recently composed songs of unknown authorship were labeled folkvisor,
and some new songs of known authorship were either called folksongs or carried the
attribution i folkton, “in folk style.”
The difference between literature for male quartet (kvartettsång) and male chorus
(manskörssång or, in the context of student song in the nineteenth century, simply
körsång) is not always clear. While some choral settings call for solo voices or subdivision
into more than two tenor or bass parts, many four-part arrangements have no explicit
visual cues indicating whether one or more voices is intended for each part.81 In practice,
81 The opera singer Fritz Arlberg (1830–96) made three arrangements for the otherwise unusual combination of five male voices (TTBBB) with similar roles rather than a solo-and-quartet texture. A review of the volume in which they were published calls them “effective/striking” (effektfull); see Adolf Lindgren, “Studengsången,” Aftonbladet (October 7, 1886): 3.
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many of the same settings were performed both by quartets and by larger ensembles.82
Among the pieces consulted in the present study, no setting included any verbal
indication explicitly precluding performance by an ensemble larger than a quartet, and
there are few obvious examples of what Alvar Modin refers to as “solistically shaped
parts” (“solistiskt utformade stämmor”) associated with some newly composed
virtuoisic solo quartet repertoire.83 Positive indications of choral song include several
arrangements that call for one or more solo voices together with a TTBB chorus, as well
as several others that occasionally split into more than four parts at cadences.84
The following sections give an overview of manuscript and published collections
of male choral song that include folksong arrangements, as well as issues involved in
determining dates of transmission and publication.
Extant manuscript collections
Hand-written scores and partbooks are important sources documenting the existence
and spread of student song, including arrangements of traditional song. Even after print
collections of male choral song became more widely available, hand-copying remained a
82 See Ternhag, “När folkvisor blev sånger för manskör,” 95. 83 Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 15. 84 Only one setting calls for a bass solo: Hugo Lutteman’s “Peter Swineherd” (“Per Svinaherde”), which the Lund Student Singing Society performed many times in the 1890s. More commonly, a tenor solo was added to the TTBB foundation; the most frequently performed settings are Carl Johan Oscar Laurin’s “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (“Du gamla, du friska”) and August Jahnke’s “The Flowers of Joy” (“Glädjens blomster”), alongside five other arrangements with fainter performance trails. “Necken’s Polska” (by Otto Lindblad) and an anonymous by commonly sung arrangement of the Norwegian folksong “Astri, mi Astri” (“Astrid, my Astrid”) call for a solo TTBB quartet in addition to the TTBB chorus.
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common practice.85 Collections are usually written in oblong format and may contain a
table of contents, either in numerical or alphabetical order, written on the front or back
endpaper and flyleaf. Sets of partbooks, especially those copied by multiple hands,
sometimes suffer from a lack of coordination in terms of numbering and the order in
which songs appear, and on occasion an extraneous song or two appears in only one
book. The name of the original owner, or one or more subsequent owners, may be
written inside or stamped upon the front cover, although a number of collections lack
identifying information altogether. Scope varies wildly, from the twenty-three entries in
the set of partbooks copied by C.F. Rydqvist around 1850 to Berndt Samuel Kallenberg’s
massive four-volume collection of 763 numbered entries in score form.86
Much of the core repertoire for male chorus was first amassed in hand-copied
collections; initially, handwritten copies prepared by singers were the only means of
preservation and transmission, as published editions did not yet exist. Considering that
pre-printed manuscript paper did not come into use until the latter half of the century,
and that staff lines were otherwise either drawn individually with a pen and a ruler, or a
rake-like pen with five evenly spaced parallel heads (rastrum), copying by hand required
a considerable investment in time on the part of the scribe. As the academic choirs
became established, multiple sets of partbooks containing relevant repertoire were
85 On the practice of copying by hand even as printed music became more easily accessible, see Hanna Enefalk, En patriotisk drömvärld: Musik, nationalism och genus under det långa 1800-talet (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2008), 193. 86 The Länsmuseet Murberget in Härnösand has made C. F. Rydqvist’s partbooks available online, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.murberget.se/om-museet/publikationer/rapporter/visa?item=AM_Noter_671. Berndt Samuel Kallenberg’s collection is in LSS Arkiv H I A a-d, S-L. The four volumes consist mostly of TTBB arrangements but also contain a few SATB settings and some trios, duets, and solo songs.
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needed to teach the music to incoming members.87
The present study draws on thirty-four manuscript sources, each source being
either a stand-alone score or a set of partbooks, which may or may not have an
associated score. With only one exception, these manuscripts are mixed collections that
contain folksong arrangements alongside songs of known compositional origin.88
Manuscript collections of mixed content
Not surprisingly, the majority of the thirty-four manuscripts in this study, which were
located using library search tools and archival catalogs, are connected with the academic
communities of Uppsala and Lund. Nearly half of the manuscripts accessed come from
Lund and its surrounding district, Skåne: thirteen volumes or sets of volumes were
created for use by the Lund Student Singing Society, and one unusually large set, which
will be treated in more detail below, was created by an individual who studied in Lund.
Nine volumes come from Uppsala: five from the Uppsala Public Song Society, including
two volumes acquired from the Scandinavian Society (Skandinaviska sällskapet), an
organization that flourished briefly in the late 1840s-early 1850s; and four created by
87 The Lund Student Singing Society deposition (LSS Arkiv) at S-L is particularly rich in sets with multiple copies of each part; for example, the partbooks marked “Older manuscripts I” (“Äldre handskrifter I”) exist in 5, 6, 6, and 4 copies for the respective four voices. Furthermore, given the number of extant manuscripts relative to the number of known choir members, Alvar Modin estimates that the surviving material from the early-middle 1800s represents only about twenty percent of what existed at the time; see Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 93. 88 For the sole volume containing only folksong arrangements, see p. 117. In addition, some surviving manuscripts do not contain any folksong arrangements and have been omitted from this study; however, they are relatively few in number.
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individual students for personal use.89
Handwritten collections also witness to the spread of male quartet song beyond
the university towns; it was not uncommon for individuals to have maintained personal
collections in the years and even decades after graduation, and some enthusiasts who
never studied at a university picked up the hobby through individual contacts with
graduates or membership in non-academic choirs. The remaining manuscripts consulted
in this study are known to have been created and/or used in Stockholm (two
individuals, one of whom studied in Uppsala), Örebrö (one individual, educational
background uncertain), and Köping/Kungsör (approximately three individuals, only one
of whom is known to have studied at university). Four anonymous volumes have no
geographically identifying clues.
Table 3.1 lists manuscript collections that contain folksong settings for male
chorus; manuscripts are arranged in approximate chronological order. The column
“#SF” gives the number of Swedish folksongs, while #T corresponds to the total number
of songs in the volume. The abbreviations AS and LSS refer to Allmänna Sången (Uppsala
Public Singing Society) and Lunds Studentsångförening (Lund Student Singing Society).
89 The Skandinaviska Sällskapet of Uppsala was founded in 1843 and dissolved in 1852, whereupon the contents of its library were given to the newly formed Student-Corps; Carl Magnus Carlander, Svenska bibliotek och ex-libris, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Förlagsaktiebolaget Iduna, 1904), 209–10.
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Table 3.1: Manuscript collections containing arrangements of folksong for TTBB chorus
Name/ Identifying information
#SF #T Approx. date
score/ TTBB
Region of origin or use
Archive
ms. Rydquist 1820s 9 70 1826 TTBB Uppsala S-Uu Orphei Drängars arkiv
ms. Palme 13 86 late 1820s TTBB unknown S-Skma Manskv 382 ms. Wellander 1: P. G. Kihlstedt
17 8390 1832 or later score Uppsala; Köping/ Kungsör
S-Uu NC 11 Wellander 1:1–5
ms. Lagrelius 13 85 1834 TTBB Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82E LSS ms. VIII 2 28 1840–46 T1 Lund S-L LSS handsk VIII LSS ms. XII 4 58 1840–46 T2BB Lund S-L LSS handsk XII LSS Anförarens partitur91
6 92 1841–55 score Lund S-L LSS handsk XVI
Skandinaviska säll- skapet (shorter)92
4 29 1843–52 score Uppsala S-Uu AS U 2905 b
Scandinaviska säll- skapet (longer)
15 140 1843–52 TTB2 Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82J
LSS ms. VII 1 63 1846–53 TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk VII LSS ms. XI 3 67 1846–55 T1 Lund S-L LSS handsk XI ms. Arpi 14 107 1847–72 TTBB Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82 J ms. Kallenberg 48 763 1840s–1872 score Skåne S-L LSS HIAb 2 ms. Beckman 10 146 1849?- TTBB Stockholm/
Karlstad S-Skma Manskv 270
AS Gamla boken [“AS Old Book”]
12 109 1850 TTBB Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82I
Partitur 28 152 1850? score Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82I ms. Rydqvist 1850 2 23 1850 TTBB unknown Länsmuseet,
Härnösand ms. Naijström 2 155 1851 score Skåne? S-Skma Manskv 540 AS Nya boken [“AS New Book”]
14 193 1852 score/ TTBB
Uppsala S-Uu AS NC 82I
LSS ms. II 3 92 1856 or later TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk II ms. Broddén 39 530 1857–? score Örebro S-Skma Manskv 334
90 This volume contains a further eight trios, for a total of ninety-one songs. 91 Most of this data, including the title of the volume, is from Jonsson’s list of the contents of this volume in “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 394–96. This volume was supposedly used and added to by four successive directors of the Lund Student Singing Society. Alvar Modin calls it Source XVI (Källa XVI), but its contents do not match the volume labeled XVI that I was able to access in the LSS Arkiv, S-L. 92 This shorter collection from the Skandinaviska sällskapet (Scandinavian Society) corresponds with the first twenty-nine entries in the longer collection below.
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Name/ Identifying information
#SF #T Approx. date
score/ TTBB
Region of origin or use
Archive
LSS ms. XXIII 9 97 1858 or later TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk XXIII
ms. Dybeck 23 14 14 1850s–60s score/ TTBB
Stockholm Nordiska Museet, Richard Dybeck, acc. 46,573, F1:1, vol. 23
LSS ms. X 12 97 1850s–60s T1 Lund S-L LSS handsk X LSS ms. VI 1 12 1850s or
later TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk VI
“Sånger för mansröster”
4 62 1850s or later
TTBB unknown S-Skma Manskv 176
“Fyrstämmiga sånger”
2 33 1861 or later score unknown S-Skma Manskv 713
LSS ms. I 1 47 1865 or later TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk I LSS ms. IV 2 26 1865 or later TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk IV ms Wellander 3: A. Låftman
5 51 1860s–90s TTBB Köping/ Kungsör
S-Uu NC 11 Wellander 3:1–4
LSS ms. XVI 1 32 1870s or later
score Lund S-L LSS handsk XVI
LSS ms. XXI 6 95 1870s or later
TTBB Lund S-L LSS handsk XXI
ms. Wellander 2 4 57 1870s or later
score/ TTBB
Köping/ Kungsör
S-Uu NC 11 Wellander 2:1–5
ms. Wellander 4 22 239 late 1800s/ early 1900s93
TTBB Köping/ Kungsör
S-Uu NC 11 Wellander 4:1–4
One student who continued to add to his collection long after moving away from
Lund and establishing his career is Berndt Samuel Kallenberg (1826–1910), who copied
out over 763 songs in four large volumes.94 Over time, Kallenberg became increasingly
interested in documenting the growth of his collection; near the end of his second
volume, he begins to note the sources from which he acquired many of the folksong
93 This volume straddles the century; for example, #164 (Norrland by Stenhammar) was written in 1901 and #169 (Waggsång by Hildor Lundvik) in 1909. 94 For a brief biography of Kallenberg, see Lunds universitets årsskrift 1903: Andra afdelningen (Lund: Malmströms, 1903), x.
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arrangements, and starting with the third volume, he records many dates and places as
well.95 Also partway through the third volume, Kallenberg begins to keep a separate,
overall index in addition to the alphabetical index written in each individual volume.
After the initial layer of 400 or so songs, carefully indexed alphabetically, additional
layers in the standalone index variously show chronological or alphabetical additions.
Although folksongs are interspersed apparently at random throughout the collection,
Kallenberg visually marks them in the index to each volume by writing and underlining
the word folkvisa in the composer column of this index (see Table 3.2 below), which
indicates that he considered the origin of these songs to be an important characteristic.96
Arrangements of songs by Carl Michael Bellman (1740–95) and compositions by the
Lund Student Singing Society’s director Otto Lindblad are also underlined, marking the
three categories deemed most worthy of consideration as cohesive groups across an
otherwise mixed, unordered collection.97
95 In addition to these four volumes of (mostly) TTBB settings, Kallenberg also began or completed a separate volume of thirty-nine trios in 1850, the first half of which is cross-indexed with numbers in his first two TTBB volumes; see LSS Arkiv, Äldre handskrifter XXII, S-L. Kallenberg was also an avid numismatist; some of his many catalogues of the coin collection at Kristianstad Secondary School (Kristianstads högre allmänna läroverk) are bound with the same patterned papers as his quartet collection; see images in Cecilia von Heijne, Dan Carlberg, and Ian Wiséhn, “Berndt Kallenberg—Myntsamlaren och donatorn från Kristianstad,” in Samlad glädje 2009: Numismatiska klubben Uppsala 1969–2009, ed. Curt Ekström, Kjell Holmberg, and Magnus Wijk (Uppsala: Numismatiska klubben i Uppsala, 2009), 108–9. 96 Berndt Samuel Kallenberg’s score collection: LSS Arkiv H I A a-d, volym 2b, index to vol. 4, S-L. 97 While the arranger is sometimes listed in the score for folksongs and Bellman songs, Kallenberg’s index never credits the arranger in the composer column.
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Table 3.2: Underlined categories, including folkvisa, in Kallenberg’s indices
No. [First line] Meter Major Key
Minor Key
Composer Page
578. Kom, ljufva vår, du himlens gåfva 6/8 G. J. Haydn 37. 754. Kom låt oss dricka det glödgade 3/4 F. Otto Lindblad 161. 526. Kära mor! Slå nu hand på kjolen 3/4 G. Bellman 8. 531. Käraste bröder, systrar o vänner 3/4 A. Bellman 11. 687. La, la, la, la, etc. das Häuslein 4/4 G. J. H. Stunz 107. 654. Lifligt jag minns när 2/4 F. W. 86. 576. Likasom åt vårens lunder 3/4 A. 35. 743. Lilla, snälla Greta, säg om du vill 3/4 F. 154. 629. Liten Kjerstin och hennes moder 2/4 A. Folkvisa 72. 577. Ljufva toner, hvilka zoner 3/8 G. Otto Lindblad 36. 589. Lofvom Gud, oss heiland stunder 4/4 F. 43. 691. Lustig lustig wer zum Wald, seine 2/4 G. C. Kreutzer 112.
Source information is not always given—the absence of a date does not
automatically imply that a song was notated on the same occasion as the previous
song(s) since the same source and date is often written out again for adjacent songs, and
dated entries are not quite strictly chronological—but Kallenberg acknowledges
drawing on arrangements from collections maintained by at least six other named
individuals in and around his home in Kristianstad, as well as print editions.98
Indeed, the practice of sharing and copying handwritten collections was so
pervasive that some songs that were never published are found in multiple collections.
At least two of Hæffner’s six unpublished arrangements appear in multiple handwritten
copies, the most prominent being “Duke Silfverdal” (“Hertig Silfverdal”), which is
found in at least seven manuscripts ranging from the 1820s to approximately 1860,
98 Kallenberg cites manuscript collections created by Berglund, Dr. Ryberg, Samuel Follin, Carl Axel Frithiof Möller (1838–1900), Sven Herman Benjamin Svensson (1840–1909), and Carl Wetter (1824–66).
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including the Kallenberg quartet books that were largely copied in Kristianstad and in
Lund, far from Hæffner’s immediate circles of influence in Uppsala and Stockholm.99
One interrelated complex of volumes not previously available to scholars is
several sets of partbooks once owned by [Johan] Georg Wellander (1853–1938).100 These
four collections of TTBB partbooks, three of which are accompanied by separate full-
score volumes, open a window to the type of private quartet-singing that grew out of
the Uppsala tradition but was practiced in the Köping/Kungsör region in the province of
Västmanland in the 1870s and 1880s. Georg Wellander, who was never a student in
Uppsala, came by his knowledge of student song indirectly. His brother Carl Edvard
(two years his senior) completed a civil service degree in law in 1873 and is listed in the
roster for the Uppsala Student Singing Society as a first bass in 1871.101 Perhaps Georg
Wellander, who received his education at the School of Mines (Bergsskolan) in Falun,
became interested in choral song through Carl Edvard.
Ultimately, Georg Wellander acquired four different sets of partbooks which are
connected by a loose web of family ties. Wellander 1 bears the imprinted name P[er]
G[ustaf] Kihlstedt (1806–86), who began to study in Uppsala in 1826 and started copying
99 Hæffner’s arrangement of “Sir Peter and [Lady] Malfred” (“Herr Peder och [fru] Malfred”), likewise unpublished to this day, exists in at least four hand-copied sources, each of which is connected with male choral song in Uppsala. 100 The collection was recently donated to Uppsala University Library (2014) and has not yet been examined in the literature. Genealogy data in the following section is mostly from “Geni,” accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.geni.com, confirmed and supplemented by Dr. Hans Helander, Professor Emeritus in Latin at Uppsala University and grandson of the John Peterson mentioned below, in an e-mail message to author, January 8, 2017. 101 An annual roster for most years between 1842–75 is found in “Allm. sångförenings album” [Public Song Society Album], NC 82 D:2, S-Uu.
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out this volume in 1832 at the earliest.102 Kihlstedt eventually became the town doctor in
Köping, Västmanland; Georg Wellander came into possession of the book some four
months after Kihlstedt’s death, signing and dating the score on June 22, 1886. Wellander
3 is imprinted with the name A. Låftman, likely Anders Gustaf August Låftman (1842–
96), the husband of Kihlstedt’s niece Adèle Sofia Erika. Given Låftman’s birth year of
1842, the set dates from the 1860s at the earliest. Wellander 2 and 4, which are imprinted
and signed with Wellander’s own name, can reasonably have been started no earlier
than the 1870s; Wellander 4, which contains material from both the 1800s and the early
1900s, was subsequently also signed by John Peterson, who married Wellander’s
daughter Anna Matilda (b. 1888) in 1917.
Like so many other volumes copied out by individuals for personal collections,
the manuscripts in the Wellander deposition contain a wide variety of repertoire,
including folksong arrangements, without indicating the popularity or performance
history of any particular song. Nevertheless, the effort expended in copying each entry,
particularly when staff lines are individually drawn, implies that songs were selected
based on some combination of likelihood of performance and personal preferences.
Manuscript collections consisting entirely of folksongs
It is rare for a manuscript collection to consist entirely of folksong arrangements; only
one hand-copied collection has surfaced, ms. Dybeck 23 (see Table 3.1 above), a set of
102 For more on Per Gustaf Kihlstedt, see his obituary in Dalpilen (March 5, 1886): 2. The first entry in Kihlstedt’s songbook, Fädernesland hvars herrliga minnen, was written by Geijer on the occasion of the Gustaf Adolf celebrations in 1832. This is the same collection that contains all of Hæffner’s published and unpublished arrangments; see n. 79 above.
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fourteen songs arranged for TTBB by at least five different people on behalf of Richard
Dybeck.103 Dybeck used this collection—a score and four sets of partbooks—in his
Evening Entertainment concerts, which will be treated in more depth in conjunction
with orchestral music in Chapter Seven.104
While individuals who created manuscript collections for personal use often
label songs as folksongs, it does not seem to have been important to gather such songs
into a separate volume. To be sure, #2–#17 in ms. Wellander 1 are folksong arrangements
by Hæffner, but of the ninety-one songs notated in the volume, the only other folksong
is #62, “The Flowers of Joy in Earth’s Soil” (“Glädjens blomster i jordens mull,” arr.
Rinnman), while the remaining seventy-four songs are either freely composed or
arrangements of melodies of known compositional origin. During the nineteenth
century, Dybeck broke significant ground as the first person to cultivate Swedish folk
music as a genre for performance in full-blown concert settings; as a result, ms. Dybeck
23 is unique among manuscript collections of repertoire for male chorus.
Extant printed collections
As male choral song grew in popularity, so, too, did the numbers of commercial
publications of songs arranged for TTBB chorus. I have located twenty-seven printed
collections printed in Sweden during the nineteenth century containing at least one
103 The majority of music for Richard Dybeck’s Evening Entertainment concerts is at his archive at the Nordiska Museet. For this particular manuscript, see Richard Dybeck, acc. 46.573, F1:1 (vol. 23), S-Sn. The set—one score and several copies of partbooks for each voice—contains fourteen TTBB settings and one SATB setting. 104 For more on Dybeck’s concerts, see Chapter Seven, p. 434.
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folksong arrangement.
Printed collections consisting entirely of folksongs
Among the twenty-seven printed volumes of male choral song consulted, a substantial
subset (eight volumes, or thirty percent) is devoted entirely to folksong arrangements.
After Hæffner, four other named composers issued single volumes of Swedish folksongs
for male chorus: Johan Peter Cronhamn (1841) and Petter Conrad Boman (1847) each
have ten arrangements, while August Söderman (1865) has eight and Jacob Edvard Gille
(1863) just four. In addition, Abraham Mankell produced two undated volumes with a
total of sixteen settings. A complete list of known collections consisting entirely of
Swedish folksongs for four-part male chorus is given below in Table 3.3.
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Table 3.3: Published collections consisting entirely of Swedish folksongs for four-part male chorus
Year Editor Title # arr. 1832
Hæffner Svenska folk-visor satte för fyra mansröster [Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices]
8
1841
Cronhamn Svenska folkvisor satta för mansröster [Swedish Folksongs Set for Male Voices]
10
1847
Boman Tio svenska folkwisor satte fyrstämmigt för mansröster [Ten Swedish Folksongs Set in Four Parts for Male Voices]
10
1841–50s
Mankell Svenska folk-melodier satte för två tenor- och två basröster [Swedish Folk-melodies Set for Two Tenor & Two Bass Voices]
9
1861 Anonymous (Abr. Lund-quist, pub.)
25 svenska folkvisor, satta för fyra mansröster [25 Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices]
25
1861
Hæffner Svenska folk-visor satte för fyra mansröster, 2nd ed. [Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices, 2nd ed. ]
8
1863 Gille I det fria: Svenska folkmelodier, fyrstämmigt satta för mansröster. Orden af Richard Dybeck [In the Open: Swedish Folk-melodies Set in Four Parts for Male Voices. Words by Richard Dybeck]
4
early 1860s?
Mankell Svenska folk-wisor satte för två tenor- och två bas-röster [Swedish Folksongs Set for two Tenor and Two Bass Voices]
7
1865 Söderman Nordiska folkmelodier harmoniskt behandlade för mansröster [Nordic Folk-Melodies Harmonized for Male Voices]
8105
In his preface, Johan Peter Cronhamn (1803–75) positions his volume as the first
folksong arrangements for male chorus to be published since Hæffner’s pioneering
edition in 1832. A brief article in the newspaper Aftonbladet announcing the publication
of Cronhamn’s volume mentions the presence of a few folksong arrangements in a
singing textbook by Abraham Mankell (1802–68) in 1835, but it turns out that the
105 This number includes seven songs of Swedish origin and one Norwegian bride-song. Like Ahlström’s repertoire in 300 nordiska folkvisor mentioned above in Chapter Two, p. 57, Söderman’s concept of “Nordic” is heavily Sweden-centric.
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textbook in question contains settings for SATB chorus, not TTBB, which does not
contradict Cronhamn’s claim of being the first to follow Hæffner’s example.106
Of the seven songs that Cronhamn acknowledges in the preface as having been
previously published—and presumably well known—four, or just over half, come from
Hæffner’s supplement to Geijer-Afzelius, an early indication of the importance of
secondary transmission of material from the earlier collection. Furthermore, Cronhamn
explicitly places himself as a follower in an unbroken tradition; after praising Hæffner’s
use of simple chords, he makes a direct appeal: “[S]urely nobody will criticize me for
using many of the same harmonic progressions, cadences, etc.”107 And emulate he does.
Cronhamn likely thought he was breaking new ground in selecting tunes that had not
previously been arranged in choral form by Hæffner, as none of Cronhamn’s choices
appear in Hæffner (1832). He must, however, have previously encountered a popular
arrangement of “Skadi’s Lament” (“Skadis klagan”) (mis)attributed to Hæffner that
circulated widely, eventually reaching at least thirteen collections by 1900, although only
106 Aftonbladet (February 5, 1841): 3. The textbook in question is Abraham Mankell, Musikalier till begagnande vid Sång-undervisning i Skolor och Gymnasier (Stockholm: Lublin, 1835). A second claim from Cronhamn’s preface, that three of the songs (referring to the melodies themselves, not just these particular arrangements thereof) in his collection are hitherto unpublished, is less accurate. The article in Aftonbladet points out that one of the three had previously appeared in an arrangement by Mankell for solo voice and piano, reducing the number of entirely new entries to two. However, these two had also previously been published in a group of settings for voice and guitar published by Johan Carl Hedbom (1806–80) in 1839—possibly with Cronhamn himself as the anonymous arranger: Tobias Norlind credits Cronhamn as arranger of the two-volume set Svenska folkvisor (Stockholm: Hedbom, 1839) in “Jöns (Johan) Peter Cronhamn.” Either the author of the Aftonbladet article did not know of this collection, or he did not want to call public attention to Cronhamn’s possible involvement with it. 107 “[S]äkert [skall] ingen klandra att jag ofta begagnat samma harmonieföljder och samma tonslut m.m.” Jöns Peter Cronhamn, Preface to Svenska folkvisor satta för mansröster (Stockholm: Sundel, 1841), [i]. Cronhamn further emphasizes his link with tradition by indicating that four of the ten melodies come from Geijer & Afzelius’s collection, making it the largest single source for this volume.
122
in handwritten form until the 1850s.108 The simple harmonic vocabulary in use for choral
arrangements of the period places limits upon harmonic choices, but the similarity of
ornamentation in accompanying vocal lines is too close to be coincidental. Example 3.3
shows all notes which are identical in “Hæffner’s” and Cronhamn’s arrangements; notes
that are missing from the four-part texture indicate the (relatively few) locations in
which the pitches diverge between the two examples. In particular, the identical
disposition of sixteenth notes in mm. 2, 6 and 16 is unlikely to have been constructed
independently by two different arrangers.
108 While Hæffner’s name is often connected with the most common arrangement of “Skadi’s Lament,” evidence conclusively demonstrating his involvement has not yet surfaced, and the attribution may well be false. Jan Wolf-Watz associates Hæffner with a three-part version published in 1822, but I have not been able to locate the arrangement in question; see his undergraduate thesis, “Svensk manskörsång 1808–1833: En repertoarstudie” (Uppsala universitet, 1969), 33. In any case, Cronhamn would have believed this particular arrangement to be Hæffner’s work.
123
Example 3.3: “Hæffner” and Cronhamn, “Skadi’s Lament,” overlapping pitches
In all, Cronhamn’s setting contains about one-third “new” material with respect to
“Hæffner’s,” as measured by the percentage of beats in which each of the lower three
voices differ from “Hæffner’s” notes.109
Whether or not Cronhamn knew Hæffner’s setting of “Little Kerstin’s Wedding
and Burial” (“Liten Kerstins bröllop och begrafning”) is more difficult to say. The setting
appears in two early manuscript collections likely copied around the 1830s and remains
109 Cronhamn’s differences correspond to 30% (T2), 41% (B1), and 32% (B2) of the beats in each respective voice.
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124
unpublished to this day.110 On the surface, this setting has even more notes in common
than the previous pair, with only about twenty percent “new” material in Cronhamn’s
version. Example 3.4 gives the melody along with a harmonic analysis for each of the
three different versions: Hæffner’s setting for voice and piano, Hæffner’s setting for
male chorus, and Cronhamn’s setting for male voices.111
A boy said to his friend so cheerfully: May I have little Kerstin, your beautiful sister?
I am inclined towards her.
Example 3.4: “Little Kerstin’s Wedding and Burial,” three harmonizations
Cronhamn’s harmonies remain close to Hæffner’s TTBB setting—but also to Hæffner’s
earlier layer, the vocal-piano version in Geijer-Afzelius. On the two occasions when
Hæffner’s TTBB cadences diverge from those in his piano-vocal setting, Cronhamn more
closely matches the TTBB version (mm. 3–4 and mm. 5–6), but enough differences exist
110 Hæffner’s setting of “Little Kerstin’s Wedding and Burial” appears as no. 29 in “ms. Palme,” manuscript TTBB part-books, late 1820s, Sv saml Manskv 382, S-Skma; and no. 14 in “ms. Wellander I,” manuscript score and part-books, after 1832, NC 11 Wellander 1:1–5, S-Uu. 111 The amount of different material in Cronhamn’s arrangement is only 12% (T2), 21% (B1) and 33% (B2).
125
(such as m. 9) to suggest Cronhamn could have based his setting on the solo version
alone.
Like Cronhamn, Petter Conrad Boman (1804–61) also avoids setting titles
previously published by Hæffner in his 1847 collection, Ten Swedish Folksongs Set in Four
Parts for Male Chorus (Tio svenska folkvisor satta fyrstämmigt för mansröster).112 In addition,
Boman largely avoids competing with Cronhamn’s selections.113
Unlike his counterparts in this genre, who produced only one volume each,
Abraham Mankell published two different sets of TTBB folksong arrangements, in
addition to his SATB settings mentioned above. The larger set, Swedish Folk-melodies Set
for Two Tenor & Two Bass Voices (Svenska folk-melodier satte för två tenor- och två basröster;
nine arrangements, hereafter Mankell TTBB 1), published in Stockholm by C. A.
Westberg, has hitherto defied attempts at determining an approximate date of
publication.114 A similarly titled volume, Swedish Folksongs Set for two Tenor and Two Bass
Voices (Svenska folk-wisor satte för två tenor- och två bas-röster; seven settings, hereafter
Mankell TTBB 2), precisely matches the format of the other volume and hence comes
from Westberg as well, although the title page omits all publication information other
112 Estimates for Boman’s undated volume vary from 1846 (Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 442) to 1847 (Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 147 and 149) to 1849 (according to a chart of publisher’s numbers in Helmer, “Något om musikaliedatering,” Svenskt musikhistoriskt arkiv Bulletin 4, 2nd ed. (1970): 21.) It was likely available by 1847, as it appears in “Musik,” Swensk bibliographi för år 1847, no. 4 (April 1847): 56. 113 Only “Sorrow’s Power” (“Sorgens makt”) is found in both collections, and Boman’s version is markedly different from Cronhamn’s. In contrast to Cronhamn’s almost completely syllabic, diatonic setting (the only accidentals being the raised 7th scale degree), Boman’s harmonic palette includes diatonic and chromatic passing notes, neighbor-tone movement within syllables, and a 4–3 suspension. 114 See Ternhag, “När folkvisor blev sånger för manskör,” 103.
126
than title and arranger.115 Since Cronhamn is not aware of other collections for male
chorus in 1841 and the Aftonbladet article from that same year discussed above mentions
only Mankell’s volume of SATB arrangements, Mankell’s undated TTBB arrangements
likely date from no earlier than 1841.116 In all, Mankell published choral folksong
arrangements in four collections: the two undated TTBB volumes, the 1835 textbook
with SATB arrangements, and a few additional SATB arrangements in his later series,
Sweden’s Beautiful Melodies (Sveriges herrliga melodier; 4 vols. of SATB arrangements,
1862–64), also meant for use in schools.117
Regardless of their actual issue date, Mankell’s folksong arrangements for male
chorus seem to have attracted little attention; not a single setting from TTBB 1 appears in
any other collection for male chorus, either print or manuscript, and only two instances
of material from TTBB 2—one of which is more closely related to the SATB 1862 version
than to TTBB 2’s exact notation—have been located.118 At the other end of the popularity
115 Until now, the existence of this second volume by Mankell has not been noted in the literature on Swedish male choral singing. 116 See n. 106 above. It should also be noted, however, that no mention of Mankell TTBB 1 or TTBB 2 shows up in searchable newspaper databases, and the almost complete lack of Mankell arrangements copied or printed in other collections—more on this below—means that publication prior to 1841, followed by nearly complete oblivion, could also have occurred. 117 Shared repertoire links Mankell TTBB 1 with SATB 1835 and TTBB 2 with SATB 1862–4; in each case, the paired collections have three songs in common, while no title from either pair appears in the other pair. A comparison of the shared repertoire shows that pieces in the first pair have more musical differences than do the pieces in the second pair, which are largely identical except for transposition and, most commonly, octave leaps and other simple shifts needed to conform to voice ranges. Thus, it seems that TTBB 1 came some time after SATB (1835)—how much after is impossible to say, though it was likely not prior to 1841—while TTBB 2 was issued in relatively close proximity to SATB (1862–64). 118 Mankell’s arrangements appear in very few other sources. “I See in Your Eyes” (“Jag ser uppå dina ögon”) and “Fine Crystal” (“Kristallen den fina,” in a version closer to Mankell SATB 1862 than TTBB 2) are found, without attribution, back-to-back in ms. Wellander 3. In addition, one SATB setting, “Peter Tyrsson’s Daughters in Vänge” (“Per Tyrssons döttrar i Vänge,” 1835), is copied in ms. Kallenberg 3.
127
spectrum, arrangements by Hæffner are found in at least eight manuscript and fourteen
print collections through 1900. Cronhamn, who published his folksong edition in 1841, is
found in seven manuscript and two other print sources, while Boman, with a collection
in 1847, appears in eight hand-written and three published sets. A generation later,
arrangements by Söderman, who published in 1865, are found in three manuscript and
seven print collections by 1900.
August Söderman’s higher ratio of print to manuscript collections than is found
with Cronhamn and Boman partly reflects a decrease in numbers of handwritten
collections during the later part of the century, and it also likely correlates with
Söderman’s greater status as a composer of original compositions for male chorus and as
a public musical figure.119 Technically, Söderman’s collection is titled Nordic Folk-
Melodies Harmonized for Male Voices (Nordiska folkmelodier harmoniskt behandlade fo ̈r
mansro ̈ster, 1865); however, only one song is given a country-specific label (a bridal song
from Norway, “The Bride Rides Ahead,” “Före rider bruden” — here, with a text in
Swedish, no less), and the other seven are commonly found in other Swedish collections,
so this Swedish-focused volume is similar in scope to the other volumes by single
named composers.
The 1863 volume In the Open: Swedish Folk-melodies Set in Four Parts for Male Voices
(I det fria: Svenska folkmelodier, fyrstämmigt satta för mansröster) is unique in that a
119 August Söderman achieved the rank of choirmaster and deputy conductor of the Royal Opera, a publicly visible post; Johan Peter Cronhamn taught singing at the Royal Musical Academy alongside a career as a civil servant, while Petter Conrad Boman also combined government work with various positions within the Academy. For biographical information on these and other Swedish composers, see Swedish Musical Heritage, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/.
128
wordsmith is given primary credit. The front cover identifies the author of the texts as
Richard Dybeck; the name of the arranger, J[acob] E[dvard] Gille, only appears at the
top of the first page of music. All four songs have new texts written by Dybeck to fit
existing traditional melodies, an important sub-genre of folksong that encompasses
many of the most commonly copied and performed folksongs, as will be demonstrated
later in this chapter. Presumably Dybeck, who also transcribed the melodies in the field
prior to their being arranged, was involved in the selection of songs for this volume.120
The collections by Hæffner, Cronhamn, Boman, Mankell, Gille and Söderman are
joined by an anonymous volume, Twenty-Five Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices
(25 svenska folkvisor, satta för fyra mansröster; Stockholm: Lundquist, 1861). While no
information regarding the origin of the collection has yet surfaced, several recent
misattributions have contributed to confusion. First of all, it is categorically not a volume
of arrangements by Hæffner; the arrangements do not match his published or
unpublished settings, with the exception of two that are somewhat close, and Hæffner
cannot possibly have arranged “To the Swedish Motherland” (“Till svenska
fosterjorden,” more commonly known by its first words as “Thou Ancient, Thou
Hale”/”Du gamla, du friska”), given that his death preceded the publication of the
melody and the writing of its new lyrics by over a decade.121 Neither is the publication
120 Gille is also identified as the arranger of four folksongs in ms. Dybeck 23, identified earlier as the only volume consisting entirely of folksongs arranged for male chorus. However, only one arrangement, “From Ancient Depths Arises Song of Swedish Men” (“Ur forntida djup stige Svenskmannasång”) is found in both sources, so Gille made a total of at least seven, if not more, distinct settings. 121 “Johann Christian Friedrich Hæffner [Haeffner]: 25 svenska folkvisor satta för fyra mansröster,” Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, accessed February 1, 2018,
129
by Mankell, as has been mistakenly attributed.122
Fewer than half of the twenty-five arrangements in Lundquist’s anonymous 1861
volume have been found in other sources. Of the twelve duplicates, five arrangements
are quite common and exist in multiple sources, while seven have been found in no
more than three other collections. Using the latter group as a guide, the largest overlap,
five of seven songs, occurs with the Library for Quartet-Singers (Bibliothek för
Qvartettsångare, 1867–82), a series of two hundred songs also printed by Abraham
Lundquist; Lundquist simply republished material from the anonymous 1861 collection.
But where did he get the arrangements in the first place? The next-closest match comes
from ms. Broddén, the large manuscript collection of 530 numbered songs that Johannes
Broddén (1823–1901) began in 1857 and which contains three arrangements also found
in Lundquist 1861. Furthermore, one common setting—”Thou Ancient, Thou Hale”—
appears in ms. Broddén attributed to “B_n,” i.e. Broddén himself (although he also
published this same arrangement in 1891 with an apparently spurious attribution to
Söderman, as no other mention of an arrangement by Söderman of this piece has turned
up anywhere).
Could a large portion of the thirteen unique settings in Lundquist 1861 also stem
from Broddén? Their absence from both ms. Broddén and his 1891 published collection,
http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/haeffner-johann-christian-friedrich/SMH-W4546-25_svenska_folkvisor_satta_for_fyra_mansroster. 122 Ternhag, “När folkvisor blev sånger för manskör,” 104. Compounding the confusion, the same article also incorrectly pairs an image from Mankell’s undated TTBB 1 with a caption for the second edition of Hæffner’s folksong arrangements, published 1861; see ibid., 99.
130
Song Album for the Folk School (Folkskolans sångalbum) would, in that case, be curious;
however, Broddén is known to have been a prolific composer in this genre (a
biographical newspaper sketch published in celebration of his retirement states, “Mighty
are the volumes of music that his diligent hand has written on behalf of [the chorus he
founded, which often had over a hundred men in it].”)123 It is not impossible to suppose
that Broddén could have finished an earlier hand-written volume around 1857
containing a good number of these thirteen unica found in Lundquist 1861.
Furthermore, Broddén is said to have published three collections of quartets,
only one of which, the aforementioned Song Album for the Folk School (1891), has been
located. It is dangerous to speculate on the contents of lost volumes, but their existence
does at least raise the possibility of additional examples of Broddén’s work. In any case,
Broddén’s footprint on subsequent collections is minuscule; very few of the
arrangements potentially written by him—those he marked “B_n,” and those without
any attribution at all—appear anywhere other than his large manuscript or the 1891
collection.124 The only other prolific arranger of folksongs with a similarly pale shadow
on later collections, Abraham Mankell, can be ruled out as a collaborator in Lundquist
1861 due to the complete absence of his known arrangements in that volume, even
though arrangements by him do exist for nine of the twenty-five pieces included. Until
123 “Väldiga äro de volymer noter, hans flitiga hand för dennas räkning skrifvit.” Svensk läraretidning (January 3, 1894): 2. Broddén’s volume Folkskolans sångalbum (1891) was later at the center of a copyright case; see n. 147 below. 124 Most of the printed songs also appear in two titles also published by Lundquist (the 1861 volume 25 svenska folkvisor and the series Bibliothek för Qvartettsångare, 1867–82), which suggests a possible connection between Broddén and Lundquist.
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clearer evidence surfaces, the possibility exists that the anonymous editor of Lundquist’s
Twenty-Five Swedish Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices (1861) is Johannes Broddén.
Publications of mixed content
The majority of instances of folksong arrangements for male chorus exist in mixed
collections, which attach varying degrees of importance to folksong as a sub-genre of
male choral song. Unlike personal manuscript collections, which come into being over a
period of time that can stretch to multiple decades, published editions offer better
control over the order in which contents appear. For some editions, folk origin does not
seem to have been a factor in organizing the contents, as arrangements are scattered
across the volume with no discernible underlying reasoning. However, in the corpus of
mixed publications in this study, a folksong arrangement is more likely to stand adjacent
to another folksong arrangement than to be sandwiched between songs of known
compositional origin.125 Settings are often clustered together, sometimes according to
arranger. Only in one instance, the first volume of Hedenblad’s Studentsången (1883), is
the principle of alphabetization by title or first line applied.126 While folksong settings
are not present in every single collection of repertoire for male chorus, relatively few
collections of any size, handwritten or published, are entirely devoid of such
arrangements. Table 3.4 lists printed collections of mixed content including at least one
125 In mixed collections published in Sweden during the nineteenth century, just under sixty percent of 220 folksongs of Swedish, Nordic, and Germanic origin were placed adjacent to another folksong. 126 In this first of four volumes, Hedenblad privileges folksongs (beginning with Swedish folksongs arranged alphabetically by first line, followed by songs from other countries) and arrangements of melodies by Bellman before printing songs by all other composers in alphabetical order. Subsequent volumes of Studentsången do not organize contents according to alphabetization.
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folksong setting in approximate chronological order, breaking down the number of
Swedish folksongs, the number of total songs, and the percentage of Swedish folksongs
in each volume.
Table 3.4: Printed mixed collections of four-part song for male voices containing at least one Swedish folksong arrangement
Editor (or publisher) Title #SF #T %SF Approx. date
Hirsch, Abraham (pub.) Odinslund och Lundagård, vols. 1–5 3 207 1% 1851–65
Ståhl, Axel Iwar Vald samling af student-sånger 9 100 9% 1855
Arpi, Hjalmar Pariser-sångarnes album 9 59 15% 1867
Lundquist, Abraham (pub.)
Bibliothek för qvartettsångare 11 200 6% 1867–82
Lewerth, C. J. Gammalt och nytt: Fyrstämmiga sånger för mansröster
14 114 12% 1872
Schumburg Rob., (autografi)
1878 års pariser-sångares album 3 34 9% 1878
Hedenblad, Ivar Studentsången, vols. 1–3 17 200 9% 1883–95
Edgren, August Aug. Edgrens Qvartett-album, vols. 1–2 2 18 11% 1886
Sällskapet för svenska qvartettsångens befrämjande
Sånger för mansröster, vol. I-X 4 91 4% 1886–97
Lutteman, Hugo Fyris, vol. 1 1 12 8% [1890/91]
Broddén, Johannes Folkskolans sångalbum 15 108 14% 1891
Åkerberg, Erik Fyris, vol. 2 2 10 20% 1891
Hirsch, Abraham (pub.) Universal-album för qvartettsångare, vols. 1–2
2 23 9% 1892
Lindqvist, Hugo Manskören: En samling körer och kvartetter för mansröster
14 125 11% 1897
Gyllenhaal, Herman Gyllenhaal 1844 (S-Uu Allmänna sången NC 82E)
14 91 15% 1844–55
anon. Samling af manskörer (S-Skma Sv. Saml. 4 mansr. Manskv. 319)
3 77 4% [1847–62]
anon. untitled (S-Uu Allmänna sången U 2905 g)
12 158 8% 1870s
133
Editor (or publisher) Title #SF #T %SF Approx. date
anon. Upsala studentkårs Allmänna sångförening (S-Uu Allmänna sången, U 2905 h and NC 82 J)
3 37 8% n.d.
The last four entries in Table 3.4 form a sub-category consisting of printed
volumes that were never on the commercial market. The first was created by Herman
Gyllenhaal (1821–1912), who made a set of partbooks by binding together separately
published materials, creating a proxy for the hand-copied personal manuscript
collection in much less time. The set, labeled Gyllenhaal 1844 in the archive for Allmänna
sången at S-Uu, consists of ninety-one songs and a hand-written table of contents, with
little publication information other than names of composers or arrangers that appear on
some (but not all) pages.127 Since the earliest entries align with Gyllenhaal’s departure
from Uppsala upon completion of his law degree in 1844, the repertoire more likely
reflects the material he was able to access during his years as a local judge in various
posts in the district of Västergötland or at a small agricultural college in Skåne, rather
than standard repertoire from Uppsala during the period of his studies.128 The high
proportion of Danish folksongs (thirteen, compared with fourteen of Swedish origin) is
127 Page layouts and plate numbers show that Gyllenhaal gathered material from two sources: various collections printed by C. C. Lose (from 1846: C. C. Lose & Delbanco) in Copenhagen with plate numbers ranging from the year 1844 to somewhere between 1849–55, and Petter Conrad Boman’s 1847 collection of folksong arrangements. 128 For a biography of Herman Gyllenhaal, see Ed Gyllenhaal, “The Gyllenhaal Family Tree Project: Centenary Album of Herman Gyllenhaal (1821–1912),” last modified May 2004, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.gyllenhaal.org/hg100/WebCatalog.htm.
134
not matched by any other collection originating in Sweden, either published or hand-
copied.
The other three non-commercial printed volumes located in this study are
lithographic prints of unknown workmanship and origin. One of these, labeled simply
“Collection of Male Choral Songs” (“Samling af manskörer”), resembles Gyllenhaal 1844
in that it gathers material from multiple collections, with the numbering of songs re-
starting or skipping around entirely with respect to the original sources; pagination was
adjusted later by hand. While much of the repertoire is consistent with that of the
Uppsala Student Singing Society, the second song is Johan Peter Cronhamn’s “Song for
the Educational Circle in Stockholm” (“Sång för bildnings cirkeln i Stockholm”), a title
not associated with academic choirs. Rather, this song was written for the bildningscirkel
(“educational circle”) in Stockholm, the first of many similar organizations in Swedish
cities and towns dedicated to the educational and moral improvement of members of the
industrial and lower classes.129
Choirs were an important feature of bildningscirklar, and Cronhamn became
director of the (male) chorus of Stockholm’s Educational Circle in 1847, two years after it
was founded. The length of Cronhamn’s tenure as director is unclear—Sverker
Jullander’s biographical piece on Cronhamn does not specify—but the circle dissolved in
1862; if this anonymous “Collection of Male Choral Songs” was prepared for the circle,
129 For the history of bildningscirklar, including the importance of music within individual circles, see Carl Landelius, 1840–1850-talets bildningscirklar och arbetareföreningar i Sverige (Stockholm: Norrmalms-tryckeriet, 1936), vol. 1. Leif Jonsson briefly discusses the choir of Stockholms bildningscirkel in “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 315.
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then it must date from between 1847–62.130 For the purposes of this study, it has not been
possible to track down other songbooks created for or used by educational circles;
nevertheless, it bears noting that the percentage of Swedish folksongs (4 percent) in this
volume is the second-lowest among published collections of mixed content, which
implies that folksongs may have made up a somewhat smaller part of the repertoire
than occurred in the university choirs. It is also significant that two of the three Swedish
folksongs are contrafacta with texts of later origin that were written specifically to fit the
traditional melodies, a phenomenon that will be explored in more detail below.
The last two anonymous collections each have continually numbered pages
written as part of the lithographic process, which indicates that they were conceived and
created as complete volumes. One untitled collection in the Uppsala Student Singing
Society archive can be roughly dated to 1872 or later.131 A second through-numbered
collection of thirty-five songs survives in the same archive in two copies with identical
decorative labels for “Uppsala Student Union Public Singing Society” (“Upsala
studentkårs Allmänna sångförening”) pasted on the front cover.132 These volumes may
be surviving members of sets of printed scores prepared for the choir’s use.
130 For biographical information on Johan Peter Cronhamn, see Sverker Jullander, “Johan Peter Cronhamn,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2015, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/cronhamn-johan-peter/. 131 An interpolated page—”Song in Praise of King Karl” (“Kung Karls Drapa”) by Gunnar Wennerberg—was printed in 1872. Allmänna sången arkiv, U 2905 g, S-Uu. A more modern, typed table of contents lists the first ninety-three of the 158 songs in the collection. 132 Allmänna sången arkiv, U 2905 h and NC 82 J, S-Uu. The choir Allmänna sångföreningen (Public Singing Society) took on the name Upsala studentkårs Allmänna sångförening (Uppsala Student Union’s Public Singing Society) for a period to avoid confusion with newly founded non-academic choirs elsewhere in Sweden starting in the 1840s that were also called Allmänna sångföreningar; see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 315.
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Manuscript and print volumes, compared
The manuscript collections curated by Johan Broddén and Bengt Kallenberg, with 530
and 763 songs, respectively, are significantly larger than their counterparts. If these two
outliers are temporarily removed from the corpus, the average size of the remaining
volumes is eighty-seven songs, of which, on average, eight entries, or around nine
percent, are folksong arrangements; in any individual volume, the highest percentage of
such arrangements is just under twenty percent. The scope of mixed printed volumes is
consistent with that of the handwritten collections minus the two inordinately large
manuscripts: the average number of songs is ninety-two, of which approximately eight,
or eight percent, are folksong settings, and the highest proportion in any one mixed
volume is twenty percent.
Folksong arrangements are present in most volumes of literature for male
chorus; very few manuscript collections consulted did not include at least one, and
usually several. Scribes nearly always expended time and energy copying out at least
one folksong in a given volume, marking such arrangements as ever-present elements of
the repertoire. Similarly, printed collections containing the work of multiple composers
also tend to include material of folk origin, while some smaller single-author
publications do consist entirely of original compositions.
Establishing the chronology of the repertoire
It is not always possible to determine the date of individual folksong arrangements with
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certainty.133 The following sections will treat methods used in dating manuscript and
print collections of this era.
Dating manuscript collections
Many settings spread informally in manuscript copies prior to publication, and it is
common for handwritten partbooks and scores to contain entries in multiple
chronological layers by one or more hands, further compounding the difficulty of
determining dates. Sometimes, a year is given (though it is not always clear whether the
year indicates the starting point or the ending point for a collection), and, in the case of a
few particularly conscientious scribes, exact dates are included for individual entries. If
the identity of the original owner is known, the period of enrollment as a university
student can help narrow a timespan, or at least a starting point, to within a few years,
while in others, the presence of songs newly composed in honor of certain celebrations,
such as royal visits, name-day celebrations, and visits to other universities provide the
terminus post quem for subsequent entries.
Nearly all music is written on hand-drawn staves; printed note-paper appears
only in a few collections from the very end of the nineteenth century. It is tempting to
try to differentiate between staves with individually drawn lines and those created with
a rastrum. However, the practice of drawing lines individually is not limited to early in
the century and may simply mean that a scribe only had an ordinary pen at hand.
133 For an overview of helpful methods for dating manuscripts and printed music from this period, see Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 16–22. For resources on dating music from German and German-influenced regions, see Joachim Jaenecke, “Dating Musical Manuscripts and Prints: An Overview of Past and Present Research,” Fontes Artis Musicae 56, no. 1 (2009): 29–35.
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Dating print collections
In nineteenth-century Europe, it was not common practice to include publication dates
in printed music; music was a “fresh” commodity, and publishers wanted to avoid
giving the impression that works printed in previous years had gone “stale” and were
no longer desirable to consumers.134 Plate numbers give clues about the date of first
printing for several collections, particularly in conjunction with Axel Helmer’s useful
lists of plate numbers for major music publishing firms in Sweden during the second
half of the nineteenth century.135
Prices printed on music can also help narrow a potential timespan for
publication. A price listed in skilling (sk) indicates a provenance in 1855 or earlier, while
its replacement, the decimal unit öre, signifies 1855 or later. In 1873, the older unit
riksdalar was retired in favor of a new entity, the krona.136
In other cases, searches of online newspaper databases have yielded
advertisements and other mentions of newly published undated material.137 The name of
the publisher, if given, can frame a window of time, particularly for houses that
periodically changed names following the formation and dissolution of partnerships.
134 Modin, “Studentsång i Lund på Otto Lindblads tid,” 19. 135 See Axel Helmer, “Något om musikaliedatering,” 21–26. Helmer’s work follows in the tradition of Otto Erich Deutsch, Musikverlagsnummern: Eine Auswahl von 40 datierten Listen 1710–1900 (Berlin: Verlag Merseburger, 1961). Often, it is not possible to know whether a given copy was from the first run, or whether it was reprinted from the same plate on a later occasion. 136 For a glossory of historical money terms pertinant to Swedish currency, see Rodney Edvinsson, “Swedish Monetary Standards in Historical Perspective,” Stockholm Papers in Economic History (Department of Economic History, Stockholm University, May 24, 2009), 49–63, http://www.riksbank.se/Upload/Dokument_riksbank/Kat_foa/2010/2.pdf. 137 For information about newspaper databases, see Chapter One, n. 88.
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The actual method of printing (moveable type, engraving, or lithography) is less
relevant, however, as all three occur during this time period; even the oldest of these
three methods, moveable type with its telltale vertical gaps in staff lines, is used
regularly across the century, from Hæffner’s first edition in 1832 through Lindqvist’s
volume prepared for Y. M. C. A. of Sweden (Sverges K. F. U. M.) in 1897.138 In one case,
visual similarity between a series of publications, in which only one volume included
the name of the publisher, has enabled positive publisher identification of the other
books in the series, although determining their dates remains, as yet, an impossible
task.139 A few surviving collections have no title page or publication information
whatsoever; here, the main technique remains, as with manuscripts, analysis of
repertoire.
Reprinting and copyright
Just as individuals copied existing arrangements into manuscript collections, editors
often reprinted previously published material in new publications. In general, it is
138 Moveable type was the only method known until the late 1700s, and the only method legal in Sweden until 1818, when Olof Åhlström’s monopoly on publishing music was effectively circumvented five years before it was due to expire in 1823. For an overview of the history of music printing in Sweden, see Veslemöy Heintz, “Förlag, musikhandel, instrumenttillverkning,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 186–91. 139 Lithographer C. A. Westberg published all of the following undated volumes of arrangements by Mankell, each of which bears the subtitle “Set for two tenor and two bass voices” (“Satte för två tenor- och två bas-röster”): Svenska folk-melodier; Svenska folk-wisor; Melodier af C. M. Bellmann; Melodier af Geijer och Lindblad; Melodier af åtskillige författare [Tunes by various composers]; Folk-Melodier från Södra Tyskland och Schweiz [Folk-tunes from southern Germany and Switzerland]; Tjugofyra choral-melodier [Twenty-four chorale tunes]. A copy of the second tenor parts for each of these volumes was bound into a single volume belonging to Royal Court Orchestra member A. H. Peipke; this bound volume, MMD 55, is part of the collection “The Music Collection of the Folk Music Commission and the Fiddler’s Books of the Music Museum” (“Folkmusikkommissionens notsamling och Musikmuseets spelmansböcker”) at the Svenskt visarkiv and has been digitized, accessed February 1, 2018, http://fmk.musikverket.se/browsevol.php?lang=en&katalogid=MMD+55.
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difficult to pinpoint exactly where an editor sourced a given folksong setting, as the
more common arrangements appear in print multiple times as well as in handwritten
collections that sometimes pre-date initial publication of the setting in question. The
clearest identifiable chain among mixed publications connects three collections over a
span of two decades: six rare, mostly anonymous settings link Twenty-Five Swedish
Folksongs Set for Four Male Voices (published by Lundquist in 1861) with the multi-
volume collection Library for Quartet-Singers (1867–82), and two additional rare settings
link Library for Quartet-Singers with Hugo Lindqvist’s 1897 collection, Male Chorus: A
Collection of Choral Songs and Quartets for Male Voices.140 These three publications share a
common publisher, Abraham Lundquist, who made items he had previously published
available for the later collections.
As copyright owner, Lundquist was free to re-print pieces at will. However, the
music publishing industry in general showed little regard for nascent copyright
regulation, and a culture of pirate reprinting (or even first printing) helps explain the
widespread appearance of the same popular arrangements.141 Legally, Swedish authors
enjoyed copyright in perpetuity beginning in 1810; while the decree technically applied
140 25 svenska folkvisor, satta för fyra mansröster (Stockholm: Lundquist, 1861); Bibliothek för qvartettsångare, 17 vols. (Stockholm: Lundquist, 1867–82); Hugo Lindqvist, Manskören: En samling körer och kvartetter för mansröster (Stockholm: Lundquist, 1897). 141 In one well known example, Johan Niclas Ahlström and Petter Conrad Boman published Richard Dybeck’s newly written text “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale, Thou Mountainous North” (“Du gamla, du friska, du fjällhöga nord”) along with the melody associated with the ballad “Thus I Ride Through the Twelve-Mile Forest” (“Så rider jag mig genom tolvmilan skog”) in 1845, before Dybeck published the same material in 1847. Ahlström and Boman had access to manuscripts used in connection with Dybeck’s folk-music concerts and published this setting without Dybeck’s permission. See Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 41–43.
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only to the written word, in practice it extended to musical works as well.142 In 1841, the
law was modified to require heirs to republish a work within twenty years of the
author’s death in order to maintain perpetual copyright. Shortly thereafter, for the first
time, music was expressly named in 1855 in a new law granting exclusive performance
rights for a work during a composer’s lifetime.143 Despite these regulations, however,
many publishers continued to reprint material taken from other collections with, as one
publisher put it, complete “carelessness with respect to copyright.”144
In a series of unpublished letters from the publisher Abraham Hirsch (1815–1900)
in Stockholm to Abraham Bohlin (1810–90) of the publishing firm N. M. Lindh in Örebro
between 1868 and 1872, Hirsch tries unsuccessfully to convince Bohlin that Bohlin
should have secured permission from Hirsch before reprinting several male choral songs
to which Hirsch owned the rights.145 Hirsch explains his motivation:
It is absolutely necessary to fight against the hitherto ingrained idea that the re-printing of original songs is permitted, and that it does the composer a favor. From this point forward, I will continually express the view that every type of reprinting should be prosecuted, and in so doing, I hope to do some good.146
Bohlin’s responses do not survive, but Hirsch’s many letters show that Bohlin was not
142 Gunnar Petri, Rätten till menuetten: Historien om musikens värde, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie 92 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2000), 133. 143 Ibid., 137. 144 “. . . nonchalance i fråga om egenderätten.” Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin (May 14, 1872), KB1/Ep. L. 20:7, S-Sk. 145 Transcriptions and translations of this correspondence are printed in Appendix D: Correspondence between the publishers Abraham Hirsch and Abraham Bohlin, pp. 528ff. 146 “[D]et är absolut behöfligt att motarbeta den hittills inrotade föreställningen att eftertryck af originalsånger är medgifven och att dermed göres komponisten en tjenst. Jag kommer härefter att beständigt uttala den åsigt, att hvarje art af eftertryck bör beifras, och hoppas jag att dermed uträtta något godt.” Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin (April 30, 1872), KB1/Ep. L. 20:7.
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inclined to change his ways easily.
Hirsch made good on his promise to act zealously on this matter whenever it
occurred in the future. In 1895, his firm sued a bookseller and engraver connected with
Johan Broddén’s Song Album for the Folk School (Folkskolans sångalbum, 1891), and shortly
thereafter Broddén himself, for illegally reprinting songs to which Hirsch owned the
rights. Broddén’s defense captures the spirit, if not the law, of the times: he testified that
all he had done was reprint some previously published songs and that he did not know
that Hirsch owned the rights.147 Ultimately, the court threw out the suits for technical
reasons, even as it agreed that Broddén had indeed infringed on Hirsch’s rights by
reprinting songs without securing permission.148
In both cases described above, the conflict hangs on the rights to original songs;
would folksong arrangements, which were also reprinted with impunity, have enjoyed
the same protections as original songs in terms of domestic copyright provisions? I have
yet to find evidence of disagreements over the wholesale reprinting of folksong
arrangements, but Kari Michelsen calls attention to a relevant incident in the Norwegian
side of the Union in 1850, when the Danish composer Andreas Peter Berggreen (1801–
80) publicly accused the German-Norwegian composer and conductor Friedrich August
Reissiger (1809–83) of plagiarizing several folksong settings.149 In an article in the major
147 “Folkskolans sångalbum,” Svensk läraretidning (November 27, 1895). 148 “I målet om ‘Folkskolans sångalbum,’ Svensk läraretidning (March 18, 1896). The court ruled that responsibility lay with Broddén, who arranged for the collection to be published, but that the plaintiff had no right to raise the suit against him. 149 Kari Michelsen refers to this case in Musikkhandel i Norge fra begynnelsen till 1909, ed. Arvid O Vollsnes (Oslo: Norsk musikkhistorisk arkiv, 2010), 128.
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newspaper Morgenbladet, Berggreen meticulously points out where Reissiger had
changed only a few notes from Berggreen’s arrangements and suggests that, rather than
arranging the melodies, Reissiger has in fact “deranged” (derangeret) them.150
Berggreen takes full intellectual ownership of his settings, referring to them as
his “work” (arbeide) and expressing the same sort of anger one might expect of a
composer whose original compositions had been published deceitfully under another’s
name. While it is possible that some Swedish composers may have approved of the
wider reach of illegally copied arrangements (the supposed “favor” to which Hirsch
referred in his letter quote above), equating it with the longstanding practice of hand-
copying manuscript collections from whatever sources were available, Berggreen’s
indignation over the publication of his work under another’s name indicates that the
publication of arrangements without permission may have been a genuine point of
contention as well.
Folksongs in the repertoire
Overview and song types
My findings with respect to repertoire are based on a corpus of 559 settings of Swedish
folksongs for male chorus culled from thirty-four manuscript and twenty-seven printed
sources. After comparing and eliminating duplicate arrangements, I have identified 179
distinct settings of ninety-seven different songs, and I have determined attributions for
approximately three-fourths of this repertoire by comparing similar arrangements across
150 A[ndreas] P[eter] Berggreen, “Til Saeters,” Morgenbladet (November 22, 1850): 3.
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different sources.151 Although I have approached this project as systematically as
possible, it is almost certain that at least a few unique settings have escaped detection
and are preserved in sources I was not able to access. Since this study is based on
Swedish choirs, it does not include the multi-volume Norwegian collection of male
choral song curated by the choirmaster Johan Diderik Behrens (1820–90) between 1845
and 1884.152 Behrens made several original arrangements of Swedish folksongs for use
by his choirs in Christiania and elsewhere in Norway that have not yet been found in
any print or manuscript source connected with a Swedish choir.153
Some songs attracted the attention of multiple composers. Ten songs have at
least five different settings each, including “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale,” which tops the
list with eight settings (Table 3.5 below; see Appendix B for translations). The vast
majority of songs, however—68 percent—exist in single arrangements, which may be
found in multiple sources.
151 See Appendix C, pp. 525ff. A certain M. Rystedt prepared a manuscript list of titles, composers, and countries of origin for male quartet song through the year 1883. In an analysis of this manuscript, Adolf Lindgren reports sixty-seven Swedish folksongs and thirty-five from other countries without specifying whether multiple arrangements of a given song counted as one or more titles. Either way, the present corpus is considerably larger than that identified by Rystedt. See Lindgren, “Kvartettsången i Sverige.” 152 Johan Diderik Behrens, Samling af flerstemmige Mandssange for større og mindre Sangforeninger [Collection of Polyphonic Male Choral Songs for Large and Small Singing Groups] (Kristiania: Udgivarens forlag, 1845–84). For details on the years of publication of individual volumes, see Michelsen, Musikkhandel i Norge fra begynnelsen till 1909, 131–32. 153 Although these settings of Swedish folksongs arranged by a Norwegian do not seem to have entered the repertoire in Sweden, Norwegian culture in general did have an influence, especially after the Nordic Student meeting in Christiania in 1869; the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912) is known to have complained that literature, music and painting were assaulted by a “cultural invasion from Norway”; see Anne Jorunn Kydland, “Song in the Service of Politics and the Building of Norway,” in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (see n. 22 above), 61.
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Table 3.5: Folksongs with five or more different arrangements for male chorus
Title First line # of arr. Till svenska fosterjorden “Du gamla, du friska” 8 Värmlandsvisan “Ack, Vermeland, du sköna” 7 Folkmarsch från Orsa i Dalarne “Mandom, mod och morske män” 6 Jag ser uppå dina ögon “Jag ser uppå dina ögon” 6 Och mins du, hvad du lofvade “Och mins du, hvad du lofvade” 6 Den bergtagna “Och jungfrun hon skulle sig åt ottesången gå” 5 Kristallen den fina “Kristallen den fina” 5 Liten Karin “Och liten Karin tjente” 5 Neckens polska “Djupt i hafvet” 5 Skadis klagan “Satt i sin sal” 5
While the presence of a song in a given source says little about whether or how
often it was performed, one measure of a song’s popularity is the number of different
sources in which it appears. A list of songs found in ten or more sources is given below
in Table 3.6. On the right-hand side of the chart, “B” designates songs that are ballads,
and “N” designates contrafacta with newly written texts by known authors. As a point
of comparison between the two tables, the eight distinct arrangements of “Thou Ancient,
Thou Hale” are collectively found in a total of twenty-one sources.
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Table 3.6: Folksongs found in ten or more sources for male chorus
Title First line no. of sources
B? N?
1. Kristallen den fina “Kristallen den fina” 31 1. Neckens polska “Djupt i hafvet” 31 N 3. Värmlandsvisan “Ack, Vermeland, du sköna” 24 N 4. Jag ser uppå dina ögon “Jag ser uppå dina ögon” 21 4. Skadis klagan “Satt i sin sal” 21 N 4. Till svenska fosterjorden “Du gamla, du friska” 21 N 7. Folkmarsch från Orsa i Dalarne “Mandom, mod och morske män” 20 N 7. Glädjens blomster “Glädjens blomster” 20 N154 7. Liten Karin “Och liten Karin tjente” 20 B 10 Till Österland vill jag fara “Till Österland” 18 11. Vårvindar friska “Vårvindar friska” 17 N 12. Gammal Dalvisa “Om lycka och ära vi hörde en sång” 16 N 12. Och mins du, hvad du lofvade “Och mins du, hvad du lofvade” 16 14. Den Bergtagna “Och jungfrun hon skulle sig åt” 15 B 14. Kämpen Grimborg “Det suto två kämpar i Nordanfjäll” 15 B 16. Den underbara harpan “Det bodde en bonde vid sjöastrand” 11 B 16. Två turturdufvor “Två turturdufvor hade växt opp” 11 N 17. Jag unnar dig ändå allt godt “Jag unnar dig ändå allt godt” 10
Distribution of sources
There is no doubt, as Gunnar Ternhag has recently pointed out in his chapter “When
Folksongs Became Male Choral Songs,” that male choral song was an important vehicle
for spreading the contents of Geijer and Afzelius’s pioneering collection to the general
public.155 Hæffner’s arrangements provide the first published instance of melodies for
154 Margareta Jersild concludes that the text to “Flowers of Joy” (“Glädjens blomster”) is likely newly composed and suggests that the author may be Erik Gustaf Östberg, editor of Songs in Four Parts (Fyrstämmiga sånger, 1843), the first volume in which this text appears. See Margareta Jersild, “Några av våra vanligaste ‘folkvisor,’” in Sumlen: Årsbok för vis- och folkmusikforskning 1981 (Stockholm: Svenska visarkiv och Samfundet för visforskning, 1981), 51. 155 Ternhag, “När folkvisor blev sånger för manskör,” 95. Likewise, Lennart Reimers credits the songs in Hæffner’s supplement to Geijer-Afzelius as having provided an important first layer of material for SATB choral arrangements in Lennart Reimers, “A Cappella: The Story Behind the Swedish ‘Choral Miracle,’” in Choral Music Perspectives: Dedicated to Eric Ericsson, ed. Lennart Reimers and Bo Wallner, Publications Issued by The Royal Swedish Academy of Music 75 (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music, 1993), 160.
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twenty-seven songs that later entered the male choral repertoire, the largest single ur-
source, as shown below in Table 3.7.156
Table 3.7: Sources of initial publication of folksongs later arranged for male chorus
Source no. of songs
% of repertoire (of 97 songs)
Hæffner (supplement to Geijer-Afzelius)
27 28%
Dybeck/Ahlström/Boman 27 28% Dybeck (13) (13%) Ahlström/Boman
(14) (14%)
Other minor sources with 1, 2 or 3 newly published folksong melodies
29 30%
Manuscript only/no printed source located 13 13%
A second group of the same size is divided between Richard Dybeck with thirteen
songs, and Jacob Niclas Ahlström and Petter Conrad Boman with fourteen. These three
figures are grouped together because Ahlström and Boman had access to much of
Dybeck’s unpublished material (and famously scooped Dybeck in the publication of
songs including “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale”). 157 Together, these two major source-
groups account for just over half of the material. Another third of the repertoire for male
chorus originates in a variety of published sources, each of which includes just one, two
or three folksongs that entered the male choral repertoire. It is worth noting here that
only three songs trace back to Arwidsson’s Ancient Swedish Songs (1834–42) as the
earliest documented source. I have not yet found the first instance of publishing for the 156 This is not to say that all composers directly consulted Hæffner’s arrangements, which may have passed through subsequent collections before coming to a composer’s attention. 157 See n. 141 above.
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remaining melodies, a little over ten percent, but they certainly do not come from any of
the major printed sources.
Ballad-style songs
The ballad repertoire does not extend far beyond the twenty-seven songs first published
in Geijer-Afzelius; only three ballads not initially arranged by Hæffner have turned up
among the male choral repertoire of this period.158 Not surprisingly, the same titles
prove to be popular across more than one genre. Boel Lindberg has compiled a list of the
seventeen folksongs that occur most commonly in school songbooks through 1920.159
There is a large degree of overlap with ballads that were set for male chorus in the
nineteenth century: eleven of the seventeen most popular ballads in school textbooks
also exist in settings for male chorus. Moreover, the top three most popular ballads in
school songbooks—”Little Karin,” twenty-seven sources; “The Bride of the Mountain
King,” sixteen sources; and “Champion Grimborg,” ten sources—are also the top three
most widespread ballads for male chorus (twenty, fifteen and fifteen sources,
respectively, in Table 3.6 above: titles marked “B”), showing a consistency of popularity
across multiple vocal genres.
While ballads make up approximately thirty percent of the overall male choral
repertoire, only one—”Little Karin”—places among the top ten most widespread
158 “Widrik Werlandson’s Battle With Long-Legs the Giant” (“Widrik Werlandsons Kamp med Högben Rese”) first appears in Afwidsson, Svenska fornsånger, 1:13; “Peter Swineherd” (“Per Svinaherde”) is printed as no. 104 in the appendix to ibid, vol. 2. “The Farmer and the Crow” (“Bonden och kråken”) is first found in Runa (1842) 1:39. 159 See Lindberg, “Och liten Karin tjente,” 192.
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arrangements of traditional song (Table 3.6 above). Just as ballads began as the focal
point of the first stage of folksong collection and publication, soon to be joined by other
types of songs, the repertoire for male chorus began largely with ballads but quickly
broadened to include other categories. Ballads form a significant basis for but are not the
main substance of folksong arrangements for male chorus. The majority of titles, almost
seventy percent, are non-ballads, including love songs, games, songs referring to
geographical locations, and songs celebrating Swedish and/or Nordic heritage.
Newly written poetry set to folksong melodies
The most significant observation is over a quarter of non-ballad texts can be
traced to known authors.160 Some of these are contrafacta, while others add a vocal layer
to a previously non-texted melody believed to be of folk origin.
In a list of the titles found in the largest numbers of sources, texts of known
authorship are disproportionately represented. It has been noted above with respect to
Table 3.6 that ballads are underrepresented among the ten most common folksong
arrangements: only one is present, although ballads make up thirty percent of the
folksong repertoire for male chorus. At the other end of the spectrum, new poems set to
existing folk melodies (twenty percent of the overall repertoire) are overrepresented,
with six of ten where random distribution would predict just two (see Table 3.6 above,
160 In only one case is the identity of the composer known: Ivar Widéen’s “To the East (Margit Thinks at the Spindle)” (“Till Österland (Margit tänker vid sländan)”) sets an excerpt from Viktor Rydberg’s novel The Armorer (Vapensmeden), an unusual situation in which the text quotes a phrase from a folksong, “To the East”). Widéen’s song (in Sånger för mansröster XIII (1899): 13) invokes melodic reminiscences of the folksong without quoting the pre-existing melody in its entirety, and so he is to be viewed as more of a composer than an arranger. In all other cases, the melodies derive from anonymous sources.
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titles marked “N”). Further compounding the matter, performance data shows an even
more lopsided picture. Gottfrid Kallstenius compiled lists of programs sung by the
Uppsala Student Singing Society between the years 1845 and 1900, which I have
supplemented with printed programs from the choir’s archives in Uppsala.161 In Figure
3.1 below, black dots represent settings of texts of known authorship, twelve songs in all,
while gray dots represent settings of anonymous texts, sixteen songs in all. The numbers
on the horizontal axis show how many times a given song was performed according to
my enhanced version of Kallstenius’s data, ranging from a low of one single
documented performance to a high of fifty-one performances.
• • • • • • • • • • • • 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 15 19 51
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • d
Figure 3.1: Number of performances of settings of known and unknown authorship
A total of nine songs—one of known authorship and eight of anonymous textual
161 Kallstenius, Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia, supplemented by extant concert programs in the Allmänna sången arkiv, NC 82 F: Konsertprogram 1848–1928, S-Uu. Occasionally, a program lists a “folksong” or “Swedish folksong” without specifying a title, although the vast majority of folksongs are listed by name; untitled folksong entries are not included in the following analysis.
•text of known authorship (12 in all) •text of unknown authorship (16 in all)
# of known performances
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origin—were performed only once according to surviving data, while one song,
“Neckens polska” with text by Arvid August Afzelius, was performed on at least fifty-
one documented occasions during this period. Texts of unknown authorship are
concentrated toward the left side of the graph, where the numbers of performances are
lower: these songs were performed much less often than the songs with texts of known
authorship. When added together, these sixteen anonymous texts set to folk melodies
were performed a total of thirty-five times, while these twelve texts by named poets add
up to a total of 140 performances. Furthermore, these numbers do not reflect all known
performances. Programs sung on the choir’s tours throughout Sweden, Scandinavia, and
northern continental Europe count each song only once per tour, not every performance
on each tour; typically, a pool of songs was prepared for a given tour, but the particular
titles sung varied from performance to performance. All six Swedish folksongs taken on
tour according to Kallstenius’s listings have texts of known authorship, which
considerably boosts their performance numbers beyond the data charted in Figure 3.1.162
In mixed collections, newly written texts paired with folk melodies are
consistently labeled folkvisor alongside anonymous poems; the traditional melodies,
rather than texts, provide the so-called folk basis for many of the most widely spread
folkvisor for male chorus. In Sweden, music bears more weight than text as the
determining element of folksong, likely because of the ready availability of published
162 Folksongs taken on tour include “Necken’s Polska” (text by Afzelius), “Manhood, Bravery, and Daring Men” (“Mandom, mod och morske män” by Dybeck), “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (Dybeck), “Fresh Spring Breezes” (“Vårvindar friska” by Euphrosyne, pseudonym for Julia Nyberg), “Skadi’s Lament” (Afzelius), and “When Morning Dawns” (“Naar Morgenrøden luer,” Borgaard’s Danish text set to a melody thought to be of Swedish origin).
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folk melodies starting early in the century. This is different from German-speaking
regions, where early collectors from Herder to Brentano and von Arnim published only
(highly edited) texts, which composers then paired with their own newly invented
melodies, a classic example being Mahler’s settings of poetry from Des Knaben
Wunderhorn (1887–90; later orchestrated).163 Songs such as August Söderman’s newly
composed melody for the traditional text “My Beloved Little Sugar Box” (“Mitt älskade
lilla sockerskrin”) are much less common in Sweden. 164 Söderman’s original melody
uses the text of the second of two stanzas of the familiar folksong “Fine Crystal”
(“Kristallen den fina”), which is, along with “Necken’s Polska,” the most widespread
folksong for male chorus, surviving in thirty-one sources in the corpus examined.
Typical characteristics of folksong arrangements for male chorus
Through much of the nineteenth century, choral arrangements of folksong were
generally written in the same syllabic, homophonic style as four-part chorales, with the
melody in the uppermost voice. In both cases, the music delivered the text in a uniform,
comprehensible manner, with a minimum of rhythmic independence of individual
voices. Hæffner had studied Martin Luther’s approach to hymnology as preparation for
writing his own chorale books of 1808 and 1820/21. According to Anders Dillmar,
Hæffner encountered a hymnal preface by Luther in Danish translation, which called for
163 To recall, German folksong collections with melodies did not begin to appear until the late 1830s and early 1840s; see Chapter One, n. 52. 164 Initially, I was told that the autograph of Söderman’s song “Mitt älskade lilla sockerskrin” (dated “Dresden den 11 Nov. [1869]”) had gone missing from S-Skma in 1975. However, I subsequently found the document mis-filed in a different carton; it has now been restored to its proper location.
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hymns to be set and sung in four parts.165 Just as Hæffner believed that Swedish
folksongs were traditionally always sung in one part, he was also convinced that
chorales were sung in four parts during Luther’s era and that the voices were
independent in terms of melodic contour, though not rhythm.
Hæffner’s homophonic settings remained the model for many later arrangers.
The two major composite collections of student song repertoire, Axel Iwar Ståhl’s
Selected Collection of Student Songs (Vald samling af student-sånger, 1855) and Ivar
Hedenblad’s Student Song (Studentsången, vol. 1, 1883), show consistent levels of
homophonic writing. Ståhl’s compilation and the first volume in Hedenblad’s four-
volume series each contain one hundred songs; Ståhl’s 1855 collection includes songs
sung at five Nordic universities, while Hedenblad’s initial volume from 1883 reflects
predominantly the repertoire in Uppsala.166 In each case, approximately three-fourths of
the Scandinavian folksong settings are homophonic (Ståhl – 73% of fifteen folksong
settings; Hedenblad – 78% of nine settings). In contrast, strictly homophonic writing is
not particularly characteristic of the remaining non-folksong compositions, about two-
thirds of which include elements of rhythmic independence such as staggered vocal
entries, dotted rhythms in the uppermost voice set against straight rhythms in lower
165 Anders Dillmar, “Luther och Hæffners koralarbete,” Årsbok för svenskt gudstjänstliv 82 (2007): 175. This article does not specify which of Luther’s prefaces was reprinted in the landmark Danish hymnal by Hans Thomissøn (1569), but the Danish quotation referring to singing in four voices comes from Luther’s first preface, which first appeared in Johann Walther’s Geystliche Gesangk Buchleyn (1524). 166 An anonymous review of Hedenblad’s first volume generally approves of the selection of songs as representative of Uppsala’s repertoire but names eight standards in the repertoire that, in the author’s opinion, are missing, the first of which is the folksong “Fresh Spring Breezes.” See “Studentsången,” Aftonbladet (September 19, 1883): 3. The reviewer may have been pleased to note that “Vårvindar friska” was included in the second volume of the collection.
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voices, or passages of non-alignment such that the text must be printed separately for
one or more voices (Ståhl – 66% of eighty-five non-folksong settings; Hedenblad – 69%
of ninety-one settings).
Yet Hæffner’s choral folksong settings also break with his own religious chorale
practice. The basic note value for the folksongs is the quarter note, not the half-note
commonly used for his chorales, and the groupings of short and long notes in the
folksongs corresponds more closely to the natural prosody of the text, unlike in his
hymns, where syllables tend to be stretched to achieve a more even pulse.167 Another
difference is that Hæffner expressed a strong dislike of setting hymns in triple meters,
believing that Luther had never done so and that a “minuet meter” could never make a
chorale “as simple and sublime as it should be.”168 The same reservation does not hold
for folksongs, as five of his fourteen choral settings (or six of fifteen, if the probably
spurious “Skadi’s Lament” is included) are notated in triple or compound meters.
Furthermore, no folk melody originally in triple time is artificially altered to duple time,
as occurred with some of his hymn melodies.
Moving beyond Hæffner to some more general characteristics, the refrain
(omkväde), one of the crucial characteristics of the earliest layers of folksong
transcriptions, became less common in later layers, particularly after about 1845. Table
3.8elaborates upon a portion of Table 2.5 to show how the presence of refrains in male 167 For more on Hæffner’s adoption of Luther’s half-note chorale notation, see Dillmar, “Luther och Hæffners koralarbete,” 178–79. The rhythmicization of chorales became a controversial topic in the nineteenth century; see, for example, Folke Bohlin, “Kyrkans koral och liturgi,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 95–96. 168 Quoted in Dillmar, “Luther och Hæffners koralarbete,” 176.
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choral settings reflects the existence of songs originating both in the older, ballad-centric
and the newer, post-1845 layers.
Table 3.8: Refrains in piano-vocal settings and male choral arrangements
OMKVÄDE PIANO-VOCAL MALE (REFRAIN) OLD NEW CHORUS double 48% 3% 22% final only 35% 20% 20% middle only 1% — 1% none 16% 77% 58%
While the majority of male choral arrangements do not have refrains, this structural
feature is still present in over forty percent of settings. The ballad refrain, while no
longer ubiquitous, maintains its relevance in this genre.
In terms of harmony, arrangements adhere closely to common-practice
standards. As observed above, ballad melodies are only a portion of the overall folksong
repertoire, and on the whole, the corpus closely mirrors the tonality of the newer, post-
1845 layer of folksongs defined in Chapter Two. Table 3.9 below expands upon Table 2.6
to show how settings for male chorus, like the newer layer of folksong melodies in
general, are predominantly in the minor mode.
Table 3.9: Tonality/Modality in piano-vocal arrangements and male choral settings
TONALITY/MODALITY PIANO-VOCAL MALE OLD NEW CHORUS minor 29% 60% 61% major 15% 30% 26% modal 38% 3% 1% mixed 18% 7% 12%
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If modal, mostly Dorian-inflected writing is rare among the newer layer of piano-vocal
settings, it is almost nonexistent in choral settings. Even ballads without inflected
leading tones in the piano versions are altered to use a harmonic or melodic minor scale
in choral settings. As melodies drifted further from their oral sources, and the composers
who encountered them in print form had no experience hearing the “hovering” sixth
and seventh scale Hæffner described as features of the Nordic folk scale, keyboard-
based minor scales took over almost entirely.169
The incorporation of instrumental techniques into vocal lines also marks a small
number of settings, although this is less common in the 1800s than it would become in
the 1900s.170 Most common is a drone at the perfect fifth or octave in imitation of fiddle
strings. The solo vocal technique called trallning, in which nonsense syllables are used to
represent instrumental (usually fiddle) playing, is employed by full chorus on a few
occasions. Passages of con bocca chiusa writing, either in a prelude-interlude-postlude
scheme or supporting a solo texted voice, give voices the role of a piano in an
accompanied song, effectively opening the intimate performance space of the semi-
private salon to larger audiences in choral performances. In addition, some lyrics evoke
fiddling (“pling, pling, plång”) or dancing (“Hej, hopp”), although the underlying music
is not particularly evocative of instrumental techniques.171 In one case, however, the first
169 Hæffner, “Anmärkningar öfver gamla nordiska sången,” 100. 170 A similar situation obtains for German literature of this period. Ryan Minor finds that “creative uses of timbre were arguably as unimportant for choral composition as they were integral to orchestral music”; see Minor, “Choral Music and Choral Singing in Germany and Austria,” 117. 171 In “First, there shall be a crown and a wreath” (“Först skall det vara krona och krans,” Mankell) and “We Shall Arrange a Merry Dance” (“Vi ska ställa till en roliger dans,” anonymous), respectively.
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tenor part contains an added interjection (“Hejsan!”) not in the original lyrics,
transporting the performance to the dance floor where such vocal cries originate.172
Hæffner vs. Hæffner
One useful control group is to compare Hæffner’s piano-vocal settings in Geijer-
Afzelius (1814–18) with his own choral arrangements from the late 1820s to early 1830s.
Of Hæffner’s fifteen folksong settings for male chorus, thirteen have origins in Geijer-
Afzelius.173 These thirteen have thin textures in their piano-vocal settings, most often in
three parts; accompanimental lines are pianistically conceived, basic harmonies
frequently hold steady across one or more measures, and chords inconsistently thicken
to four or five voices. In no instance does Hæffner simply add a fourth voice to an
existing three-voice texture to create a choral arrangement nearly identical to the version
in Geijer-Afzelius. Rather, the shift in genre provides the opportunity for Hæffner to re-
visit the earlier version and, in many cases, complicate certain harmonic aspects.
In the choral versions, melodies are nearly always borrowed intact but
transposed to a different key.174 Since there is little reason to believe that most
172 “Suitor’s Song” (“Friarevisa,” anonymous). 173 The text to “Of Fortune and Honor we Heard a Song” (“Om lycka och ära vi hörde en sång”) was written in 1831 in honor of the birth of Prince Nicolaus August. Märta Ramsten traces the melody to Abraham Hülphers’ diary-notes from 1757, although Hülphers’ variant is in duple rather than Hæffner’s triple meter; see her brief article Märta Ramsten, “Om sommaren sköna (Litet vis- och låtlexikon),” Noterat 18 (2010): 173–74. The Tenor 1 volume of Hæffner’s published 1832 collection mistakenly prints “Om lycka och ära vi hörde en gång” (i.e. “Of fortune and honor we heard once,” rather than “Of fortune and honor we heard a song”); this error did not spread to subsequent sources. For Fahlcrantz’s occasional text, see Christian Eric Fahlcrantz, Chr. Er. Fahlcrantz’ Samlade skrifter, 1864, 11. “Skadi’s Lament” has been attributed to Hæffner in several sources, although I question this attribution; for evidence for and against, see n. 108 above. 174 Slight pitch alterations occur in “Duke Silfverdal” (m. 9), “Hillebrand” (m. 11), and “The Trial” (“Pröfningen,” m. 3).
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nineteenth-century folksong transcriptions were notated or first published in the key in
which informants performed, the new choice of key for the choral settings puts the
arrangements at a double remove from the source material. As a rule, bass lines become
more active than the piano bass parts, which often move with a slower harmonic rhythm
than the melody does. Long notes and rests in the piano version are filled in with chords
that match the melodic rhythm. In such passages, later composers might have opted to
keep one or two voices as an instrumental drone, but Hæffner never uses voices in this
manner. When passages in the two versions are harmonized differently, it is more
common for the beginnings of pieces or sections to have fewer changes and the later
parts to have more changes, although this is not universally the case.
The most significant of Hæffner’s alterations is his tendency to weaken the final
cadence in the choral versions. In just over half of these settings, a root-position V(or V7)
– i (or I) cadence in Geijer-Afzelius is replaced in his choral version by an inversion of
the subtonic vii˚(7), the supertonic ii˚, or an unusual inversion of the dominant (V4/2 or
V6/4). As a result, the final bass motion cannot copy the conclusive rising-fourth or
falling-fifth motion of the piano versions; instead, it either descends a single step down
to the tonic (not as part of a chain of five steps falling from the dominant) or leaps in the
“wrong” direction, i.e. down a fourth or up a fifth. In theory, Hæffner could have
attempted to re-introduce his concept of the ancient Nordic scale by training choral
singers to reproduce the sväfning (“hovering; levitating”) he identifies in altered scale
degrees 6 and 7. In practice, however, there seems to have been little support at that time
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for incorporating such details of performance practice into classical applications of folk
music. Instead, by weakening more than half of the final cadences and breaking with
modern expectations for bass motion, Hæffner found a different way to give these
settings a degree of otherness not present in his piano-vocal versions.
Cronhamn vs. Cronhamn
An anonymous set of arrangements for solo voice and guitar (Swedish Folksongs;
Svenska folk-visor, 1839) possibly arranged by Johan Peter Cronhamn was mentioned
above in connection with Mankell’s undated choral arrangements.175 Six of these titles
also appear in Cronhamn’s Swedish Folksongs Set for Male Voices (Svenska folkvisor satta för
mansröster, 1841), and a seventh is attributed to him in two other collections. However,
differences between the two versions of four of these seven settings cast doubt on the
hypothesis of Cronhamn’s connection with the 1839 volume.
Three cases are fairly minor, with discrepancies in dotted vs. straight rhythms
and a few pitches. These are not of individual interest, though as a group, they show a
higher degree of intervention than might be expected if the same composer were
involved in both collections. In the fourth case, “I See in Your Eyes” (“Jag ser uppå dina
ögon”), similar small variations are present, but substantial differences also exist
between the texts, the first verses of which are given below.176
175 See p. 125. 176 The 1839 volume includes three verses, and the 1841 text exists in at least four verses in other sources; there is no overlap among these additional stanzas, either.
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1839 (“Cronhamn” voice + guitar) 1841 (Cronhamn male chorus) Jag ser uppå dina ögon Jag ser uppå dina ögon att du har en annan kär; att du har en annan kär; derför kära lilla vännen, ack! skönsta lilla vännen, säg hvilken den är? säg hvem det då är. Men när som jag blir döder Då ville jag så gerna och lagder uppå bår, vara redelig mot dig, skänk då min trogna kärlek så länge som mitt hjerta en saknadens tår. det röres i mig. I can see in your eyes I can see in your eyes that you love another; that you love another; therefore, dear little friend, oh! most beautiful little friend, tell me which one it is? tell me who it is. But when I am dead Then I would so gladly and laid upon the bier, be faithful to you, grant my faithful love as long as my heart a tear of regret. moves within me.
After two identical and two similar lines, the texts diverge completely in the second half
of the strophe (underlined). Eva Danielson’s research on this song in Noterat, the journal
of the Center for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research, states that the text has been
associated with at least two different melodies—a “concert melody” found in many
published arrangements and heard often on the concert stage, and one or more sung by
people in general (“folk i allmänhet”)—yet no mention is made of variant texts
associated with the “concert melody.”177 It turns out that among the twenty instances of
choral arrangements consulted in this study, the text found in the 1839 volume is by far
the most prevalent, while the version in Cronhamn’s 1841 setting is shared with just two
copies of a different arrangement of anonymous origin. Of the seven pieces found in
177 The article also mentions that the first printing of “Jag ser uppå dina ögon” together with a melody occurred in a collection by Mankell in 1840. However, the 1839 volume discussed here is both dated on the title page and listed in the March 1839 volume of a major book catalog, making it the first known edition containing both text and tune; see “Musik,” Svensk bibliographi för år 1839, no. 3 (March 1839): 23.
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both Cronhamn (1841) and the anonymous volume published by Hedbom (1839), it is
striking that only three melodies occur in identical versions, simple transposition
notwithstanding. Four have some different pitches and/or rhythms, and one of these
essentially has a different text. A substantial amount of overlap among titles and a
paucity of discrepancies between these two collections would lend credence to the claim
that Cronhamn arranged the 1839 guitar settings, but there are too many differences to
draw a firm conclusion.
The pool of folksong arrangements so laboriously copied out in partbooks or
mass-produced in print form tells only part of the story; a closer look at who sang them,
and when, and why, will flesh out their position in social history.
Performing politics: From nationalism to pan-nationalism
Male choral repertoire came to life through the sounding voices of the students who
sang it. Historically, higher education in Sweden was closely bound with religion, but as
society became more secular in the 1800s, the make-up of the student body changed
accordingly: the proportion of sons of clergy fell and the share of students of middle-
class or noble background rose, a shift that helped precipitate political involvement in
national questions by mid-century.178 In addition, the average age of students increased
slightly in the first decades of choral singing. Around 1800, it was not uncommon for
younger boys under age fifteen to enroll as university students under the supervision of
individual tutors; but by the 1830s, when the Uppsala Student Singing Society was
178 Lindroth, A History of Uppsala University 1477–1977, 180.
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founded, this practice had ceased, with the consequence that the voices of all potential
singers would already have developed adult ranges. The author and historian Bernhard
von Beskow was one of these young students, enrolling at age eleven in 1807, a year
prior to Hæffner’s arrival.179 Beskow later recalled in his memoirs that Hæffner recruited
boys to sing the soprano and alto parts in early performances of SATB literature as it
would have been impossible at the time to convince a woman to perform in public,
although Hæffner’s two daughters did sing some solo parts.180 Here, Beskow is referring
to choral pieces included in concerts given by the mostly-instrumental Akademiska
kapellet, which took place more than two decades before the Uppsala Student Singing
Society was founded.181 Although the reliability of Beskow’s memoirs has been
challenged (see n. 52 above), he shows that, early in the century, SATB choral music was
occasionally present at university functions. However, by the time folksong
arrangements entered the repertoire around 1830, TTBB was the choral standard for
students. Until 1872, when Betty Petterson (1838–85) sought and received permission to
enroll at Uppsala, the student population at both Swedish universities was entirely
male.182
179 For more on Bernhard von Beskow, see Ivar Simonsson, “Bernhard Beskow, von,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1924): 4:65, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/Sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=18136. 180 Beskow, Levnadsminnen, 63–64. 181 Although the Akademiska kapellet in Uppsala had focused primarily on vocal music in earlier generations, it had become mostly an instrumental ensemble in the years prior to Hæffner’s tenure; see Folke Bohlin, “Från Haeffner till Alfvén,” in Akademiska kapellet i Uppsala under 350 år: En översikt - från “chorus musicus” till symfonisk samverkan, ed. Anna Johnson, Uppsala University 500 years 13 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1977), 35. 182 The following year, 1873, women received the right to study all university subjects except for theology. For more on Betty Pettersson, see Britta Lövgren, “Betty M C Pettersson,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1995–97): 29:245, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/Sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=7224.
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As has been noted earlier, the most substantial study of Swedish male choral
song to date, Leif Jonsson’s dissertation “Guardians of Enlightenment: 19th-Century
Student Songs as a Form of ‘Public Art’ in Swedish Society” (“Ljusets riddarvakt: 1800-
talets studentsång utövad som offentlig samhällskonst”) draws on a tripartite
periodicization with the initial establishment of student song (1808–45), political
Scandinavianism (1845–64), and increasing industrialism (post-1864). The first division-
point in 1845 reflects a growing intellectual and political will—spurred largely by
students—in favor of a united Scandinavia in the 1840s and 1850s; 1845 is the year in
which students from the universities in Sweden, Denmark and Norway convened the
first of several joint meetings that would take place over the next three decades. The
second division-point, 1864, is often singled out as the year in which everything
changed.183 Momentum in favor of Scandinavian cooperation was cut short when
Prussian and Austrian soldiers took control of the duchies of Slesvig (Schleswig) and
Holstein from Denmark.184 Sweden, fearing a reprisal from Russia, did not send soldiers
to assist Denmark, and the idea of a united Scandinavia lost its currency. However, as
will become apparent, there was more cultural continuity before and after 1864 than is
often acknowledged.
183 See, for example, Kari Haarder Ekman, Mitt hems gränser vidgades: En studie i den kulturella skandinavismen under 1800-talet, Centrum för Danmarksstudier 23 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2010), 10. 184 For a concise account of Danish-Scandinavian history from 1850–64, see Stewart P. Oakley, A Short History of Denmark (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 180–89. Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen analyzes in more detail how the identity of people in Slesvig/Schleswig developed from the region’s political and linguistic history; see “The Duchy of Schleswig — Political Status and Identities,” in Vid gränsen: Integration och identitet i det förnationella Norden, ed. Harald Gustafsson and Hanne Sanders, Centrum för Danmarksstudier 10 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2006), 180–203.
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The following sections, therefore, will not proceed strictly chronologically. The
role that the performance of folksong settings played in student political movements
will be examined in three overlapping contexts. In the initial period, from approximately
1808 to the early 1840s, I argue that students sang Swedish folksongs to assert national
identity and build fraternal camaraderie. The second module begins in the late 1830s
and runs through 1875, as students from the universities in Sweden, Denmark and
Norway met together and advocated—partly through song—for political and cultural
unity among the Scandinavian nations. The third performance context analyzed here
runs largely parallel with the second, examining the role of formal performances by
choirs in Uppsala and Lund from 1845 until the end of the century.
Initial establishment: National identity (1808–1840s)
Initially, student song was not oriented towards concerts in the formal sense. Although
the Uppsala Student Singing Society was founded in 1830, a constitution was not drawn
up until 1842, and the document does not mention public concerts, the first of which
only occurred in 1845.185 Rather, two performance outlets during this early period were
ceremonial university functions and outdoor serenades. The earliest mentions of choral
folksong on ceremonial occasions come from 1831 and 1832, bookending the publication
of Hæffner’s arrangements. Both songs performed on these occasions have newly
composed occasional texts, and both use the same melody—a folk melody which, by the
1830s, was commonly associated with a text dating back to the 1660s, “In the beautiful 185 For an overview of the first 200 years of student song in Uppsala, see Bohlin, “Fyrstämmig studentsång: Ett 200-årsminne,” 8.
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summer, when the land rejoices” (“Om sommaren sköna, när marken hon gläds”).186 All
three texts—the original, as well as the two newer poems—are of known authorship,
which reinforces the finding that, through the century as a whole, university choruses
privileged the combination of a traditional, anonymous melody with a literarily
conceived text as the ideal form of folksong. The familiar melody marked these songs as
Swedish in origin, while the occasional texts with their elevated language continued an
earlier Romantic tradition of reading celebratory poetry aloud on festive occasions.187
The informal singing of partsong was an even more widespread performance
context, especially during the first few decades of organized student song. In a two-
volume set of books that oriented incoming students to the geography, history, and
academic culture of Uppsala and its surrounding regions in the 1840s, the student Carl
Johan Bergman prepares the new arrivals for the nocturnal serenades that periodically
disturbed the sleep of residents:
You have hardly fallen asleep after a hot day’s strenuous walking, before you are awakened from your seraphic dreams, awakened by sounds so wonderful that they seem to belong to the dreams themselves. It is the serenade of students sounding outside your window. You can hear all the songs of longing and delight sung in Uppsala, from “Fine Crystal” to “Hulda Rosa,” from “Earth and Heaven” to “My Life is a Wave,” one after the other in euphony. One quartet takes up as another leaves off, and it continues like this all through the night. 188
186 “Om lycka och ära,” text by Christian Eric Fahlcrantz, was performed during the celebration held on November 17–18, 1831 in honor of the birth of Prince August, Duke of Dalarna; on November 6, 1832, the Uppsala Student Singing Society performed “Crushed, O Svea, in the Bonds of Servitude” (“Förkrossad, O Svea, i träldomens makt”), text by Elias Vilhelm Ruda, during the annual Gustaf Adolf Fest. See Kallstenius, Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia, 56, 58–59. Märta Ramsten traces the history of the melody in “Om sommaren sköna,” 173. Hæffner’s musical setting of this tune is found, with different words, in Example 3.7 on p. 187. 187 Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 130. 188 “Ty knappt har ni inslumrat efter en het dags mödosamma promenader, förr än ni väckes ur edra serafiska drömmar, och väckes af toner så underbara, som tillhörde de dessa drömmar. Det är Studenternas
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Bergman’s representation of outdoor serenading includes two folksongs that
occur often in handwritten and printed settings (“Fine Crystal”/”Kristallen den fina”
and “Earth and Heaven”/”Jord och himmel jag”). The most common arrangements of
these two songs, which are not ballads and are not found in Geijer-Afzelius, are by Otto
Tullberg, the first official leader of the Uppsala Student Singing Society in the 1830s, and
Johan Erik Nordblom (1788–1848), who succeeded Hæffner as director musices at Uppsala
University. However, since the earliest known copies of these particular settings date
from the 1840s, and Bergman’s text was published in 1842, it is possible that he may be
referring to arrangements by John Peter Cronhamn, which seem to survive only in a
single set of handwritten partbooks at Uppsala University labeled “Lagrelius 1834”;
Cronhamn’s versions may have been current in Uppsala until they were replaced by
newer arrangements.189 Furthermore, the composers of the other two pieces Bergman
mentions by name are well known for their folksong arrangements: “Hulda Rosa” is by
Hæffner, whose connections with folksong have already been shown, while “My Life is
a Wave” is by C. J. O. Laurin, whose settings of “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” and
“Manhood, Bravery, and Daring Men” (“Mandom, mod och morska män”) are among
the most commonly found folksong settings for male chorus during the second half of
the nineteenth century.
Serenad, som klingar utanför ert fönster. Allt hvad Upsala-sången har trånande och ljuft, från “Kristallen den fina” till “Hulda Rosa,” från “Jord och himmel jag” till “Mitt lif är en våg,” hör ni derute i vexlande välljud. Och den ena sångqvartetten aflöser den andra, och så fortsättes det natten om.” Carl Johan Bergman, Upsala och dess nejder (Jönköping: J.E. Lundström, 1842), viii–ix. 189 “Kvartettböcker, Lagrelius 1834, komplett,” Allmänna sången arkiv, NC 82E, S-Uu.
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During this early stage, the singing of Swedish folksongs primarily reinforced
inward-looking identities: singers believed that these songs emerged in Herderian
fashion over generations from the collective soul of the people and projected a common
heritage across the nation. Everything that developed inside the borders was Swedish.
The use of these melodies in annual festivities honoring various royalty celebrated their
Swedish origins.190 In addition to this, when used as informal serenades, folksongs
helped reinforce the collective identity of students. Relative to the country as a whole,
students formed two tiny, close-knit populations in Uppsala and Lund, and during this
early period, singing became a major catalyst for the development of social life.
Folksongs from countries other than German-speaking lands were rare in the repertoire
until the 1840s; when folk material was sung, national heritage stood at the forefront.
Choral Scandinavianism (late 1830s–1875)
Near the end of this initial period of student song, students from the Swedish and other
Nordic universities began to attend meetings at each others’ institutions. The purpose of
these joint meetings was to foster a sense of comradeship between students of different
institutions and to advocate for unity among the Scandinavian nations. Outwardly,
many features of these student meetings—singing, speeches, parades, meals—were
adapted from ceremonial functions as they were celebrated prior to this point at
individual universities; however, rather than continuing to build a sense of
Swedishness, students in Lund, and soon also in Uppsala, began to foster a sense of 190 Academic festivals were celebrated with vary degrees of regularity in honor of Karl XII (November 30), Prince Oscar (December 1), Gustaf Vasa (June 6), and Gustaf II Adolf (November 6).
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shared heritage and common outlook with their Danish and Norwegian counterparts.
In the present day, the term “Scandinavia” is often understood to refer to
Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as opposed to the phrase “the Nordic countries,” which
also includes Iceland, Finland, and the Faroe Islands. Until the very end of the
nineteenth century, however, these two terms were basically synonymous in the larger
geographical sense: Iceland and the Faroe Islands were possessions of Denmark, while
many Swedes still had hope of regaining Finland from Russian control.191 While the
signs of cooperation among students are most visible through the meetings involving
Swedish, Danish and Norwegian students, it should be remembered that Finnish
students from the University of Helsingfors were also invited to attend the meetings;
however, the Tsar, also known as the Grand Duke of the supposedly autonomous Grand
Duchy of Finland, refused to grant them travel permission to attend.192
Nationalism across borders: The pan-Scandinavian movement
Just as the region “Scandinavia” has had varied meanings, the Scandinavianism
movement is an umbrella term that applies to different conceptions of and plans for
cooperation among Scandinavian states. While the most concrete advocation for unity
originated largely with the generation of university students in the 1830s and 1840s,
certain general trends can be seen among adherents from each country. On the Danish
side, a united Scandinavian front against German claims on Slesvig was a primary
motivating factor. However, as Scandinavianism began to spread beyond the Lund-
191 Ekman, Mitt hems gränser vidgades, 11. 192 Erik Ronne and Marta Ronne, “Studentmötet 1875,” Ergo, August 2005.
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Copenhagen region, a different argument proved more persuasive in Sweden: together,
a united Scandinavia could provide the might to stand up to Russia and possibly even
regain Finland. However, this idea was not without its problems, as some Swedes
preferred the idea of a larger Scandinavian-German alliance against Russia—an
impossibility in the anti-Prussian political climate of Denmark. In Norway, geographical
conditions created yet other understandings of Scandinavianism: with little direct threat
from either Russia or German powers, there was little perceived need to join in a
Scandinavian political union. On the contrary, Norwegians were reticent to reconcile
with Denmark after centuries of occupation, and even the present union with Sweden
was an undesireable situation; as a result, Norwegian perspectives on Scandinavianism
tended to favor strengthening cultural ties rather than political bonds.193
The distinction between cultural and political Svandinavianism is not always
clear in scholarly accounts, where the political side tends to dominate; however, Kari
Haarder Ekman has argued convincingly that the roles should be reversed, and that
cultural Scandinavianism should be viewed as the leading factor.194 Ekman re-frames the
common understanding of “Scandinavianism” by applying the term “political
Scandinavianism,” which she defines as a short-term movement towards a union under
193 For diverging Danish, Swedish and Norwegian perspectives on Scandinavianism, see John Danstrup, “Den politiske Skandinavismen i perioden 1830–50,” Scandia 16, no. 2 (1944): 221–32. Norwegian students were also slower than their Danish and Swedish counterparts to take up this cause; see Fredrik Collett, “The Christiania University’s 50 Years Celebration in 1861: National Pride and Scandinavian Solidarity,” in National, Nordic or European? Nineteenth-Century University Jubilees and Nordic Cooperation, ed. Pieter Dhondt, History of Science and Medicine Library 25 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 89. See also Kydland, “Song in the Service of Politics and the Building of Norway,” 63. 194 Ekman, Mitt hems gränser vidgades, 10–11.
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a common monarch in which each country would come to the others’ defense against,
for example, Germany and Russia; in this sense, Scandinavianism is said to have faltered
between 1850 and 1864, when it ceased entirely. This traditional, politically oriented
view gives a misleading picture of the extent of cross-border cooperation in the longer
term. In this respect, Ekman’s revised definition of Scandiniavianism in general as “a
successful cultural movement that took on political elements for a limited time” more
accurately describes the choral activity that furthered common Scandinavian agendas.195
As popular as Scandinavism came to be during its peak in the years around 1850,
it was not universally admired. In the intial stages from the 1830s until about 1843, it
was very much an opposition movement at odds with both king and government in
Denmark and Sweden.196 Later on, even as official steps towards joint activity were
taking place, not all social groups who were actively invested in the idea approved of it.
Åke Holmberg calls attention to reaction to a proposal within the Swedish Parliament
(riksdag) to introduce common systems of money, weights and measures within
Scandinavia in 1863. While the Parliament ultimately decided to look into the matter
further, the Estate of the Peasants (bondeståndet) was against giving up the current
systems.197 In the end, no substantial action was taken, and the political fallout between
Sweden and Denmark over the defense of the province of Slesvig against German attack
195 “[S]kandinavismen var en framgångsrik kulturell rörelse som under en period fick politiska inslag.” Ekman, Mitt hems gränser vidgades. 196 Collett, “The Christiania University’s 50 Years Celebration in 1861,” 89. See also Danstrup, “Den politiske Skandinavismen i perioden 1830–50,” 219. 197 Åke Holmberg, “On the Practicability of Scandinavianism: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Debate and Aspirations,” Scandinavian Journal of History 9, no. 2–3 (1984): 180.
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the following year definitively ended the discussion. Nevertheless, the pan-
Scandinavianism movement began largely with university students before becoming a
political question, and the university choirs continued to promote cross-border musical
cooperation long after the politicians gave up on the idea.198
Sounds of Scandinavia at Nordic student meetings
A key moment in early Scandinavian thought—a symbolic thawing in the
cultural relations between Sweden and Denmark—took place in Lund in 1829, when
Swedish students invited the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) to attend
their degree ceremony in Lund Cathedral. There, the noted poet, bishop, and former
professor Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846) crowned Oehlenschläger with laurel, naming him
“the Nordic king of poets” (“den nordiska sångarekungen”) and heir to Goethe’s
throne.199 In his poetic address, Tegnér famously announced:
The time of division is over — and it never should have existed in the free, infinite realm of the spirit — and kindred tones sounding across the strait delight us now, your tones in particular.200
198 Scandinavianism continued in certain other venues as well. For example, Peter Aronsson calls attention to two Scandinavia-oriented monuments from later decades. The monument in Lund commemorating the 200th anniversary of the final battle between Sweden and Denmark (1676) notes that peoples of both countries share a common tribe and culture, while the monument erected on the Swedish-Norwegian border in 1914 to celebrate Nordic peace is inscribed with the motto, “Hereafter shall war between Scandinavian brothers be impossible” (“Hädanefter skall krig mellan skandinaviska bröder vara omöjligt”). See Peter Aronsson, “Exhibiting Scandinavian Culture: The National Museums of Denmark and Sweden,” in Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present, ed. Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 2012), 169. 199 This moment was fixed on canvas in 1866 in Constantin Hansen’s famous painting, Tegnér crowns Oehlenschläger in Lund Cathedral 1829 (Tegnér bekransar Oehlenschläger i Lunds domkyrka 1829), which is located in the Museum of National History (Det Nationalhistoriske Museet) at Fredriksborg Castle in Hillerød, Denmark. 200 “Söndringens tid är förbi — och hon borde ej funnits i andens / fria, oändliga värld —, och besläktade toner, som klinga / Sundet utöfver, förtjusa oss nu, och synnerligt dina.” Esaias Tegnér, “Vid
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Only the previous year, a steamship had begun regular service across the Öresund,
shortening the effective distance between Sweden and Denmark; this important
infrastructural development not only facilitated the transportation of individuals, but
also the spread of ideas and news between these two peoples who were starting to see
themselves as culturally related, rather than historical enemies.201
Despite the heat-based technology of the steam engine and the ensuing
metaphorical thaw in cultural relations, it was an unusually frigid winter that most
directly precipitated the student meetings. During the winter of 1837–38, when the ice-
covered Öresund was impassable by boat, groups of students walking across the ice
from Lund to Copenhagen and vice versa happened to meet mid-way, and discussions
about further meetings ensued.202 Danish students attended the degree ceremony in
Lund in 1838, and the following year, Swedish students made a formal visit to
Copenhagen. The circle was widened in a meeting in Uppsala in 1843, and Norwegian
students first participated two years later in Copenhagen. An overview of official
Magisterpromotionen i Lund,” in Esaias Tegner. Erik Gustaf Geijer, vol. VIII of Sveriges national-litteratur 1500–1900, edited by O[tto] Sylwan (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1911), 115. 201 Jonas Harvard and Magdalena Hillström, “Media Scandinavianism: Media Events and the Historical Legacy of Pan-Scandinavianism,” in Communicating the North: Media Structures and Images in the Making of the Nordic Region, ed. Jonas Harvard and Peter Stadius (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 78. In 2000, a new chapter of communication opened with the completion of the Öresund Bridge/Tunnel linking Malmö with Copenhagen. 202 A brief history of the first meetings—impromptu and intentional alike—is found in Det skandinaviska student-tåget 1856 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1856), 3. As the crow flies, the two universities are about twenty-five miles apart, with the majority of the most direct route being over open water. The shortest water crossing is about eight miles. As Kari Haarder Ekman points out, not only was crossing on the ice cheaper than purchasing a ticket for the steamship, it also permitted students to make the journey without the otherwise obligatory need for a passport; see Mitt hems gränser vidgades, 61–63.
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meetings is given in Table 3.10, along with a few additional gatherings of students from
multiple universities for other ceremonial purposes. The host of each respective meeting
is underlined, and the events officially designated as student meetings are marked in
bold font. 203
Table 3.10: Nordic student meetings
Year Host(s) and other participants Nature of meeting (official student meetings in bold)
1839 Copenhagen Lund Lund University degree ceremony 1842 Copenhagen Lund Student meeting 1843 Copenhagen Lund Uppsala Scandinavian student meeting 1845 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 1st Nordic student meeting204 1851 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Student meeting; Uppsala delegates did
not attend due to scheduling conflict 1852 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 2nd Nordic student meeting 1856 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 3rd Nordic student meeting; scheduled
for 1855, but delayed for political reasons
1861 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala Dedication for the new building of the Student Society (Studentersamfund)
1862 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 4th Nordic student meeting; scheduled for 1861, but delayed for political reasons
1868 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 200th anniversary of Lund University
1869 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 5th Nordic student meeting; scheduled for 1867, but delayed for political reasons
1875 Christiania Copenhagen Lund Uppsala 6th (and last) Nordic student meeting
As with many university festivities, singing was a central feature of all student
meetings. Arrivals, meals, outdoor parades, concerts, speeches, and departures all called
203 The only meeting officially hosted jointly by two universities was in 1862. In general, however, students stopped and celebrated in towns as they traveled to their hosts, and secondary celebrations often occurred in Lund and/or Copenhagen on the way to or from Uppsala and Christiania. 204 Although students from the University of Helsingfors in Finland were invited to this and several other meetings, they did not receive travel permission to attend; see n. 192 above.
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for singing, and many choir singers from each participating institution—along with their
directors—were always in attendance.205 Published accounts of individual meetings
include copious numbers of song texts written specifically for each occasion,206 and a
volume issued in 1856 consists of texts for a total of ninety-eight songs sung at the four
meetings between 1843–52.207 While words were fastidiously documented, however, less
is recorded about the melodies. A few titles do include “timbres”—instructions
indicating which tune should be used—including one folk melody in particular (to be
discussed below), but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Tracing the folksongs actually sung at student meetings is further impeded by
the fact that, often, published accounts give only vague mentions such as this official
account from 1842:
After [the students from Copenhagen] had alighted from their wagons and been welcomed by their Swedish friends [in Lund], the two large groups blended together and marched up to Lundagård, while the two united choirs sang together and Swedish and Danish flags led the parade.208
205 The opera singer Carl Fredrik Lundqvist (1841–1920), who attended the 1862 meeting in Copenhagen, reports that some choir singers, including himself, received partial subsidies (“vissa lättnader i utgifterna”) in order to be able to participate. Lundquist also records that singers were given preference on the crowded steamship journey and were permitted sleep in beds in cabins, whereas many other students slept on the floor in cargo space and shared salons. See his memoirs, Minnen och anteckningar: En blick tillbaka på mitt lif (Stockholm: Geber, 1908), 91–92. 206 Detailed, official accounts of individual student meetings include the following: Skandinaviska studenternas möte i juni 1843 (Stockholm: Dalman, 1843); Det nordiska studentmötet i Köpenhamn, år 1845 (Göteborg: Ekbohrns, 1845); Studenttåg till Christiania 1852 från Upsala (Upsala: Leffler, 1854); Det skandinaviska student-tåget 1856; Studentmötet i Lund och Köpenhamn, 1862 (Upsala: Schultz, 1863); Studentmötet i Kristiania 1869 (Lund: Berlingska boktryckeriet, 1871). While no official account of the 1875 meeting was published in Sweden, Peter Bagge describes the event in his memoirs, Minnen från Uppsala katedralskola läsåren 1874–1899 även som från studentmötet i Uppsala 1875 (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1922), 61–72. 207 Sange ved Studentermöderne i Upsala, Lund, Kjöbenhavn, Christiania. 1843. 1845. 1851. 1852. (Copenhagen: Skandinaviske Selskab, 1856). 208 “Sedan dessa stigit ur vagnarne och blifvit välkomnade af sina svenska kamrater, tågade de båda talrika skarorna, blandade om hvarandra, under sång af de tvenne förenade sångföreningarne och med de svenska
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When titles and/or song texts are stated, they are usually either newly written for the
occasion, well-known student marches, or serving in the capacity of (semi-)official
national or royal anthems.209 Given that the various choirs all had folksongs in their
repertoire, it can be assumed that traditional song was part of the festivities more often
than it appears by name.210 Among the few Swedish folksongs mentioned by title are
“Fine Crystal” (1845 and 1862), “The Song of Värmland” (1845), and “Necken’s Polska”
(1869)—which also happen to be the three folksongs found in the highest number of
male choral sources (Table 3.6).
One set of Danish folksongs is mentioned by name in 1845, though the
circumstances of performance are inconclusive. Arrangements of the ballads “Little
Tove,” “The Tournament,” “A Summer’s Day,” “Sven Vonved” and “Verner Ravn”
attributed to C. Brandt were performed as part of a formal concert at Tivoli Gardens
consisting mostly of instrumental and vocal excerpts from operas and popular dance
music.211 Regimental bandleader Henrik Braunstein conducted the ensemble, likely the
First Brigade Brass Band, and an unspecified choir participated in a chorus from
och danska fanorna i têten, upp till Lundagård.” See “Besök i Lund af danska studenter,” in Aftonbladet (June 14, 1842): 2. Lundagård Park in Lund, and its counterpart Odinslund in Uppsala, were important gathering places for students in general, and choral singers in particular. 209 The volume of collected songs sung at the four meetings between 1843–52 includies ninety-eight entries; most if not all were original texts written for the occasion, as no familiar staple from the repertoire prior to that time is included. Sange ved Studentermöderne. 210 For a brief, unusually specific report on the topic of folksongs sung at the 1845 meeting in Copenhagen, including six titles, see Richard Dybeck’s write-up in his journal, Runa (1845): 107. Dybeck likely received this information from his friend and fellow folksong enthusiast Oscar Meijerberg (see epigraph to the Acknowledgements, p. xxi), who led the Uppsala Student Song Organization during the event. 211 “Tovelille,” “Tournering,” “En sommardag”; Det nordiska studentmötet i Köpenhamn, år 1845, 89.
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Rossini’s Le Comte d’Ory, likely performed the unspecified Swedish songs by Otto
Lindblad, and may well have sung these five heroic ballads.212 While Brandt’s
arrangements have not yet definitively surfaced, male choral arrangements have
survived for the first three of these titles, two of which are as yet anonymous. An 1864
volume of ballad texts published by Danish priest and author Carl Joakim Brandt (1817–
89) includes all five titles, yet there is no historical indication that this Brandt was active
as an arranger or composer; the melodic references he gives refer to existing published
collections of melodies by Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse and Andreas Peter
Berggreen. Thus, both the provenance and the performers of these Danish ballads
performed in 1845 remain unknown.
On other occasions, surviving evidence allows for more in-depth analysis of
performance context. The following section will discuss how folksongs and their
contrafacta furthered the development of a common Scandinavian identity. Instead of
merely evoking the individual nation’s past, folksong brought a promise—even a full-
fledged vision—of a new cooperative future.
Metaphor: A new Scandinavian dawn
A consistent metaphor underscores much of the pan-Scandinavian rhetoric, one
that also finds expression through folksong. The opening two paragraphs of the official
account of the 1843 meeting in Uppsala, the first meeting to expand beyond the local
212 For an overview of Braunstein’s conducting activity at Tivoli Gardens, see Knud Arne Jürgensen’s Introduction to Telegraph-Galop, by Hans Christian Lumbye, ed. Niels Bo Foltmann, trans. Dan A. Marmorstein (Copenhagen: Dansk Center for Musikudgivelse, 2010), 3.
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Lund/Copenhagen region, introduce the metaphor of a dawn of Scandinavian
cooperation emerging out of the long night of discord: thanks to the combined efforts of
the students, light and truth are replacing the darkness of old prejudices and
fortifications.213 The pastor and historian Arvid August Afzelius—the mastermind
between the original folksong publications of 1814–18—accompanied one of his sons to
the student meeting in Copenhagen in June 1845 and published his journal of his trip the
following year. While on the boat from Copenhagen to Ystad, Afzelius recorded an
entry in which he compares the current state of potential for Scandinavian cooperation
with the refrain from a well-known ballad:
I am sitting in my cabin and writing this last page about the visit to Copenhagen — and I think: What time is it? — It is not yet day; for as long as mistrust, hate and prejudice are working against light and love, it is twilight. But I have seen many a morning star over there [in Copenhagen] — and several in the skies of my native district [Enköping, Sweden] — and when I think of them in the midst of my desolation, I sometimes sing to myself the words of this folksong refrain: “No daylight is yet visible; / But the stars in the heavens, / They glitter.”214
These lines form the final refrain of the ballad “St. Stephen’s Song” or “Stephen’s Song”
(“St. Staffans Visa” or “Staffansvisan”), which has retained its popularity and counts
among the best-known and most-sung ballads today.215 Given the seasonal nature of the
213 Skandinaviska studenternas möte i juni 1843, 3. 214 “Jag sitter i min hytt och nedskrifver detta sista blad, om vistandet i Köpenhamn — och tänker: Hvad lider tiden? — Det är ännu icke dag; ty så länge ännu misstro, hat och fördomar arbeta mot ljus och kärlek, är det skymning. Men mången morgonstjerna har jag sett derborta — och mången på min hembyggds himmel — och då jag så uti min enslighet på dem tänker, sjunger jag stundom för mig sjelf dessa Omqvädets ord i Folksången: ‘Ingen dager synes än; / Men stjernorna på himmelen, / De blänka.’”Arvid August Afzelius, Blad ur en dagbok under studentfärden till Köpenhamn i juni månad 1845 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1846), 71–72. 215 Like the English carol “Good King Wenceslas,” “St. Stephen’s Song” is specific to the day after Christmas; see Geijer-Afzelius, III:206. This tradition was mentioned as early as the 1720s in Olof Broman’s Glysisvallur;
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refrain, the stars shining in a dark sky conjure up visions of the long Scandinavian
winter nights, but Afzelius recalled these words on the night of June 28, 1845, when the
sun would have slipped below the horizon for not quite 6.5 hours at his latitude. Stars
would have appeared, but the line “No daylight is yet visible” can hardly apply when
the light never completely disappeared in the first place. Rather, Afzelius means that
cooperative sentiments such as those shared so pointedly at the student meeting boded
well for a shared Scandinavian future. These same lines from “St. Stephen’s Song”
appear as a motto on the front cover of the 1856 compilation of song texts from student
meetings.216 Prior to the early 1840s, folksong in Sweden had a distinctly historical
function as a means of documenting, celebrating, and reviving a lost past. Now,
however, it also began to acquire forward-looking properties anticipating a new future.
Singing the Danish folksong “Roeskilde” in Roskilde Cathedral
Another folksong served less as metaphor and more as conduit drawing the
future out of the past. During an excursion as part of the 1862 meeting in Copenhagen,
representatives from the Uppsala Student Singing Society sang the Danish folksong
“Roeskilde” inside Roskilde Cathedral.217 According to the official account, the
performance was unplanned; but as it began to rain at the end of a tour of the cathedral,
see Jonsson, Sveriges medeltida ballader 2:29. Currently, the song remains in the popular caroling and concert repertoire throughout the entire Advent and Christmas period. 216 Sange ved Studentermöderne. 217 Studentmötet i Lund och Köpenhamn, 1862, 98. The title of the folksong is invariably spelled “Roeskilde” in sources, while the modern name of the town in which the Cathedral is located is “Roskilde.”
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all of the guests remained inside a while longer, and the students from Uppsala
performed an impromptu concert of several pieces, including “Roeskilde.”218 The fact
that Swedish, rather than Danish, students performed this song is significant: the text
refers to ancient Danish royal and religious figures, but cast in the light of common
Scandinavian heritage, the “bygone” is a shared Nordic past, while the “whispers of
new times” becomes a vision of a joint future. Here is the first strophe of the text by
Bernhard Severin Ingermann (1789–1862), which is paired with a traditional melody:
Fra Issefjorden det bruser i Kongegravenes Bye; Om gamle Tid det suser, det hvisker om Tider nye. Blandt Konger Saxo hviler, Bisp Villeem hos Kong Svend, Fra Graven Margrette smiler med fred till Nordens Maend.
Sounds from the Ise Fjord echo in the royal burial grounds; There are murmurs of bygone days, and whispers of new times. Saxo219 rests among the kings, and Bishop William with King Svend;220 From her grave, Margaret smiles in peace towards the men of the North.
The last two lines refer to Queen Margaret (1353–1412), founder of the Kalmar Union
that joined her native Denmark in alliance with Sweden and Norway from 1397–1523.
The message is that, by performing this song in the location where it takes place, the
Swedish contingent publicly accepted ancient Danish history as part of a common
Scandinavian heritage and actively participated in the “whispers of new times.”
The Swedish student Carl Fredrik Lundqvist (1841–1920), who went on to have a
long and successful career as an opera singer, called this performance at Queen
Margaret’s grave the most moving, deeply serious moment of the entire journey to
218 Ibid. 219 Saxo Grammaticus (ca. 1150 – ca. 1220), the first major Danish historian. 220 St. William (d. 1073/74), bishop of Roskilde, and King Svend Estridsen (ca. 1019–74), Vilhelm’s friend and contemporary.
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Denmark.221 In his memoirs, he recalls the effect as follows:
When we youths stood at the sarcophagus, where the dust of this noble woman rested, a moving, reverent spirit flowed through us, and the queen’s grand idea—the federation of the three Nordic countries—appeared so distinctly, that there was not one person among this youthful crowd who was not convinced of it and was willing to live and die, so that the whole Scandinavian tribe, and each particular branch of it, could have its happiness and future within a fervent and strong union.222
In the context of this performance, “Roeskilde” functioned as a conduit that figuratively
and emotionally brought the past alive as vision of the future.
“Roeskilde” is also significant as the first folksong from one of the Nordic
countries to be performed in public concert by Uppsala Student Singing Society (in
Uppsala in 1849), and it appears frequently in materials associated with the Lund
Student Singing Society as well.223 Although the text, written by Ingemann in 1842 at the
latest, has a dual Danish-Scandinavian focus, it becomes a stronger plea for union when
placed in the mouths of non-Danish singers.224
The Nordic choirs all used an arrangement of this song by Hans Matthison-
Hansen (1807–90), organist at Roskilde Cathedral from 1832–82; Matthison-Hansen
played the organ for the visiting students that day in 1862 and would have heard the
221 Lundqvist, Minnen och anteckningar, 93. 222 “När ungdomen så stod vid sarkofagen, där stoftet af denna storsinnade kvinna hvilade, var det en gripande andaktsfull stämning som genomströmmade oss, och drottningens stora tanke: de tre nordiska ländernas sammanslutning framträdde så klar, att icke fanns där någon af denna ynglingaskara, som ej var öfvertygad och därpå ville lefva och dö, att den skandinaviska stammen, och hvarje särskild del af den, hade sin lycka och framtid uti en innerlig och stark sammanhållning.” Ibid., 100–101. 223 Jonsson, Offentlig musik i Uppsala 1747–1854, 366. 224 A printed copy dated 1842 is found in the B.S. Ingemann and Lucie Ingemann archive at Sorø Academy: VII: Særtryk, Sang ved Præstekonventet i Roskilde. The first strophe is the most pan-Nordic in character, and also the only strophe typically included in male choir sources. The remaining strophes are more specifically Danish in outlook.
181
impromptu performance of his setting.225 If he listened closely to the inner and lower
voices, he may well have been surprised at what he heard. In 1872, the Swedish
composer Carl Johan Lewerth (1818–88) edited a volume of male choral songs. Lewerth
was evidently in contact with Matthison-Hansen, as the following comment printed in
the songbook attests: “This song [‘Roeskilde’] is not notated the way it is usually sung
here in Sweden, spread through faulty hand copies, but rather as the composer himself
wrote it down for this collection.”226 Of the fifteen different copies of this song examined
in Swedish sources, thirteen used the older, “incorrect” variant (Example 3.5 below), and
there is no doubt that the 1862 performance was of that variant as well.227 Lewerth’s
“corrected” version (Example 3.6) is found in only one other source, a manuscript from
the Lund Student Singing Society.228 In both examples below, dashed rectangles identify
the location of pitches that do not agree in the two versions.
225 For a basic biography of Hans Matthison-Hansen, see the entry by A. Lindgren in Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencycklopedi, revised edition (Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förlag, 1912), 17:1273. 226 “Denna sång är här upptecknad icke såsom densamma, efter oriktiga afskrifter, i Sverige brukar sjungas, utan såsom Tonsättaren sjelf upptecknat honom för denna samling.” C. J. Lewerth, Gammalt och nytt: Fyrstämmiga sånger för mansröster (Stockholm: Beijer, 1872), 76. 227 Axel Ivar Ståhl, Vald samling af student-sånger (Ord och musik) (Stockholm: J. L. Brudin, 1855), 34. 228 Lewerth, Gammalt och nytt, 76–77.
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Example 3.5: Matthison-Hansen, “Roeskilde,” version more commonly sung by Swedish choirs, including in Roskilde Cathedral in 1862
&?
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4646
œœœœ
˙ œ .œ jœ œ˙ œ .œ# Jœn œ˙ œ .œ jœ œ˙ œ .œ Jœ œ
.˙ ˙ œ.˙ ˙# œ
.˙ ˙ œ.˙ ˙ œ
˙ œ .œ jœ œ˙ œ .œ Jœ œ˙ œ .œ jœ œ˙ œ .œ Jœ œ
.˙ œ œ.˙# œ Œ œ
.˙ œ œ.˙ œ Œ œ
&?
bb
5 ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ
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.œb jœ œ ˙ œ.œ Jœ# œ ˙ œ
.œ jœ œ ˙ œ.œ Jœ œ ˙ œ.˙ ˙ œ.˙ œ Œ œ.˙ œ œ.˙ œ Œ œ
&?
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9 ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ˙# œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ
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13 œ œ œ .œ jœ œœ œ œ .œ# Jœn œnœ œ œ ˙ œœ œ œ ˙ œ
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Roeskilde
H Matthison-HansenFra Issefjorden
183
Example 3.6: Matthison-Hansen, “Roeskilde,” “corrected” version published by Lewerth in 1872
Of the four four-bar phrases, only the first phrase and the second half of the fourth
phrase are identical in the two versions. In the intervening measures, when pitches in
each part are compared beat-by-beat, the alto parts differ from each other forty-five
percent of the time, which is nearly matched by the variation in tenor pitches (forty-
three percent). The bass, while more consistent, still varies twenty-six percent of the
time. Harmonically, the changes are minor, such that one version cannot really be said to
be more complex than the other. For example, a suspension that disappears in the alto
voice in m. 5 of the corrected version is balanced by the introduction of passing motion
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5 ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙n œ˙ œ ˙ œ˙ œ ˙ œ
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Roeskilde
H Matthison-HansenFra Issefjorden
184
in inner voices in mm. 9 and 11 that was not present in the more commonly sung
version. Aurally, the main difference has to do with range: at the beginning of the final
phrase (mm. 12–13), the more common, “incorrect” version places all four voices fairly
high in their registers, while the corrected version drops the bass an octave and respaces
inner voices accordingly. The lower bass line in the corrected version more aptly fits the
text of the corresponding line in verse one (“From her grave, Margaret smiles”), and the
placement of the three lower voices more in the center, rather than the top, of their
registers allows for a more rounded, stable timbre.
Carl Fredrik Lundqvist records that the act of singing “Roeskilde” was deeply
moving from the perspective of Swedish students. While the thoughts of Danish
students and townsfolk in attendance are not known, there is little reason to doubt that
the performance, under the circumstances and with Scandinavian spirit running high,
was anything other than well received. While the performance of other Scandinavian
folksongs was still a relatively rare occurrence for Swedish choirs at this time, a
phenomenon that will be explored below, this performance of “Roeskilde” in Roskilde
Cathedral shows that the students from Uppsala had the song in their repertoire and felt
authorized to sing it in presence of experts, i.e. Danish singers.
Contrafacta: Legitimizing new ideas through traditional melodies
Not surprisingly, the most prominently documented type of folksong at student
meetings is traditional melodies with new occasional texts, the primacy of which has
already been demonstrated with respect to male choral music at large. The most
185
common melody, “In beautiful summer,” is the same that was so often used for earlier
institutional celebrations in Uppsala.229 This melody is used for at least eight different
texts at student meetings: three times, the melody is explicitly listed in the timbre, while
five other texts are written in the unusual seven-line stanzaic structure that clearly
applies to this familiar melody. Other folk melodies often used for contrafacta include
“The Song of Värmland” and “Necken’s Polska.”
By repurposing these melodies, participants in the student meetings add an
undercurrent of musical tradition that gives a measure of gravitas to the newly written
texts. In addition, verbal markers in new texts can also refer to older songs. A poem by
Magister Bjurstén written to the melody of “Necken’s Polska” opens with quintessential
male-female imagery lifted directly from the imagined world of the “medieval” ballad:
Medan Nordens raska viking-söner Fordom drogo på härnads-tåg, Följde qvinnans längtansfulla böner Deras drakar på skummig våg. Sjelf i högan loft hon satt, så oskuldsfull, Sömmade i silke, sömmade i gull. Den bild, som lefde i jungfruns sinn’ Hon väfde så i purportråder in.230
While the spry Viking-sons went raiding in days of yore, the woman’s longing prayers followed their ships on frothy waves. She sat in the bower in the loft, so innocently, stitching with silk, stitching with gold. The image that lived in the virgin’s mind, she wove it in with purple threads.
Bjurstén’s female figure matches the young woman in the ballad “Botswain”
(“Båtsman”) as published by Geijer and Afzelius, which opens with an identical image:
“The virgin sat in a room up in the loft / and sewed gold onto leather.”231 Several
strophes later, the maiden in “Botswain” tries to give away a silk-sewn shirt
229 Hæffner’s choral setting of the tune “Om sommaren sköna” is printed, with yet another set of new words, in Example 3.7 on p. 187. 230 Det skandinaviska student-tåget 1856, 140. 231 “Jungfrun satt i högan loft / Och virka’ gull’ på skinn.” Geijer-Afzelius, II:37.
186
(“silkesömmad skjorta”), presumably of her own making. Similar images are found in
other ballads as well, the upstairs bower being a common trope of medieval
Scandinavian and Germanic literature.232 By transposing details from a ballad onto what
was originally an instrumental folk melody, Bjurstén creates a new-old folk-like song
with a perceived legitimacy similar to that of the underlying ballad genre.
Contrafacta also allow poets to introduce the metaphor of darkness giving way
to the dawn of Scandinavian unity into songs where it did not originally exist. For
example, twice when the melody from the traditional song “In the beautiful summer,
when the land rejoices” is re-used, the topic of summer is replaced by the transition from
darkness to light. As the students from Lund and Copenhagen arrived in Uppsala for
the first Scandinavian student meeting in 1843, they heard a song by the student Carl
Fredrik Säve (1812–76) set to the melody of “Om sommaren sköna”; printed copies of
the text were passed around, as so often occurred at these meetings, so that many could
join in the singing.233 Although no mention is made of whether this song was sung in
unison or in parts, the familiarity of Hæffner’s choral arrangement of the tune and the
large number of choral singers present among the participants make part-singing a real
possibility. A hypothetical version—Säve’s new text, “What Clamor Arises on the Banks
of the Fyris” (“Hvad gny uppstiger på Fyris’ strand”) set to Hæffner’s existing choral
arrangement of the traditional melody to which Säve’s words were sung—is given
232 For a contemporary explanation of the phenomenon of the bower within medieval Scandinavian literature, see R. L., “Den skandinaviska qvinnan i älsta tider. I: Uppfostran,” Litteraturblad för allmän medborgerlig bildning 14, no. 4 (April 1860): 156. 233 The full text of Säve’s “Hvad gny uppstiger på Fyris’ strand” is given in Sange ved Studentermöderne, 4–6.
187
below in Example 3.7.234 The text of first strophe, shown here, reinforces the historical
enmity between Sweden and Denmark. Recalling the Battle of Fýrisvellir fought in this
region shortly before the year 1000, the people of Uppsala once again hear the sounds of
a Danish ship arriving on the Fyris and prepare for a violent meeting of swords.
What clamor arises on the banks of the Fyris, / Not heard since long ago? Is this a return of murderous destruction and fire? / Who will forge weapons for us?
Let us see what an enemy of Svea can endure: / Swedish steel strikes keenly yet. Arise! Danes have come ashore!
Example 3.7: “What clamor arises on the banks of the Fyris,”
reconstructed choral version
After the “invaders” are recognized as students coming in friendship, not warriors in
234 Hæffner’s arrangement is no. 8 in each respective partbook of Hæffner, Svenska folk-wisor satte för fyra mans-röster.
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188
enmity, the song introduces the dawn of Scandinavian cooperation in strophe five:
Jo, furstar fordom och adel, folk, Af mörkret förvillade, stredo. Nu ljuset kommit som fridens tolk Och Skandien till vänskap är redo.235
Yea, princes and nobility of old, ordinary people, Confused by darkness, fought. Now the light has come as interpreter of peace, And Skandinavia is ready for friendship.
In an age prior to recording, the printed texts that were distributed to attendees also
served as important mementos: an 11-year-old boy from Uppsala, Carl Rupert Nyblom,
later recalled in his memoirs that “What Clamor Arises on the Banks of the Fyris”
became his favorite song for a long time to come.236
Similarly, for the 1845 meeting in Copenhagen, a student identified only by the
nickname Neodanus (“New Dane”) wrote a text in Danish describing a battle being
fought by students with their swords (words). To begin with, “Yes, night broods still
o’er the north. / Yes, the night is dark, and the road is long.”237 But the warriors guide
their steps “toward the star that [they] see beyond the gloom,” swinging their sword-
words to the long-awaited victory: “That soon it may be said: now day is dawning / in
the North over mountains and valleys.”238 The pairing of these words with this
traditional melody makes the metaphor of the Scandinavian dawn seem older than it is,
lending an aura of historical authenticity to a more modern idea.
235 Skandinaviska studenternas möte i juni 1843, 14. 236 Carl Rupert Nyblom, En sjuttioårings minnen: Anteckningar. I. Skolgossetiden 1832–1850, vol. 1 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1908), 135. For more on Carl Rupert Nyblom, see Gösta Lundström, “Carl Rupert Nyblom,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1990–91): 27:664, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=8443. Nyblom later became a professor at Uppsala and is also the author of this chapter’s epigraph; see n. 1 above. 237 “Ja, end ruger Nat over Norden. Ja, mörk er vel Natten, og Vejen er lang.” Upsalastudenternas direktion, ed., Berättelse om studenttågen till Lund och Köpenhamn sommaren 1845 (Upsala: Wahlström & C., 1846), 131. 238 “Mot Stjernen, bag Mulmet vi skue / . . . / At snart det maa lyde: nu Dagen opgryr / I Nord over Bjerge og Dale.” Ibid.
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Through the Scandinavian movement, ties between Sweden and Norway—
already, in many instances, fabricated in the wake of the Union of 1814—continued to be
invented. As part of a toast to Norway given during the Student meeting in Copenhagen
in 1845, a text by Magister A. Andersson was sung to the “Värmlandsvisan” melody.
Given that the Swedish province of Värmland borders Norway, the melody provides a
symbolic “middle ground” for the two nations.239 After introducing the countries in a
sibling relationship (“Och syskontycke ha de med hvarandra”), the text explains how
they used to play at fighting, like lion cubs (“Som lejonungar lekte de med strider”),
until playfulness turned to serious hate. But now, as the final strophe states, long-lost
peace has returned to the family:
De Asabarn nu ligga, som elfvor uppå äng, Så lungt och fredligt vid hvarandras sida, Och hafvets vågor vagga de tu i syskonsäng Och tak är stjernehvalfvet det vida. Hvar afton dagen åldras, hvar morgon dag blir ung, De knäppa sina händer och be för samma Kung. Blott med, ej mot hvarann de mera strida.240
The children of Asa now lie, like rivers on a meadow, so quietly and peacefully by each other’s side, And the waves of the sea rock them both in their sibling-cradle, and the roof is the starry canopy so wide. Each evening the day ages, each morning it becomes young, They fold their hands and pray for the same King. Only for, not against, each other will they fight.
In this scenario, discord in recent centuries brought about by the Swedish-Danish rivalry
is cast as a temporary middle state linking ancient and modern harmony. The ancient
belief system—children of the Asa gods—is reconstituted in modern times, reconciled
239 The melody did not, however, originate in Värmland; it seems to have come from the Netherlands and first acquired a text related to the southeastern Swedish district of Östergötland before receiving its more famous text about Värmland. For a brief history of the song, see Eva Danielson and Märta Ramsten, “Ack Värmeland du sköna (Litet vis- och låtlexikon),” Noterat 9 (2001): 83–86. 240 Upsalastudenternas direktion, Berättelse om studenttågen till Lund och Köpenhamn sommaren 1845, 50.
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with the act of (Christian) prayer directed toward a joint king. On the musical side, the
familiar “Värmlandsvisan,” with its ancient-sounding Dorian modality and sometimes-
raised 7th scale degree, reinforces the invented historicity of the text.
Parallel identities: Swedish vs. Scandinavian
As strongly as participants in student meetings advocated for a common
Scandinavian heritage and identity, a complete erasure of internal divisions was never
intended. When the Swedish participant Fredrik Theodor Blomstrand (1824–92) brought
up this point in an address during the Copenhagen portion of the 1862 meeting
(“Nobody can be a good Scandinavian, without also being a good Dane, Swede or
Norwegian”), he was widely cheered by the audience.241 The prevailing idea was that
each should retain an individual identity in addition to the communal identity. In the
words of one observer in 1869, “The four choirs from Christiania, Copenhagen, Uppsala
and Lund made up a complete Scandinavian quartet . . . the tones blended together in a
rich and full-bodied Scandinavian harmony.”242 The idea was that in order for the whole
to be balanced, the parts must be stable as well. The prominent newspaper editor
August Sohlman (1824–74) likewise praised the dual nature of student song in Sweden
as having an “entirely patriotic and Nordic character” (“helt och hållet fosterländska och
nordiska karakter”).243
241 “Ingen kan vara god skandinav, utan att tillika vara god dansk, svensk eller norrman.” Studentmötet i Lund och Köpenhamn, 1862, 180. 242 “[D]e fyra sångkörerna från Kristiania, Köpenhamn, Upsala och Lund utgjorde ju en fullständig skandinavisk qvartett . . . smälte också tonerna tillhopa i en rik och fyllig skandinavisk harmoni.” Studentmötet i Kristiania 1869, 111. 243 August Sohlman, “Skall den folkliga sången dö bort i vårt land?”, Aftonbladet (June 10, 1874): 3.
191
Despite the overwhelmingly pro-Scandinavian rhetoric at the student meetings,
traditional music also helped solidify Swedish sentiment. As Swedish students traveled
by ship towards Christiania on Midsummer Eve in 1852, it is recorded that celebratory
polskor (a common general type of folkdance) and nationaldanser (folk dances and their
variants specific to certain local regions) were performed on deck.244 While Midsummer
was celebrated in each of the Nordic nations, there is no evidence that this particular
occasion aboard ship was celebrated in an intentionally pan-Scandinavian style. Rather,
the published account frames the event as an impromptu affair fueled by thoughts of
local celebrations occurring back home; music was provided by one student who
happened to play the fiddle, traditional songs were sung by participants en masse, and
the nationaldanser were performed by individual dancers in the style of their particular
home regions (hembygder). In the midst of an atmosphere permeated with pan-
Scandinavian discourse, local Swedish traditions continued to hold meaning as elements
of nationality; depending on context, singers used folksong to express regional, national
or pan-national identity, a situation not uncommon across Europe.245
Ultimately, a pan-Scandinavian political union never came into being.
Nevertheless, the cultural connections brought about by the student meetings left deep
roots in the active repertoire of the Swedish choirs, which came to include substantial
numbers of Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish folksongs.
244 Studenttåg till Christiania 1852 från Upsala, 43. 245 For example, Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen note how choirs in Belgium easily shifted musical expression towards national (Belgian) or regional (Flemish) identities; see their Introduction in Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe (see n. 22 above), 9.
192
Formal performances (1845–1900)
Concert performances allowed wider audiences to hear the repertoire cultivated within
academic communities. Often, performances were billed as benefit concerts for purposes
of humanitarian relief (such as needy residents of the Uppland district, November 25,
1845); assistance for those suffering from illness (children with cholera, December 1,
1857); financial support for widows and their families (the family of composer August
Söderman, May 16, 1876); and the renovation of an important cultural and religious
monument (Uppsala Cathedral, May 12, 1885).246 A contemporary account written for
Parisian audiences during the Uppsala Student Singing Society tour of 1878 notes that
the sums of money raised in benefit “were not insignificant” (“icke varit obetydliga”).247
The proceeds of many other performances by this ensemble contributed to the long-term
goal of constructing a new building for the choir’s use.
Neighboring nations also stand among the beneficiaries, a visible sign of
international cooperation among choirs and mutual concern for the well-being of fellow
students and citizens in the respective countries. Aid to “the destitute [nödlidande] in
Finland” raised at two concerts in March 1857 and November 1862 aligns with periods
of famine from severe crop failure in that region.248 Support for Denmark from two
246 Kallstenius includes beneficieries of performances by the Uppsala Student Singing Society, such as the events noted here, in his lists of concert programs in Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia, 228–68. 247 “Den svenska och norska studentsången,” Aftonbladet (July 30, 1878): 3. 248 In their discussion of mid-nineteenth century famine in Finland, Andrew G. Newby and Timo Myllyntaus quote a contemporary newspaper reporting that the famine of 1862 “was perceived as ‘even more severe than 1856’”; see “‘The Terrible Visitation’: Famine in Finland and Ireland 1845 to 1868: Towards an Agenda for Comparative Irish-Finnish Famine Studies,” in Famines in European Economic History: The Last
193
concerts in May 1848 and three concerts in May 1864 takes on overt political overtones,
providing financial and moral support as Denmark engaged in the First and Second
Slesvig Wars with Prussia and Austria. Especially in 1864, even as the Swedish King
Charles XV (Charles IV of Norway) refused to send military aid to Denmark, students
from Uppsala raised money for their Danish counterparts in three back-to-back
performances, using cultural Scandinavianism for political ends at a time when political
Scandinavianism was failing.
Frequency of performances
Records show that the Uppsala Student Singing Society participated in concerts
arranged by other entities as early as 1832, including performances by visiting musicians
such as Jenny Lind, but performance records during this early period are incomplete.249
The era of formal performances began in 1845, when the Uppsala Student Singing
Society put on the first concert of their own; the program consisted primarily of
accompanied and unaccompanied choral song—including three of Hæffner’s folksong
arrangements—though it also included the first movement of Beethoven’s Eroica
Symphony. From 1845 through the end of the century, the Uppsala Student Singing
Society averaged slightly more than three public concerts per year.250 The genre of
Great European Famines Reconsidered, ed. Declan Curran, Lubomyr Luciuk, and Andrew G. Newby (London: Routledge, 2015), 153. 249 Kallstenius discusses early concerts in which the Uppsala Student Singing Society participated in Blad ur Uppsalasångens historia, 65–67. 250 Kallstenius lists 173 concert appearances between 1845 and 1899 inclusive. For a list of concerts and pieces performed, see ibid., 228–62.
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folksong is nearly universally represented in these performances: only ten of 173
programs, or fewer than six percent, are entirely devoid of folksong.
Information on performances by the Lund Student Singing Society draws on the
ninety-eight archival programs preserved from concerts between 1856 and 1899, as no
systematic list of performance repertoire has been published. While this collection is
almost certainly incomplete, especially for the period prior to 1876, it is worth noting
that only two-thirds of the extant programs include at least one folksong. Almost from
its inception, the Lund choir had a somewhat weaker connection with folksong than did
its model in Uppsala. Hæffner directly provided the Uppsala community with a
substantial number of folksong arrangements in addition to the source material in
Geijer-Afzelius from which so many other composers drew. But Otto Lindblad, who
continued to cast a shadow on the Lund Student Singing Society long after he ceased
directing it in 1846, held Hæffner’s settings in low esteem. In his memoirs, Lindblad
derided Hæffner’s folksong arrangements:
I see him, as I said, as a German musical traveling tradesman, who had enough talent to bungle many of our splendid national melodies by setting them for four-part chorus; most of them came out the worse . . . But maybe Hæffner was to be excused. The time of Bach, of Mozart, of Haydn was so close to him251 that he, too, wanted to climb upon their shoulders and look around in the musical world, but the Pegasus became too awkward for him to steer; and so he did not soar to Olympus, but rather hopped around a bit until he fell headlong into the underworld.252
251 Hæffner was born in 1759. 252 “Jag anser honom, som sagt, för en tysk musikalisk Probenreuter, som ägde nog talang att förfuska många av våra herrliga nationalmelodier genom att sätta dem i fyrstämmigt chor, varpå de fleste förlora . . . Kanske var Hæffner även att ursäkta. Bachs, Mozarts, Haydns tider lågo honom så nära, att även han ville bestiga deras axlar och se sig om i den musikaliska världen, men pegasen blev honom för krånglig att styra;
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Of course, Lindblad’s disapproval of Hæffner’s decision to set folksongs for chorus did
not entirely prevent him from doing the same; Lindblad’s “Necken’s Polska” was widely
copied, published and performed, as has been mentioned earlier.253 In addition, the
Lund Student Singing Society did count folksong as a major element of its active
performance repertoire, though to a somewhat lesser extent than the Uppsala Student
Singing Society did. The following sections will examine how both of these university
choirs programmed Swedish folksongs and other Scandinavian folksongs in
performance.
Swedish folksongs
Although the performance data for the Lund Student Singing Society is less
complete than that of the Uppsala Student Singing Society, the two choirs appear to
have had similar numbers of Swedish folksongs in their active repertoire during the
latter half of the nineteenth century: programs for the Uppsala choir list twenty-eight
därför bar det ej av till Olympen utan föll han efter några krumsprång pladask ned i Orcus. Således hade man även i Sverge börjat komma till musikaliskt medvetande.” Quoted in Ture Nerman, Otto Lindblad: Ett sångaröde: Efter självbiografiska anteckningar och gamla brev (Uppsala: J. A. Lindblad, 1930), 31–32. Otto Lindblad was not alone in his criticism of folksong settings. The newspaper editor August Sohlman argued that the more modern settings performed in concerts were out of character, given his perception of the nature of the folksongs providing the raw material: “When Swedish folksongs are performed on such occasions [concerts], it is not rare that they are harmonized with such artifice and fitted with such splendid trimmings, that one is taken with admiration and delight, but still one somehow feels a certain embarrassment on behalf of the simple folksong.” “Och när svenska folkvisor vid ett sådant tillfälle sjungas, äro de ej sällan så konstmässigt harmoniserade och försedda med en så präktig utstyrsel, att man intages af beundran och förtjusning, men ändock liksom känner en viss förlägenhet på den enkla folkvisans vägnar.” August Sohlman, “Skall den folkliga sången dö bort i vårt land?”, Aftonbladet (June 10, 1874): 3. 253 Details of a setting by Hæffner that has been posthumously (and, as I have found, mistakenly) attributed to Lindblad are found in n. 61 above. Lindblad’s potential ire at discovering this error, had he lived to see it, can only be imagined.
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titles by name, while Lund’s known repertoire comprises 26. Just over half of the titles
(15) are common to the two choirs. As far as is possible to determine, the majority of the
paired settings are identical; it does not seem to be the case that the choirs championed
rival or proprietary settings of the same songs by different composers.254 Both choirs also
share similar numbers of ballad arrangements—six for Uppsala, five for Lund—though
with only one title in common, Hæffner’s “The Bride of the Mountain King.” As ballads
receded from relevance in male choral repertoire (in comparison with piano-vocal
settings, where they remained common), there was little shared ground between the two
choirs in this sub-genre.
Nordic folksongs
If Uppsala and Lund performed similarly sized repertoires of Swedish folksongs,
they developed different outlooks with respect to folksongs from neighboring Nordic
countries. Table 3.11 shows how many individual titles of Danish, Finnish and
Norwegian folk origin were performed by each choir, plus the aggregate number of
performances of traditional songs from each respective country.255
254 In only one case is it possible to identify divergent arrangements: the Uppsala Student Singing Society performed C. J. O. Laurin’s setting of “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” for TTBB chorus with tenor solo, while Lund Student Singing Society is listed as having sung in unison. A few songs are inconclusive, with the name of the arranger omitted from listings for one or both choirs. 255 Aggregate numbers for Uppsala do include a small number of references to unnamed folksongs from the respective countries; they do not, however, factor in the multiple performances of the two Nordic folksongs taken on tours—both of which were Norwegian, and which would considerably boost the aggregate performance total for Norwegian songs. Kallstenius lists the overall repertoire for each tour but not the exact sub-set of songs performed in a given concert. Documented performances do not align perfectly with preserved repertoire. Even though no folksongs of Finnish origin are documented among the surviving programs in Lund, they must have been sung in some capacity: two manuscripts in the LSS archive at S-L (ms. X and ms. XXI) collectively contain three different Finnish folksongs, including one piece that appears in both collections. In the opposite situation, no Norwegian folksong is found in the numerous preserved
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Table 3.11: Scandinavian folksongs performed by Swedish choirs
Uppsala Student Singing Society Lund Student Singing Society # of different
titles total # of performances
# of different titles
total # of performances
2 17 Danish 9 25 2 9 Finnish — — 4 47 Norwegian 1 4
Even this incomplete data for Lund shows that the particularly close relationship that
developed between students in Lund and nearby Copenhagen is reflected in the large
number of Danish folksongs programmed in public performance by Lund Student
Singing Society.256
The Uppsala Student Singing Society had a more cosmopolitan approach to
Nordic repertoire, with positive proof of performance of titles from all three neighboring
Nordic countries. Norwegian titles are by far the best represented. The only Nordic
folksongs listed as having been chosen for inclusion in any of the Uppsala Student
Singing Society’s tour repertoires are also Norwegian—two titles apiece in three
different tour years—significantly increasing their performance numbers beyond those
included in Table 3.11, which only counts the repertoire for an entire tour one time.
Finnish songs also make an appearance: the University of Helsingfors/Helsinki was,
manuscripts associated with the Lund Student Singing Society despite the positive indication of one title in several performances. It may, for example, have been learned and spread within this choir entirely from printed sources. 256 It should be noted that prior to 1658, Skåne (the province in southern Sweden that includes the town of Lund) was part of Denmark. For analyses of shifts in the meaning of this border region over time, see Fredrik Nilsson, Hanne Sanders, and Ylva Stubbergaard, eds., Öresundsgränser: Rörelser, möten och visioner i tid och rum, Centrum för Danmarksstudier 14 (Göteborg: Makadam, 2007).
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after all, significantly closer to Uppsala than to Lund. Moreover, there was a long history
of Finnish students attending Uppsala University; this tradition did not end in 1809,
when Finland fell to Russian control, though it did slow somewhat by the late 1820s,
around the time that a fire at the Royal Academy in Åbo/Turku (1827) forced a move of
the Finnish university further east to the new Imperial capital, Helsingfors (1829).257
Table 3.12 below breaks down the number of Danish, Finnish and Norwegian folksongs
performed each year by the Uppsala Student Singing Society and Lund Student Singing
Society.258 Each letter D, F or N indicates one documented performance of a Danish,
Finnish, or Norwegian folksong in a given year. For example, the Uppsala Student
Singing Society performed a Norwegian folksong four times in 1864.
257 Among the regional “student nations” (studentnationerna), a Finnish Nation existed in Uppsala until it was dissolved in the 1820s; its archive is preserved in Finska nationen, REA000138003, S-Uu. For an overview of the presence of Finnish students in Uppsala, see G. Heinricius, “Uttalanden af finländare om personer och förhållanden i Sverige 1817–21,” in Förhandlingar och uppsatser: 1910, vol. 24, Skrifter utgivna av Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, XCVI (Helsingfors: Tidnings- & Tryckeri-Aktiebolagets Tryckeri, 1911), 22–23. 258 While Uppsala Student Singing Society began public concerts in 1845, the first documented performance of a Nordic folksong was in 1849. Available data for the Lund Student Singing Society begins in 1856.
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Table 3.12: Number of Scandinavian folksongs performed by the Uppsala Student Singing Society and Lund Student Singing Society, 1849–1900
Upp
sala
PSS
N
N
N
NN
N
N
NN
N
N
N N
NN
NN
N
N
N
F F F F F F FFF
D
D D
DD
D
D D
DD
D
18
75
1876
18
77
1878
18
79
1880
18
81
1882
18
83
1884
18
85
1886
18
87
1888
18
89
1890
18
91
1892
18
93
1894
18
95
1896
18
97
1898
18
99
1900
Lund
SSO
N
N
N
N
N25
9
F
D
DD
D
D
D
D
D
D
D
DD
D
D
DD
D
DD
DD
D
D
Upp
sala
PSS
N
N N N
NN
NN
N
N
N
N
NN
NN
NN
N
N
NN
NN
N
NN
N
F
D
DD
D D D D
1849
18
50
1851
18
52
1853
18
54
1855
18
56
1857
18
58
1859
18
60
1861
18
62
1863
18
64
1865
18
66
1867
18
68
1869
18
70
1871
18
72
1873
18
74
Lund
SSO
N
F
D D
D D
259 This program is printed “Saturday, February 28,” with “1899” later added in pencil, but the year cannot be correct. Possible candidates include 1874, 1880, 1885, 1891, 1903, or 1914; font and design elements most closely resemble two programs from 1882, though since that is not a candidate year, the similarity is inconclusive. LSS archive, FIa 1, Konsertprogr. 1856–1899, S-L.
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In Uppsala, 1864—the year in which political Scandinavianism notoriously
foundered—marks a turning point in terms of numbers of Scandinavian folksongs
performed. Specifically, it is Norwegian songs that begin to amass large numbers of
performances that year. Finnish and Danish songs each become relevant for about a
decade, but not until somewhat later, over the periods 1884–93 (Finnish) and 1888–99
(Danish). Given that the last official Nordic student meeting took place in 1875, the full
exchange of folk repertoire in performance developed significantly after the conclusion
of the concerted efforts to bring students from the Nordic universities together face-to-
face. Even in Lund, where personal contact with students in Copenhagen was more
robust, the large-scale performance of Danish folksongs also occurred later than might
be expected, according to surviving programs: only in 1880 did Danish folksong become
a regular part of the performance repertoire.
This delay is the exchange of folksong repertoire is puzzling. Missing concert
programs may cause numbers to skew lower than they actually were, although this is
more likely to affect the Lund Student Singing Society, whose archival program
collection is less complete than that of Uppsala Student Singing Society. It is possible
that choirs may have sung each other’s folksongs informally during meetings under
circumstances not recorded in the official accounts; alternately, it is also possible that, at
first, folksongs were considered proprietary to each particular nation, and that despite
all the rhetoric about Scandinavian cooperation, it would have been unsuitable for one
group of students to co-opt the national material of another. A review of a joint concert
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between the choirs of Copenhagen and Lund in 1867 gives evidence of this latter view,
at least in certain circles (emphasis added):
This joint singing appearance deserves to be held up as proof of something that some people have doubted, namely the ability to properly and with the right expression perform each other’s national songs . . . Who, upon listening to the Swedish songs performed, could hear that half of the choir was made up of Danes? . . . For every person who heard the Swedish folksong “The Maiden and the Sailor,” which was performed by an excellent Danish quartet, these two things speak volumes: the way in which the Swedish words were sung and the way in which the remarkable quality of Swedish folksong was made apparent.260
Through so much of the nineteenth century, as has been seen, folksongs were thought to
represent the soul of a people, that which marked them as belonging to each other and
as separate from others. Theoretically, singers performing folksongs from outside their
own national tradition would be at a disadvantage—and, according to the reviewer,
some people did share this view.261 Yet in practice, the Danish singers in the joint concert
of 1867 successfully conveyed not only the pronunciation, but also the ineffable, innately
Swedish aspect that the reviewer needed to hear in a true performance of “The Maiden
and the Sailor.”262
260 “. . . förtjenar detta sjungande tillsammans att påaktas såsom bevisande en sak, hvilken man å vissa håll tillåtit sig betvifla, nemligen förmågen att korrekt och med det rätta uttrycket föredraga hvarandras nationella sanger . . . hvem kunde vid afhörandet af de exequerade svenska sångarna höra, att halva kören utgjordes af danskar? . . . För enhvar, som hörde den svenska folkvisa, ‘Jungfrun och Sjömannen,’ hvilken af en ypperlig dansk enkelqvartett utfördes, är det sätt, hvarpå både de svenska orden sjungos och hvarvid det egendomliga som ligger i svenska folkvisan tog ut sin rätt, tillräckligt talande i detta fall.” Emphasis added. Originally appeared in Lunds Weckoblad; quoted in Möller, Lundensisk studentsång under ett sekel, 179–80. 261 The fact that most Swedish consumers of printed Swedish folksong did not grow up hearing traditional music performed seems to have been less of an issue. 262 Given that many sources and concert programs fail to list the arranger for folksongs, it can be inferred that the identity of the arranger was of little importance either to singers or audiences. The only choral arrangement of “Jungfrun och sjömannen” I have encountered is, in fact, by Danish composer Christian Julius Hansen (1814–75). More than likely, the reviewer did not think to ponder the origin of the arranger; had he done so, he would have been forced to question his assumptions about national identity and folksong performance.
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Another factor likely contributed to the slowness with which Swedish choirs
added other Nordic folksongs to their performance repertoire: their audiences’ relative
unfamiliarity with the foreign pieces. Over time, thanks to the series of joint concerts
(faelleskonserter) performed primarily by students from Lund and Copenhagen, Swedish
audiences would have had many opportunities to hear Danish singers perform Danish
folksongs.263 Then, Swedish choirs could program these same songs and know that at
least some portion of the audience would find them familiar. A newspaper report about
Lund University’s May celebration in 1884, which began with a concert by the Lund
Student Singing Society, draws a direct connection between repertoire at an earlier
faelleskonsert with the concert at hand: “[We] also had the opportunity to enjoy . . . the
beautiful Danish heroic ballad ‘Little Tove,’ which Danish students taught us to love at
the joint concert last fall. As a counterpart to this, a Swedish folksong was also sung,
‘The Maiden and the Sailor.’”264 The thorough discussion of Scandinavian cooperation at
the student meetings was slow to translate into a widespread sharing of folk repertoire;
but once this did occur, it continued to carry the message of productive cultural
interchange long after serious political discourse ceased.
263 Little research has been done on the nineteenth-century faelleskonserter. Joint concerts between Lund and Copenhagen took place in 1856, 1867, 1869, 1870, 1872, 1875, 1877, 1878, 1883, 1894 and 1895. In addition, Lund and Christiania sang together in 1899, and Uppsala and Christiania performed jointly in Paris in 1878. Dates are from programs in LSS archive, FIa 1, Konsertprogr. 1856–1899, S-L, supplemented by Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt.” 264 “Vidare fick man tillfälle att njuta af . . . den vackra danska ‘kaempevisen’ ‘Tovelille,’ hvilken danska studenter lärde oss att älska vid Faelleskonserten i fjor höst. Som pendant till denna afsjöngs äfven en svensk folkvisa ‘Jungfrun och sjömannen.” See “Majfestligheterna i Lund,” Nyare Blekings-Posten (May 20 1884): 3.
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Conclusion
Folksong has long been appreciated as a staple of Swedish choral repertoire, whether for
male chorus, female chorus, or mixed chorus.265 While a general consensus in the
literature agrees that it holds an important place in the repertoire for male chorus in the
nineteenth century, this topic has not yet been investigated in the depth it deserves until
now.266 The most prominent arranger of folksongs for male and mixed chorus in the
twentieth century, Hugo Alfvén, once commented on the centrality of this work in his
life:
I consider the folksong arrangements to be the most meaningful work in my life. They are the central lyric poetry in my work.267 I took most of the material from the collections by Geijer and Afzelius. The idea was to save songs that are
265 The present chapter has been limited to male choral repertoire and performance by two university choirs. A parallel study deserves to be carried out on the folksongs arranged for and performed female and mixed quartets and choruses. For the former category, scattered newspaper reports tell of the great popularity of female quartets both domestically and abroad; for example, an entry in the London-based organ The Monthly Musical Record praises “the vocal quartet of Swedish ladies, who met with so much success last season, [that] again came forward with some of their national part-songs, and again proved their power to charm.” See “Mr. C. Hallé’s Pianoforte Recitals,” The Monthly Musical Record (July 1, 1875): 107. Furthermore, in the years around 1900, Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929) arranged a sizable body of folksongs for female choir and quartet with and without accompaniment by piano or harp; see her archive at S-Skma. As a starting-point for mixed settings, relevant collections include the following: Fritz Arlberg, Tre svenska folkvisor for SATBB ([by 1872]); Andréas Hallén, Svenska folkvisor och dansar, op. 37, for 8-part mixed chorus ([by 1889]), published with parallel Swedish and German texts for an international market; Albert Rubenson, Svenska folkvisor (1855); and Abraham Mankell, Sveriges herrliga melodier: Fyrstämmiga sånger (1862), along with a large number of other song textbooks designed for use in schools, including the collection Svenska skol-qvartetten edited by C. J. Berg, A. W. Larsson, and Frans Tiger (1898). Lennart Reimers discusses how mixed choral singing grew from the early folksong collection movement in Reimers, “A Cappella: The Story Behind the Swedish ‘Choral Miracle.’” 266 A closely related topic also in need of further study is the role of folksong arrangements in the many non-academic male choruses connected with trade groups and other organizations in cities and towns across Sweden. For an overview of Swedish male choral activity not directly connected with universities, see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 313–43. 267 Centrallyrik: a lyric that gives an immediate expression for the poet’s feelings and moods and is usually free of reflective elements. See definition in Svensk ordbok (2009).
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[otherwise] never sung from a death by oblivion.268
Yet the history of how this genre came to develop in the generations prior to Alfvén was
largely uncharted.
Arrangements of folksong have been shown to be widespread among surviving
nineteenth-century manuscript and printed sources alike; few sources contain no
folksongs, and the average number of folksongs in a given volume is close to ten percent
for both manuscripts and printed volumes. Overall, arrangements comply harmonically
with common-practice expectations and exhibit hymn-like textures, although some
settings include vocal features that imitate instruments.269 In addition, Hæffner has a
tendency to weaken the cadences in his choral arrangements as compared with his
earlier piano-vocal settings, which makes them sound “older.” Among the songs
performed most often, ballads are somewhat underrepresented, while new texts set to
existing traditional melodies appear more often than they do among settings for solo
voice and piano.
In performance by university choirs, folksong fulfilled three distinct roles. Until
268 “Folkvisearrangemangen betraktar jag som det betydelsefullaste i mitt liv. De är centrallyriken i mitt verk. Det mesta hämtade jag ur Afzelius’ och Geijers samlingar. Idén var att rädda undan glömskans död sånger, som aldrig blir sjungna.” Quoted in ibid., 276. The original citation comes from a newspaper interview of Alfvén by Björn Johansson, Göteborgs Handels-och Sjöfartstidning (June 22, 1956). 269 While folksong arrangements in general tend to exhibit conservative musical tendencies, composers in more recent times have taken greater liberties in using folk material as raw material for greater manipulation. A prime example is Karin Rehnqvist’s Davids nimm (1984) for three solo voices with optional descant choir, which is derived partly from a recording of a sung polska played backwards (the original text opening, “Minns du vad” (“Do you remember”) becomes “Davuds nnim” which, altered slightly to fit Swedish phonemes, in turn becomes “Davids nimm”). Rehnqvist discusses her innovative approach to folk music in an interview with Lennart Reimers: “Here I Am—What a Triumph to Exist! A Vocal Conversation with Karin Rehnqvist,” in Choral Music Perspectives, ed. Lennart Reimers and Bo Wallner (see Chapter Three, n. 155), 219–22. A brief analysis of the piece is found in Ling, A History of European Folk Music, 218.
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the early 1840s, folksong largely reflected backwards on Swedish history with the
urgency of preserving a national historical treasure being irreparably eroded by modern
ways of life. Beginning in the mid-1840s, as students from Nordic universities met and
discussed ways to bring their countries together culturally and politically, folksong
became, in certain respects, a forward-looking device: contrafacta allowed poets to layer
new ideas concerning Scandinavian cooperation upon traditional melodies, lending a
sense of historical legitimacy to decidedly modern thought. Eventually, near the end of
the century, after the possibility of political union had disappeared, folksong allowed
the choirs in Uppsala and Lund to carry on the mission of cultural Scandinavianism,
speaking with and for each other in acts of musical diplomacy by performing traditional
songs of Danish, Norwegian and Finnish origin alongside Swedish ones.
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4 Taking center stage: The theatricalization of folk music
In musical theater, the Herderian penchant for domesticating rural folksong for literary
purposes in educated spheres reached its apotheosis. The arrangements for solo voice
and piano discussed in the second chapter represent a first step beyond Herder’s text-
focused editorial ambitions, in which composers normalized and harmonized melodies
for commercial consumption and aural reproduction in the homes of middle- to upper-
class Swedes and, to a smaller extent, in concert performances. On the theatrical stage, a
third dimension was added to the words and music: characters meant to depict rural
practitioners of folk music in its traditional settings variously sang, danced, and played
instruments in choreographed scenes intended to portray realistic moments in peasant
life. Much as solo arrangements by Hæffner and others introduced heavily retouched
versions of folk music to new audiences as part of a purported “rediscovery” of
“ancient” traditions, theatrical performances invited audiences to imagine the scenes as
“authentic” portrayals of folk music in its natural habitat. Not only could audiences hear
the music they had come to recognize as “folk music,” they could also, by virtue of the
stories acted out onstage, imagine themselves into community with the characters, who
were predominantly of peasant background.
As through so much of its history, opera in nineteenth-century Europe was about
much more than what appeared onstage. The public demonstration of the wealth, power
and social status of patrons and audience alike was more visible—and more widely
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discussed in the press—than with any other form of art. New theaters were built to hold
larger audiences and with bigger stages that could accommodate mass choruses, a
popular new development.1 While Italian and French opera continued to be two
important sources of repertoire across Europe, they were soon joined by a third major
category, German-language opera, that grew from its roots in Viennese and German
Singspiel of the later 1700s to become a major component of pan-European repertoire. By
the middle of the 1800s, the Berlin-based theorist and pedagogue Adolf Bernhard Marx
(1795–1866) defined, from his German perspective, three national schools of opera:
Italian opera was known for its melodious qualities, French opera offered the best drama
and musical effects, and German opera was prized for its truth, earnestness and
intellect.2
As other, less operatically developed regions built the physical and musical
infrastructure to support opera in venues outside of court theaters, the translation of
operas from these three major traditions for performance in other local languages
became increasingly common. Performance language is one of three elements that
musicologist Philipp Ther identifies as central to the cultural nationalization of opera in
Europe, along with dramatic and musical elements of the works and the reception and
1 James Parakilas explores the phenomenon of mass choral scenes giving organized voice to “the people” in “Political Representation and the Chorus in Nineteenth-Century Opera,” 19th-Century Music 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 181–202. 2 Philipp Ther’s analysis of the development of national opera in three European centers (Dresden, Prague, and Lemberg/L’viv) informs much of this introductory discussion of national opera; for his comments on A. B. Marx, see Center Stage: Operatic Culture and Nation Building in Nineteenth-Century Central Europe, trans. Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmuller (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2014), 16.
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place of the works in the repertoire.3 Initially, performances in local languages relied
largely on translations of existing works; but operas and other works for musical theater
were soon written by and for speakers of regional languages around the geographical
edges of Europe, often with the goal of edifying audiences according to Enlightenment
principles or, as the century progressed, of stirring national sentiment.4 A continent-
wide, in-depth analysis of the development of national opera would be a major
undertaking indeed, particularly as the process unfolded in different times and manners
in each region. Ther does acknowledge the presence of certain commonalities, noting
early in the introduction to his analysis of national opera in three central European
regions that “the opening comments on opera in the nineteenth century were made
without distinguishing between Western, Central, and Eastern Europe.”5
A glaring absence here is Northern Europe, which, in grand narratives of music
history, is often considered to be so distant that it does not even appear on the map. For
example, in his six-volume, 4,272-page Oxford History of Western Music (2005), Richard
Taruskin devotes a mere two sentences to nineteenth-century Swedish composers and a
few paragraphs to a discussion of a Swedish folktune thought to underlie Smetana’s
symphonic poem Vltava (1874).6 Similarly, the 2010 edition of the standard textbook A
History of Western Music (Burkholder, Grout & Palisca) omits nineteenth-century Sweden
3 Ibid., 205. 4 Ibid., 17. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 “The Song of Värmland” (“Värmlandsvisan”) has been mentioned earlier with respect to male chorus song (see Chapter Three, n. 239) and will figure prominently later in this chapter. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3:455–56.
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altogether, while neighboring Norway, Finland and Denmark do receive coverage.7
Looking beneath the surface of such sweeping narratives, however, it becomes
apparent that Sweden has a long history of national operas that developed in three
stages spanning the late 1700s to the early 1900s. During the initial period, language was
the first Swedish element to appear, followed by subjects related to (royal) history. The
second layer is characterized by a stronger emphasis on folk culture, including folksongs
and folk melodies used as individual numbers, often interspersed between passages of
spoken dialogue; here, music functions as an auditory prop signaling the rural peasantry
to audiences consisting primarily of urban upper and middle classes. Finally, later in the
nineteenth century, concurrently with the arrival of Wagnerian style in the north,
individual folksongs became the central organizing features of entire operas, both
musically and dramatically.
Sweden’s most prominent display of national opera occurred relatively early
according to European standards. Already in the 1770s and 1780s, original works in
Swedish with plots derived from Swedish history were written for a specific purpose:
Gustaf III sought to use the prestige of opera to raise the status of the Swedish language.
However, Gustavian opera, which preceded the spread of Herder’s concept of Volkslied
to Sweden, contains relatively few musical references to traditional Swedish melodies.
This chapter opens by introducing Gustavian opera through the twin lenses of
Swedish language and the concept of “national music” current during that period. After
7 Donald Jay Grout, J. Peter Burkholder, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 8th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).
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sketching a comparative landscape of uses of folk melody in national opera in several
European countries in the 1800s—including the concept of the national theater—it then
examines the case of Sweden in depth. Two categories of analysis are presented, in
which folk music either functions as an auditory prop (analogous to costumes or
furniture) or becomes the central organizing principle of an entire theatrical work.
The underlying factor in this discussion is the Andersonian imagined
community: many features of nineteenth-century national opera, from local historical
plots to mass scenes to the incorporation of traditional melodies, invited audiences to
identify with characters and events onstage.8 Depending on perspective, such
identification had positive and negative ramifications. In the theater, audiences whose
cultural heritage lacked an independent state could find a sense of imagined community
among fellow countrypeople, whether in the case of fractured, soon-to-be-united
wholes, as with Italy and the German Empire, or regions such as Bohemia and Galicia
that were ruled by foreign powers.9 By this same token, skittish rulers feared that
audiences, upon seeing their counterparts fighting and suffering—or even, heaven
forbid, winning—on stage could encourage their subjects to imitate such treacherous
actions in real life.10 Indeed, reaction to La muette de Portici (Auber and Scribe, 1828) has
widely been credited with having instigated the revolutionary riots in Belgium in 1830,
8 Vlado Kotnik also argues for viewing “the field of collectivity of opera audiences, crowds, claques and publics” an an imagined community in Anderson’s sense; see “The Adaptability of Opera: When Different Social Agents Come to Common Ground,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44, no. 2 (December 2013): 309. 9 The region of Galicia meant here, covering parts of modern-day Poland and the Ukraine, is distinct from the community by the same name in northwestern Spain. 10 Ther, Center Stage, 3.
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although subsequent research has shown that the uprising was likely more planned than
spontaneous.11 In Sweden as elsewhere, (musical) drama developed the power to link
audiences in imagined community with characters portrayed onstage.
Eighteenth-century precursors: Gustaf III, Swedish-language opera, and the “national music” of Carl Envallsson
Across much of eighteenth-century Europe, musical theater relied on imported Italian
and, later in the century, French works. In Sweden, however, native-language opera and
theater flourished unusually early, during a brief golden age under the reign of Gustaf
III (r. 1771–92), the “Theater King,” who made a conscious effort to raise the status of his
country’s language by channeling the power of drama, stage, and music.12 Gustaf’s
patronage went beyond the financial support typical of monarchs. An avid fan of French
theater since childhood, Gustaf enjoyed acting onstage in court performances as a young
man, until he was forced to bow to criticism that such antics did not become a king.13
Thereafter, he continued to maintain close ties with theater, writing a number of plays
11 For evidence that the rioting was planned and largely led by people who did not attend the Brussels performance of La muette de Portici the night of August 25, 1830, see Sonia Slatin, “Opera and Revolution: La muette de Portici and the Belgian Revolution of 1830 Revisited,” Journal of Musicological Research 3, no. 1–2 (1979): 52–54. See also Sarah Hibberd, “La Muette and Her Context,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 435, n. 2. 12 I discuss these ideas in connection with Vogler’s opera Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe at more length in my article, “Swedish Opera in Translation: Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe.” A valuable English-language resource for Gustavian Opera in general is the collection of essays edited by Inger Mattsson: Gustavian Opera. 13 For more on the king’s onstage appearances, see the chapter “Player and King: Gustav III” in Matthew H. Wikander, Princes to Act: Royal Audience and Royal Performance, 1578–1792 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 264–313. Yvonne Frendel treats the king’s early theater background in Gustaf III, Nationalmusei utställningskatalog 367 (Stockholm: Egnellska boktryckeriet, 1972), 30. Generally, see also Peter Cassirer, “Gustaf III—The Theatre King: Librettist and Politician,” in Gustavian Opera, ed. Mattsson, 29–46.
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and plots in French and Swedish that were later versified for spoken and musical
performance in Swedish.14
In the decades immediately preceding Gustaf’s interventions, two types of opera
were performed in Sweden: original compositions by the Italian-born Swedish court
composer Francesco Uttini (1723–95) and the noble amateur Arvid Niclas von Höpken
(1710–78), who wrote opere serie on Metastasian texts in the 1750s and 1760s, and opéras-
comiques by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817), Egidio Duni (1708–75), François-
André Danican Philidor (1726–95) and André Grétry (1741–1813) performed by visiting
and resident French troupes.15 The first known musical play in the Swedish language,
the comic opera pastiche Syrinx, or The Water Nymph Transformed into Reeds (Syrinx, eller
Then uti wass förvandlade wattunymphen) on music by composers including Handel and
Graun, received a single performance at court in 1747, followed by a handful of
performances in three different Stockholm venues later in the century.16
Gustaf III’s project coincides with a general trend in which countries peripheral
14 As a member of the royal family, Gustaf’s native language was French. Marie-Christine Skuncke has pointed out that, in general, many dramas labeled “original” are actually translations or adaptations from other sources, including French dramas; see her chapter, “Sweden and European Drama 1771–1796,” in Gustavian Opera (see Chapter One, n. 2), 151. 15 See Johanna Ethnersson’s study, “Metastasiansk opera i Lovisa Ulrikas Sverige: En Studie av Fyra Drammi per Musica av Arvid Niclas von Höpken och Francesco Antonio Uttini,” PhD diss. (Stockholm University, 2003). 16 For pre-Gustavian repertory, see Gustaf Hilleström, The Royal Opera, Stockholm: A Presentation of the Royal Swedish Opera and Its History (Stockholm: Royal Opera House, 1960), 6. The libretto to Syrinx was published in conjunction with its premiere: Peter Lindahl, Syrinx, eller Then uti wass förwandlade wattu-nymphen (Stockholm: Kongl. tryckeriet, 1747). Fredrik August Dahlgren’s thorough list of Swedish works performed in Stockholm between 1737 and 1863, a valuable source for performance information, lists additional performances in 1768, 1770, and 1790; Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel uppförda på Stockholms theatrar 1737–1863 och Kongl. theatrarnes personal 1773–1863: Med flera anteckningar (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1866), 357. The pastiche was revised for the 1790 performances; see Lennart Hedwall, “Stenborgs teater och det svenska sångspelet,” in Musiken i Sverige II (see Chapter Three, n. 50), 363.
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to the powerhouses of Italy and France began to develop their own vernacular operas. A
scant two decades earlier, the first original Russian-language opera, Cephalus and Procris
(Tsefal i Prokris, 1755), had premiered in St. Petersburg, another northern capital with a
strong operatic tradition. Cephalus and Procris is the result of a collaboration between a
foreign-born composer, Francesco Araia (1709–ca. 1770), and a local poet, Aleksandr
Sumarokov (1717–77); this half-foreign, half-domestic model was adopted for the first
Swedish operas as well.
Shortly after taking the throne in 1771 and consolidating power by means of a
coup d’état the following year, Gustaf III dismissed the resident French opera troupe. In
1773, he founded the Royal Theater (Kungliga teatern), as the operatic institution was
originally called, with the express purpose of elevating the Swedish language, which
was otherwise viewed as literarily and musically inferior to French and Italian.17 The
inaugural director, Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd (1746–83), confirms Gustaf’s intention “to
begin where other nations ended, by establishing a grand opera.”18 Ehrensvärd
continues:
An opera, which contains pleasant and engaging music, a well-integrated ballet, brilliant costumes, pretty and well-painted scenery, has so much going for it, that the eye and remaining senses are all satisfied simultaneously. Eventually we shall become accustomed to the [Swedish] language, minimizing its hardness through the engaging music; we shall eventually find words and expressions
17 From its founding in 1773, the Royal Theater was initially conceived primarily as an opera house. Later, in 1788, the theater was split into two branches: the Royal Opera (Kungliga operan) for works based primarily in music, and the Royal Dramatic Theater (Kungliga dramatiska teatern, or Dramaten for short) for stage productions based primarily on the spoken word. In this dissertation, the term “Royal Opera” will be used to designate operatic activities both prior to and following the split of the Royal Theater in 1788. 18 “Jo att börja med det, hvarmed andra nationer slutat: at inrätta en stor opera.” Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd, Dagboksanteckningar förda vid Gustaf III:s Hof, ed. E. V. Montan (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söner, 1877), 1:216.
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easier, and take the most useful ones and gradually adjust our own speech.19
To its traditional roles as entertainment and lavish court spectacle, Gustavian opera was
accorded a new, sociolinguistic function. Although Gustaf did not have a strong musical
background, he sought to appropriate music as a tool to enhance language, gradually
transforming the perceptions of his subjects so that their native tongue would lose its
crudeness, become palatable through familiarity, and eventually develop into a
prescriptive model for linguistic usage.
Parallel ideas arose in intellectual domains. The Italian author Abbé Domenico
Michelessi (1735–73) came to Sweden during the early stages of Gustaf’s endeavor. In his
Inaugural Address (Inträdes-tal) to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga
Vetenskapsakademien) in 1772, he voiced similar aesthetic ideas:
The harmony of music, to which your native tongue so well lends itself, will unite its delights with the art of poetry . . . Music will actively encourage Swedish men of genius to represent, by means of strong, expressive and well-suited tones, the encouraging voice of joy, the deep sighs of sorrow, the rudely interrupted screams of threats, wrath and despair.20
Michelessi’s argument echoes Rousseau’s ideal of song as the truest, most basic form of
speech and ascribes to music the power to bring out a depth of emotion not currently
19 “En opera, som eger en behaglig och intagande musique, en väl inrättad ballet, prydliga kläder, vackra och väl målade decorationer, har så mycket intagande, at ögat, örat och de öfriga sinnena äro alla på en gång förnöjda. Man vänjer sig härigenom småningom vid språket, minskar dess hårdhet genom en intagande musique; man finner ord och uttryck småningom lindrigare, man torde finna de tjenligaste, och småningom ingår man en förlikning med sitt språk.” Ibid. Translation expanded from Bertil H. van Boer, “Gustavian Opera: An Overview,” in Gustavian Opera (see Chapter One, n. 2), 162. 20 Kathleen Kuzmick Hansell provides this translation in, “Gluck’s ‘Orpheus och Euridice’ in Stockholm: Performance Practices on the Way from ‘Orfeo’ to ‘Orphée’ 1773–1786,” in Gustavian Opera (see Chapter One, n. 2), 259. The original Swedish is printed in Agne Beijer, “Abbé Domenico Michelessi: Några anteckningar om honom själv och hans verksamhet i Sverige,” Samlaren: Tidskrift för svensk litteraturhistorisk forskning 1 (1920): 92–140.
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accessible to merely spoken language. In so doing, he aligns himself squarely with the
linguistic motives of the nascent Gustavian opera movement. Well versed in
contemporary reform ideas espoused in Italy and Vienna, Michelessi helped generate
interest in devising a new path for Swedish opera.21
Under Gustaf III’s watch, the Royal Opera was founded in 1772, premiered its
first performance in 1773, and moved to a newly built theater of its own, the Opera
House (Operahuset), in 1782. That same year, Gustaf created the Society for the
Improvement of the Swedish Language (Förbättringssällskapet för svenska språket), a
society designed to support the performance of Swedish-language plays by theater-
minded members of the court. The Swedish Academy (Svenska Akademien) was founded
in 1786, following the model of the Académie Française (1635), with the primary mission
of enhancing the “purity, strength and greatness” (“renhet, styrka och höghet”) of the
Swedish language.22 A separate stage for spoken plays, the Royal Dramatic Theater
(Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern), followed shortly thereafter in 1788; the idea of Swedish-
language drama, whether spoken or sung, was by now firmly entrenched both socially
and institutionally.
The Gustavian era came to a sudden end when the king was mortally injured
21 Michelessi was a friend of the opera reformer Francesco Algarotti (1712–64) and edited Algarotti’s complete writings; he was partway through a Swedish translation of Gluck’s first “reform” opera, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), at the time of his death in 1773. For more on Michelessi and Algarotti, see Beijer, “Abbé Domenico Michelessi.” Richard Engländer writes more generally on Gluck’s operas in Copenhagen and Stockholm in “Gluck und der Norden,” Acta Musicologica 24, no. 1/2 (June 1952): 62–83. 22 “Historisk översikt,” Svenska Akademien, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.svenskaakademien.se/svenska-akademien/historisk-oversikt.
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inside his opera house during a masked ball in 1792.23 In many ways, Swedish opera
took a hit along with the king: the systematic creation of new works in accordance with
Gustaf’s program ceased, and the Opera House itself was shuttered by his son, Gustaf
IV Adolf, for several years early in the 1800s. However, this oversimplification belies the
amount of operatic activity that continued to occur in the following decades.24 Historical
performance records for different periods prior to and after 1792 give a better picture of
how the king’s death affected the opera he so staunchly supported; the following
discussion relates to Figures 4.1–4.3 below.
Records show that, between the first performance by the Royal Opera in 1773
and the completion of the Opera House in 1782, foreign, French-based repertoire
provided the primary material, both in terms of overall numbers of performances and
the numbers of different works performed each season.25 The presence of original
Swedish material, while culturally groundbreaking, is not overwhelming: on average
over this time period, twenty-four percent of overall performances, and twenty-one
percent of individual works performed, were new operas or sångspel by Swedish
23 This assassination forms the disguised subject of Un ballo in maschera (Verdi and Somma, 1859) by way of the earlier opera Gustav III (Auber and Scribe, 1833). 24 Owe Ander makes a similar argument in his unpublished paper, “Amphions of the North: Court Kapellmeisters in the Musical Life of Sweden Around 1800,” Manuscript submitted for publication, n.d., [11–13]. Likewise, Magnus Blomkvist shows that, in the short term, ballet productions were temporarily suspended for the remainder of the season following the king’s death but resumed the following year and continued to grow over the next several years; see his chapter “Ballet in the Royal Opera’s Repertoire 1773–1806,” in Gustavian Opera (see Chapter One, n. 2), 429. Hofsten and Strömbeck’s tables for “pure” ballet performances between 1773 and 1820 show a similar trajectory in the mid 1790s, although the remainder of the years through 1820 show a wider fluctuation than is found for opera performances; see Kungliga teatern: Repertoar 1773–1973: Opera, operett, sångspel, balett, Skrifter från Operan (Stockholm: Operan, 1974), 156–58. 25 Data is gathered from charts of performances by season in Hofsten and Strömbeck, Kungliga teatern, 85–90.
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composers.26 Immediately prior to the opening of the Opera House, performance
numbers plunged to an all-time low of a grand total of two performances of two
different foreign works in the 1781/82 season. From the opening of the house through
the end of the 1790/91 season—the last complete season before Gustaf’s mortal injury
there in March 1792—overall performance numbers were slow to rebound and never
reached the most active seasons of the previous decade, when performances had been
held in the Bollhuset (Ball House) theater adjacent to the Royal Palace.27 Nevertheless,
original Swedish works now took on a much larger position in the repertoire than they
had previously done: fully forty-six percent of overall performances, and thirty-five
percent of individual works performed, were original Swedish creations (although the
term “original” is applied loosely, as some librettos derived from foreign models).
Upon the king’s death in 1792, performance numbers did decrease, but almost
immediately they began to rise steadily and substantially; by now, the opera was an
established institution in Stockholm, and it continued to grow despite the absence of its
founder.28 However, Swedish works lost their prominence. From 1792 until 1806, when
26 Performance numbers may be incomplete, given that no performances of any sort are listed for the 1774/75, 1779/80 or 1781/82 seasons. These averages come from the seven seasons during this period for which data is given. For definitions of different types of musical theater, including sångspel, see below, p. 228. 27 To be sure, the highest proportions of original Swedish material of any season (seventy-five percent of the performances and fifty percent of the works) took place in that initial year of the opera house in 1782/83; however, those percentages are less impressive considering that absolute numbers were strikingly low in that period, with only a total of four performances of two different operas. For a concise list of main, secondary and occasional theater venues in which performances by the Royal Opera have taken place through 1973, see the comments in English in Hofsten and Strömbeck, Kungliga teatern, 184. 28 For a discussion of the economic state of the Royal Opera through the nineteenth century, see Karin Hallgren, “Opera in Stockholm during the 19th Century: From Royal Patronage to a Theatre on the
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the Opera House temporarily closed and productions moved to the nearby Arsenal
Theater (Arsenalsteatern), the proportion of performances of original Swedish works fell
to eighteen percent of overall performances and fourteen percent of works performed.29
The gulf between Swedish and foreign repertoire continued to grow during the interim
period in the Arsenal Theater. From 1806 to 1812, just six percent of overall
performances and seven percent of individual works were Swedish, a situation that
hardly changed in the years after the opera house reopened; between 1812 and 1819, the
numbers remain steady, with seven percent of performances and six percent of works
being of Swedish origin.
For a visual representation of Swedish operas performed during the periods
discussed above, Figure 4.1 shows the total number of performances of all works each
season (solid line) and the number of performances of Swedish works (dashed line). The
years refer to seasons; with the exception of the initial season, s1773 (spring 1773), each
season includes part of the following year, i.e. 1800 indicates the 1800/01 season.
Bourgeois Market,” in “Verwandlung Der Welt”? Die Musikkultur des Ostseeraums in der Sattelzeit (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016), 109–22. 29 While sources agree the opera house closed in 1806, they differ as to its re-opening, which is variously listed as 1809, 1810 and 1812. The most detailed and modern discussion of this period, which indicates that the Opera House gradually re-opened starting in late 1809, is found in Karin Hallgren, “Opera’s Role in Royal Image Making: Repertoire and Performances 1810–1826,” in Scripts of Kingship: Essays on Bernadotte and Dynastic Formation in an Age of Revolution, ed. Mikael Alm and Britt-Inger Johansson (Uppsala: Historiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet, 2008), 110.
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Figure 4.1: Royal Opera, total performances of all operas and Swedish operas per season, 1773–1820
In the first period of the Royal Opera, during Gustaf III’s lifetime, the number of
performances varies wildly. After his death in 1792, overall performances actually
increase substantially; even when they begin to fall in 1809/10, numbers remain much
higher than in Gustaf’s most active season, 1778/79. In contrast, during this entire
period, the number of Swedish operas performed in a given season fluctuates roughly
within the same bounds (zero to twenty-seven) established when Gustaf actively
supported the creation and performance of vernacular opera.
Figure 4.2 is closely related and shows the total number of different works
performed each season (solid line) and the number of original Swedish works (dashed
line).
0
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Figure 4.2: Royal Opera, number of total operas and Swedish operas performed per season, 1773–1820
Surprisingly, the number of different titles performed each year after 1792 creates a
relatively even rising trajectory (Figure 4.2), showing continued investment in the Opera
in general, although the number of Swedish titles performed annually essentially freezes
upon Gustaf’s death.
Figure 4.3 combines information from the previous two figures. The darker gray
line pertains to overall performances and shows the percentage of performances that
were of Swedish works each season, based on the data in Figure 4.1. The lighter gray
line indicates individual works and shows the percentage of titles performer that were
original Swedish works, based on Figure 4.2.
0
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Figure 4.3: Royal Opera, percentage of performances and individual titles of Swedish works, 1773–1820
It becomes clear that, although numbers fluctuated from season to season,
original Swedish opera was a crucial component of the performance repertoire during
the Gustavian period, with as many as half of the titles (in 1790/91) and up to three-
quarters of total performances (in 1782/83) being of native works. After plummeting in
the years following the king’s death and reaching zero in 1796/97, a small rebound
occurred briefly (averaging just under twenty percent of total performances between
1797/98 and 1802/03), but by the time of the temporary closing of the Opera House in
1806, proportions for overall performances and individual titles struggled to reach even
ten percent in a given season.
Owe Ander has charted a similar phenomenon over the longer term: the
presence of new premieres of Swedish works at the Royal Opera over various periods
0
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between 1770 and 1920.30 Ander finds an unexpected continuity in the absolute numbers
of new Swedish works that premiered in the two decades or so preceding and following
Gustaf III’s death in 1792; however, the number of overall premieres in the years after
1792 increased so much compared with the previous period that the percentage of
premieres of new Swedish originals fell from a high of over one-third during the
Gustavian period to just ten percent in the years leading to 1818, when Sweden selected
Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, Marshal of France, as its new king, ending the seventy-year
reign of the House of Holstein-Gottorp and transitioning to the House of Bernadotte, the
current royal family.31
Other than the Gustavian period, the period with the highest premium on new
Swedish premieres occurred between 1868 and 1900, when nineteen operas, or fully one-
quarter of new premieres, were of Swedish origin. This corresponds roughly with the
third stage of national opera in that country, the most thorough integration of folksong
with drama, which developed as composers moved beyond using melodies as small-
scale signifiers of local color or as individual numbers sung diegetically for
entertainment purposes built into the plot, and began to use single songs as the central
principle for entire operas.
While opera itself continued to flourish in Stockholm after the death of the king,
it is clear that he was not only a central figure, but the central figure in the first stage of
30 Owe Ander, “‘The Wealth of the Nations’: Die Stockholmer Oper und die Entwicklung einer nationalen Identität in Schweden,” Studia Musicologica 52, no. 1/4 (December 2011): 451–53. 31 Because Ander divides the years 1770–1920 according to major political events, the length of time of each section varies from approximately twenty to thirty years. Ibid.
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the nationalization of opera. Furthermore, just as his stated aim was to elevate the
Swedish language (and his not-so-subtle subtext in choosing excerpts from Swedish
history for the libretti he drafted was to glorify his own person), there was no attempt to
create a distinctly Swedish musical style—and if there had been, it certainly would not
have been based on peasant music.32
For Gustavian opera, folk music—an anachronistic category in itself, as the
Herderian concept had not yet arrived in Sweden—was not a priority.33 Rather, the
primary aesthetic aim was, as Johann Gottlieb Naumann (composer of the first “national
opera,” Gustaf Wasa, 1786) put it, to unite the magnificence of French opera with the
melodiousness of Italian opera.34 On the one hand, most composers of Gustavian
opera—Johann Gottlieb Naumann, Joseph Martin Kraus, Georg Joseph Vogler, Johann
Christoph Hæffner—were born in Germany, and a fifth, Francesco Antonio Uttini, came
from Italy; only one composer, Olof Åhlström (1756–1835), was born in Sweden and
would thus have been more likely to have had the chance to develop an early awareness
of Swedish folk music, which was not at all as visible in urban life as it would become
starting in the 1810s.35 On the other hand, while Swedish society was accustomed to the
use of what would later come to be categorized as folk material in lighter musical
32 Gustaf III himself wrote drafts of librettos that treated episodes in the lives of his predecessors Gustaf I (r. 1523–60) and Gustaf II Adolf (r. 1611–32), conferring glorious representations of their deeds onto his own person. 33 See Anna Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Den gustavianska operan,” in Musiken i Sverige II (see Chapter Three, n. 50), 343. 34 An excerpt of a letter by Naumann to his brother is quoted in Swedish translation in ibid., 337–38. 35 On the German and Italian backgrounds of court composers, during period, see Ander, “Amphions of the North.”
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theater, its position in opera was less widely accepted, as a contemporary response to a
certain passage in Vogler’s Gustavus Adolphus and Ebba Brahe (Gustaf Adolf och Ebba Brahe,
1788) demonstrates.
Gustavus Adolphus and Ebba Brahe is structured around a blending of social levels
that was unusual for Swedish theater at this time, with a first act set in a royal-
aristocratic milieu, a second act that takes place in a fishing village, and a third act that
returns to the same location as the first, but which includes characters from both
environments. During the folk-oriented second act, a peasant woman sings new words
to a melody known as the “Poultry-woman’s Song” (“Hönsgummans visa”). This tune,
familiar to audiences via a version that was sung to a different newly composed text in
honor of King Adolf Fredrik’s marriage to Lovisa Ulrika nearly forty years earlier, is
believed to be of folk origin, which did not sit well with aristocratic circles in the
audience.36 The baron Schering Rosenhane (1754–1812) was piqued enough to complain
in a letter to his sister that if she had not yet heard the “Poultry-woman’s Song,” she
could go hear it in the second act of the latest opera.37 The Herderian idea of a nation’s
soul residing in its folk had not yet come to Sweden, and Rosenhane, a member of the
lower nobility, found the gulf between the common origins of the melody and its
performance in the refined space of the opera house too great to reconcile. He could not
yet imagine himself in cultural community with rural Sweden the way that future
36 Martin Tegen, Introduction to Georg Joseph Vogler, Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe: Lyriskt drama i tre akter. Facsimile of the vocal score by Per Conrad Boman, ed. Martin Tegen, Monumenta Musicae Svecicae 7 (Stockholm: AB Nordiska Musikförlaget, 1973), xviii. 37 Oscar Levertin, Gustaf III som dramatisk författare: Literaturhistorisk studie (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1894), 130.
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generations of operagoers would do.38
In other musical theater venues, however, folk music was more acceptable on the
stage. A series of theaters associated with the actor and director Petter Stenborg (1719–
81) and his son, Carl (1752–1813), put on various types of musical plays and sångspel.
One especially popular piece in the repertoire—Harvest Ale, or The Enforcement Agency
(Slåtterölet eller Kronfogdarna, 1787), a comedy with melodies arranged by Carl
Envallsson (1756–1806)—contained a number of melodies of folk origin.39 Envallsson, a
prolific author-translator and composer-arranger for the Swedish Comic Theater, also
authored the country’s first musical dictionary, Swedish Musical Lexikon (Svenskt
musikaliskt lexikon, 1802), which, while based largely on Rousseau, shows trends current
in Stockholm at the end of the eighteenth century.40
In his entry on “National-Musik,” Envallsson carefully differentiates between
melodies of regional origin, which he calls “Provincial melodies,” and “National music,”
those tunes that are “common around the whole country.”41 In professing a connection
between a nation’s music and its character and temperament, Envallsson closely follows
the doctrine of climate espoused by Rousseau and Montesquieu; Herder’s ideas on the
value and purity of folksong, and the subsequent emphasis on “unspoiled” songs
coming from regional traditions, had not yet taken hold. Envallsson chooses the
38 In contrast, foreign(-sounding) national dances appeared in Joseph Martin Kraus’s pantomine-ballet Fiskarena, VB 40 (1789). 39 Hedwall, “Stenborgs teater och det svenska sångspelet,” 359. 40 See earlier discussion on Envallsson, Chapter Two, p. 45. 41 Massengale, “Carl Envallsson and Swedish ‘National Music,’” 381. Massengale translates a substantial portion of Envallsson’s “National-Musik” article from Svenskt Musikaliskt Lexikon.
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“Poultry-woman’s Song” as an example, declaring that the song is not to be considered
national music, though it is often mistakenly touted as such, because it originated in the
province of Södermanland and was not common across the country.
Using Envallsson’s definition of national music as tunes known by—rather than
emerging from—people at large, such “folk-familiar” tunes, as one might call them,
were quite common in light opera and vaudevilles. Envallsson claims to have compiled
a collection of national melodies, although its whereabouts are unknown. Nevertheless,
James Massengale has traced melodies for many of Envallsson’s nearly four hundred
references to tunes; among this corpus are some melodies that, by the second decade of
the nineteenth century, would unquestionably have been classified as “folktunes”
proper, including the venerable “Poultry-woman’s Song.”42 Despite the presence of
folksongs on the musical theater stage during the Gustavian era, they did not become
central features of works—lighter or serious—until the second phase of national opera,
which began to take form in the 1820s and blossomed beginning in the 1840s.
Swedish musical theater: An overview
In nineteenth-century Sweden, theater was a matter of life and death. Beginning in 1798,
royal permission was required in order to operate a theater, which limited performance
venues in Stockholm to the Opera House, the Arsenal Theater for predominantly spoken
42 Envallsson states that “national music” is typically in the major mode, while “provincial melodies” are commonly in minor modes; collectors of folksongs in the nineteenth century, who sought out what Envallsson would have called “provincial melodies,” likewise noted the prevalence of minor modes. Ibid., 381–82.
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theater, and a summer theater on the island of Djurgården, home of the royal hunting
preserve.43 Shortly after the playwright and journalist Anders Lindeberg (1789–1849)
made yet another of his unsuccessful requests to break the Stockholm theater monopoly
in 1834, he wrote a letter to the justice ombudsman in which he called the monopoly
illegal, accused Karl XIV Johan of acting in a manner contrary to the Constitution, and,
most threateningly of all, reminded the king that on that very day, twenty-five years
earlier, a previous Swedish monarch had been ousted from his throne for failing to act in
his country’s best interests.44 As a result, Lindeberg was condemned to death by the
highest court, a sentence that was simultaneously commuted to three years’
imprisonment, as neither the king nor the government actually wished to kill him.
In a plot twist worthy of the stage, Lindeberg refused to accept clemency,
arguing that he sought “justice, not clemency” (“rättvisa, ej nåd”) and asking only for
permission to live until his birthday two months hence, though also assuring that he was
“spiritually prepared to die at any time, even tomorrow.”45 Karl XIV Johan countered
with an appropriately unexpected rex ex machina solution that allowed him to pardon
Lindeberg without losing face in the process: the French-born king declared that, in
43 On the theater monopoly, which lasted until 1829 outside of Stockholm and until 1842 within the capital city limits, see Martin Tegen and Inga Lewenhaupt, “Teatrarna och deras musik,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 131–33. Karin Hallgren points out that various theater societies (föreningar) such as Aurora, Polymnia and Thalia, made it possible for members to put on and attend private theatrical performances; see “Stockholms rum för musik under 1800-talets första hälft − mot ett offentligt musikliv,” Bebyggelsehistorisk tidskrift 54 (2007): 15–16. 44 Ami Lönnroth and Per Eric Mattsson paraphrase and cite from Lindeberg’s letter in Anders Lindeberg: Mannen som höll på att mista huvudet för sin kärlek till teatern (Stockholm: Books on Demand, 2011), 40–41. 45 “[Jag är] andligen… beredd att dö när som helst, om det ock vore i morgon.” Lindeberg’s letter, dated September 10, 1834, is reprinted in ibid., 46–47.
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honor of the twenty-fourth anniversary of his arrival in Sweden, he would grant general
amnesty to all political prisoners in the country. As the story goes, Lindeberg was the
only political prisoner; and not only did his head remain firmly attached to his
shoulders, he was eventually able to open a new theater, appropriately called the New
Theater (Nya Teatern), in 1842, ending the theater monopoly.46 In 1846, the New Theater
became known as the Smaller Theater (Mindre Teatern), which was eventually
purchased by the Royal Theater.47
Terminology: Genres and types
Through much of the nineteenth century, music was more pervasive on the theatrical
stage in general than it is in the present day. Until the 1860s, a typical theater
performance in Sweden had multiple parts: an initial piece in three acts, a brief musical
concert, and a shorter, one-act piece.48 The idea of purely spoken drama did not come
into its own until near the end of the century; even plays that were primarily spoken
contained at least a song or two or other small musical elements. In addition, no
46 The story of Lindeberg’s release—perhaps apocryphal, although entirely in keeping with his behavior throughout this case—claims that the determined prisoner, who was granted a great deal of freedom of movement, was simply locked outside the prison gates while taking a walk, and that he reportedly spent time trying to get back in before giving up and walking away a free man; ibid., 48. Most sources say that Lindeberg was the only political prisoner at the time, but Claës Lundin claims that two others were released as well; see Tidsbilder ur Stockholmslifvet (Stockholm: Beckman, 1895), 63. In practice, other figures helped bring about the eventual end of the monopoly. In addition to performance activity within established private theatrical societies, the actor and theater leader Olof Ulrik Torsslow (1801–81) arranged private performances for members of a closed society—except the society was brand-new, and would-be members could arrange for membership at the same time that they purchased their tickets, effectively circumventing the prohibition against public theatrical performances; see Hallgren, “Stockholms rum för musik under 1800-talets första hälft,” 17. 47 Karin Hallgren, Borgerlighetens teater: Om verksamhet, musiker och repertoar vid Mindre Teatern i Stockholm 1842–63 (Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2000), 274. 48 Tegen and Lewenhaupt, “Teatrarna och deras musik,” 129.
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performance was complete without overtures, choruses, marches or other types of music
performed between acts by a resident ensemble and/or visiting musicians.
Folksongs, folk melodies and dances frequently appeared in theatrical works.
Table 4.1 lists some three dozen titles prior to 1900 with close connections to folksong.
Titles analyzed in this dissertation are written in bold text. In most cases, the year
indicates the year of composition, with a premiere following immediately or within the
next few years. Exceptions include Clas Livijn’s two librettos (1806, 1810), which were
never set to music, and Ivar Hallström’s Little Karin (1896), premiered only in 1997.
Table 4.1: Theatrical works in Swedish containing musical quotations of or other direct connections with folk music
Title Translation Composer Librettist Year Genre type Hafsfrun The Mermaid (none) Livijn 1806 libretto Strömkarlen The Water Sprite (none) Livijn 1810 libretto Föreningen The Union Du Puy Löwenhielm/
Nordforss 1815 play with song &
divertissement Balder Balder Du Puy Valerius 1819 divertissement Vermlands-flickan The Girl from
Värmland Fryxell Fryxell 1821 sångspel
Ryno, eller Den vandrande riddaren
Ryno, or The Knight Errant
Brendler/ Oscar I
von Beskow 1831 sångspel
Hobergsgubben Old Man Hoberg Torssell Weser 1836 vådevill Silfverbröllopet The Silver
Wedding Ahlström? Blanche 1843 vådevill
Ett national-divertissement
A National Divertissement
Berwald, J.
Böttiger 1843 vådevill
En majdag i Värend A May Day in Värend
Berwald, J.
Böttiger 1843 occasional piece with national melodies, dances
Kröningsdagen Coronation Day Ahlström Blanche 1844 occasional piece Fiskarstugan The Fisherman’s
Cottage Säfström/ Randel
Säfström 1844 operetta
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Title Translation Composer Librettist Year Genre type Näcken, eller Älvspelet
The Water Sprite, or The Elf Play
Van Boom Meijersson 1844 romantic opera (sångspel)
Engelbrekt och hans dalkarlar
Engelbrekt and his Dalecarlian Men
Ahlström Blanche 1846 historical drama
Värmlänningarna The Värmlanders Randel Dahlgren 1846 tragi-comic spoken play with song and dance (vådevill)
National-Divertissement
National Divertissement
Foroni/ Berwald, J.
Böttiger/ Schyberg
1850 divertissement
Aura Aura Ahlström Granberg 1850 drama Urdur, eller Näckens dotter
Urdur, or Necken’s Daughter
Ahlström Granberg/ Overskou
1851 fairy-drama
En folkfest i Dalarne A Folk Celebration in Dalarna
Foroni Schyberg 1851 divertissement
Kung Karls jakt King Charles’ Hunt
Pacius Topelius 1852 opera (Swedish-Finnish)
Veteranerne The Veterans Foroni Jolin 1857 occasional piece with song
Ljungby horn och pipa
The Drinking Horn & Whistle from Ljungby
Boman Silfverstolpe 1858 romantic drama with song
Maj-kungen The May King Söderman Hedberg 1860 occasional piece with song
Ung-Hanses dotter Ung-Hanse’s Daughter
Jolin Randel 1860 historical-romantic drama
Till tings! Till tings! To the Courts! To the Courts!
de Wahl Hedberg 1861 New year’s review with song
Ur lotsarnas liv From the Pilots’ Lives
Berens Dalin 1863 dramatic poem with song
Korp-Kirsti Korp-Kirsti Berens Hedberg 1863 vådevill Folkunga-lek The Games of
the House of Folkung
Söderman Josephson 1864 romantic-historical drama
Marsk stigs döttrar Marsk Stig’s Daughters
Söderman Josephson 1866 drama
Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun
Duke Magnus and the Mermaid
Hallström Hedberg 1867 romantic opera
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Title Translation Composer Librettist Year Genre type Stolts Elisif Lady Elisif Hallström Hedberg 1870 drama
Nerkingarne: Bilder ur folklivet
The People from Närke: Images of Folk-Life
Littmarck Anrep 1871 folk comedy with song
Den bergtagna The Bride of the Mountain King
Hallström Hedberg 1874 romantic opera
Per svinaherde Peter Pig-Herder Hallström Christiernsson 1887 folktale play with song
Liten Karin Little Karin Littmarck unknown 1895 operetta Liten Karin Little Karin Hallström Hedberg 1896 opera
Theatrical works ranged from all music all the time, to mostly music with some
spoken text, to mostly spoken text with a little music.49 Genre designations can give
clues about the extent and type of music found in a given piece, although the terms were
not necessarily applied consistently during the period in question.50 The most
prestigious genre, opera, placed the highest premium on music: productions were wholly
sung, whether consisting of individual song numbers interspersed with recitative or,
later in the century, entirely through-composed acts along Wagnerian lines. The sångspel
or operett denoted productions with spoken dialogue alternating with copious amounts
of newly composed music (as opposed to mostly borrowed melodies); as etymology
49 An important finding aid for manuscript scores of works performed at the Royal Opera between its founding in 1773 and the mid-1800s is the “Schwarz katalog,” KT Schwarz katalog, S-Skma. 50 For genre terminology and corresponding definitions, see Tegen and Lewenhaupt, “Teatrarna och deras musik,” 129–30. Dag Kronlund makes similar distinctions among spoken plays at the Royal Dramatic Theater in the 1860s, discerning four categories: music plays (musikpjäser); spoken vaudeville-type plays (talpjäser av vaudevilletyp); spoken plays with instances of dramatic music (talpjäser med dramatiska musikinslag); and spoken plays without music (talpjäser utan musikinslag), keeping in mind that overtures, entractes, and other general theatrical music would have been added in conjunction with performance; see “‘Musiken låten ljuda, mina vänner!’ Musiken i talpjäserna på Kungliga teatern vid 1800-talets mitt,” PhD diss. (Stockholm University, 1989), 6.
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suggests, this type of piece grew out of the German singspiel, with later influence from
new developments in Paris and Vienna in the 1860s. A related type, the vådevill (or,
sometimes, pjäs med sång — “play with song”), also contained significant amounts of
music, but in the form of existing tunes for which new words were written. Nearer the
spoken end of the spectrum, the terms skådespel med sång (“drama with song”) or komedi
med sång indicate that singing was an important, though secondary, component of the
piece. Finally, even spoken plays labelled skådespel (“drama”), sorgespel (“tragedy”),
komedi, or fars (“farce”) contained musical elements of some sort.
Rather than divide musical theater along generic lines, the present analysis
introduces a categorization informed by the role of folk music within a work. The first
type, the folksong (or instrumental tune) as auditory prop, grew out of the occasional
use of such melodies in the Gustavian era and came to be more significant in the
nineteenth century, hitting its stride in a series of pieces in the 1840s. Here, folksong is
an important element, alongside costumes, scenery, and physical props, that signals the
location, class, and status of characters. While it is invariably employed as a positive
feature inviting the audience to imagine itself in community with the image of “folk”
being presented, this image—like the arrangements of folk melodies performed—is itself
a construct twice removed: librettos are based on academic research (at best) or urban
stereotypes (more often) of rural folk life as understood and portrayed by middle- to
upper-class authors. The majority of folk music on the theatrical stage is used in this
capacity of auditory prop since it integrates well into the structure of longer or shorter
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passages of spoken dialogue interspersed with musical numbers, the primary mode of
theater in Sweden during this time.
The second category for analysis is somewhat smaller and developed slightly
later in the century. Here, folksong is the “central organizing principle” for most aspects
of an entire work, as characters come to dramatic life. Librettos spin out the narratives of
ballads into evening-length stories by adding extra material and motivations to sustain
the action; costumes and scenery are designed accordingly. On the musical side, the
melody in question becomes a leading motive and appears in multiple forms: with its
original text as a song “sung” diegetically by a character onstage (as an auditory prop,
though perhaps more integrated into the texture than in many of the musically simpler
works belonging to that category), as contrafacta with new words that advance the
story, in fragments for motivic development, and in instrumental overtures and
interludes. This expanded use of folksong, while more common in operas and sångspel,
also occurs in a few works closer to the spoken-drama end of the spectrum. The function
of folksong as central organizing principle for a work differs from its role as auditory
prop, where it helps invite audiences to identify with characters portrayed onstage in a
semblance of (constructed) reality; here, it takes on an edifying tone, typically by
locating a ballad in a notable moment within Swedish history or by re-enacting the
supposed events underlying a ballad plot, further reinforcing contemporaneous
perceptions of folksong as an ancient historical phenomenon with cultural relevance for
the present day.
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Folk influences in Swedish musical theater are part of a larger trend of
vernacular musics in dramatic works across nineteenth-century Europe. As countries
and would-be countries developed theatrical institutions to perform vernacular-
language works with plots and musical features tailored to local audiences, folk music
became a common means of claiming national heritage onstage. After establishing key
pan-European developments with an eye toward Swedish participation, this chapter
examines selected Swedish works according to their respective categorization of
folksong as auditory prop or central organizing principle.
National opera in nineteenth-century Europe
The nationalization of opera occurred at different times and by various means across
Europe. In general, the initial stage of nationalization in most regions—the incorporation
of folksongs, melodies and dances as individual numbers in semi-realistic settings—
corresponds with Sweden’s second, post-Gustavian stage.
Institutional nationalization
In much of nineteenth-century Europe, opera shifted from an almost exclusively royal or
aristocratic art form to a more widely accessible form of entertainment. A common
driving factor towards drama for the people in many countries was the development of
“national theaters.” The idea caught on in German-speaking lands, which invoked Paris
as a model, and subsequently spread to neighboring central European peoples. While
the gist of the term remained consistent over time, its expression varied, as can be seen
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in the progression of entries for Nationaltheater in successive editions of the Brockhaus
Encyclopedia.
The initial entry (2nd ed., 1815) stayed largely in place for nearly forty years,
although it was shortened over time, particularly in 1835 and again in 1846. The main
idea is that a nation must first possess its own dramatic literature (“eigenthümliche
dramatische Literatur”) in order to be able to have a national theater, and that while this
had already occurred with the Théâtre-Français in Paris, Germany had not yet reached
this level.51 By 1846 (9th ed.), the definition is a perfunctory forty-two words, down from
the original 143.52 But in 1853 (10th ed.), following the March Revolution of 1848 and the
short-lived National Assembly in Frankfurt, for the first time the definition is completely
rewritten: in addition to the emphasis on original dramatic literature of national
character, the term is also defined as “a stage that is tasked with bringing only native
pieces of substantially national character to performance, and in so doing to encourage
public education in the art of dramatic poetry” (emphasis added).53 In this edition of
1853, historicization is at its highest; not only are the Parisian theater and various
subsequent attempts at national theaters in Germany mentioned, but also the
achievements of the Greeks, Spanish and English are praised, and a line is traced from
Hans Sachs to Schiller to as-yet-unknown Germans who, it is hoped, will someday bring
51 “Nationaltheater,” Conversations-Lexikon, 2nd ed. (Brockhaus, 1815), 6:608. 52 “Nationaltheater,” Conversations-Lexikon, 9th ed. (1846), 10:159. 53 “Zweitens bezeichnet man als Nationaltheater solche Schaubühnen, welche nur einheimische Stücke von wesentlich nationalem Charakter zur Aufführung bringen und eben dadurch auch die nationale Ausbildung der dramatischen Dichtkunst fördern.” Emphasis added. “Nationaltheater,” Conversations-Lexikon, 10th ed. (1853), 11:66–67.
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this unrealized concept to fruition.
While the entry in 1867 (11th ed.) is somewhat smaller in scope, its final sentence
brings the long-simmering political situation to a head: “The grand idea of a true
National Theater will only become reality when the running of the theater, independent
from all court influences and financial speculations, is recognized as an inviolable matter
of the state and is supported and managed by the state itself.”54 In short: a national
theater can only exist when the state, not the court, is in charge. The ideal solution for a
German national theater, according to the author, would be for a state—a single state—
to unite the German-speaking regions. Not surprisingly, this sentence disappears in the
subsequent edition of 1878 (12th ed.), no longer relevant after the establishment of
German statehood.55
National theater was widely viewed as a potential contributor to German
cultural nationalism. In some rhetoric, it was even considered to be the means by which
Germans could be inculcated with feelings of unity. In 1784, around the same time that
Herder was spreading the idea of poetry as the soul of a folk, Schiller famously
advocated for the moral influence of theater on the national spirit of a people:
I cannot possibly neglect to mention the great influence that a fine standing theater [“eine gute stehende Bühne”] would have upon the spirit of our nation. I define a people’s national spirit [“Nationalgeist”] as the similarity and agreement of its opinions and inclinations concerning matters in which another nation thinks and feels differently. Only the stage is capable of eliciting a high degree of
54 “Der große Gedanke eines wahren N. wird sich nur dann verwirklichen lassen, wenn die Pflege des Theaters, unabhängig von allen Hofeinflüssen und Finanzspeculationen, als unverbrüchlich Staatsangelegenheit erkannt und vom Staat selbst erhalten und verwaltet wird.” “Nationaltheater,” Conversations-Lexikon, 11th ed. (1867), 10:610. 55 “Nationaltheater,” Conversations-Lexikon, 12th ed. (1878), 10:793.
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such agreement, because… it unites all classes and social strata, and can boast the most well-beaten pathway to our heart and our understanding.56
The ideal expressed in this passage offers an early glimpse into an important shift that
would soon occur in German lands, as elsewhere in Europe: while society continued to
be divided into classes visualized as horizontal layers in a hierarchical system, the idea
of nationhood as a unifying device began to cut vertically across social lines. The
development of mass transportation, which also facilitated the spread of print media on
an increasingly larger scale, helped groups of people imagine themselves in community
with other group members with whom they would never personally come in contact.57
Even if reality was messier than Schiller’s vision, theater did exert an important unifying
influence. Schiller predicted that developing theater along these lines would have a
radical outcome: “if we could witness the birth of our own national theater, then we
would truly become a nation.”58
The success of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz (1821), which is typically hailed as
the German national opera par excellence, has been shown to derive partly from cutting-
edge architectural features in the institution in which it premiered, the Neues
Schauspielhaus in Berlin, which opened in 1821.59 Designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
the theater contained a number of innovations that effectively removed barriers: the
56 Friedrich Schiller, “Theater Considered as a Moral Institution,” trans. John Sigerson and John Chambless, in Friedrich Schiller: Poet of Freedom (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), 217. 57 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6–7. 58 Friedrich Schiller, “Theater Considered as a Moral Institution.” 59 Margaret King, “Opera and the Imagined Nation: Weber’s Der Freischütz, Schinkel’s Neues Schauspielhaus and the Politics of German National Identity,” in Word and Music Studies: Essays in Honor of Steven Paul Scher and on Cultural Identity and the Musical Stage, ed. Suzanne M. Lodato, Suzanne Aspden, and Walter Bernhart, Word and Music Studies 4 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 219–21.
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majority of seating was now arranged in curved rows, rather than separated into boxes,
and the stage was wider and shallower than usual. As a result, the audience could not
only see and hear the actors better, they were also seated as part of a de facto group,
adding to the sense of shared experience among equals.
The concept of the “National Theater” proved elusive in Germany, a sprawling
region where individual buildings such as the short-lived Nationaltheater in Berlin
carried the name but did not fulfill the role of an enduring culturally German theater. In
smaller neighboring regions, particularly those inhabited by peoples without a self-
determined state of their own, national theaters became major causes, and their
construction correlates directly with the creation of vernacular operas for performance
on their stages, which will be explored below.
In multilingual Prague, for example, where German-speaking cultural and
educational institutions held positions of prominence, efforts to collect money to open a
Czech national theater began in 1862.60 A Provisional Theater opened that same year, but
the Czech operas existing at that time were considered to be so weak that none was
deemed worthy of performance on that stage. Over the next two decades, Smetana and
other composers created a sizable body of works in Czech, so that by the time the newly
built National Theater opened in 1881, it could draw on an established vernacular opera
60 Stanley Buchholz Kimball discusses the development of the National Theater at length in Czech Nationalism: A Study of the National Theatre Movement, 1845–83 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964). The most substantial source on Czech opera includes an extended discussion of national theater: see John Tyrrell, Czech Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 13–59.
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tradition in addition to more general European currents.61 Stanley Buchholz Kimball has
calculated statistics for the nationality of works performed in the National Theater
during its first ten years of operation, 1881–91; when raw numbers are turned into
proportions, the resulting figure that over one-third of performances were of original
Czech repertoire compares respectably with the share of Swedish operatic repertoire
performed during many of the Gustavian opera seasons (Figure 4.3 above) and is
substantially higher than has occurred in any Swedish season since 1793.62
The Croatian National Theater in Zagreb opened its doors significantly earlier,
already in 1834, although the decision to present exclusively works in Croatian was not
reached until 1860.63 Even then, most of the literature performed was of foreign origin,
albeit in Croatian translation. A new Croatian National Theater building opened in 1895,
further increasing the status of Croatian-language theater and opera. Unlike the Czech
National Theater, which placed a premium on the native origin of both building
materials and construction workers, the Croatian National Theater acknowledged the
61 Similarly to Sibelius, who studied Finnish as a second language on top of his native Swedish, Smetana was educated in German and had to study the finer details of Czech as an adult; see Anders Carlsson, “Handel och Bacchus eller Händel och Bach?” Det borgerliga musiklivet och dess orkesterbildningar i köpmannastaden Göteborg under andra hälften av 1800-talet (Göteborg: Tre Böcker, 1996), 223. Smetana even borrowed a Czech grammar book and dictionary from a library in Gothenburg; personal conversation with Owe Ander, October 2017. 62 Kimball identifies 679 performances of Czech operas out of a total of 1857 performances, or thirty-seven percent; see Czech Nationalism, 152. 63 On the Croatian National Theater and National Opera, see Ana Lederer, “HNK – The History of CNT Zagreb,” Croatian National Theater in Zagreb, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.hnk.hr/en/about-cnt/the-history-of-the-croatian-national-theatre-in-zagreb/. See also “Opera,” Croatian National Theater in Zagreb, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.hnk.hr/en/about-cnt/the-history-of-the-croatian-national-theatre-in-zagreb/opera/.
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balance of power in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which it was located.64 Local
workers from Zagreb completed much of the construction work, the painter Ivan Tišov
(1870–1928) was engaged to paint the ceiling of the first-floor foyer, and decorative busts
of Croatian cultural figures were commissioned to adorn the façades; but a Viennese
architectural firm was in charge of the entire project, and the painter Alexander
Demetrius Goltz (1857–1944), who was born in rural Hungary and raised in Vienna, was
selected to paint the ceiling of the auditorium.65
Sweden’s western neighbor, Norway, had little native theater tradition to speak
of in the middle of the nineteenth century, let alone musical theater. Ann Schmiesing has
charted how the changing views of the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) on the
idea of a Norwegian national theater reflect a path from theater-as-opposition to theater-
as-cultural-ambassador. To begin with, the young, then largely unknown writer
described the concept of a theater located in a nation’s capital as “a nationality’s most
remote outpost against foreign countries,” on the front lines of a great battle between
native and foreign influences.66 In this case, although Norway was in union with
Sweden at the time, the battle was over Danish cultural influence: Denmark supplied a
64 On the requirement for native Czech construction materials and workmanship, see Kimball, Czech Nationalism, 4. 65 On the building of the Croatian National Theater, see the website “HNK – About the Building,” Croatian National Theater in Zagreb, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.hnk.hr/en/about-cnt/about-the-building-2/. 66 Ann Schmiesing, “The Christiania Theater and Norwegian Nationalism: Bjørnson’s Defense of the 1856 Whistle Concerts in ‘Pibernes Program,’” Scandinavian Studies 76, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 317.
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majority of theatrical material, as well as most of the actors at the Christiania Theater.67
In Bjørnson’s opinion, supporting the rival Kristiania Norwegian Theater (Kristiania
norske teater) was not enough; rather, the reign of Danish influence at the landmark
Christiania Theater must be brought to an end.
In the coming years, the balance of actors shifted strongly towards Norwegian
talent; Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) put Norway firmly on the map as a nation with a solid
dramatic tradition.68 By 1907, when the now-established writer Bjørnson again weighed
in on Norwegian theater, he praised its ability to portray images of Norwegian people
past and present to audiences both at home and abroad. By breaking with Danish
tradition and transforming existing infrastructure to support vernacular production,
Norwegian (spoken) theater changed from a defense against foreign encroachment to a
positive force for national representation in domestic and international spheres.69
Linguistic nationalization
An important step in the development of national opera traditions is the creation of a 67 On the theaters in Christiania, see Ann Schmiesing, Norway’s Christiania Theatre, 1827–1867: From Danish Showhouse to National Stage (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). The struggle over Danish influence extended more broadly to language as well. In the 1850s and 1860s, two conflicting systems emerged: one called for gradual and systematic reforms of existing written Danish, while the other involved standardizing elements of rural spoken Norwegian dialects and Old Norse to create a new “indigenous” language—as Einar Haugen pointedly observed a century later, “One of them claims to be the more civilized, the other more Norwegian.” See his article “Planning for a Standard Language in Modern Norway,” Anthropological Linguistics 1, no. 3: Urbanization and Standard Language: A Symposium Presented at the 1958 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association (March 1959): 8. 68 While Norwegian opera remained a minor phenomenon in the nineteenth century, theatrical music developed in other channels, including incidental music, of which Grieg’s Peer Gynt, op. 23 (1875) for the play by Ibsen is perhaps the best-known example. 69 Even as Norwegian literature enjoyed a golden age in the last third of the nineteenth century, Denmark maintained a major cultural presence, as Ibsen and other notable authors published their works almost exclusively in Copenhagen, rather than with more minor publishers in Christiania; see Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42–43.
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body of repertoire in the vernacular. The first opera or other substantial piece of musical
theater in any language is a momentous event; however, considering that performance
numbers may have been small and audiences limited, the value of such “firsts” may not
go beyond the symbolic, and as works, they may have had limited or no cultural
influence.70 As an extreme example, The Peacemaker (Fredkulla, 1858) by Martin Andreas
Udbye (1820–89) is technically the first Norwegian-language opera, following an earlier
“first,” a syngespill from 1825. However, The Peacemaker had no effect or influence
whatsoever on Norwegian musical or cultural life, as it was not performed until 1997
due to unfortunate circumstances: the work was finally slated to premiere in 1877, but
the performance was cancelled after the Christiania Theater burned down shortly before
opening night.71 Although the score survived the fire, the piece was laid aside and then
forgotten before audiences had a chance to experience anything other than a few
excerpts that had been performed, to great acclaim, in 1858.
More commonly, several decades or more separate an initial work in the
vernacular and the creation of a piece arriving at a time when conditions are favorable
for nationalist sentiment. Factors at play include institutional support for performance
and sufficiently receptive critical and/or popular audiences—audiences primed, in many
though not all cases, towards nationalist interpretations due to political oppression.
Table 4.2 charts two interlaced strands: the first known work for musical theater in each
70 Roger Parker, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 239. 71 Mogens H Andersson, “Norsk Operahistoria,” Operalogg (blog), last modified January 4, 2016, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.operalogg.com/norsk-operahistoria-2/.
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of several European languages, along with one or more subsequent works that either
represent other significant “firsts” or which ultimately gained the status of the pre-
eminent “national opera” for the relevant cultural group.72
Table 4.2: Vernacular operas in several European languages
Year Title Composer Librettist Comments
ITALIAN
1594–98
Dafne Peri Rinuccini First known opera; music lost
1607 L’Orfeo Monteverdi Striggio Earliest opera (favola in musica) performed regularly today
GERMAN
1627 Dafne Schütz Opitz Libretto translated from Italian (Rinuccini); music lost
1644 Seelewig Staden Harsdörffer First German opera (“spiri-tual pastorale”) on original libretto with extant music
1821 Der Freischütz Weber Kind First major German national opera
SPANISH
1627 La selva sin amor Piccinini de Vega Italian composer; music lost
1658 El laurel de Apolo Hidalgo Calderón First known zarzuela, Spanish musical theater with song and spoken dialogue73
72 Information is culled from relevant entries in Oxford Music Online, and Jerzy Gołos, “Italian Baroque Opera in Seventeenth-Century Poland,” The Polish Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 1963): 67–75; Donald Jay Grout and Hermine Weigel Williams, A Short History of Opera, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Parker, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera; Ther, Center Stage; and Tyrrell, Czech Opera. 73 According to Clinton D. Young, national opera in the nineteenth-century sense never developed in Spain, due partly to a lack of infrastructure and institutional support, and partly to difficulties in reconciling Wagnerian approaches with nationalist Spanish aims; see “Why Did Spain Fail to Develop Nationalist Opera?,” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 38, no. 1 (December, 2013): 117–37.
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Year Title Composer Librettist Comments
ENGLISH
1656 Siege of Rhodes Lawes et al. Davenant Masque, often called the first English opera
1689 Dido and Aeneas Purcell Tate Earliest English opera performed regularly today
FRENCH
1673 Cadmus et Hermione Lully Quinault First tragédie en musique
DUTCH
1678/ 1680
De triomfeerend min [Love’s Triumph]
Hacquart Buysero Zangspel/incidental music, possibly not premiered until 192074
PORTUGUESE (EUROPEAN)
1733 Vida do Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança
Teixeira Silva, after Cervantes
Play with music; dismissed as “an isolated attempt that led to nothing”75
1899 Serrana Keil Lopes de Mendonça
Comic opera; first major opera with a Portuguese libretto76
SWEDISH
1747 Syrinx, eller Then uti wass förvandlade wattunymphen [Syrinx, or The Water Nymph Transformed into Reeds]
Händel, Graun, Ohl
Lindahl or Lalin
First Swedish-language musical play (3-act comic opera pastiche)
1786 Gustaf Wasa Naumann Kellgren First Swedish national opera; German composer
1846 Värmlänningarna [The Värmlanders]
Randel Dahlgren Most popular and long-lived national music theater work
74 This piece is alternately referred to as a zangspel (Grout and Williams, A Short History of Opera, 540) or incidental music to a play performed in 1678 (P. Andriessen, “Hacquart, Carolus,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/12134). No significant Dutch-language opera was written in the nineteenth century; for more on opera in the Netherlands, see Douwe Fokkema and Frans Grijzenhout, Accounting for the Past, 1650–2000, vol. 5 of Dutch Culture in a European Perspective, trans. Paul Vincent (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), 264. 75 Grout and Williams, A Short History of Opera, 558. 76 Keil previously wrote three operas on historical Portuguese subjects, though the librettos were in Italian. No significant “national” Portuguese opera was written in the nineteenth century.
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Year Title Composer Librettist Comments
CZECH
1747 Pargamotéka [Pragmatic Sanction]
Plumlovský Plumlovský Music lost
1826 Dráteník [The Tinker]
Škroup Chmelenský First opera in Czech by professional composer
1866/ 1870
Prodaná nevěsta [The Bartered Bride]
Smetana Sabina Most important Czech national opera
RUSSIAN
1755 Tsefal i Prokris [Cephalus and Procris]
Araia Sumarokov Italian composer
1836 Zhizn’ za tsarya [A Life for the Tsar]
Glinka Rozen First Russian opera, as opposed to Singspiel
DANISH
1756 Gram og Signe Sarti Bredal Pastiche on a Danish historical subject
1776 Belsor i Hytten [Belsor in the Cabin]
Zielche Malling First original Danish Syngespil; dismissed as “unsuccessful”77
1790 Holger Danske [Ogier the Dane]
Kunzen Baggesen First “grand” opera in Danish, no spoken dialogue; German composer
1828 Elverhøj [Elves’ Hill]
Kuhlau Heiberg Immensely popular play with incidental music; German-born composer
POLISH
1771 Filozof zmieniony [The Philosopher Transformed]
Ogiński Ogiński One of two Polish operas premiered in 177178
1848/ 1858
Halka Moniuszko Wolski Most important Polish national opera
77 “His Singspiel Belsor i Hytten, hardly any of which has been preserved, was unsuccessful.” Joachim Kremer, “Zielche [Zielcke], Hans Heinrich [Hinrich],” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2001, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/46293. 78 Typically, Kamieński and Bogusławski’s Nędza uszczęśliwiona [Poverty Made Happy, 1778] is cited as the first opera in Polish. However, already in 1771, Ogiński premiered two Polish-language operas, the other being Opuszczone dzieci [Abandoned Children].
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Year Title Composer Librettist Comments
HUNGARIAN
1793 Pikkó Hertzeg és Jutka Perzsi [Duke Pikkó and Princess Perzsi]
Chudy Szalkay Singspiel; libretto is translated from German; music lost
1844 Hunyadi László Erkel Egressy Both Hunyadi László and Erkel’s Bánk bán (1861) have been called the national opera of Hungary
NORWEGIAN
1825 Fjeldeventyret [The Mountain Adventure]
Thrane Bjerregaard First musical theater piece in Norwegian; Syngespill79
1858 Fredkulla [The Peacemaker]
Udbye Müller First Norwegian opera; composed 1858, premiered 1997
SERBIAN
1840 Zenidba Cara Dusana [Czar Dusan’s Wedding]
Slezinger Nikolic Play with extensive music (now lost); a contemporary newspaper called it an “opera”80
1903/ 1904?
Na uranku [At Dawn]
Binički Nušić First opera in Serbian
CROATIAN
1846 Ljubav i zloba [Love and Malice]
Lisinski Car First opera in Croatian
1876 Nikola Šubić Zrinski Zajc Badalić Most popular Croatian national opera81
FLEMISH
1896 De Herbergprinses Blockx de Tière First opera in Flemish
FINNISH
1908 Pohjan neiti [Maiden of the North]
Merikanto Achté and Rytkönen
First Finnish-language opera82
79 Unlike with many languages, this first known Norwegian-language piece also gained staying-power in the repertoire; however, it was also written later than many of the vernacular “firsts” around Europe. 80 Stana Djuric-Klajn, “Music during the Reign of Prince Milos,” in A Brief History of Serbian Music, ed. William Dorich (Cork: BookBaby, 2011), [iv]. The pages in this electronic book are not numbered. 81 See William A Everett, “Opera and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Croatian and Czech Lands,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 35, no. 1 (June 2004): 63–69. 82 Prior to this, Pacius’s Kung Carl’s jakt [The Hunt of King Charles, 1852] is sometimes called “the first Finnish opera,” but its libretto is in Swedish.
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Year Title Composer Librettist Comments
BULGARIAN
1911 Borislav Atanasov Popov First Bulgarian national opera
SLOVAK
1928 Detvan Figuš-Bystrý Lukáč First opera in Slovak
The appearance of Naumann’s Gustaf Wasa already in 1786, as the first of several
possible contenders in the category of “national Swedish opera,” is remarkably early,
compared with other breakthrough pieces elsewhere in Europe.83 As in most peripheral
European countries, original vernacular repertoire made up only a small percentage of
the operas performed.84 Yet the Swedish language maintained its dominance, as foreign
works were invariably translated for performance.85
Support for new vernacular operas created opportunities for stories of local,
regional, and national interest: historical subjects interpreted through music, long a
mainstay of operatic storylines, took on new roles as reflections of national identity. In
France, where ancient historical and mythological plots traditionally upheld the status of
83 Consensus is not unanimous about which piece bears the label of “national opera” for Sweden. The main contenders based on performance numbers include Gustaf Wasa (Naumann), Värmlänningarna (Randel), Den bergtagna (Hallström), and Arnljot (Peterson-Berger); see Ander, “The Wealth of the Nations,” 454. 84 Owe Ander counts that sixty-six of the 384 different operas performed at the Royal Opera between 1773 and 1920, or seventeen percent, were written by composers who were either born in Sweden or lived there for substantial periods of time; see ibid., 451. 85 Sören Ekebjörns reports that approximately fifty translators provided material for the Royal Opera, although most of the work was done by eight individuals, of whom two were particularly active. Familiar names in the folksong arena include Fritz Arlberg, the baritone who published a set of popular arrangements for 5-part male voices; Frans Hedberg, who authored the texts for a number of theatrical pieces discussed here; and the noted clarinettist Bernhard Crusell. See Sören Ekebjörns, “Ack som ett fjun så lätt . . . Något om operaöversättningar på 1800-talet,” in Operan 200 år: jubelboken, ed. Klas Ralf, 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Prisma, 1979), 75–77.
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the ruling monarch, the revolution ushered in a new era in which subjects from more
recent history, alongside new retellings of classical Roman tales, emphasized
republicanism as the legitimate mode of national organization.86 In Risorgimento and
post-unification Italy, historical subjects shaped opera as “a national art, which told the
past for a political present,” as Simon Goldhill eloquently puts it.87 More generally,
Goldhill continues: thanks to the liveness of the stage, “operatic (re)performance
becomes the site for the expression and contestation of the role of the past for
contemporary national self-understanding.”88 However, theatrical subject matter that
could be perceived as political was a matter of concern anywhere that ruling powers felt
threatened, and censors stood ready to object to offending passages.89 A solution applied
in non-sovereign regions, such as Bohemia, Hungary, and parts of soon-to-become Italy,
was to avoid subjects from the recent past; older stories were less likely to raise
suspicion among insecure rulers.90
Musical nationalization
Composers have devised many methods of signaling nationality musically in opera.
Techniques generally fall into two categories: borrowing existing material with national
associations, such as national anthems or folk melodies, and writing new material in the
86 Suzanne Aspden, “Opera and National Identity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 282. 87 Simon Goldhill, “Revolutionary Politics and Revolutionary Aesthetics: Opera, Classics, and Popular National History,” in Popularizing National Pasts: 1800 to the Present, ed. Stefan Berger, Chris Lorenz, and Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 2012), 39. 88 Ibid. 89 Hallgren, “Opera’s Role in Royal Image Making,” 98. 90 Parker, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, 247.
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style of pieces with such associations. However, other, more subtle methods include the
conscious decision to shape newly composed music to match the intonation, stress, and
rhythm of the vernacular language in question.
National and royal anthems
One obvious means of evoking a nation musically is by quoting the relevant national or
royal anthem. However, this device is unexpectedly rare in nineteenth-century opera. To
be sure, the appearance of the “Marseillaise” in the final act of Giordano’s Andrea Chénier
(1896) is as unmistakable a marker of revolutionary France as is the guillotine waiting to
claim the protagonist’s life as the curtain drops. In another case, when Donizetti wrote a
new Sinfonia for the Paris premiere of Roberto Devereux, ossia Il conte di Essex in 1838
(following the opera’s Naples premiere the previous year), he chose to lead off with the
quintessentially English royal anthem, “God Save the Queen.” Not only was this melody
recognizably British, and therefore fitting for an opera set in England—it was equally
recognizable in a number of other national contexts, serving as the royal or national
anthem melody in Sweden and Norway, Russia, and several German states,
undercutting its ability to signify Britain unilaterally. Furthermore, one Englishman who
would certainly not have recognized it is Robert Devereux (1565–1601) himself, as the
anthem post-dates the Elizabethan era.91
91 In all, approximately twenty countries have used this melody at some point as their national or royal anthem. The source of the song is unclear; it first became popular in London in the 1740s, although both tune and text are thought to be somewhat older. See Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne Kennedy, “God Save The Queen (King),” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, edited by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (Oxford
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In both examples here, an anthem is used to signify a nationality that is foreign to
composer and audience alike, although not culturally removed enough to fall under the
category of the exotic. Leaning to the “long” end of the century, perhaps the most
famous quotation of a national anthem in all of opera is the brief snippet of “The Star-
Spangled Banner” embedded in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904). Once again, the
anthem does not match the heritage of the composer or his primary audience; here, the
tune enters into meta-exotic nationalistic discourse, where the American anthem is
wholly foreign to the “local” Japanese setting of the opera, which itself is exotic to the
sphere of influence of Italian opera.
If the examples cited above seem narrowly chosen—all three stemming from
Italian composers writing operas set in foreign lands—it is by necessity, not design. The
practice was surprisingly uncommon, at least among operas that gained any kind of
staying power in the repertoire. In part, this may stem from the fluidity with which
unofficial and official anthems succeeded one another over time in some regions, with
the transitory and unofficial status of patriotic songs hindering their wholesale adoption
into opera.92 Yet several national anthems were written by opera composers, particularly
under Italian colonial and cultural influence in Central and South America,
University Press), last modified 2013, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199578108.001.0001/acref-9780199578108-e-3890. 92 In Sweden, for example, several songs have held unofficial status as royal or national anthem: “Gustafs skål” (1772), “Bevare Gud vår Kung” (1805), “Carl Johan vår kung” (1818), “Ur svenska hjärtans djup” (1844), and “Du gamla, du friska.” See Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 175–85. For other popular patriotic songs, see ibid., 187–93.
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underscoring essential links between these two genres. Furthermore, in at least two
cases, songs that originated in musical theater later became actual anthems. The Czech
anthem, “Where is my home?” (“Kde domov můj”), comes from a song in František Jan
Škroup’s incidental music to J.K. Tyl’s play Shoemakers’ Feast (Fidlovačka, 1834).
Even earlier, a similar situation occurred in Scandinavia, where the text that
would eventually become the Danish royal anthem, “King Christian Stood by the Lofty
Mast” (“Kong Christian stod ved højen Mast”), first appeared in The Fishermen (Fiskerne,
1780), a syngespil with music by Johan Ernst Hartmann (1726–93) on a libretto by
Johannes Ewald.93 In the next few years, the text became united with the melody
associated with it today.94 When Kuhlau used the now-familiar melody to “King
Christian Stood by the Lofty Mast” near the end of his overture to Heiberg’s play Elves’
Hill (Elverhøj, 1828), the single most influential nationalist piece of musical theater in
nineteenth-century Denmark, and also re-used the tune with different words in the final
chorus, he catapulted the associated royal anthem to increased popularity.95
Although Sweden has never officially designated a national anthem, “Thou
Ancient, Thou Hale/Free” (“Du gamla, du friska/fria”) has fulfilled that role since the
93 Dan Shore provides the title of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s English translation; see “The Emergence of Danish National Opera, 1779–1846,” PhD diss. (City University of New York, 2008), 28. 94 On the provenance of the melody, which slightly predates Ewald’s text but is not believed to be of folk origin, see Angul Hammerich, “Melodien til ‘Kong Christian stod ved højen mast,’” in J. P. E. Hartmann Biographiske essays, Tillige med en studie over melodien til “Kong Christian stod ved højen mast,” ed. Angul Hammerich (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gads forlag, 1916), 150. 95 On the melody to “Kong Christian Stod Ved Højen Mast”in Elverhøj, see Shore, “The Emergence of Danish National Opera,” 155–58.
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middle of the 1800s.96 The melody is adapted from a folksong, which gave it extra
resonance during the folk-obsessed nineteenth century. On several occasions, the
anthem’s melody appeared on the theatrical stage with new texts, including Jacob Niclas
Ahlström’s incidental music to the play Aura (1850) by Jeanette Granberg, which
borrows the melodies of four folksongs, and August Söderman’s music for Frans
Hedberg’s play Maj-Kungen (1860), which uses a total of thirteen folk melodies.97 In both
instances, “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” counts merely as one folk melody among others,
without raising special consciousness of nationalism in itself. Hedberg also calls for the
melody in his one-act “new year’s revue with song” To the court! To the court! (Till tings!
Till tings!), which enjoyed a brief run at the Southern Theater (Södra teatern) in January
1862. As the comedic genre of the revy depended entirely on popular song melodies, it is
unlikely that this orchestral setting by Oscar de Wahl (1832–73) that appeared partly as a
scene transition and partly undergirding spoken text carried great political weight.
While the anthem became a popular part of the repertoire of opera singers in concert
performance, it appeared only sparingly, and divorced from its text, in theatrical pieces.
Linguistic features
A more subtle sign of the musical nationalization of opera is the degree to which the
music accommodates and reflects linguistic features of the language in question. In
general, arias are somewhat restricted by poetic norms of texts and the metrical 96 Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 9. 97 Although Granberg’s play was performed only twice (and both performances took place in Åbo, Finland), it is nevertheless remarkable because its author was one of Sweden’s first female playwrights; see n. 223 below.
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regularity of the accompanying music; it is in recitative that a hand-in-glove match
between music and vernacular language can most clearly be made. Smetana, for one,
recognized the national implications of text setting, writing in a letter to his librettist,
Eliška Krásnohorská (1847–1926), that “he who looks for Czech style only in [folk]songs
and not in the characteristic declamation of Czech words will certainly be none the
wiser.”98 More recently, John Tyrrell has written at length on aspects of the Czech
language that differentiate it from the standard operatic languages, showing how
features such as a consistent stress on the first syllable in multisyllabic words yield a
distinctive textual energy not found in Italian, French or German.99 Sometimes, different
solutions emerge to the puzzle of recitative in a particular language. Marina Frolova-
Walker speaks of two divergent approaches to Russian recitative: an older “melodic
recitative” developed by Alexander Dargomïzhsky (1813–69), a younger contemporary
of Glinka, and a newer kind of recitative built on epic recitation formulas that Rimsky-
Korsakov created for Sadko (1897/98).100
Likewise, writing recitative in a style appropriate to the Swedish language was a
98 Quoted in Tyrrell, Czech Opera, 254; Smetana’s emphasis. 99 Ibid., 254–55. 100 Marina Frolova-Walker, “A Ukrainian Tune in Medieval France: Perceptions of Nationalism and Local Color in Russian Opera,” 19th-Century Music 35, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 125. According to Julian Budden, the “more measured and even-paced” nature of Dargomïzhsky’s melodic recitative suits Russian prosody particularly well; see Julian Budden, “Recitative 2. After 1800,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2001, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/23019. Rimsky-Korsakov helped develop the libretto for Sadko from the texts of several epic ballads, or bïlina, and adapted their melodies for use in several places in the opera, including recitatives; see Richard Taruskin, “Sadko,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2002, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O002379. Similarly, Dan Shore speaks of a “folk-inflected accompanied recitative” in Danish opera from the 1820s onward, though he does not clarify this description further; see “The Emergence of Danish National Opera,” 168.
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topic of concern for some, but not all, composers of Swedish opera. In the Gustavian era,
a lack of established tradition of Swedish-language recitative, coupled with the foreign
backgrounds of opera composers, yielded mixed results. Johann Gottlieb Naumann
stays close to French and Italian models for secco recitative in Gustaf Wasa (1786),
packing syllables closely together without taking into account the length of elongated
Swedish vowels. In contrast, Georg Joseph Vogler more accurately incorporates patterns
of word stress into recitatives in Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe (1788).101 By the later
nineteenth century, according to Inga Lewenhaupt, composers attempted other methods
of adapting recitative into a more distinctly Swedish style.102
Folk music
One specific means of nationalizing opera musically lies at the heart of the present
study: the use of folk music. Folksong touches on each of the categories explored above:
consider the Swedish national anthem based on a folk melody, the Russian recitative
modeled on epic recitation formulas, and the legends and (quasi-)historical episodes out
of which ballad narratives developed. In countries where composers readily had access
to folk music in the form of printed collections, this material became, alongside
vernacular librettos, the single most important tool for self-nationalization in opera in
the 1800s. Prior to that, in the later eighteenth century, folksy material could occur
onstage, but only in the context of lower classes in comic opera, such as the middle act of
101 For analysis of Naumann’s and Vogler’s recitative styles, see Rutschman, “Swedish Opera in Translation: Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe,” 116–23. 102 Inga Lewenhaupt, “Teatermusiken 1870–1920,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 399.
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Vogler’s Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe. But in the wake of Herder’s re-evaluation of the
term Volk and its constituent cultural elements, higher classes came to acknowledge
folklore as representative not just of peasants, but of all members of a “vertically”
oriented cultural and political nation, themselves included.103
Even in established sovereign states, folksong became a crucial marker of
operatic national identity. England provides a telescoped example of developments in
folksong usage in opera. According to the standard narrative, English musical
nationalism developed late in the 1800s, significantly after most of continental Europe
(as well as its neighbors in the Isles).104 Yet in the space of a short time and within the
confines of a single composer’s oeuvre, two different approaches to folksong-in-opera
emerge, a fast-forward version of a process that unfolded more slowly elsewhere in
Europe. Vaughan Williams is well known for his folksong collection activity; many of
the approximately eight hundred tunes he collected between 1903 and 1913 found their
way into wider circles in English musical life through hymn settings, orchestral
arrangements, and, not least, opera—a practice that, in the latter case, met with a certain
amount of critical opposition.105
103 On the transition of folksong from a signifier of the lower classes to a general national phenomenon in opera, see Krisztina Lajosi, “Shaping the Voice of the People in Nineteenth-Century Operas,” in Folklore and Nationalism in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 32. 104 Nicholas Temperley has questioned this common view in light of a small group of English opera composers active beginning in the 1830s, with a focus on the folksong-quoting works of George Alexander Macfarren (1813–87); see his chapter “Musical Nationalism in English Romantic Opera,” in The Lost Chord: Essays in Victorian Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 143–57. 105 See Eric Saylor, “Dramatic Applications of Folksong in Vaughan Williams’s Operas Hugh the Drover and Sir John in Love,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 134, no. 1 (2009): 41.
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Eric Saylor has shown how Vaughan William’s changing views on English
nationalism in music are evident in the composer’s treatment of folksong in opera. To
begin with, Vaughan William’s first opera, Hugh the Drover (vocal score 1914; premiere
1924), includes ten folksongs that act primarily as self-contained musical units: they are
mostly atmospheric; do not advance or even relate closely to the plot; and are sung
diegetically, either by ensembles or minor characters. Musically, the orchestral texture
becomes simpler; meters more regular (to accommodate strophic poetry intruding in an
otherwise prose libretto); and melodies more lyrical, highlighting the “performances”
taking place within the opera.106 The use of folksong as separate musical entities more or
less pasted into an opera as individual numbers is typical of the first wave of national
opera in many countries (which, in Sweden, corresponds to the second wave, after the
Gustavian period that focused almost exclusively on vernacular language). Vaughan
William’s second approach to folksong in opera takes a different approach: in Sir John in
Love (1929), the composer intervenes more directly in many of the twelve folktunes by
creating contrafacta or omitting text altogether, by integrating the music into the texture
of the opera as a continuous whole, and by avoiding indications in the dialogue or
action that a given melody is a folksong. Melodies disappear mid-strophe into the
background as instrumental lines and transition seamlessly into newly composed
passages, such that the average listener may not even be aware of the folk origins of a
106 On folksong in Hugh the Drover, see ibid., 43–58.
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given tune.107 This type of approach, in which folk material becomes raw material to be
manipulated more thoroughly by a composer, is characteristic of a later, second wave of
musical nationalism in opera (or third wave, in the case of Sweden). What is unusual is
the relatively short time over which this development occurred with Vaughan Williams,
with work on the second opera beginning only fourteen years after the first, and their
premieres a scarce five years apart. Writing in the early twentieth century, Vaughan
Williams was not breaking new ground; his work in these two operas accurately reflects
larger trends that played out elsewhere in the preceding century.
Folk-style music: Writing in folkton
Contrary to nineteenth-century belief, folk music springs from flesh-and-blood
individuals, not a mythical collective soul. As with other genres, composers of operas
used the musical vocabulary of folksong to compose new melodies in the style of those
printed in anthologies, to the extent that the untrained ear cannot readily distinguish the
new from the pre-existing. One method is to select pitch content according to scales used
in folk music. When such scales differ substantially from common-practice major and
minor modes, the resulting melodies are more likely to bear an audible imprint of the
folk style being imitated. For example, the pentatonic pitch-set in the first fifteen
measures of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (A kékszakállú herceg vára, 1911/18) and that recurs
elsewhere in the opera is derived from Hungarian folk sources and contrasts with other
107 For Vaughan William’s use of folksong in Sir John in Love, see ibid., 58–80.
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chromatic and whole-tone pitch sets that carry their own layers of symbolism.108
Although Hæffner commented on the “hovering” sixth and seventh scale degrees in
Swedish folksong, this alternative tuning does not seem to have made its way into
opera. Instead, the overwhelming preference for minor scales over major scales in
Swedish folksong, a 2:1 ratio in both the older and newer layers of anthologies (see Table
2.6) translates into a predilection for folkton writing in the minor mode.
Characteristic rhythms and meters are another hallmark of folkton writing, not
least because they evoke the dances intimately bound up in many kinds of traditional
music. Nineteenth-century audiences had plenty of opportunities to become familiar
with folk-inspired rhythms such as the mazurka, a 3/4 structure with a dotted figure or
even eighth-notes on the first beat, and the “Scotch snap,” a reverse dotted figure in
which a sixteenth-note is followed by a dotted eighth-note.109 In Sweden, the polska, a
dance in 3/4 time with characteristic stress on beats one and three, was easily emulated
in new compositions. Across Europe, some meters have also been adopted for
widespread use in the concert hall, such as the fast triple meter of the Italian tarantella
and saltarello dances, the latter of which signals, to audiences indoctrinated in such cues,
the “Italianness” of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A Major, op. 90 (1833). But prior
to the emancipation of rhythm in the twentieth century, with the shifting bar-lengths of
108 For more on pitch sets in Bluebeard’s Castle, including the way in which this particular symmetrical minor-modal form of the pentatonic scale is typical of Hungarian music and differs from similar constructions in Chinese and Russian musics, see Elliott Antokoletz, “Bartók’s Bluebeard: The Sources of Its ‘Modernism,’” College Music Symposium 30, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 79. 109 For a study of language patterns behind the use or non-use of the Scotch snap rhythm in four western European languages, see Nicholas Temperley and David Temperley, “Music-Language Correlations and the ‘Scotch Snap,’” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29, no. 1 (September 2011): 51–63.
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the “Sacrificial Dance” in Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (1913) as a prime example,
unbalanced meters are relatively rare in art music, and when they do occur, they are
often borrowed from folk genres. Thus, the bridal chorus in 5/4 time in the third act of
Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, while newly composed, reflects the practice of folk wedding
songs traditionally sung in pentasyllabic hemistichs.110
While much of the crossover from folk to art music of this time period depends
on song, instruments also carry weight as signifiers of folkton writing. Antoine Reicha
takes up this topic in a similar context, the use of local color in operas set in foreign
lands, in his manual, Art du compositeur dramatique, ou Cours complet de composition vocale
(Paris, 1833). Reicha is skeptical toward the idea of using exotic musical styles,
preferring that composers stick to the conventions of their own audiences, with the
possible exception of “braiding a folksong in… [especially] if it is already familiar and
has melodic interest.”111 The addition of an ethnographically correct instrument to the
traditional orchestra is, however, not only permitted by Reicha, but even recommended:
“But if [a composer] is writing a piece set in a land where a certain instrument is
customary, he would do well to include one.”112 Massenet, for one, followed this practice
110 On uneven metrical groupings in Russian folk music, see Nicolas Slonimsky, Russian and Soviet Music and Composers, ed. Electra Slonimsky Yourke, vol. 2, Nicolas Slonimsky: Writings on Music (Psychology Press, 2004), 3. Taruskin dubs this chorus the first example of a composer setting a wedding song in its original meter, rather than forcing it into even subdivisions; see his entry “Life for the Tsar, A,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2002, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O009358. 111 Heinz Becker quotes a German translation of Reicha’s manual in “Die ‘Couleur locale’ als Stilkategorie der Oper,” in Die Couleur locale in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz Becker (Regensburg: Bosse, 1976), 23. 112 Ibid. Reicha’s views also reflect varying degrees of comfort with the exotic: the negative examples about musical style refer to China and several African countries, while the instruments listed—the
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when he included Indian percussion instruments in Le Roi de Lahore (1877). The
technique is also heard in action in the opening phrases of the Swedish musical play
Korp-Kirsti: A Dala-Adventure in One Act with Song and Dance (1863). As the curtain rises,
the first sounds heard are those of a lur, the natural trumpet used by shepherds for
communication.
Just as folkton writing imitates folk music without directly quoting existing
sources, composers also found ways to imitate sounds of traditional instruments using
conventional orchestral forces. The concept is not new to opera; one need only think of
the pizzicato string arpeggios in “Voi che sapete” from Mozart’s Le nozzi di Figaro
simulating the sound of the “guitar” accompanying Cherubino’s aria. In Glinka’s A Life
for the Tsar, plucked strings stand in for a balalaika, and a harp is used to approximate
the sound of the gusli, a folk zither.113 Casting a broader net, the oboe and English horn
were often used to bring up associations with double reed instruments of Arabic and
Asian countries, although such operas are mostly if not entirely examples of exoticising
an other rather than nationalizing the self.114 A modest example from Swedish theater
includes the performance of a herding call, traditionally played on a lur, assigned to a
Ossianic/Scottish harp, the Italian mandolin, the Spanish guitar, and the Swiss alphorn—hail from neighboring regions in Europe. 113 Parker, The Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, 257. 114 See Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 202.
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more prosaic E-flat horn in Littmarck’s folk-comedy The People of Närke (1872).115
While each of the aforementioned techniques is widely found in opera,
composers do not necessarily need to incorporate specific details from folk genres to
imbue their folkton music with national character. Even a device as ordinary as the
strophic song can take on national overtones for audiences primed to hear elements of
folksong therein. John Tyrrell has noted that this familiar form, a hallmark of folk music
as well as of songs of known compositional background, can signal simple heritage of
the people (i.e. the folk), proposing that Czech audiences may have “sensed ‘Czechness’
in any of the simpler parts of the opera, in strophic songs for instance.”116
Through these methods, from folksong quotation to adaptation and imitation,
composers used the music recognized as belonging to a specific cultural tradition in
order to make space for local creativity within the prevailing international musical
language.
Folksong as auditory prop
As the first systematic support for the creation of new Swedish-language operas faded
into history, the second stage of nationalism in music theater emerged in the form of
works showcasing folksongs and folk dances as individual numbers, invariably as
diegetic entities in settings that are meant to be realistic, although they are usually
idealized or stereotyped.
115 C. G. R. Littmarck, “Nerkingarne: Folkkomedi med sång i 3 akter af Anrep,” manuscript orchestral score, 1871, T/SV-Ä, S-Skma, p. 39. 116 Tyrrell, Czech Opera, 223.
262
Music for the people and by the people in The Union (1815)
If 1814 was a year of change for Sweden, the changes were even greater in Norway: the
year opened with the promise of freedom from Denmark (January) followed by a
declaration of independence and the selection of a king (May); however, after Swedes
threatened military action, Norwegians agreed to give up their king in favor of
recognizing the Swedish monarch as their own (August) and officially entered a political
union with their neighbor to the east (November).117 It has been noted earlier how this
union prompted many Swedes to invent historical ties with Norway that had not
previously existed. One of the first and most publicly visible statements was made on
the stage of the Royal Opera in the form of The Union (Föreningen; text by Löwenhjelm
and Nordforss, music by Du Puy), billed as a one-act occasional play with song and
divertissement, which premiered on January 2, 1815, just two months after the union
was officially consummated. The broader message of the play by Gustaf Carl Fredrik
Löwenhjelm, Royal Opera Director and a close friend of King Carl XIII, is not subtle: two
farming families live on their respective sides of the Swedish-Norwegian border, and
after overcoming some misunderstandings, the daughter of each family marries the son
of the other.118
The dialogue is peppered with acknowledgements of a close relationship
between the two countries, such as “Norwegians and Swedes have only one language,” 117 For an overview of Norwegian history in 1814, see T. K. (Thomas Kingston) Derry, A Short History of Norway. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1957), 130–40. 118 Carl Gustaf Nordforss assisted Löwenhjelm with song lyrics for the play, which was published anonymously as Föreningen, Tillfällighets-pjes i en akt, med sång och divertissement [play text] (Stockholm: Grahn, 1815).
263
and “a forked tree is never strong.”119 Like Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe, this play
promotes royalism, even if the king does not appear onstage: in the words of the
Swedish farmer, Sven Carlson, “Norway and Sweden are brothers, and two brothers
must [logically] have the same father!”120 The character of Sven Carlson—”Carl’s son”—
portrays Karl XIII as a benevolent father-king who takes care of his children. Sven’s
daughter, Lena, draws a concrete parallel between the (from her perspective still
impending) political union of the two nations and the union of marriage across state
lines: “These kingdoms, they can take as long as they want to enter into their large
unions, as long as they let us poor creatures enter into our own small unions as quickly
as we want to.”121
The most pertinent lines with respect to the manipulation of historical sentiment
come from the Norwegian farmer, Olof Haraldson, who tells of a purportedly unbroken
link from a past union through the present day:
Dear brother Sven! The common people of Norway still remember, in a legend told from father to son, that Norway and Sweden were united several hundred years ago under a Swedish king; we remember that we were free then, and prosperous and safe, and that together the two kingdoms had such power that even the devil himself didn’t dare to look at it.122
Olof does not specify who this joint king was or when he may have reigned. Historical
precedent does exist during the later portion of the Kalmar Union, after the nature of the
119 “Norrmän å Svenskar ha bara ett språk,” and “klufvi träd ä aldri starkt.” Ibid., 36, 24. 120 “Norrige å Sverige ä bröder, å två bröder måste ju ha samma Far!” Ibid., 14. 121 “De här Konungarikena, de må göra sina stora föreningar hur långsamt de behagar, bara de låter oss, stackare, få göra våra små föreningar så fort vi vill.” Föreningen, 11. 122 “Kära bror Sven! Norriges Allmoge vet ännu, genom sägen från far te son, att Norrige å Sverige förr en gång för flera hundra år se’n vari förenta under Svensk Konung; att vi då va fria, å välmående å trygga, å att de två rikena då utgjorde en makt ihop som inte hin håle tordes titta på en gång.” Ibid., 23.
264
union had changed from a single monarch governing the three Scandinavian states to a
personal union of separate monarchs.123 Karl Knutsson reigned simultaneously as Karl
VIII of Sweden and Karl I of Norway, but this period was too brief (less than a full year
in 1348–49) to have launched a story that would survive as folklore nearly five hundred
years later. Rather, Count Löwenhjelm furthers the interests of his present monarch and
friend, Karl XIII, by manufacturing historical feelings of brotherhood supposedly long
harbored in secret by the common people of Norway. What other reason would
Norwegians have to rejoice in the new union, rather than grieve over their long-awaited,
short-lived independence from Denmark? The Union was a popular play, with forty-six
performances through November 4, 1820, the sixth anniversary of the union’s
establishment.124 Not surprisingly, given its propagandistic slant, the piece was
performed in Stockholm—and not on any stage in the Norwegian half of the union.
The Union is often mentioned in literature on musical theater of this period due to
its inclusion of three polska dance melodies, one of which is labeled Norwegian. Martin
Tegen rightly notes that folk melodies and dances onstage were not new by 1815 and
places the novelty of these polskor, instead, on their context within the play: music for
dancing by and for the personal entertainment of common people, not as a
123 On royal politics in the later period of the Kalmar Union, see John P. Maarbjerg, “‘Regimen Politicum’ and ‘Regimen Regale’: Political Change and Continuity in Denmark and Sweden (c.1450–c.1550),” Scandinavian Studies 72, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 141–62. 124 Dahlgren, Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 218. As an historical aside, Dahlgren also reports that money remaining from the king’s contribution after all production costs were subtracted was used to begin a pension fund for members of the Royal Orchestra.
265
demonstration for royal or other noble persons.125 However, this characterization
misleadingly takes the folk material at face value, rather than acknowledging the
mediating roles of composer Edouard Du Puy (1770–1822) or choreographer Louis
Deland (1772–1823), and it perpetuates the myth being served to the Stockholm public:
the performance of Du Puy’s “genuine-sounding polska tunes” (“genuint klingande
polskemelodier”), as Tegen describes them, may have sounded genuine to the ears of
the audience, but not to inhabitants of the region where the play is set. Much like stage
sets, which may have raked floors, odd angles between walls, and walls that are out-of-
proportion in order to give audience members a false sense of balance and perspective,
the artfully modified polska dances are designed to create an impression of realness.
The Union is likely the first opportunity that Stockholmers would have had to
hear folk music in performance after the initial publications of notated folk music began
to appear the previous year. Geijer and Afzelius’s first volume of folksongs has garnered
significant research among musicologists and scholars in other fields, but a lesser-known
set of instrumental dance tunes set for piano, Traditions of Swedish Folk Dances (Traditioner
af swenska folk-dansar) by Afzelius and Olof Åhlström, seems to have arrived on the
market slightly earlier.126 While the three polskor from The Union are not found among
125 Martin Tegen, “Föreningen: Norsk-svenska unionen 1814 och tillfällespjäsen 1815,” in “Hemländsk hundraårig sång” (see Chapter One, n. 3), 141. 126 I have found a notice of Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances in the September 23, 1814 edition of Dagligt Allehanda; the earliest mention of the first volume of the Geijer-Afzelius folksong collection I have been able to locate is from December 23, 1814 in the same newspaper. Bengt R. Jonsson has a helpful afterward in the modern facsimile edition: Afzelius and Åhlström, Traditioner av svenska folkdansar, 4:85–91. Although Traditions was published anonymously, Märta Ramsten, in agreement with modern scholarship, states that there is “no doubt” (“inget tvekan om”) that the project was a collaboration between Afzelius and Åhlström; “Svenska folk-visor från forntiden 200 år: Inledning,” in “En alldeles egen och förträfflig National-Musik”: Nio
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the dances published just four months earlier in Traditions (and to this day, their sources
remain untraced), the piano reduction by Johan Gustaf Zetterström (1816) closely
follows the style and simplicity modeled by the arrangements in Traditions.127 Example
4.1 shows two excerpts from “Svensk Polska,” no. 3, in The Union—the opening (Example
4.1a) and closing (Example 4.1c) portions of the first section—alongside examples from
two pieces in Traditions (Example 4.1b and Example 4.1d) showing a strong similarity of
melodic gestures and, in the first pair, accompanimental styles.128
författare om Svenska folk-visor från forntiden (1814–1818), ed. Märta Ramsten and Gunnar Ternhag, Acta academiae regiae Gustavi Adolphi 139 (Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur, 2015), 12. 127 Tegen reprints parts of the piano reduction for these dances in “Det nationella som estetiskt problem,” 138. The reduction was originally published as Föreningen. Musik af Professor Du Puy, lämpad für Forte Piano och underdånigst tillägnad Hennes Kongl. Maj:t Drottningen af Joh. Gustaf Zetterström (Stockholm och Kongl. Privilegierade Not Tryckeriet, 1816). 128 The “Svensk Polska” in Example 4.1a and Example 4.1c is no. 3 in Jean Baptiste Edouard Du Puy, “Föreningen,” manuscript orchestral score, 1815, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, F14 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 182:3), S-Skma. Example 4.1b is titled “Nr. 25: Södermanland” in Afzelius and Åhlström, Traditioner av svenska folkdansar, 2:12. Example 4.1d is “Nr. 23: Östergötland” in ibid., 3:14.
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4.1a) “Swedish Polska” (no. 3), The Union, mm. 1–4
4.1b) “Polska from Södermanland,” Traditions, vol. 2, no. 25, mm. 1–4
4.1c) “Swedish Polska” (no. 3), The Union, mm. 11–12
4.1d) “Polska from Östergötland,” Traditions, vol. 3, no. 23, mm. 11–12
Example 4.1: Similar gestures in polskas from The Union (Du Puy) and Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances ([Afzelius & Åhlström])
Du Puy’s polskas are in the style of dances notated in Traditions, but when
performed by an orchestra of similar proportions as Mozart calls for in Die Zauberflöte
(1791), they are utterly foreign to the play’s rural setting. The music of The Union, though
designed to give a genuine impression of “folk culture” alongside physical objects such
as the costumes and farmer Sven’s woodworking tools, is bound up in ideas of its time,
when “authenticity” was of little concern.
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Signaling location: Oklahoma! (1943) vs. The Värmlanders (1846) and The Girl from Värmland (1821)
If music is to serve as an auditory prop, it must signal relevant associations for
audiences to recognize. Before turning to the most iconic piece of Swedish musical
theater of the 1800s—a musical play named after a rural province—it is helpful to
consider an American musical from almost exactly a century later: Rodgers and
Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943). To audiences on Broadway and around the country, its
songs signaled place by various means: in addition to using geographical names, the
lyrics praise the crops, livestock, wildlife, and natural features of the soon-to-be-state,
often served up in regional dialect. East-coast listeners heard what they believed to be
“authentic Southwestern musical forms”; Oklahomans may not have recognized the
musical style as local—more on this in a moment—but they quickly claimed it as their
own, and in 1953, the title song became the official state song.129 How did two New
Yorkers, neither of whom had ever set foot in Oklahoma until three years after the
musical’s premiere, write a piece that would invoke its eponymous region so clearly?
To begin with, they had help: Oklahoma! is adapted from the play Green Grow the
Lilacs (1931) by R. Lynn Riggs (1899–1954).130 Subtitled “A Folk-Play in Six Scenes,” the
play contained a number of traditional songs that Riggs had learned while growing up
in Oklahoma in the years before and after the attainment of statehood in 1907; Rodgers
129 William W. Savage, Singing Cowboys and All That Jazz: A Short History of Popular Music in Oklahoma (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 136–37. 130 Lynn Riggs, “Green Grow the Lilacs: A Folk-Play in Six Scenes,” in The Cherokee Night and Other Plays, by Lynn Riggs, ed. Jace Weaver (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 2–105. On Riggs’ background, including his familiarity with speech patterns and folk songs of Oklahomans, see Phyllis Cole Braunlich, “The Oklahoma Plays of R. Lynn Riggs,” World Literature Today 64, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 390, 392.
269
could have incorporated signals of local musical life into his score, yet these folksongs
are conspicuously absent from the musical.131 Rather than write new lyrics to fit existing
folk melodies, a tactic employed in both theatrical pieces set in Värmland discussed
below, Hammerstein wrote texts free of pre-existing metrical constraints, and Rodgers
composed new melodies with few connections to regional music.132 His music signaled
“Oklahoma” only because he said it did—and listeners believed him. Any musical
references to Oklahoma heard by audiences were imaginary, fabricated by expectations
and likely abetted by a lack of familiarity with tunes of the type that Riggs incorporated
into Green Grow the Lilacs.133 A hundred years earlier in Sweden, however, a different
situation obtained during an era in which folk melodies were gaining traction as
mainstream musical currency.
Long before Oklahoma!, a province in western Sweden gave rise to The
Värmlanders (Värmlänningarne, 1846; literally, “The People of Värmland”), a vådevill with
text by Fredrik August Dahlgren and music arranged by Andreas Randel that has
131 On Hammerstein’s decision to write new songs, rather than interpolate existing songs, see “In Re ‘Oklahoma!’: The Adaptor-Lyricist Describes How the Musical Hit Came into Being,’ New York Times (May 23, 1943): section 2; quoted in Tim Carter, Oklahoma! The Making of an American Musical (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 185. Carter has rightly taken issue with the way Hammerstein minimizes the use of folksongs in the play Green Grow the Lilacs, calling them “more than just incidental”; ibid. 132 In his autobiography, Rodgers explains his approach to creating “southwest” music in Oklahoma!, the same mindset with which he created “Chinese,” “French,” and “Siamese” music for other productions: “I felt it important that the songs be my kind of music, though they could be embellished with a certain amount of regional flavoring . . . If my melodies were going to be authentic, they’d have to be authentic in my own terms . . . All a composer—any composer—can do is to make an audience believe it is hearing an authentic sound without losing his own musical identity.” Richard Rodgers, Musical Stages: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 219–20. 133 Published collections of songs of the American Southwest were available; Rodgers reports that Hammerstein gifted him such a collection, but that he only looked at one song before making the decision to write songs that were “authentic in [his] own terms.” Ibid., 220.
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enjoyed a robust performance tradition from its premiere through the present time.134
According to performance statistics for the repertoire of the Royal Swedish Opera
between 1773 and 1972, The Värmlanders was, by far, the most-performed piece of
Swedish origin; furthermore, of the entire repertoire, including both operas and
operettas, The Värmlanders was second only to Bizet’s Carmen in terms of overall
performance numbers, as shown below in Table 4.3.135
Table 4.3: Most-performed works by the Royal Swedish Opera, 1773–1972
Title
Swedish premiere
Composer
Total performances through 1972
Performances through 1900
1. Carmen 1878 Bizet 1205 260 2. Värmlänningarna 1846 Randel 839 318 3. Figaros bröllop 1821 Mozart 725 316 4. Trollflöjten (Die Zauberflöte) 1812 Mozart 641 312 5. Barberaren i Sevilla 1825 Rossini 572 205 6. Faust 1862 Gounod 601 294 7. La Bohème 1901 Puccini 585 — 8. På Sicilien (Cavalleria rusticana) 1890 Mascagni 575 127 9. Don Juan 1813 Mozart 547 338 10. Mignon 1873 Thomas 537 266 . . . . . . . . . . . . 40. Gustaf Wasa 1886 Naumann 200 177
For reference, the next-most-performed Swedish opera, Naumann’s Gustaf Wasa, only
appeared onstage at the Royal Opera one-fourth as many times as The Värmlanders
through 1972—despite having had a sixty-year head start.
Fredrik August Dahlgren’s text, which was published as a “tragi-comic play with
134 See, for example, Martin Tegen, “Teatermusiken [1810–70],” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 299. 135 Performance statistics are available in Hofsten and Strömbeck, Kungliga teatern, 78–80. These numbers do not take into account the many performances by other companies.
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singing and dancing in two acts and six scenes,” places a Romeo and Juliet-style pair of
lovers in the rural province of Värmland under what prove, ultimately, to be kinder
stars.136 Dahlgren was born and raised in Värmland and had firsthand knowledge of its
dialects, which are evident in the speech of several characters.137 Like Richard Rodgers,
composer Andreas Randel had no connection with the region in which his most famous
theatrical piece was set; but since Dahlgren wrote new texts to fit existing folksongs and
instrumental melodies, several of which were common in Värmland, Randel built his
score on a foundation of traditional music, which he arranged for full orchestra.
For a time, confusion reigned as to the extent to which Andreas Randel either
composed or arranged the music based on existing sources. In a 1926 study of the
musical sources for The Värmlanders, Axel Ringström counters the “rather widespread”
(“rätt utbredd”) mistaken belief that Randel was responsible for writing a majority of the
melodies, which are often thought of as “successful folksong imitations” (“lyckade
folkviseimitationer”), by tracing the sources for sixteen of the eighteen melodies in
question.138 That same year, Sven Lindström also references the debate in an early issue
136 The text was originally published as Fredrik August Dahlgren, Wermlänningarne: Sorglustigt tal- sång- och dansspel i två afdelningar och sex indelningar [play text] (Stockholm: Hörberska boktryckeriet, 1846). In the introduction to a modern facsimile edition, Uno Willers notes that Dahlgren had finished the first Swedish translation of Romeo and Juliet in January 1845, shortly before commencing work on The Värmlanders by September of that same year; see Uno Willers, “[Foreword],” in Wermlänningarne: Sorglustigt tal-, sång- och dansspel i två af delningar och sex indelningar, by Fredrik August Dahlgren (Stockholm: Rediviva, 1974), [i–ii]. 137 Dahlgren spent most of his childhood in the rural community of Ransäter in Värmland on the farm where Geijer, with whom he later studied in Uppsala, had been born in 1783; see Willers, “[Foreword],” [iii]. 138 Axel Ringström, “Källorna till musiken i ‘Värmlänningarne,’” Musikkultur i (1926): 45. In other instances, the question of authorship versus arrangement is moot; Randel’s grandson, Ane Randel, wrote a biographical piece that opens with the observation that, on the occasion of the 500th performance of the piece at the Royal Opera in 1919, which was a festive event that included a special commemorative speech
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of STM, agreeing that Randel composed just one or “at the most” two of the melodies.139
The earnestness with which Ringström and Lindström approach this topic is evidence of
the pervasiveness of the misconception surrounding the origins of the melodies in The
Värmlanders, a misconception that was only possible due to the large number of
performances, not only in Stockholm as referenced in Table 4.3 above, but also in large
and small cities across the country.140 Given that many audience members, urban and
rural alike, were familiar with only a small subset of the folk melodies published in
collections or performed in theatrical or concert settings, it is not surprising that many
assumed Randel may have composed the majority of the music.
One of Randel’s sources for melodies, Anders Fryxell’s The Girl from Värmland
(Vermlands-flickan, 1821), has only the shortest of production histories: a single
performance by students at Uppsala University which, according to an account by a
in honor of the (textual) author, the name of the composer-arranger Randel was not even mentioned; see “Värmländingarnes kompositör,” Ord och bild: Illustrerad månadsskrift 39, no. 12 (1930): 637. 139 Sven Lindström, “‘Vermländingarne’ och det svensk-folkliga sångspelet intill 19:de seklets mitt,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning viii (1926): 108. 140 Ane Randel estimates roughly that by 1930, the total number of performances outside the capital was “many times” the 600 that had taken place under the auspices of the Royal Theater; see Randel, “Värmländingarnes kompositör,” 637. The Värmlanders also enjoys a long performance history abroad; Carl Gustaf Hessler’s troupe brought the play to Helsingfors in 1850 for a performance reviewed as “undeniably… among the better recent Swedish works” (“tillhör onekligen . . . de bättre bland den Svenska dramatikens nyare alster”); see the supplement to the Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (September 14, 1850): 5. Among Swedish-American communities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, The Värmlanders was the most-performed theatrical piece from the late 1860s through the early 1950s; see Ann-Kristin Wallengren, Welcome Home Mr. Swanson: Swedish Emigrants and Swedishness on Film (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014), 99–100. More recently, a performance took place in Los Angeles in 2013, with English dialogue and Swedish songs; see “Swedish theater group to perform at CLU,” Ventura County Star (June 5, 2013).
273
prominent member of the audience, was not particularly successful.141 Fryxell’s sångspel
would be a mere footnote today, had not Dahlgren accessed the published version and
written new lyrics to several tunes for use in The Värmlanders.142 One such melody, “O
Värmland, Thou Beautiful”(“Ack Vermeland, du sköna”), with a hybrid of Fryxell and
Dahlgren’s lyrics, became immensely popular and counts as one of the most widespread
folksongs of the nineteenth century.143 However, Fryxell’s play is notable for another
reason that has almost escaped notice: it also incorporates the functional work song of a
shepherdess, albeit relocated into a plot-friendly scenario.
Like The Union from 1815, The Girl from Värmland also takes place on the
Swedish-Norwegian border, but instead of an impending union, a military campaign is
underway; an engaged couple take turns rescuing each other from imprisonment by
Dano-Norwegian forces, until peace is declared and the community rejoices over the
wedding that will soon take place. The initial condition for the repurposed herding song
is set up in Act I, when Sven, a farmhand and soldier, must march away with his unit,
141 The salon hostess and diarist Malla Silfverstolpe recorded the performance (April 10, 1822, in the quarters of the student nation of Östergötland), as follows in her diary, where she always speaks of herself in the third person: “Malla had expected to enjoy it more than she did; the long entr’actes and the rather unrehearsed performance disturbed the whole thing”; “Malla hade väntat sig mera nöje däraf än hon erfor; de långa entreakterna och något oöfvadt i föreställningen störde det hela.” Malla Montgomery-Silfverstolpe, Memoarer, ed. Malla Grandinson (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1908–1911), 3:58. 142 Anders Fryxell, “Vermlands-Flickan: Sångspel i tre acter,” in Poetisk kalender för år 1822 (Upsala: Palmblad, 1821), 45–117. 143 On the history of “The Song of Värmland” (“Värmlandsvisan”), see Danielson and Ramsten, “Ack värmeland du sköna.” In the twentieth century, the tune underwent a renaissance in the jazz scene and became popular in the English-speaking world in renditions by Stan Getz and Miles Davis, among others; however, its rural origins were entirely effaced by the egregiously mistranslated English title, “Dear Old Stockholm.” See Mischa van Kan, “The Racial Imagination and Authenticity in Swedish Jazz: The Swedish Reception of Miles Davis’ Versions of Dear Old Stockholm,” in Jazz, Gender, Authenticity: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Jazz Research Conference Stockholm August 30–31 2012, ed. Alf Arvidsson, Publikationer från jazzavdelningen, Svenskt visarkiv 25 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv/Statens musikverk, 2014), 81–83.
274
leaving behind his Anna, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, who is forced to hide in the
forest to escape enemy troops. Near the end of Act II, Anna senses Sven’s company
approaching in the distance, and soon she hears him sing: “Send word to Anna, and
send word to me; / And if you are my friend, then answer me. / Now I send word to
you!” (Example 4.2). She immediately responds in like fashion before running out to
meet him.144
Example 4.2: Fryxell, The Girl from Värmland, “Send Word to Anna”
In a footnote, Fryxell explains that this song, “Send Word to Anna” (“Helsa Anna”) was
used by shepherdesses as a means of calling out to their counterparts across mountains
and forests during the summer grazing season.145 Although the play lacks the occasion
for a herding song in its original context, Fryxell maintains the song’s essential function
as a tool for communication; rather than allowing isolated herders to communicate
across long distances, the song becomes a foreshadowing device signaling the return of a
main character after an absence. The song is short, and with no internal plot to sustain it
as a standalone number, it breaks with the early notion of “folksong” being synonymous
144 The song is published in the musical appendix to Fryxell, “Vermlands-Flickan,” 6. 145 Fryxell introduced the standard Swedish greeting helsa in place of the dialect words lola or låla used in the field; see ibid., 83. This type of texted herding song for communication between shepherd girls is characteristic of regions near the Norwegian border; for more on the many dialect words for this type of singing in various regions, see Märta Ramsten, “Att kula, käuka eller lulla: Ett bidrag till ett historiskt perspektiv på lockrop,” Noterat 16 (2012): 77–78.
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with ballad. Not until the 1830s, in Arwidsson’s Svenska fornsånger (Ancient Swedish
Songs), would such rural work songs be officially adopted into the gradually widening
definition of “folksong,” and the first publication devoted exclusively to herding songs
appeared as late as 1846. In that collection, Richard Dybeck briefly mentions Fryxell’s
use of this herding song, but without elaborating on its status as a theatrical “first.”146
Musically, Fryxell’s arrangement of “Send Word to Anna” is indistinguishable from the
other numbers in the play; Fryxell’s published piano score harmonizes the melody in the
same manner as Hæffner had done for Geijer and Afzelius the previous decade, in a
texture that wanders between three and four voices. In performance, nothing signals the
song’s unusual origins as a work song, and the melody slips unnoticed into the
domesticated sphere of art music at a time when traditional performance practice was
not of concern. It becomes one of many auditory props signaling rural culture in general
and Värmland in particular, having shed the particulars of its functional origin.
By the time The Värmlanders premiered in 1846, folk melodies and dances often
appeared onstage (see Table 4.1 above). This libretto accounts for the paradigm of staged
folk performance by setting up a scene in which upper-class visitors from Stockholm
attend a rural midsummer celebration as guests of the community’s wealthy industrial
proprietor. The proprietor announces his intention early on, when he responds to an
invitation to attend the celebration: “I have many guests who are coming over
146 See the modern reprint of the 1846 volume: Richard Dybeck, Svenska vallvisor och hornlåtar, med norska artförändringar, Samfundet för visforskning/Svenskt visarkiv (Stockholm: Bok och bild, 1974), 19. Anna Johnson confirms that this volume contains the first known detailed explanation of Swedish herding music in “Sången i skogen: Studier kring den svenska fäbodmusiken,” PhD diss. (Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för musikvetenskap, 1986), 33.
276
tomorrow; but it is okay if I bring them along? It would be entertaining for the residents
of Stockholm to see the dances of Värmland.”147 Upon their arrival, a local official
welcomes them:
This was really too sweet, that the proprietor deigned to stop by our midsummer festivities. — And all of these grand strangers from Stockholm! (He turns toward the audience.) Heavens, so splendid! Our most humble thanks to you, gracious gentlefolk, who wanted to come and see how we do things out here in farming country.148
With the turn of the official’s head, the theater audience becomes the well-heeled visitors
to Värmland, who are present at a performance designed to impress them. The
celebration ceases to be a dance by Värmlanders for Värmlanders and becomes a
spectacle designed to please outsiders. The difference between musical expectations
across the rural/urban divide is summed up early on in the words of the farmhand Per,
who recalls a party at the industrial proprietor’s house:
Heavens! I remember last fall, when the proprietor had those visitors from Stockholm, and I went to his manor to see the guests. I’d never seen such a sight! All of the big rooms and halls were just bursting of people. And among them was such a lively crowd of musicians from Stockholm, with fiddles and clarinets and drums and tooting horns, that sometimes were no longer than your arm, but sometimes they shot out and were as long as I am tall, and they bellowed as coarsely as father Sven’s bull, and then there were tinkly iron things and a whole bunch of other funny instruments, that I’ve never before seen in my life. And then good Lord, they played so very sweetly, that I thought I’d [died and] come to heaven.149
147 “Jag får mycket främmande till mig i morgon; men jag kan ju få ta dem med hit? Det skulle roa Stockholmsboarne att se på Wermlandsdansen.” Dahlgren, Wermlänningarne, 18. 148 Sven’s dialogue, like much of the play (including Per’s speech in n. 149 below), is written in dialect: “Det var nu rektigt för rart, att herrskape va’ så go’ och inte försmådde te titte hit på midsommersvaka. — Och all denne storfrämmaten frå Stockholm se’n! (vänder sig till åskådarne) Kors så öfverpräktigt! Tackar allraödmjukast, nådi’ herrskap, som ville komme och se, hur det går te på bonnvis.” Ibid., 45–46. 149 “Kors! jag mins i fjol, när Patron hade Stockholmsfolk hos sej, då var jag ve herrgåln och titta’ på gästbude. Aldri’ har jag sett maken. Alle di store rumma och salera va’ plakat fulle med folk. Och deribland
277
This passage bears the stamp of urban stereotypes of unrefined rural bumpkins who
know nothing about city ways. Per’s impression of the trombones shooting out hits the
right comical notes, yet the entire description is calculated to emphasize his ignorance.
His knowledge of musical vocabulary is limited; the word he uses for “musicians”
(spelmän) refers, in standard Swedish, only to folk musicians and would never signify
musicians in the classical tradition. The term “tooting horns” (tutlurer) is not a standard
name for trombones, and one can only guess which percussion—triangle?—is meant by
the “tinkly iron things” (pingeljern). His words for “fiddles” and “drums” (fejoler and
trummer) are close enough to standard Swedish, dialect spelling differences
notwithstanding, but his word for “clarinets” (klanetter) drops a syllable (standard:
klarinetter), which further distances him from being “in the know.”
Despite his lack of knowledge, however, the fictional Per is said to appreciate the
beauty of the strange music intuitively—a feat the actual audience does not have the
opportunity to replicate with respect to the music of Per’s Värmland, as everything
passed through the filter of orchestrated scores interpreted by classically trained
musicians; Stockholm residents would not have the opportunity to hear public
var en lefvandes hoper spelmän frå Stockholm, med fejoler och klanetter och trummer och tutlurer, som ibland inte va’ länger än armen, men ibland sköt ut och ble så långe som jag, och böla’ så groft som fader Svens tjur, och så var det pingeljern och en hop andre konstige spelerverk, som jag aldri i min lefnad sett förr. Å herre jesta, di spelte så inneli ljufligt, så jag rent trodde, att jag had’ komme in i saligheta.” Ibid., 19.
278
performances of traditional music in their city by musicians steeped in that tradition (i.e.
actual spelmän) until 1891.150
Structurally, the folk music performed on theatrical stages in settings by Randel
and others was similar to the piano-vocal settings that had circulated widely since 1814.
Texted melodies are supported by unadventurous functional harmonies (chordal
accompaniments are in; complex counterpoint is out), and repeat signs are commonly
present for multiple strophes. Introductions are perfunctory: sometimes a four-measure
phrase, and sometimes just a single chord. Conventions develop among orchestrations
as well: first violins carry the majority of the melodic material, sometimes doubled by
oboe or flute, and the strings in general provide a complete accompaniment, with other
instrumental families employed to enhance texture and sonority. Whether a song is sung
with its usual text or given new words to more seamlessly further the plot, the auditory
prop is, by design, simple in structure, if occasionally ornate on the surface. In such
plays, the locus of maximum musical flexibility occurs in the overture, where the
composer is freer from constraints imposed by the need to accommodate the human
voice, textual coherence, and the dramatic pacing of the libretto.
In the printed version of excerpts arranged for piano, Randel’s overture to The
Värmlanders is only twenty measures long, but the full version in the manuscript
orchestral score runs just over four hundred bars and incorporates at least four pre-
150 On the origins of performances by folk musicians at Skansen, see Jonas Berg, “Folkmusikens första början på Skansen och Skansens ordinarie spelmän 1891–1930,” Noterat 6 (1998): 5–18.
279
existing folk melodies in addition to passages of newly composed music.151 A structural
analysis of this large-scale piece is given later, in connection with his overture to The
Fisherman’s Cottage.152 But first, the interaction between its component parts—the pre-
existing melodies and the meanings they carry—and the play as a whole must be
investigated.153
In all, the overture uses five melodies that recur later in the play (Table 4.4).
Table 4.4: Tunes in the Overture to The Värmlanders
Tune name Text in The Värmlanders “Unexpected Wedding-Guest” (“Oväntad bröllopsgäst”)
Anna: “Godnatt nu, min väna lilja” Act II, Section IV, Scene 1
“Revenge” (“Vedergällningen”)
Erik: “Farväl nu med lycka” Act I, Section I, Scene 6
“The Song of Värmland” (“Värmlandsvisan”)
Erik: “I Wermland är lustigt att lefva och bo” Act II, Section VI, Scene 2
unknown
Anna: “Nu jag sjungit har i dagar” Act II, Section V, Scene 3
“Polska from Jösse District” (“Jössehäradspolskan”)
untexted tune for dancing Act II, Section VI, Scene 2
From the perspective of the libretto, three tunes build dramatic conflict, while
two provide celebratory release at the end. Anna’s two songs appear at the height of the
crisis, when, having heard the local priest read the first marriage banns between her
151 Andreas Randel, Värmlänningarna: Tal-, sång- och dansspel: Arrangement för piano med överlagd text (Stockholm: Nordiska musikförl., n.d.), 3. This edition solves the composer/arranger question by including the following note on p. 2: “music arranged and partly composed by A. Randel.” The scope of the full overture was not apparent to at least one scholar, Axel Ringström, who had access only to a piano arrangement; see Ringström, “Källorna till musiken i ‘Värmlänningarne,’” 51. 152 For a structural analysis of the overture to The Värmlanders, see p. 302 below. 153 The use of song melodies as contrafacta to add layers of meaning to new situations extends beyond folksong. Karin Hallgren points out that, particularly in comedies, the use of a well-known melody “gives a certain atmosphere of milieu or character”; see Karin Hallgren, Borgerlighetens teater, 285.
280
beloved Erik and the rich girl whom his parents want him to marry, she temporarily
loses her mind.154 Erik’s first song occurs early on, as he laments his parents’ inability to
understand his desire to marry Anna, a poor farmer’s daughter, while expressing
optimism that the oaths they have given each other will carry them through. His second
song, the celebrated “Song of Värmland,” is heard during the midsummer celebration at
the play’s end, the same occasion on which the “Jössehäradspolskan” is played and
danced. Such insider information is dependent on having seen prior performances; even
reading the libretto is insufficient, as there is no indication of tune names for songs.
However, the tunes themselves carry meanings that overlap with the plot, giving hints
about the story to come.
Two melodies, “Unexpected Wedding-Guest” and “Revenge,” are ballads
originally published in Geijer-Afzelius that revolve around the common theme of
faithlessness. In the original text of “Unexpected Wedding-Guest” (“Oväntad
bröllopsgäst”), a young knight instructs his betrothed to be faithful to him while he
travels abroad, but while he is away, she becomes engaged to another man. The first
three strophes are given here in Example 4.3.155
154 Besides Juliet, Anna resembles other Shakespearean heroes at certain moments. Upon hearing the banns in church, Anna initially reacts in Hero-like fashion, falling in a dead faint. When she awakens to madness, her songs and her delusional attempt to drown herself are reminiscent of Ophelia. In addition to his translation of Romeo and Juliet (pub. 1845) noted earlier, Dahlgren later made or adapted three other translations of plays by Shakespeare that were performed at the Royal Opera, though never published: Macbeth (performed for one week in 1858); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (En midsommarnattsdröm, eighteen performances, 1860–62); and The Comedy of Errors (Förvexlingarne, eight performances, 1861–62). See Dahlgren, Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 279, 183, 224. 155 The text is found in Geijer-Afzelius, I:3–5. The melody is printed in Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 24.
281
There were two dear friends who loved each other; he traveled to a distant land, away from his betrothed. The young knight was going to travel away from his heart’s beloved. “Do not let anybody seduce you before I return!” When the young knight was away, she took another love, who pleased her well according to her desire.
Det var två såta vänner, som höll’ hvarandra kär; den ena for till främmand’ land ifrån sin fästemö. Den ungersven skulle bortresa ifrån sin hjertans vän: “Låt ingen dig bortlocka, Till dess jag kommer igen!” När ungersvennen var bortrester, fick hon en annan kär, som henne väl behagade, allt efter sitt begär.
Example 4.3: Ballad melody, “Unexpected Wedding-Guest,” strophes 1–3
At her wedding ceremony, her original suitor returns and confronts her; full of grief, he
writes a long farewell letter before committing suicide. At first, Dahlgren’s libretto
seems to flip the roles by having the woman (Anna) believe that her suitor (Erik) is
going to marry another girl (Britta). Yet Anna’s descent into madness eventually
parallels the story of the “Unexpected Wedding-Guest” all the more clearly: she does
betray her betrothed by falling in love with a mythical spirit and forgetting Erik—and,
indeed, her past, and her identity—altogether. Only when Erik rescues Anna from
drowning does she come to her senses and break free from the undertones of the tragic
story behind this ballad melody.
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The first three strophes of the second ballad melody in the Overture, “Revenge”
(“Vedergällningen”), also parallel a key moment in The Värmlanders: a young knight tells
his intended bride that her father forbids their marriage. The first three strophes are
given in Example 4.4.156
“If mountains and valleys were made of gold, and all water were turned into wine, all of this would I risk for your sake, you who are dearest of all to me.” If what you say to me is true, that you want to become my dearest, follow me home to my dear father’s farm, and ask honorably for my hand. “I visited your dear father yesterday, your father told me, ‘No.’ Beautiful maiden, hold your own council and follow me outside the country.”
“Om alla berg och dalar de voro utav gull, allt vatten vore vändt uti vin, allt sammans ville jag våga för din skull, du som är allrakärasten min.” Är det då sant du säger för mig, du vill bli allra kärasten min; du följer mig hem på min kära faders gård, och bedes med äran om mig. “Jag var hos din kära fader i går, din fader han svara mig nej. Skön jungfrun tager nu rådet av sig själv och följer utav landet med mig.”
Example 4.4: Ballad melody, “Revenge,” strophes 1–3
In this ballad, it is the knight who becomes unfaithful, and the girl leaves him and
returns home. After seven years and seven days, he reappears at her father’s door,
begging for bread; but instead of forgiveness, he earns himself a slap on the cheek. While
the majority of this story does not play out in Dahlgren’s libretto, the element of a
156 The text is from Geijer-Afzelius, III:61–63. Hæffner’s setting is printed in Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 49–50.
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283
father’s refusal manifests itself in Erik’s and Anna’s parents, each of whom refuses to
permit a marriage with the offspring of the opposing family.157 The decision to use these
two well-known ballad melodies not only for key moments of song as contrafacta within
the vådevill, but also as part of the overture, cannot be accidental; each reinforces an
important element of the plot.
In addition to the famous “Song of Värmland,” an untexted dance tune for fiddle
appearing near the end of the overture also identifies the setting to knowledgeable
parties. The polska from Jösse district in Värmland (“Jössehäradspolskan”) began to
come to the attention of outsiders early in the 1800s. Known for its athletic kicks, leaps
and cartwheels, the “Jössehäradspolskan” spread first through descriptions of those
who had witnessed it, and the performance by a group of students at the May 1
celebration in Uppsala in 1843 was widely praised.158 While it is not clear which melody
was played on that occasion, I have traced the one used by Randel to Richard Dybeck’s
first evening concert of folk music arranged for orchestra, held in Stockholm on
November 18, 1844, and it was likely circulating in some form prior to that as well.159 It is
likely that, prior to its popularization in The Värmlanders, the dance may have been
paired with many other melodies, although nineteenth-century anthologies variously
157 Erik discusses this topic with his parents in Dahlgren, Wermlänningarne, 23–29. For Anna’s discussion with her parents, see ibid., 38–40. 158 On the background of the Jössehäradspolskan, see Mats Rehnberg, “Klackarna i taket: Om halling och jössehäradspolska,” in Kulturspeglingar Studier tillägnade Sam Owen Jansson 19 mars 1966, ed. Ernst-Folke Lindberg and Sam Owen Jansson (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1966), 215–23. 159 J. N. Ahlström’s manuscript score, dated 1844, is in Richard Dybeck’s archive at the Nordiska museet, accession 46.573, F1:6, Notmanuscript 27. This melody is not found in [Afzelius and Åhlström], Traditioner av svenska folkdansar.
284
include just two melodies associated with this dance. Just as folk melodies were stripped
of their variety and developed standardized forms through the processes of
transcription, publication, and subsequent performance, many folk dances met similar
fates: their popularity on the theatrical stage both ensured their longevity and destroyed
their spontaneity, as choreographed versions replaced the freedom of choice of
individuals dancing for their own enjoyment.160 The choreography for the
“Jössehäradspolskan” designed by Anders Selinder (1806–74), master of the Royal
Swedish Ballet, was adopted as gospel by subsequent folk dance movements.
One final melody used in both the overture and as a song is credited as a folkvisa
in numerous later anthologies and concert programs. In a study on musical sources for
The Värmlanders, Axel Ringström—writing in 1926—mentions in passing the origins of
this song as “a well-known folk melody” (“en välkänd folkvisa”), as if this truth is so
obvious that it need not be investigated further. However, I have not been able to trace
the melody prior to 1846, and I have also yet to find any text other than Dahlgren’s
associated with this melody. Could it count among the modern layer of songs written
after the era of folksong collection began but that became disassociated with their
composers? Example 4.5 shows the melody of “For Days I Have Been Singing” (“Nu jag
sjungit har i dagar”) as printed in The Värmlanders, with all four of its verses.161
160 Rehnberg, “Klackarna i taket,” 223. 161 The text is from Dahlgren, Wermlänningarne, 70–71.
285
For days I have been singing, for three days I have been singing; But of what use are my complaints? My friend will not give me an answer. Recently a flower died in the woods, and I wept over her pall; the flower was called “faithful little Anna”— Will she awaken next spring? But now is not the time for weeping, for today I am a bride; but where is my bridegroom, my dearest? I am already dressed in wedding finery. Arise from your wave and answer my song! Then I shall follow to the altar among the many mermaids.
Nu jag sjungit har i dagar, Nu jag sjungit har i tre; Men hvad båtar det mig, hur jag klagar? Vännen vill ej svar mig ge. Nyss en blomma dog i skogen Och jag gret vid hennes bår; Ty den blomman het Anna-lill trogen — Månn’ hon vaknar nästa vår? Men nu är ej tid att gråta, Då i dag jag skall stå brud; Dock hvi dröjer min brudgum, den såta? Jag står re’n i bröloppsskrud. Stig då opp utur din bölja Och gif svar uppå min sång! Sedan skall jag till altaret följa Allt ibland sjöjungfrur mång’.
Example 4.5: Randel/Dahlgren, The Värmlanders, “For Days I Have Been Singing”
The use of the flat seventh and flat third scale degrees in a tune that begins firmly in the
major mode is unusual in the mostly diatonic world of folksongs, though it is not in
itself firm evidence of nineteenth century compositional creativity. Rather, the location
of this melody in the central portion of the overture, its juxtaposition with substantial
amounts of other newly composed material, and its pattern of repetition in conjunction
with this other new material lends credence to the hypothesis that it is also newly
composed by Randel and/or Dahlgren.
Over time, “For Days I Have Been Singing” became disassociated from its
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bå tar- det mig, hur jag kla gar?- Vän nen- vill ej svar mig ge.
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position in The Värmlanders. The song may well be a victim of its own success,
remembered for its content but not its composer as it entered the active performance
repertoire of male choruses in a popular arrangement by August Söderman.162 By the
time Gustav Hägg published his edition of songs with parallel English singing
translations, including the first two strophes of what is translated as “Days and Days
Have I Been Singing,” genders have swapped. The flower “faithful little Anna,” cut from
its association with Anna the protagonist, becomes instead a symbol of the friend who
will not answer in the last line of the first strophe, which Chapman translates as, “When
she will not answer me”?163 According to gender roles of the time, this almost certainly
implies that Hägg and Chapman understood the lyrical I to be a masculine figure, which
is completely at odds with the song’s appearance in The Värmlanders—yet in keeping
with its intermediary popularity as a song for male chorus. In a similar manner, the song
itself may have undergone an existential swap: from a melody written for use in
Värmlänningarna to a “folksong” without specific regional association.
The many folk melodies used as auditory props in The Värmlanders signify region
through a combination of origin and assumption: some either originate in or were
commonly played in that region, while others became associated with it through their
presence in the play. In at least one case, “For Days I Have Been Singing,” a song
developed a life of its own apart from the musical, while “The Song of Värmland” only
162 August Söderman, Nordiska folkmelodier harmoniskt behandlade för mansröster (Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1865), 2. 163 Emphasis added. Gustaf Hägg, Songs of Sweden: Eighty-Seven Swedish Folk- and Popular Songs, trans. Henry Grafton Chapman (New York: G.S. Schirmer, 1909), 158–59.
287
became more firmly connected with that western province. Richard Rodgers’ boastful
claim to have written Oklahoma-style music based entirely on his own ideas of what
such music should sound like has no counterpart in The Värmlanders, and it is
inconceivable that “The Song of Värmland” could have achieved such great popularity if
Dahlgren had not approached its lyrics with this pre-existing melody in mind.
A copycat piece, The People of Närke: Images of Folk-Life (Nerkingarne: Bilder ur
folklivet, 1871), with text by Axel Anrep (1835–97) and music by Carl Gottfried Reinhold
Littmarck (1842–99), proves a useful counterexample to this last point. Within a week of
the premiere in Stockholm, the newspaper in Jönköping was already offering the
cautiously optimistic prediction that this “folk comedy with song” might well enjoy as
long and fortuitous a future as The Värmlanders.164 A lengthy review of the premiere from
a correspondent in Stockholm to the main organ of the province of Närke takes a more
tempered view, noting that the play is far from a masterpiece, an obvious “beginner’s
work” (förstlingsarbete) with many failures, yet also with many positive features that bear
witness to the author’s future promise.165 The review closes with the text to a hymn to
Närke, which, like the “Värmlandsvisan,” praises citizens and, above all, the natural
164 Jönköpingsbladet (December 23, 1871): 3. The People of Närke was popular enough to spawn a continuation the following year, Lasse’s Journey to Stockholm (Lasse’s Stockholmsresa, 1872), although the premiere of this sequel failed to live up to expectations; see “Lasses Stockholmsresa,” Nerikes Allehanda (December 7, 1872): 3. 165 Nerikes Allehanda was published in Örebro; see “Nerkingarne på Södra teatern,” Nerikes Allehanda (December 20, 1871): 3.
288
features of its eponymous region. However, rather than building on a traditional tune
from Närke, the hymn melody is newly composed by Littmarck.166
Where Dahlgren and Randel model collective song by having everyone present
at the celebration for Erik and Anna join in on the last three repeated lines of each
strophe, Anrep and Littmarck discourage collective associations by placing the “Hymn
to Närke” in the mouth of a single character standing alone on the stage. The song came
nowhere near the iconic cultural status of its model, and evidence suggests that more
recent citizens of Närke may well be completely oblivious to the song’s—and even the
play’s—existence.167
Country folk and city folk in Korp-Kirsti (1863)
Of all the Swedish provinces, Värmland enjoys the most established reputation in
musical theater, but its northern neighbor, Dalarna (“The Dales”), would eventually
come to be interpreted as the most symbolic of Swedish folk music traditions surviving
into the modern age.168 Although it is all but forgotten today, a vådevill set in this
region—Korp-Kirsti: A Dala-Adventure in One Act with Song and Dance (1863) by Frans
166 The People of Närke includes, among others, five folk melodies from Närke and eight tunes composed by Littmarck, director of the Southern Theater. “Nerkingarne,” Dagens Nyheter (December 19, 1871): 2. 167 In 1978, a magazine produced for a town in Närke reprinted the song’s text and briefly compares the play to the more familiar The Värmlanders, assuming that contemporary readers were no longer familiar with the work celebrating their own region; [Nils Helander], “En sång till Närke,” Kumla julblad 49 (1978): 42. 168 One reason for this is likely the shift in general focus from vocal to instrumental folk music that occurred in the latter part of the 1800s. By 1906, when Anders Zorn began his series of competitions for traditional folk musicians which soon developed into the system of “badges” signifying knowledge of certain musical traditions, he selected a site near the shores of Lake Siljan in Dalarna; see Anna Ivarsdotter-Johnson and Märta Ramsten, “Folkmusiken som nationell och provinsiell symbol,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 241–43. Likewise, the first four volumes of the monumental collection Svenska låtar (24 vols., 1922–40) initiated by Nils Andersson treat the music of Dalarna.
289
Hedberg (1828–1908) with music by Herman Berens (1826–80)—was among the more
popular, long-lived works of its generation, enjoying solid runs in Stockholm and
several other cities and reaching at least 150 performances within eleven years of its 1863
premiere at the Royal Dramatic Theater, with regular performances continuing for at
least another three decades beyond that.169 A critic at a performance at Skansen’s
outdoor theater in the summer of 1901 speaks confidently of “the old familiar singspiel”
(“det gamla välkända sångspelet”), as if readers were intimately familiar with it.170
Neither Hedberg, who was raised in and around Stockholm, nor Berens, who
was born in Hamburg and immigrated to Stockholm around age twenty, had direct
connections with Dalarna, a situation that seems to have bothered a correspondent for
Dalpilen, a newspaper from Falun, the primary population center of the region.171 This
anonymous correspondent wrote disparagingly of the piece as a “cheap product”
(“tarflig produkt”) with next to no plot, and an “insignificant derivative imitation” (“en
obetydligt afwikande imitation”) of the play A Midsummer Night in Dalarna (1854), the
implication being that Hedberg and Berens made no new or meaningful contributions
169 The Nya Dagligt Allehanda ran a notice about the upcoming 150th performance (September 22, 1874). Regular performances continued through the early 1900s; the most recent performance I have traced occurred in 1935. 170 Waldeck [pseud. for Thorgny Wallbeck-Hallgren], “‘Korp-Kirsti’ på Skansen,” Svenska Dagbladet, August 10, 1901, 5. 171 “Korresponds. Stockholm den 5 nov.,” Dalpilen (November 7, 1863). For biographies of Hedberg and Berens, see Ragnar Amenius, “Frans T Hedberg,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1969–71): 18:394, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=12687; and Julius Rabe, “Hermann Johann Berens,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1922): 3:334, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/Sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=18523. Although it has more recently been eclipsed by Borlänge, Falun was the largest population center in Dalarna during the nineteenth century, when it doubled in size from approximately 4,000 to 8,000 inhabitants. See Befolkning 1720–1967, 61.
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with Korp-Kirsti.172 A Midsummer Night in Dalarna is itself a freely adapted translation of
Huldrebakken (1852) by Danish writer-composer Erik Bøgh (1822–99), and neither the
author nor the translator of these earlier plays could claim roots in Dalarna, either.173
Yet accounts of overwhelmingly positive audience response to Korp-Kirsti in
other newspapers indicate that the general public was apparently untroubled by the
supposedly poorly fashioned imitation; furthermore, while certain overarching plot
similarities do exist, the central matter in Korp-Kirsti is entirely different from that of A
Midsummer Night in Dalarna.174 Most importantly for the present study, the dissatisfied
reviewer missed the fact that the supposed “imitation” shares only two melodies with
its “model.” Furthermore, Hedberg and Berens make use of several local melodies—
including a tune from Orsa (typically associated with Dybeck’s text, “Manhood,
Bravery, and Daring Men”) and several Dalarna-songs (dalvisor)—in addition to folk
melodies familiar more generally across much of Sweden. In contrast, the earlier Danish
play and its free Swedish translation lack music local to the Dalarna region; Bøgh
identifies geographical sources for folk melodies from Blekinge (a district in the
southeast corner of Sweden), Sorunda (a village south of Stockholm), and Jösse district
172 En midsommarnatt i Dalarne, a “dramatic idyll with song in one act” translated and edited by August Kloo, was performed eighty times at theaters on Södermalm and in the Humlegården between 1854 and 1860; Dahlgren, Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 183. The play is unrelated to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 173 For the melodies in Bøgh’s Huldrebakken, including a number of Swedish folk melodies, see Erling Jan Sørensen’s innovative project, Den danske vaudeville: “Huldrebakken,” Vaudeviller og syngespil, last modified 2017, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.erlingmusic.dk/29878/Huldrebakken. 174 The Danish play Huldrebakken hinges on Swedish folk superstitions of the Necken’s evil powers, while Korp-Kirsti depends on traditional courting customs, which will be explained below.
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in Värmland—but not Dalarna.175
To an even stronger extent than The Värmlanders, Korp-Kirsti relies on interactions
between local residents and foreign visitors from Stockholm who are unfamiliar with the
customs of the region. At times, the dialogue becomes didactic: for example, the title
demonstrates the rural custom of affixing a farm name before a person’s given name, as
one urban character explains to another in the course of the play (in this case, the title
refers to protagonist Kirsti of Korp (“Raven”) farm).176 The story is set in a shieling
(fäbod), a hut and the surrounding fields where livestock graze in the summer, in the
Orsa district in Dalarna. The majority of the folk melodies in this lighthearted piece are
used vådevill-style with new lyrics that help advance the story of how traditional
courting customs are temporarily upset by an outsider, although I have been unable to
confirm the existence of the custom outside of this play.177 According to local custom, a
suitor supposedly woos his intended by sneaking into her fäbod hut while she is out with
the animals and hanging his pocket-watch on the wall above her bed. If his watch
remains in its place when he returns a week later—and it is still running, which means
the girl has faithfully wound it during the interim—it means that she has accepted his
175 The one Dalarna tune present may be accidental; a melody labeled by Bøgh as “a polska from Jösse Härad” appeared in print much earlier in [Afzelius and Åhlström], Traditioner av svenska folkdansar, 1:6, where it is labeled as originating in Dalarna; however, Bøgh makes no indication that he is aware of any possible link between the melody and the region in which his play is set. 176 Frans Hedberg, Korp-Kirsti: Ett Dalaäfventyr i en akt: Med sång och dans [play text], 2nd ed. (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1903), 15. On the history of the concept of the “farm name” (gårdsnamn) in Dalarna, as well as recent attempts to revive it, see Sune Garmo, “Om våra gårdsnamn,” Dagsverket, no. 1 (2007): 10. 177 Kerstin Brorson’s enlightening monograph on daily life, customs, beliefs, and music in fäbod communities includes a chapter on courting traditions: “Courting and Festive Activities” in Kerstin Brorson, Sing the Cows Home: The Remarkable Herdswomen of Sweden (Seattle: Welcome Press, 1985), 153–59.
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proposal.178 Upon learning of this tradition, a district court judge (häradshöfding) visiting
from Stockholm causes an uproar by secretly switching clocks around, confusing the
identities and fates of would-be suitors; his deed is eventually discovered, mistaken
feelings are assuaged, and all ends happily.
Initially, the visiting city dwellers appear to have wildly differing reactions to the
rural community. Hertzner, an artist unhappy with life in “busy” Stockholm, praises the
natural scenery, while Strand, the meddling district court judge, finds the hilly
landscape around Orsa unpleasant (“I don’t give a damn for your views! All this
climbing makes me lose my breath!”).179 Likewise, as the call of a natural horn pierces
the distance, Hertzner approvingly proclaims it to stand “in harmony with the painting”
into which his artistic eye has already transformed the landscape (and which he is about
to begin to sketch), while Strand responds prosaically, “I thought that it sounded like
when the clock honks twelve in Stockholm.”180 To Strand, the aural image of the clock in
the city at noontime strikes at the heart of modernity, where industrialism breeds
machinery, and time—standardized according to the needs of transportation
schedules—rules all. The horn call, stripped of musical associations, reminds him of
what he otherwise might be doing on his lunch break at that hour: drinking arrack-
flavored spirits in the Operakällaren, a restaurant located in the basement of the opera
178 Hedberg, Korp-Kirsti, 14. 179 “Jag ger tusan dina utsikter! Man mister ju andan på det här klättrandet!” Ibid., 10. 180 “…i harmoni med taflan…” Ibid. “Jag tyckte att det lät som när klockan tutar tolf I Stockholm.” Ibid., 11.
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house in Stockholm.181 Yet even to Hertzner, who approves of what he observes in this
rural territory, the value of the scenery lies less in its intrinsic beauty, and more in its
ability to serve as material to be painted for personal enjoyment and potential financial
benefit. And Strand, who has no apparent monetary interest in this visit, still finds the
opportunity for personal gain when he decides to interfere with the local courting
custom for his own amusement, thereby manipulating the feelings of quite a few
individuals. Korp-Kirsti may be the heroine, but her story—and hence her existence—
hinges on outsiders.
To set the scene and characterize the central figure, Hedberg’s play draws on the
type of herding music (vallmusik) mentioned above in connection with Fryxell’s The Girl
from Värmland that was introduced to urban publics in print by Arwidsson in 1834 and
on a larger scale by Dybeck in the 1840s. As the curtain rises on an idyllic mountain
pasture with views of Lake Siljan in the background, audiences are greeted not by a
person onstage, but by the far-off call of a lur, a natural trumpet used by shepherds—
typically girls and unmarried women (dalkullor)—to communicate with animals and
fellow shepherds.182 This call is immediately answered by a second lur, audibly closer
though still offstage. The aural distance and the heard-but-not-seen quality of the lur
tones would have brought most audiences as close as they would ever come to herding
music in its original practice, which was driven entirely by functionality (calling one’s
181 “Det påminde mig om punschen på operakällaren!” Hedberg, Korp-Kirsti, 11. From the rough sketch of Strand’s character presented in this brief play, one assumes that the musical performances upstairs on the opera stage would have held little interest for him. 182 Ibid., 3.
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cows, scaring bears away, alerting a neighbor) and had no intrinsic performance
aesthetic.183 However, the artificiality of the theatrical stage in Korp-Kirsti is omnipresent,
and the brief attempt to invoke traditional practice in the field gives way to the norms of
art music, as the orchestra quietly begins to play an arrangement of a herding song
(vallvisa), crescendoing as Kirsti enters the stage to sing.184 Furthermore, although Kirsti
is wearing a lur on a strap over her shoulder, implying a connection with the horn calls
heard prior to her entrance, she never plays the instrument onstage, and according to
the stage directions, her character cannot be responsible for the initial lur calls: the first is
heard “from a distance” and the second is “closer, to the right,” while Kirsti enters the
stage immediately thereafter through a door from the hut on the left.185
During the brief prelude, the first herding song emerges fragmentarily, with
motives traded between high and low voices, transposed, and inverted. The melody is
telescoped, such that only phrase one and the first half of phrase three (A and C) appear,
along with a reference to an augmented variant of phrase four (D) in the last three
measures. Example 4.6 shows a version of the source melody, alongside a reduction of
the first section of the orchestral introduction in Example 4.7.186
183 On music in fäbod settings, see the chapter “Sing the Cows Home” in Brorson, Sing the Cows Home, 81–100. 184 Hedberg’s printed play indicates the source of the melody for each song. 185 Hedberg, Korp-Kirsti, 3. 186 The source melody is a herding song that came to double as a lullaby: “Tu Lu, Is He Still Asleep?” (“Tu — lu! sofver han än?”). Hedberg cites a Vallvisa from Hallström’s Svenska folkvisor, nr. 15, as his source; the reference is likely to Ivar Hallström, but I have not found any collection of fifteen or more folksongs by him. I have located a reference to a set of Folksongs from Different Countries (Folkvisor från olika länder) by Ivar Hallström (Stockholm: Lundqvist, 1871), but this volume post-dates Korp-Kirsti by eight years and includes songs of many countries, not just Sweden. In any case, the earliest I have traced this melody is Arvid August Afzelius, Afsked af swenska folksharpan, med bidrag till swenska folksångernas historia (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1848), 103–5. Here, Afzelius claims that the melody had been transcribed approximately fifty years
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Example 4.6: Source melody, “Tu – Lu! Is He Still Asleep?”
Example 4.7: Berens, Korp-Kirsti, Orchestral introduction, mm. 1–22, reduction
The treatment of the melody in this passage recalls the brush strokes of the artist
Herztner as he captures scenes of rural life on paper to sell to inhabitants of Stockholm.
In effect, the composer gradually paints the scene into being, applying broad melodic
strokes that culminate with the entrance of the voice singing a complete statement of the
melody at the end of the orchestral introduction. Such an image parallels the actual
ending of the play, in which Herztner picks up his album and begins to draw the lively
engagement dance celebration (to the sounds of a traditional fiddle tune) as the curtain
previously. For orchestral parts, see Hermann Berens, “Korp-Kirsti,” manuscript vocal and orchestral parts, 1863, Kungliga dramatiska teatern, KDT N20:2, S-Skma.
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falls.187 This brief overture also exemplifies, albeit on a small scale, the deeper
compositional engagement with folk music material that occurs in the other major type
of musical theater under discussion, when a single folksong becomes the central
organizing principle for an entire work.
Hyperrealism in The Games of the House of Folkung (1864)
Typically when folk music is used as an auditory prop, the goal is to simulate reality on
the theatrical stage, insofar as that is possible in this inherently performative art. In The
Games of the House of Folkung (Folkunga-lek), a play by Ludvig Josephson (1832–99) with
music by August Söderman, the attempt to convey realism through folkdance is carried
out too earnestly: a certain dance is performed somewhat “authentically” according to
field notes, but two versions—presumably from different regions—are danced
simultaneously by two groups of characters, something that would not have occurred
naturally.188
At a wedding celebration in this historical drama set in 1306, guests sing and
dance the traditional song-game “Oh, If Only I Dared” (“Ack, om jag tordes våga”). The
full song text is adopted word-for-word from Arwidsson’s published version in 1842,
and the melody is transposed but otherwise identical.189 While the sound palette of the
187 Hedberg, Korp-Kirsti, 44. 188 The Games of the House of Folkung ran for seven performances in 1864, according to announcements in Aftonbladet between October and December 1864. 189 “Ack, om jag tordes våga,” from Adolf Iwar Arwidsson, Svenska fornsånger (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1834–42), 3:193–94. The song occurs in the play in Ludvig Josephson, Folkunga-Lek: Första avdelningen: Håtuna-leken: Romantiskt-historiskt skådespel i fem akter [play text] (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1864), 103–4. See also no. 7, “Dans-lek,” in August Söderman, “Folkunga-Lek: Historiskt romantiskt skådespel i 5 akter,” manuscript
297
full orchestral accompaniment is far removed from the unison singing voices of the
game under normal circumstances, the theatrical setting closely simulates the
performance context as Arwidsson conveys it. Stage directions instruct performers to
form two lines, men on one side and women on the other, as if for the more familiar
song-game “Simon from Sälle Goes Courting.”190 However, an additional set of stage
directions tells the bridal couple to dance this same dance alone as a “ring dance”
(ringdans, which in this situation surely means a couple dance) in the background.
Which version, the line dance or the ring dance, corresponds with Arwidsson’s
instructions? Both versions do. In addition to the usual choreography of two lines of men
and women facing each other, Arwidsson also mentions a less-common variant danced
in a circle.191
Folk dances onstage were already carefully choreographed creations lacking the
spontaneity of actual practice, just as the music to which they were performed was
transcribed, adapted, and arranged for orchestra. In the field, only one version would
have been danced, according to local tradition. Within the artificial space of the theater,
Josephson seeks to invoke authenticity by including both documented versions, but their
very simultaneity renders them even more unreal.
orchestral score, 1864, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, F42 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 190:3–4), S-Skma. 190 This song gets its own back-story in another theatrical piece discussed below, Engelbrekt and His Dalecarlian Men; see p. 318. 191 Arwidsson provides no details about the circle version, as the field notes to which he had access did not give him enough information to reconstruct the dance; see Svenska fornsånger, vol. 3:193–194.
298
An indispensible, interchangeable folk melody in The Fisherman’s Cottage (1844)
The question of whether a song serves as auditory prop or something more substantial is
not always clear-cut. In the case of The Fisherman’s Cottage (Fiskarstugan, 1844), a one-act
operetta with a libretto and songs by August Säfström (1813–88) and orchestrated by
Andreas Randel, a folk melody is both crucial to the crux of the intrigue and, as will be
demonstrated later, entirely interchangeable.192
In the operetta, a young Swedish woman recalls hearing a young man sing a
Swedish folksong as she was passing through Switzerland; shortly thereafter, as they
independently happen to take refuge in a fisherman’s cottage during a storm in the
Bohuslän archipelago near Gothenburg, she sings the song—and he overhears her in his
sleep. They eventually realize when and where they met previously, declare their
mutual love, and presumably live happily ever after. The song in question, “In the
Green Forest of the North” (“I nordanskog grön”), is a contrafactum on the familiar
192 The Fisherman’s Cottage was never published in its entirety. A manuscript libretto, which varies somewhat from the text ultimately copied into the score, is August Säfström, “Fiskar-stugan: Operett i en akt” 1844, KTA Pjäs F.015, Kungliga Teaterns Arkiv, Stockholm (Gäddviken). For the manuscript score, see August Säfström and Andreas Randel, “Fiskar-stugan: Operett i en akt,” manuscript full score, 1844, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, F33b, S-Skma. This is Säfstrom’s first securely attributed text among the approximately one hundred that he wrote or translated; see Karin Hallgren, “August Säfström,” trans. Thalia Thunander, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2015, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/safstrom-august/. Additionally, the score is one of Randel’s earliest theater orchestrations, as he began writing and/or arranging music to a total of twenty-four stage works in 1844; see Martin Tegen, “Andreas Randel,” trans. Robin McGinley, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2013, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/randel-andreas/. The operetta ran for five performances at the Royal Opera in January 1844; Dahlgren, Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 207. Despite its short run, the publisher Abraham Hirsch—who issued a collection of excerpted songs, Sånger ur operetten Fiskar-stugan af Aug. Säfström in early 1844, advertised other works “by the author of Fiskarstugan,” counting on the work’s popularity to boost sales by an as-yet unknown Säfström; Aftonbladet (February 13, 1844): 4.
299
ballad melody “The Bride of the Mountain King” (“Den bergtagna”); the first strophe, in
a reduction of Randel’s manuscript score, is given below in Example 4.8.193
In the green forest of the north, the bird sought his dear friend, time seems long to me.
But however much he looked, he could not find her anywhere, but I know that sorrow is heavy.
Example 4.8: Säfström/Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, “In the Green Forest of the North,” mm. 1–22, reduction
An early review notes that this folk melody “goes through the entire [piece] like a
leading thread” (“genomgår det hela såsom en ledande tråd”), which seems to indicate
that the song serves as a central organizing principle of sorts, even if the operetta’s title
193 Säfström and Randel, “Fiskar-stugan” (full score), 85–89.
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has nothing to do with the folktune in question. However, this statement proves to be an
exaggeration; the tune does appear several times—in the overture as well as two of the
thirteen musical numbers—but it is not more consistently woven “throughout.” The two
presentations of the song with Säfström’s text “In the Green Forest of the North,” sung
first by Clara (No. 5) and then by Leonard (No. 8), are straightforward; her three
strophes are through-composed, accompanied by three different orchestral textures
(strings, winds, and full orchestra with tremolo strings), and the accompaniment to
Leonard’s single strophe is identical to that of Clara’s first strophe.
Of more interest musically is the recitative immediately following Leonard’s
solo, which forms the central portion of what is labeled a “Folk Song, Recitative and
Romance.” The first phrase of the folksong, the portion of the melody corresponding to
the opening lines (“In the green forest of the north, the bird sought his dear friend”),
figures promintly in brief orchestral interludes preceding the two halves of the
recitative. At this point, Leonard has heard Clara sing the song—in his sleep, as if in a
dream—but has not yet realized who she is; as the orchestra repeatedly sounds this
“searching” motive (marked in brackets in Example 4.9 below), wandering upwards to
enter on ever-higher pitch levels in its second interlude, the magnitude of his despair
over his as-yet fruitless search for the mysterious girl in the traditional dress of a certain
Swedish village (Wingåkersdräkt) he encountered in Switzerland becomes all the more
evident.
301
Alas, the fire that consumes me will not be quenched until I reach my grave.
My beautiful dream-picture continually disappears just when I believe her to be closest by.
Example 4.9: Säfström/Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage,
Recitative: “Alas, the Fire that Consumes Me,” mm. 8–24, reduction
The abstract treatment of material from a folk melody in this recitative is more typical of
lyric opera than the lighter plays-with-music using songs as auditory props. As has been
noted above, the most common locus of musical abstraction in otherwise
straightforward pieces is the overture; before analyzing the use of this same folktune in
the overture to The Fisherman’s Cottage, let us turn to Randel’s more famous overture to
The Värmlanders, which dates from just two years later.
In the orchestral overture to The Värmlanders, most folk tunes are presented in
their entirety; in the central Allegro agitato portion, however, a more abstract form
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emerges.194
Table 4.5: Randel, The Värmlanders, Overture, structure
Tempo Tune name/function
Key P. Comments
Andante sostenuto “Unexpected
Wedding-Guest”
g 1
3
duple ballad melody altered to triple time, primarily by compressing material in beats three and four to fit the new beat three; after initial presentation, includes some sequential use of altered fragments at rising pitch levels and as motive in bass
Andante con moto “Revenge”
g 5 straightforward presentation of ballad melody (horn) accompanied by lower winds
Poco allegretto “The Song of
Värmland”
g 6 straightforward presentation of folksong melody, with melody moving around strings & winds
Andantino transition
E-flat
9
horn calls above low string tremolo pedal
Allegro agitato Transition Theme 1 Transition Theme 2: “For Days I
Have Been Singing” Transition Theme 1 Transition Theme 2 Closing
g
B-flat
g
G
10 13
16 21
25
29 31 34 38
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Tempo di pollacca “Polska from Jösse
District”
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41
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Molto allegro “The Song of
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g
43
fragmented
As copied into the score, the Allegro agitato section fills thirty-one of the overture’s
194 For the origins of folk tunes in The Värmlanders, see above, p. 279.
303
forty-five pages and contains the least amount of folk-derived material: perhaps none, as
I speculated earlier that the song that serves as the second theme, “For Days I Have Been
Singing,” was newly composed.195 The two main themes appear in a sonata-like
relationship, introduced in related key areas (i and III) and recapitulated on a single
tonic (i and I); however, there is no real development, but rather a short passage of
transitionary material that shares large amounts of material with the other transition
passages occurring in the Allegro agitato.
Randel’s overture to The Fisherman’s Cottage, written two years earlier, also
showcases a lengthy Allegro agitato section with two themes that stand in sonata-like
relation to each other (i-III, i-I). In this case, however, there is also a developmental
passage including, among other motives, fragmentation of theme 1 in the winds, causing
the Allegro agitato to fulfill the structural requirements for basic sonata form.
Table 4.6: Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Overture, structure
Tempo Tune name/function
Key P. Comments
Grave
c 1 slow introduction
Andante “The Bride of the
Mountain King”
c
4
straightforward presentation of ballad melody in winds/brass, then strings
195 See above, p. 284.
304
Tempo Tune name/function
Key P. Comments
Allegro agitato Theme 1: “The Bride of the
Mountain King” Transition Theme 2 Development Theme 1 Transition Theme 2 Closing (General pause) Theme 2
c
E-flat c
C c
7
12 17
23
30 33 36 41
45
dotted theme based on first measure of the folk-tune, spun out to four full measures; also used fragmentarily and in bass line jaunty major melody, also dotted includes fragmentation of Theme 1 in winds a section of Theme 2 is transposed to minor and is treated as a subject for fugal entries in four voices
Più anime
c 50 includes fragment of Theme 1 in bass and other material from earlier transitionary passages
The transition passages surrounding statements of the themes often share material with
each other, and at times fragments of the folktune are woven into the orchestral texture,
including in the bass line, techniques to which Randel would return in his overture for
The Värmlanders.
Where that latter overture incorporated several folktunes, The Fisherman’s Cottage
derives pre-extant source material from a single ballad melody—the same one that also
appears twice as a contrafactum. “The Bride of the Mountain King” is first presented in a
straightforward manner and subsequently manipulated as part of the sonata section,
where the first measure of the folksong is transformed into a dotted theme and spun out
to four measures as the backbone of Theme 1 (Example 4.10).
305
Example 4.10: Randel, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Overture, Theme 1 and its source melody
The dotted, expanded melody in Theme 1, initially introduced in the first violins, has the
character of a fugal subject although it is not treated as such. It does, however, presage a
fugue on Theme 2 that eventually appears as a codetta to the sonata section.
Given the recurrence of the melody to “The Bride of the Mountain King” in The
Fisherman’s Cottage, the question arises as to what relation the operetta—grounded in the
modern-day 1840s—bears to this ballad set in an unidentified past where the spirit
world was as real as life itself. In this case, the melody was apparently chosen for its
familiarity alone, and not because its text relates to the subject matter of the libretto.
Furthermore, the song itself is interchangeable, as evidenced by the manuscript copy of
the libretto at the archives of the Royal Opera. Originally, where the folksong now
stands, Clara was meant to sing a romans (“art song”) in four strophes, which implies
that Säfström had an original melody in mind. The text of the romans, which is crossed
out yet clearly legible in the libretto, is quite similar in content to the folksong
contrafactum that replaced it (“In the Green Forest of the North,” Example 4.8 above);
the same collection of words is used, but they are arranged into a different metrical
pattern.
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The deleted romans makes reference to typical folk ballad structure, concluding
each of its four strophes with the refrain “Oh that I were dead! It is heavy, it is heavy to
keep living.”196 This omkväde is similar, although not identical to, the refrain to the ballad
“Duke Fröjdenborg and Miss Adelin” (“Hertig Fröjdenborg och fröken Adelin”) in
Geijer-Afzelius: “Methinks it is heavy to keep living.”197 And indeed, the first four lines
of the romans can be made to fit the melody to “Duke Fröjdenborg” as printed by
Hæffner, with a few small rhythmic alterations to adjust to the syllables (see Example
4.11 below); but a serious problem occurs with the final line of the new text, as the music
runs out before this refrain can even begin.198
In the green forest of the north, the bird sought his friend, / his dearest friend. But however much he searched and lamented, / he never found her again.
[refrain: Oh that I were dead! It is heavy, it is heavy to keep living]
Example 4.11: Säfström, The Fisherman’s Cottage, Text from crossed-out romans (no. 5) applied to the ballad melody “Duke Fröjdenborg and Miss Adelin”
Perhaps Clara’s original text was inspired by the structure of “Duke
Fröjdenborg,” but the label romans indicates that Säfström intended to use a new tune
196 “O vore jag död! Det är tungt, det är tungt till att leva.” Säfström, “Fiskar-stugan,” scene 5. 197 Geijer-Afzelius, 1:95. 198 Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 16.
I nord an- skog- grön sök te- få geln- sin vän, Wän nen- kär e- sta- sin; Men
hu ru- han sök te- och kla ga- de- än, Han fann hen ne- dock ic ke- me ra- i gen.-
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307
rather than to adopt a folk melody wholesale. Then, at some point after the entire
libretto to The Fisherman’s Cottage was drafted, he crossed out the romans entirely and re-
wrote the text in the margins, now labeled an “Old Folksong” (“Gammal Folkvisa”) that
clearly fits the melody to “The Bride of the Mountain King,” a match subsequently
confirmed by the music in the score. The particular song upon which the entire musical
hinges—the song that Clara heard Leonard sing in Switzerland, and which he in turn
hears her singing in the cottage—was, in reality, a late addition to the game. In the
second major category of musical theater, works organized around both the music and
the plot of individual folksongs, such a last-minute substitution would be impossible.
Folksong as central organizing principle
In cases of extraordinary magnification, a single folksong forms the basis for evening-
length theatrical pieces, a precursor to the related genre of the fairy-tale film popularized
by Disney with animated shorts and feature films beginning in the 1920s and 1930s.
These theatrical pieces—usually lyrical in nature and falling under the classification of
“opera”—form a smaller group than the aforementioned works using folksongs as
auditory props, and they flourished primarily during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. From the perspective of the characters involved, songs and dances become
more than mere entertainment; they exemplify folk belief (folktro) in a supernatural
world populated by spirits with real power to affect the lives of the characters, for good
or ill.
Music is not a necessary condition of the supernatural world in Scandinavia.
308
Some works are steeped in the supernatural beliefs of folk culture, referencing characters
and creatures from folktales without associated music. An early example, Old Man
Hoberg (Hobergsgubben, 1836), a vådevill with a libretto by Lars August Weser (1809–86)
and songs arranged by court cellist Carl Torssell (1808–72), plays with folk superstition
to manipulate the actions of believers.199 A sailor comes to the aid of a young woman
whose father wants her to marry a rich magistrate (rådman) rather than the poor sergeant
whom she loves; the sailor, with the help of the boys on his ship, leverages folk belief in
a local mountain wizard to the girl’s advantage.200 By dressing up as the wizard, the
sailor terrifies the girl’s father and her wealthy suitor into dropping their plans, and the
girl is allowed to marry her sergeant. Moving even closer to the spirit world, The
Drinking Horn and Whistle from Ljungby (Ljungby horn och pipa, 1858), a romantic play by
Gudmund Leonhard Silfverstolpe (1815–53) with music by Pehr Conrad Boman,
embellishes a folktale based on the magical powers of the horn and whistle to defeat evil
spirits.201 No traditional song is associated with either piece of folklore.
Weser created a new ballad-style text neatly summarizing the folktale of Old Man
Hoberg, which Torrsell set to the ballad tune “The Wondrous Harp” (“Den underbara
harpan”), shown here in Example 4.12; a four-part chorus provides the omkväde, a
199 According to Dahlgren, Old Man Hoberg was performed six times at the Royal Opera in 1836 and seven more times at the theater in Humlegården in 1857; see Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 242. 200 For more on the folktale Old Man Hoberg and the mountain where he is said to live, see the entries “Hoberget” and “Hobergsgubben” in Nordisk familjebok, rev. ed (1909): 11:879, accessed February 1, 2018, http://runeberg.org/nfbk/0462.html. 201 The tale of the animal horn and ivory whistle, which first appeared in print in 1692, is summarized in the entry “Ljungby horn och pipa” in Nordisk familjebok, rev. ed (1912): 16:877–878, accessed February 1, 2018, http://runeberg.org/nfbp/0475.html.
309
dramaticization of the communal act of ballad-singing implied by Grønland nearly two
decades earlier.202
A farmer lived in destitution. It rarely occurs.
He invited the Hoberg Wizard to be godfather [to his new-born child]. Old Man Hoberg is rich.
Example 4.12: Weser/Torssell, Old Man Hoberg,
“A Farmer Lived in Destitution,” strophe 1
In effect, Weser and Torssell invented a “folksong” for the (imaginary) title character: a 202 Lars August Weser, Hobergsgubben [play text] (Stockholm: Westerling & Salmson, 1836), 12–13. For the musical setting, see Carl Torssell, “Hobergsgubben,” manuscript piano score, 1836, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, H6, S-Skma, p. 12. Grønland’s own arrangement of “The Wondrous Harp” with choral refrain is from Alte schwedische Volks-Melodien, 7.
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figure who does not exist according to modern sensibility, but is invoked in order to
scare a segment of the population who does believe in his existence.
In The Drinking Horn and Whistle from Ljungby, Silfverstolpe also creates a
strophic poem explaining the titular objects; while I have not been able to access the
score to see Boman’s melody, clues indicate that the song is meant to be a ballad as
well.203 The opening line, “And the knight departed from the castle tower” (“Och
riddaren gångar sig ur borgatorn”), is consistent with the aristocratic medieval imagery
of other ballads. Like many ballads, the song is long—so long, in fact, that the singer
breaks off after the first two strophes to give a verbal summary of the story before
skipping ahead to the final three strophes.204 The terrifying content of the song proves
true within the world of the operetta, and only when the hero is able to use knowledge
from the song to modify his own behavior in a dangerous situation do humans gain the
upper hand over the subterranean spirits (underjordiskar). Although neither folk source is
musical per se, both Old Man Hoberg and The Drinking Horn and Whistle from Ljungby
center around new folk-style songs that carry core meaning for the stories.
The unfulfilled promise of The Mermaid (1806)
A very early attempt at an opera on Swedish folk themes came already in 1806, before
the loss of Finland, the founding of the Gothic League, and Geijer and Afzelius’s
203 G[udmund] L[eonhard] Silwerstolpe, Ljungby horn och pipa: Romantisk skådespel med sång i 3 Akter [play text] (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söner, 1858). 204 Alfhild excuses herself: “But the whole song is too long to sing, so I just want to say that when the knight came to the stone . . .” (“Men hela visan blir för lång att sjunga, jag vill då säga blott att när riddarn till stenen kom . . .”)
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groundbreaking folksong publications. It is clear that the author, Clas Livijn (1781–1844),
intended folksong to take on a central role in his libretto for The Mermaid (Hafs-frun). In
the preface, he quotes a few half-remembered lines from a folksong about Duke
Magnus, the unfortunate son of Gustaf Vasa who is said to have nearly drowned in his
moat when he attempted to jump from a castle window into the arms of a mermaid.205
While little is known of the circumstances under which Livijn conceived of this opera,
evidence suggests that he did in fact use firsthand knowledge of a folksong from his
childhood; furthermore, as Livijn grew up in Skänninge, just ten miles from Magnus’s
castle in Vadstena, the story would have resonated with him on a personal level.206
Ultimately, however, The Mermaid never advanced beyond the libretto stage, and the
extent to which the song may have figured musically remains an open question.207
The Water Sprite (Necken, 1844) reconsidered
In May 1844, the opera The Water Sprite or The Elf-Play (Necken eller Elfspelet) by the
Dutch-born virtuoso pianist Jan van Boom made its long-awaited premiere at the Royal
Opera.208 The piece was advertised as a “Swedish original” and carried high hopes for a
205 In Livijn’s libretto, Magnus does die as he throws himself towards the water, though not by drowning: an angel catches him in mid-leap and gently lays his body down on the ground. Clas Livijn, “Hafs-frun,” in Samlade skrifter, edited by Adolf Iwar Arwidsson (Örebro: N. M. Lindhs Boktryckeri, 1850), 1:131. 206 Johan Mortensen cites a passage from a letter in which the folksong collector Leonhard Fredrik Rääf sent Livijn a complete copy of the song text that Livijn had “long been searching for”; see Johan Mortensen, Clas Livijns dramatiska författarskap (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1911), 141–43. 207 Clas Livijn recognized early on that his text was unwieldy as a libretto, and he advised in his preface to the published version that, should a theatrical performance ever be considered (which he doubted would ever come to pass), significant cuts would be necessary. See his preface to the first edition: Hafs-frun: Romantisk opera (Stockholm: Carl Deleen, 1816), [5]. 208 The work is labeled a “romantic opera in three acts,” although it more closely resembles a sångspel because of its extensive spoken dialogue. A lengthy review of the premiere opens by acknowledging that
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national Swedish opera along the lines of Weber’s Der Freischütz, full of folklore, folk
music and dance, peasants expressing a deep love for their land, and, above all, the
victory of Christianity over older belief systems.209 Yet the opera failed to catch on, and
the run ended after just four performances in the space of nine days.210 A review of the
premiere cast blame on the excessive length of the libretto and inexperience of the
composer in theatrical genres while also noting that there was much to be commended
in this first major attempt at a national opera, even if it failed to live up to expectations.
In particular, it opined that folk music could and should have been used more widely
and better integrated into the musical texture:
As for the composition as a whole, we are compelled to note that it is missing that basic color that should have tinted the whole; it does not exude “Nordicness”; “Neckens polska” both could and (in our opinion) should have formed the basic musical idea, but it just sits there, isolated and without connection to the other material. Because of this lack of unity, the basic character fails to make a total impression; the effects have only a fleeting impact.211
Subsequent scholars have generally echoed the comments of this anonymous
this opera (or, more likely, the concept of a national opera in general) had long been the topic of discussion, and audiences had eagerly been awaiting its premiere; “Necken eller Elfspelet, Romantisk Opera i tre akter, Svenskt original, Musiken af J van Boom.” Stockholms Musik-tidning 21 (May 24, 1844): 1. 209 Tobias Norlind, “Jan van Boom,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 25 (1843): 174. Norlind provides the most thorough account of The Water Sprite in scholarship, devoting one-third of this general article about van Boom to the composer’s only opera. 210 Dahlgren, Förteckning öfver svenska skådespel, 298. 211 “Hvad kompositionen i sin helhet beträffar, så nödgas vi anmärka, att den saknar denna grundfärg, som borde genomgått det hela, den andas intet nordiskt; Neckens polska, som både kunde och i vårt tycke borde utgjort grundideen, står der isolerad utan samband med det öfriga. Genom denna brist på enhet, på grundkarakter åstadkommes intet totalintryck; effekterna äro endast af en förflygande verkan.” See “Necken eller Elfspelet,” Stockholms Musik-tidning (May 24, 1844), 2.
313
reviewer.212 Tobias Norlind praised the “exceptionally fine” (“sällsynt fin”) orchestration
of one instance of “Necken’s Polska” and wished that it would become a model for the
effective orchestration of folksong, but he also asserted that the opera was not “national”
because no other old folk melodies were used, not even for the dancing scenes.213 Martin
Tegen also keeps close to the surface, commenting that despite the “national topic,” the
music remains “international in style, even in the splendid presentation of ‘Necken’s
Polska’.”214 Despite the opera’s high profile in literature as an important precursor to
national opera in Sweden, its sparing use of folk music melodies has hitherto been
glossed over. Upon closer analysis, van Boom’s score reveals that the quotations, while
few, are more than just token appearances; they deftly underscore the legend of the song
as it figures in the storyline.
The printed libretto opens with a preface explaining the legend of the water
sprite (Necken) and detailing the magical means by which a fiddler may learn to play the
devil’s dance, with dire consequences: once the polska is in full swing, dancers and
musicians alike are compelled to continue until all have danced themselves to the
bottom of the nearest river or lake.215 The tune in question makes three appearances in
212 While Pehr Conrad Boman (acting under the signature “Bmn”) was the primary reviewer for performances at the Royal Opera, this review is unsigned; on the main contributors to the journal, which ran from October 1843 to June 1844 primarily under the leadership of Wilhelm Bauck, see the Introduction to Kirsti Grinde and Veslemöy Heintz, Stockholms music-tidning: 1843–1844; Ny tidning for musik: 1853–1857 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1997), xi–xii. 213 Norlind, “Jan van Boom,” 179, 181. 214 Tegen, “Teatermusiken [1810–70],” 298. Martin Edin makes similar remarks in “Jan van Boom,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2013, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/boom-jan-van/. 215 In some regions, the Necken was also believed to be responsible for causing illness in people who bathed in lakes or rivers without first performing a protective ritual; see Brorson, Sing the Cows Home, 106–7.
314
the opera: once onstage, as the evil fiddler Rolf nearly plays and dances the assembled
crowd to death (Act III, scene 5, the passage so admired by Norlind above), and twice
more in fragmented form (Overture and in Rolf’s aria, Act I, scene 4).
The overture begins promisingly by dissecting, transforming and alluding to
fragments of the familiar melody, which is given for reference in Example 4.13.216
Example 4.13: “Necken’s Polska” melody
Example 4.14: Van Boom, The Water Sprite (Necken), Overture, reduction, mm. 1–16
216 This version of the melody is the complete statement used by van Boom in Act III, scene 5, transposed to treble clef. See Necken eller Elfspelet: Romantisk opera i tre akter, manuscript orchestral score, 1844, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, N3 (KT FILM Nr 126:1, 127:1), S-Skma, p. 1:1–3.
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References to the first two measures of the tune abound at pitch, in transposition, and in
inversion, while the repeated eighth notes in mm. 5–8 of the source are present in much
of the second system of this reduction of the orchestral overture. The last three measures
of this passage simultaneously treat the gist of the tune’s first measure (in the ascending
bass line) and the general descent of its final two measures (reflected in the descending
upper voices). The water sprite can be heard lurking everywhere in this passage, ready
to emerge for action when the time is right; yet by page four he disappears, not to
surface again until page 131.
Rather than adding to existing criticism of van Boom for failing to make more
thorough use of folk melodies, I propose that the libretto provides a clear justification for
the type of writing in this opening passage. When the fiddler Rolf tries to explain the
legend of the devil’s dance to several members of his community, he is rebuffed by
others who do not believe the story. Ominously, he warns, “A magic power lives within
the strings, and woe is he who hears more than just the first notes of ‘Necken’s
Polska’.”217 True to form, only the first three notes are immediately audible in unaltered
form in van Boom’s overture (m. 3); all the rest is distorted allusion.218 The overture
musically illustrate’s Rolf’s threat by showing the incredible power of these three notes
to generate material; they twist and turn, right-side-up and upside-down, contorting
reality through transpositions and augmentations. The overture seems to imply that if 217 “En trollkraft bor i strängarna, och ve den som får höra mer än de första tonerna af Neckens Polska.” Jan van Boom and Josef Henrik Meijersson, Necken, eller, Elfspelet romantisk opera i tre akter [libretto] (Stockholm: Elmen & Granbergs tryckeri, 1844), 19. 218 In all, the first seven pitches of the tune are given in mm. 3–4, but half of these pitches are hidden in the bass line, not immediately accessible to audiences whose ears are accustomed to seeking out melody lines.
316
these first notes can do so much, the power that the full melody wields must be
impressive indeed.
Rolf’s belief in the power of the tune comes through in a passage from his aria,
“Like Lightning Blazes the Glaive of Revenge” (“Ljungeldslik lågar hämndens glaf,” Act
I, scene 4), in which a central portion of the melody is derived from material in
“Necken’s Polska.” In the first four measures of this passage (Example 4.15 below), Rolf
announces his intention to bewitch the guests at the wedding of Thyra, the unrequited
object of his love.219 The rhythm of his melody is nearly identical to the first four
measures of “Necken’s Polska,” and the contours are quite similar, with the exception of
m. 3: the original dance has been adjusted to form two short, lyrical major-mode
phrases.
219 Jan van Boom, Necken eller Elfspelet, 1:131–33.
317
With the troll’s dance, I’ll bewitch women, children and men. And I’ll sink them in the depth of the wave, deep down in the dark grave.
Only Thyra will be saved, and she will be mine!
Example 4.15: Meijersson/Van Boom, The Water Sprite, “Like Lightning Blazes the Glaive of Revenge,” Act I, Scene 4, excerpt
In the next four measures, Rolf repeats his message, but now in a minor mode, a musical
foreboding of his evil plan. As with the overture, rhythmic fragments continue to
reference the tune in the ensuing phrases; a turn to F major with a perfect authentic
cadence (the first such cadence in this passage) on Rolf’s words, “she will be mine!”
betrays the depth of his conviction in his own success. Van Boom adapts elements of
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“Necken’s Polska” to reflect Rolf’s intentions long before the fiddler ultimately deploys
the song in its entirety in Act III. Together with the beginning of the overture, this aria
demonstrates that the use of folksong in The Water Sprite, while limited, has a more
calculated effect than has previously been acknowledged.
Two steps forward, one to the side: Engelbrekt (1846), Urdur (1851), and Duke Magnus and the Mermaid (1867)
Despite the rhetoric surrounding The Water Sprite (1844) and failed expectations for a
national opera, several decades passed before the next serious contender emerged. The
genres of sångspel and spoken plays with music remained the predominant modes of
Swedish musical theater, with works such as The Värmlanders (1846), The Drinking Horn
and Whistle from Ljungby (1858), and Korp-Kirsti (1863).
From time to time, brief examples of deeper interaction with folksongs occurred.
In the five-act historical drama Engelbrekt and his Dalecarlian Men (Engelbrekt och hans
dalkarlar, 1846), playwright August Blanche has the character Ingeborg claim to have
invented a song-game:
This Christmas isn’t nearly as happy as the other years; but my father was home then. He always used to come up with such fun games, and he knew so many pretty songs. You know, I’ve also invented a new game called “Simon from Sälle Goes Courting.” Everybody thinks it’s so fun, and it’s going to be popular for a long time, you’ll see.220
220 “Den här julen är på långt när inte så glad som de förra åren; men då var min far hemma. Han hittade alltid på så roliga lekar och kunde så många vackra visor. Vet du, jag har också uppfunnit en ny lek, som heter: Fria vill Simon i Sälle. Alla tycka den är så rolig och den kommer nog att bibehålla sig, ska du få se.” August Blanche, Engelbrekt och hans dalkarlar: Historiskt skådespel i fem akter, Theaterstycken af August Blanche 5 (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1846), 8. For the relevant passage in the score, see Jakob Niklas Ahlström, “Englebrekt och hans dalkarlar,” manuscript orchestral score, 1846, Ahlströmska samlingen, Sh 8:38 Musikalier, S-Sk.
319
The actual author of this now-famous song game is lost to time; hypotheses regarding its
subject matter include roots in historical events such as the courtship of King Olof
Skötkonung (ca. 1000 A.D.) or, further back, the imprisonment of Simeon as related in
Genesis 42.221 Blanche makes light of attempts to locate the origins by ascribing
authorship to a prescient teenager in the district of Dalarna in the 1430s.
Engelbrekt and his Dalecarlian Men numbers among the over one hundred plays
for which Jacob Niclas Ahlström (1805–57) composed or arranged music.222 Born in
Visby, where he studied several instruments as a child, Ahlström became an avid choral
singer while studying in Uppsala (1824–28). After a period of traveling and working in
different parts of the country, part of the time attached to a traveling theater troupe, he
settled in Stockholm to take up the post of director of the orchestra at the Smaller
Theater, which he held from its founding in 1842 until 1854. Ahlström was a well-known
figure in the public eye during his lifetime, but his music, most of which was created for
theatrical performance, is little known in the present day. In addition to the incidental
music discussed in this chapter, other examples of his engagement with folk music
include large volumes of arrangements for solo piano and for voice and piano, a few
pieces of instrumental solo and chamber music, and several pioneering arrangements for
221 This song game appears in many sources; Adolf Iwar Arwidsson gives several variants and discusses possible historical origins in Svenska fornsånger, 3:175–184. Hugo Alfvén later arranged “Simon i Sälle” for SATB chorus (1941). 222 For basic details of Ahlström’s life, see Karin Hallgren’s biographical text, “Jacob Niclas Ahlström,” trans. Jill Ann Johnson, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/ahlstrom-jacob-niclas/. However, this biography makes no mention of Ahlström’s collaboration with Richard Dybeck and his folk-music concerts, for which Ahlström arranged numerous pieces, including for full orchestra; see Chapter Seven, p. 445.
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Richard Dybeck’s folk-music concerts, including for full orchestra.
Five years after Engelbrekt, Ahlström also used a traditional melody in his
incidental music for Urdur, or the Water Sprite’s Daughter (Urdur, eller Neckens dotter,
1851), a play freely translated and adapted by Jeannette Granberg (1825–57) from an
earlier Danish play.223 By placing the main character into a familial relationship with the
Necken, Granberg opens the door for the “Necken’s Polska” to appear. Somewhat
surprisingly, however, there is no text in the play that matches the meter of the song,
and hence no natural opportunity for the tune to appear as a contrafactum.224 Instead,
Ahlström not only works the tune into an expected location, the Overture, but he also
brings it back in a very unusual position in the Finale: as the bass line in a melodrama. In
Overskou’s original play, the closing speech is given entirely by Urdur’s counterpart,
Capriciosa; Granberg’s adaptation splits the text between daughter and father, and
Ahlström’s musical setting differentiates between these two characters. After Urdur
delivers her final lines in conjunction with the tremolo chords in the first system of
223 The original model is Capriciosa by Thomas Overskou (1836). Granberg was one of Sweden’s first major female playwrights; she and her sister, Louise Granberg, collectively authored twenty-six plays, several of which achieved successful theatrical runs; see Lena Kjersén Edman, “Sveriges första kvinnliga dramatiker - Jeanette Granberg Stjernström 1825–1857” (Dramawebben: Fri svensk dramatik, n.d.), [ii], accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.dramawebben.se/sites/default/files/Sveriges%20forsta%20kvinnliga%20dramatiker.pdf. The title character’s name was changed late in the process; on the title page of and within the manuscript libretto, “Capriciosa” is consistently crossed out and replaced with “Urdur.” See Jeannette Granberg, “Urdur, eller Neckens dotter,” manuscript play text, 1851, KTA Pjäs U.013, Kungliga Teaterns Arkiv, Stockholm (Gäddviken). Karin Hallgren calls Urdur one of the most successful plays for which Ahlström wrote a substantial amount of music; see Hallgren, “Jacob Niclas Ahlström.” 224 When August Söderman created his own incidental music for the play the following year, he did not include this polska at all. Ahlström’s music was performed at the play’s premiere at the Smaller Theater in 1851; Söderman’s music was used for performances in Helsingfors, Finland in 1852 and in Gothenburg in 1854. See Adolf Lindblad, “August Södermans manuskript samling,” Svensk musiktidning 9, no. 8 (April 15, 1889): 60.
321
Example 4.16, her father begins to speak at the moment the low strings and bassoon take
up the “Necken’s Polska.”225
Example 4.16: Granberg/Ahlström, Urdur, Finale – Melodrama
The closing speech is bittersweet: Urdur publicly acknowledges that she has been unable
to lure the affections of the sailor Petter, and the Necken then blesses Petter’s future
journey sans Urdur. Mortal love triumphs over supernatural desire, and “Necken’s
Polska,” rather than leading the texture, is out of joint, unable to fit its slow triple meter
within the duple confines of 6/8 time. Each bar of the tune as properly notated spills
across 1.5 bars in the bass line of the melodrama. Step by step, composers such as
Ahlström gradually approach the idea of moving beyond the surface level of
entertainment and engaging folk melodies more creatively onstage. However, the idea
that stories rooted in folktale must contain quotations of known folk melodies was not
universal.
225 Jacob Niclas Ahlström, “Urdur eller Neckens dotter: Feeri-skådespel,” manuscript orchestral score, 1851, Ahlströmska samlingen, Sh 8:29 Musikalier, S-Sk.
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Almost seventy years after Livijn’s attempted libretto for The Mermaid, the story
finally reached the stage in the operetta Duke Magnus and the Mermaid (Hertig Magnus och
sjöjungfrun, 1874), the first of several collaborations between Frans Hedberg and Ivar
Hallström (1826–1901).226 Anders Wiklund calls Duke Magnus “the first really national
opera” due to its historical Swedish topic and Hallström’s folk-like melodies.227
Contemporary reviews note the work’s “melodic richness and clarity”; “beautiful,
flowing melodies”; and “a nationally nordic tone [“en nationelt nordisk grundton”], that
certainly could have been more nuanced, but which gives a certain unity to the
whole.”228 One review even mentions “pleasant melodies, most of which [are] grounded
in folksong” (“på folkvisans grund”), acknowledging the folkton writing for which
Hallström would come to be known.229
Yet nowhere in contemporary reviews have I found reference to the fact that
Hallström composed the operetta from scratch without recourse to pre-extant song
material. Links between Duke Magnus and folksong run deep; Geijer and Afzelius
printed not only a variant of the song to which Clas Livijn referred in his preface to the
earlier libretto The Mermaid, but also a second ballad by the name “Sir Magnus and the
226 Ivar Hallström and Frans Hedberg, “Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun,” manuscript score for chamber orchestra, 1867, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, H17 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 208:2), S-Skma. 227 Anders Wiklund, “Ivar Hallströms nationella operor,” in Hemländsk hundraårig sång (see Chapter One, n. 3), 126. 228 Aftonbladet (January 29, 1867): 2; Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (January 30, 1867): 3; and Nya Dagligt Allehanda (January 31, 1867): 3. 229 On folkton writing in Duke Magnus and the Mermaid, see Wiklund, “Ivar Hallströms nationella operor,” 128. Hallström’s folkton was deceptively accurate; Martin Tegen has pointed out that the anthology The Medieval Ballad (Den medeltida balladen) recorded by Radio Sweden in the 1960s includes a song from Duke Magnus that had evidently entered oral tradition. See “Ivar Hallström — vår meste operakompositör,” in Operan 200 år (see n. 85 above), 70.
323
Sea-Elf.”230 Even with a national topic, direct folksong quotation and adapation was not
viewed by an up-and-coming theater composer or his critics as a necessary
compositional element.
Despite initial enthusiasm, Duke Magnus and the Mermaid was performed just six
times 1867, with the illness of a lead singer cited as the primary reason for the shortness
of the run.231 However, several reviews mention a general dramatic weakness in the
libretto, which could have contributed to a lack of interest in re-staging the piece in
subsequent seasons.232 Conversely, I cannot help but wonder whether closer links with
Swedish folksong—definite aural connections with the ballads that were so important to
nineteenth-century conceptions of “Swedishness”—would have made Duke Magnus a
stronger candidate for more performances during the lifetimes of its creators, as was the
case with their later opera, The Bride of the Mountain King.233
230 Geijer and Afzelius print two ballads related to this topic. For a version of “Duke Magnus and the Mermaid” (“Hertig Magnus och hafsfrun”), the song half-remembered by Clas Livijn, see Geijer-Afzelius, 3:178–180. “Sir Magnus and the Sea-Elf” (“Herr Magnus och havstrollet”), while common more broadly across Scandinavia, was by tradition connected with the legend of Duke Magnus in nineteenth-century Swedish thought; ibid., 3:168–174. 231 Wiklund, “Ivar Hallströms nationella operor,” 130. 232 See, for example, Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (January 29, 1867): 2. Duke Magnus and the Mermaid was eventually revived in 1988 with performances on-site at Vadstena Castle, and Swedish Television recorded and broadcast the opera in 1991. See Wiklund, “Ivar Hallströms nationella operor,” 130. Niclas Willén and the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra have issued a commercial recording (CD, Marco Polo/Naxos, 2000/2003). The project Swedish Musical Heritage lists an edition of the score under production in 2014, presumably Anders Wiklund’s critical edition, although it has not yet come out: “Ivar Hallström: Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun,” Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hallstrom-ivar/SMH-W3506-Hertig_Magnus_och_sjojungfrun. 233 The opera has found more favor in modern times, and a commercial recording is available: Ivar Hallström, Niklas Willén, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra et al., Duke Magnus and the mermaid = Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun, audio CD (Marco Polo 8.225214–15, 2003).
324
Lady Elisif (1870) as intermediate stage
On the page after “Duke Magnus and the Mermaid” in Geijer-Afzelius, there begins a
ballad of fifty strophes on “Elisif, Nun in Risberga Cloister.”234 Parts of this story form
the basis for Frans Hedberg’s play Lady Elisif (Stolts Elisif), for which Ivar Hallström
provided incidental music in what, in retrospect, was a test run for his use of folksong in
their next opera a few years later. It appears as if Hallström most likely did not have
access to a melody for Elisif’s own folksong.235 Instead, the familiar melody to “The
Dove’s Song on the Lily-Branch” (“Dufvans sång på liljeqvist”) figures prominently in
the first, seventh, and last of Hallström’s nine musical contributions.236
“The Dove’s Song” first enters on the third page of the overture, as the strings
play one strophe, followed by a slightly expanded second strophe with full orchestra.237
In wordless form, this widely-published folksong signals to audiences that the play will
involve a religious topic (strophe one: “She sings so prettily about Jesus Christ”), which
dovetails with Elisif’s status as a nun, and it also foreshadows the death of an important
female lead character.
Later on in the play, a contrafactum is sung as an unaccompanied solo by the
character Einar, who seeks to rescue Elisif from the prison-like bars of the cloister.
234 See “Elisif nunna i Risberga kloster,” in Geijer-Afzelius, 3:181–92. 235 Hæffner’s musical appendix to Geijer and Afzelius’s collection notes that the melody for this song is not available, and a later prominent collection likewise fails to include a melody for this particular ballad; see Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and George Stephens, Sveriges historiska och politiska visor (Örebro: Lindh, 1853), 1:96–106. 236 For the melody to “Dufvans sång på liljeqvist,” see Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 45–46. 237 Ivar Hallström and Frans Hedberg, “Stolts Elisif: Skådespel i 5 handlingar,” manuscript orchestral score, 1870, KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, S49 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 294:3), S-Skma.
325
Hedberg’s text maintains the traditional refrains and is sufficiently folk-like to mislead
listeners, whose knowledge of strophic songs tends to diminish after the first strophe,
into thinking they are hearing the actual song:238
The dove was locked in a cage, In midsummer-time! But her mate pecked through the bars; In heaven, there is much rejoicing. Thus they flew to the northern forest, For even the strongest cage can be opened. Therefore, be of good courage, my dove, Your friend is coming to assist you.
Och dufvan hon stängdes i fängselbur, I midsommarstider! Men maken han hackade gallret ur; I himmelen är en stor glädje! Så flögo de båda till nordanskog, Ty, är buren än stark, den öppnas nog. Var modig, derför du dufva min, Snart är vännen dig när med hjelpen sin.
Although Einar sings all three strophes, his song functions as the third strophe:
imprisoned Elisif recognizes his voice, which gives her the hope that her long-lost friend
from childhood will rescue her.
The final appearance of “The Dove’s Song,” a single strophe for strings nearly
identical to the first occurrence in the overture but transposed down a fifth, reveals the
half-truth told by the overture: in the ballad about the dove, a beloved maiden
eventually dies, while in Stolts Elisif, her death is symbolic. It is Einar who suffers a
mortal injury while rescuing Elisif, and in grief she voluntarily gives up her freedom in
order to return to the cloister and await her eventual death. Despite the limited amount
of incidental music in this play, it forms both a chronological and technical stepping-
stone between Duke Magnus and the Mermaid and The Bride of the Mountain King.239
238 Frans Hedberg, Stolts Elisif: Skådespel i fem handlingar (Stockholm: A. Bonnier, 1870), 100. 239 Lady Elisif also includes another folksong quotation, the melody associated with Richard Dybeck’s “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (“Du gamla, du friska”), near the celebratory ending of no. 8: “Battle and Victory” (“Strid och seger”); Hallström and Hedberg, “Stoltz Elisif,” 62–64.
326
Creative impulse in The Bride of the Mountain King (Den bergtagna, 1874)
Since the beginnings of vernacular opera in Sweden, one work has emerged as the clear
favorite each century. Naumann’s Gustaf Wasa (1786) leads in terms of the total number
of performances, followed by Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s “space opera” Aniara (1959).240 In
third place overall is Ivar Hallström’s five-act opera The Bride of the Mountain King, the
first full-length Swedish opera in the Romantic tradition with entirely sung dialogue.241
Unlike Duke Magnus, this opera does make use of its eponymous folksong melody, a fact
usually noted in the literature but not analyzed in closer detail.242 Hallström’s use of the
melody goes far beyond the simple auditory prop; aspects of creative treatment in the
five occurrences of the theme resonate with librettist Hedberg’s expansion of the
folksong legend.
The ballad “The Bride of the Mountain King,” which Geijer and Afzelius chose to
print as the first entry in the first volume of their collection, tells the story of a maiden
who is walking to the Christmas morning service when she is lured instead to the lair of
the Mountain King. Eight years pass. He eventually grants her wish to return home and
see her mother, on the condition that she not mention the eight children she has borne
240 As of 1973, Gustaf Wasa had amassed 177 complete and twenty-three partial performances at the Royal Opera; Aniara had 90 (19), and The Bride of the Mountain King had 84 (9); for statistics, see Hofsten and Strömbeck, Kungliga teatern, 117, 116 and 104. 241 The Swedish title of the ballad and the opera, Den bergtagna, translates more directly as “The one who was taken by the mountain” or “The one who was kidnapped by the mountain.” On the translation of this ballad title, see Appendix A: Glossary of Swedish terms, p. 517. 242 Anders Wiklund mentions the use of folksong briefly while making the larger point that the opera’s music is mostly in the more international style of French opera; see “Ivar Hallströms nationella operor,” 130. Martin Tegen makes a similar argument, connecting the opera with more general continental style in “Ivar Hallström — vår meste operakompositör,” 72. Inga Lewenhaupt helpfully notes each appearance of the folktune in her synopsis to the opera in “Teatermusiken 1870–1920,” 402.
327
him in captivity. When she does tell her mother about the children, the king
immediately appears and drags her back underground, where she soon dies.243
Hedberg’s libretto follows the gist of this story, but with the addition of extra
characters, details, and an outer framework preceding and following the kidnapping of
the maiden.244 These changes occur partly out of necessity—even a ballad with dozens of
strophes can only stretch so far for an evening-length theatrical work—and partly out of
creative impulse, as the well-known kernel of a legend offers the opportunity for
spinning out a new story. This impulse for innovation sets off a creative chain, in which
the author adds to the folksong story, and then the composer treats the melody in new
ways to reflect the story’s expanded reality. Each appearance of the melody (see
Example 2.1 above), charted here in Table 4.7, connects with one of Hedberg’s
innovations.245
Table 4.7: Appearances of the melody “The Bride of the Mountain King” in Hallström and Hedberg’s opera
Overture: Maestoso (p. 3) Initial fragments, trailing off into descending scale
C minor (A-flat major)
Overture: Andante (p. 4)
Full statement followed by fragments
C minor
Act II, Scene 5 (p. 156) First half of melody, spun out into arpeggios
B minor
243 “The Bride of the Mountain King” exists in many variants; this summary applies to the version originally printed by Geijer-Afzelius, 1:1–4. 244 Göran Gademan has pointed out that the folksong exists in many versions—the modern scholarly anthology Sveriges medeltida ballader includes the texts of thirty-six variants and references an additional twenty-eight, with the majority of the printed variants predating the opera’s 1874 premiere—and that Hedberg does not follow any one variant exactly. Gademan concludes that Geijer-Afzelius’s version is closest to Hedberg’s text; see his undergraduate thesis “Den bergtagna: 1874–1987” (Stockholm University, 1987), 5–6. 245 Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 1.
328
Act III, Scene 4 (p. 201) Fragments, inversions, modulations D major (tonally unstable)
Act V, Scene 1 (p. 308) Solo song, 2.5 strophes, interspersed with commentary
E minor
Appearances of the tune in adjacent sections early in the Overture foreshadow
moments in Act I, part of the frame invented by Hedberg to give context to the legend.
The idea of the Mountain King is introduced by borrowing the contour of the first two
measures of the tune, asserted twice by the brass (Example 4.17).246
Example 4.17: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King (Den bergtagna), Overture, piano score, mm. 1–16
Each time, the head of the melody trails off into a descending scale, until the upper
strings take over with a searching melody (mm. 11–14) and the texture dissolves into an
ominous collection of minor and diminished harmonies and chromatic runs through the
remainder of the Maestoso. The Mountain King’s power is implied, but its extent is
246 Ivar Hallström and Frans Hedberg, Den bergtagna = Bergkönigs Braut; Klaverutdrag med svensk och tysk text, trans. Eugène Peschier (Stockholm: Abraham Lundquist, n.d.), 3. Hereafter, Hallström and Hedberg, Den bergtagna (piano score). See also Hallström, Alan Hacker, Umea Symphony Orchestra et al., Den Bergtagna, audio CD (Sterling Records, 1998).
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unknown, as the firm announcement of his presence leads to chaos and confusion.
Likewise, when the troll is first introduced in the text at the end of Act I, Scene 1, his
fearsome reputation outstrips actual knowledge of his being. In the words of the Abbot,
who brings up the topic of supernatural beings during the Christmas Eve celebration
that makes up the first Act:
Here in the deep halls of the mountain, there lives a troll, about whom rumors swirl with words of darkest terror.
Här bor i bergets djupa salar Ett troll, om hvilket ryktet talar Så många dunkla fasans ord. 247
Like the first few notes of the theme, the Mountain King’s name alone is enough to
inspire dread, supported by the spun-out stories and rumors of those who fear him.
The Christmas Eve celebration is hosted by the mother of the folksong’s
unnamed maiden. Hedberg’s greatest contribution lies in the depth he gives this
anonymous girl: in the opera, she becomes Ingeborg, a flesh-and-blood young woman
with a history, a complex psychological situation, and opinions of her own. When the
Abbot raises the specter of the much-feared Mountain King, Ingeborg responds with
defiant anticipation:
I would so gladly see the mountain king! Tell me, is he fair? Is he young? Does he have treasures in a gilded cabinet? I would that he would give me his golden crown!
Rätt gerna jag såge den bergakung! Säg, är han fager? säg är han ung? Äger han skatt, i förgyllande skrin? Gerna han skänke mig gullkronan sin!248
After the Mountain King himself shows up a few pages later and attempts to seduce
Ingeborg, her flimsy excuses hint that she will eventually succumb to his advances, and
247 Frans Hedberg and Ivar Hallström, Den bergtagna [libretto] (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1874), 7. Hereafter, Hallström and Hedberg, Den bergtagna (libretto). 248 Ibid.
330
not entirely unwillingly. This in-person visit by the troll corresponds to the second
occurrence of the folksong in the Overture, in the Andante section immediately following
the Maestoso discussed above.249 Here, a complete statement of the theme is followed by
further spinning-out of motivic fragments, foreshadowing the Mountain King’s last
words to Ingeborg in Act I:
At the time of matins, I’ll await you at my door on Christmas morning!
Till ottesången väntar jag Dig vid min port på juledag!250
By now, it is all too clear that Ingeborg will enact the first strophe of the folksong:
instead of going to matins, she will turn her steps toward the mountain.
Ingeborg’s abduction takes place during an orchestral postlude to Act II, Scene 5,
in which the first half of the folktune appears in altered form (Example 4.18).251
The maiden was supposed to go to matins. / Time moves slowly for me.
Example 4.18: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King, Act II, Scene 5, altered version of the first half of the ballad melody in the orchestral postlude
In the refrain (“Time moves slowly for me”), which is transposed down an octave and a
third from its expected pitch class, time is literally out of joint; doubled note values slow
the song’s progression. As Ingeborg will later learn, time moves slowly for her in the
Mountain King’s lair as well, with fifty years (not just eight, as in the folksong) elapsing
249 Hallström and Hedberg, Den bergtagna (piano score), 4. 250 Hedberg and Hallström, Den bergtagna (libretto), 21. 251 For the full passage in this example, see Hallström and Hedberg, Den bergtagna (piano score), 156.
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The fragments and statements of “The Bride of the Mountain King” occur in a
variety of keys (see Table 4.7 above), with tonal instability culminating in the fourth
statement of the tune, in the orchestra in Act III, Scene 4 (Example 4.19).
Example 4.19: Hallström, The Bride of the Mountain King, Act III, Scene 4, piano score, excerpt
The innate harmony of the folktune strongly suggests that its first phrase should begin
in a minor key, and keyboard harmonizations generally use a progression that cadences
on the dominant in m. 4. In the above example, however, the ostensible tonic D major(!)
harmony in mm. 1–2 shows itself to be the dominant of an arrival in G minor in mm. 3–
4, which contradicts the key signature in two sharps and is further destabilized by a
pedal rendering the G minor chords in second inversion. In effect, the harmony of the
opening phrase is reversed, such that it begins in D major, proceeds through some
melodic alterations, and lands on G minor. Life has turned inside out.
The next melodic entrance (m. 5) is deformed to include a tritone leap, and a
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G major chord that jars against the preceding G minor passage (m. 7). The progression
then sidesteps to a deceptive cadence (mm. 8–9). The varied keys in which the tune is
referenced in general, and this unstable passage in particular, show the shifting ground
of multiple realities experienced by Ingeborg, who falls under the spell of an Isolde-like
potion prepared by the Mountain King’s mother that makes her fall in love with her
abductor. The three phases of Ingeborg’s life (pre-, mid-, and post-potion) are as difficult
to reconcile as the constellation of keys (C minor, A-flat major, B minor, D major, E
minor) in which the folktune appears.
The crux of folksong quotation arrives early in Act V. In the real world, fifty
years have passed, and the elderly servant Ulf is the sole surviving member. To himself,
he sings two and a half strophes of the ballad “The Bride of the Mountain King,”
interspersed with commentary about the passage of time and recollections of the day
young Ingeborg disappeared.252 Fortunately for audiences already concerned about the
length of the opera, Ulf does not perform the entire ballad; he stops midway through the
third strophe, overcome by sleep.253 Timing aside, however, he could not have continued
to the fourth strophe as related in Geijer-Afzelius because here the opera diverges from
the folksong in terms of the number children borne and length of imprisonment.
Ulf is not inventing the folksong on the spot; each strophe is marked with
quotation marks implying pre-extant material. However, unlike the next opera to be
252 See Act V, Scene 1 in ibid., 308–11. 253 With the original ballet divertissement in the third act, the opera was originally projected to last four hours, a common cause of complaint; see Gademan, “Den bergtagna,” 16. In effect, the ballad’s refrain (“Time passes slowly for me”; “Tiden görs mig lång”) became all too true for some listeners.
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examined, Hallström’s Little Karin, where multiple characters are already aware of the
relevant folksong, there is no indication that any character in The Bride of the Mountain
King already knew Ulf’s song at the time of Ingeborg’s abduction. It must have
“originated” in the decades following her disappearance. Ulf has likely been living alone
for quite some time; the once-splendid manor house has fallen into disrepair, and
Ingeborg’s mother died “a long time ago” (“sedan länge”).254 The image arises of an
aging servant, bereft of company, gradually piecing together a ballad marking the tragic
fate of the daughter of the house and repeating it, alone, through the years. Unlike the
Ingeborg of Engelbrekt and his Dalecarlian Men who self-awarely invented the song-game
“Simon from Sälle Goes Courting,” Ulf serves as a foil for the anonymous folk soul out
of which ballads were thought to originate in Herderian tradition.
Little Karin (1896) caught between history and legend
When the Royal Opera adjudicated a competition in 1897 for an original Swedish work
with which to open the new opera house, another Hallström-Hedberg collaboration
received dubious honors: judges preferred their four-act opera Little Karin (Liten Karin)
over the other two entries, yet they deemed it worthy of only third place.255 The top two
prizes were not conferred. As a reward, Hallström received an honorarium of one
thousand crowns and the promise of zero performances: the piece was not staged on the
occasion of the opening of the new opera house in 1898, nor in the remaining years 254 Hedberg and Hallström, Den bergtagna (libretto), 53, 56. 255 The topic of “Little Karin” was timely; newspapers in 1895 include many announcements about an operetta by that title with music by C. G. R. Littmarck, but I have been unable to locate a score or libretto, or even a synopsis of this piece.
334
before Hallström’s death in 1901.256 In fact, this opera based on the most widely printed
Swedish folksong of the 1800s did not receive its premiere performance until 1997, a full
century later, with the Vadstena Academy in Kalmar.
From its position at the end of the nineteenth century, the opera complicates two
key themes from the earlier era of the Gothic League: folksong and history. The ballad
derives from the medieval legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was martyred
“about the year of our Lord three hundred,” as an early English translation of the Latin
legend puts it.257 It is believed that the song recounting her death came to Sweden from
German or French sources around the fifteenth century, although the subject mutated
from religious martyrdom to class differences in the wake of the Reformation, leaving
only a skeleton of the original storyline intact. By the 1800s, a mistaken belief developed
that “Little Karin” derived from the historical figure of the commoner Karin Månsdotter
(1550–1612), who was mistress to and then, briefly, married to King Erik XIV (r. 1560–
68).258 Hedberg and Hallström offer a meta-reflection on the ballad, in which the
historical-operatic Karin’s fate is inextricably linked with that of the legendary-folk
Karin even as she struggles to disassociate herself from the same.
Even more explicitely than in The Bride of the Mountain King, the eponymous
ballad encases the opera: the first strophe (introducing Karin as a servant in the young
256 See Lewenhaupt, “Teatermusiken 1870–1920,” 408. 257 For an early translation of the legend of St. Catherine, see Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Or, Lives of the Saints, ed. Frederick Startridge Ellis, trans. William Caxton (London: J.M. Dent, 1900), 7:7. The original Legenda aurea dates from 1275, and Caxton’s translation was made around 1483. The legend is printed in the Latin collection Legenda aurea (1263–75) and also appears in the Swedish collection Fornsvenska legendariet (1276–1307); see Sven-Bertil Jansson, “Liten Karin (Litet vis- och låtlexikon),” Noterat 3 (1996): 100. 258 Jansson, “Liten Karin,” 101.
335
king’s court) is sung on pp. 5–6, after a short unrelated orchestral overture, and the
second half of the final strophe (in which Karin’s soul ascends to heaven) rounds out
two of the score’s last three pages in a perverse counterpart to the stock “Once upon a
time . . .” and “They lived happily ever after” fairy tale formulas.259 In each case, music
leads: a subset of the wind section leads the first iteration, followed by the chorus on the
repeated section, this time with text. The first few measures are familiar from Example
2.3; the strophe is given in full below (Example 4.20), in Hallström’s choral setting from
Act I.260
And little Karin served in the young king’s court. She shone like a star among all of the little maidens.
Example 4.20: Hallström, Little Karin, Act I: Choral setting of the ballad
by the same name
Additionally, certain moments in the ballad appear in the libretto, further
strengthening connections between the micro and macro versions of the Karin story. On
several occasions, she is addressed or referred to as “Little Karin.” Like the girl in the
259 “Det var en gång . . .” and “. . . och så levde de lyckliga i alla sina dagar.” A critical edition of the score is freely available online: Ivar Hallström, Liten Karin: Opera i fyra akter med libretto av Frans Hedberg, ed. Anders Wiklund, Anders Högstedt, and Erik Wallrup, trans. Roger Tanner (Stockholm: Levande Musikarv, 2014), accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hallstrom-ivar/SMH-W3507-Liten_Karin. Some versions of the ballad contain an additional final strophe in which the king’s soul is dragged down to Hell. 260 Ibid., Act I, 5–6.
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ballad, Hedberg’s Karin refuses the king’s suit—to begin with, at least—even when
offered both crown and kingdom. Similarly, King Erik threatens her with torture inside
the spiked barrel (spiketunnan), the device that kills ballad-Karin. These similarities, and
also key departures from the ballad story, are summarized below in Table 4.8.
Table 4.8: Little Karin, ballad vs. opera
Ballad Opera Karin is a servant to the king. Same. The king addresses her as “Little Karin.” Same. The king is married. King Erik is unmarried. The king offers her horses and saddles, a golden crown, and the half of his kingdom.
Similar (no horses or saddles).
Karin does not love the king. Karin has loved Erik for some time. Karin refuses the king’s advances. Karin initially hesitates. The king threatens Karin with a spike-filled barrel.
Same.
Karin is rolled to death inside the barrel. Karin is not put in a barrel. Karin gladly accepts Erik’s marriage proposal. Karin’s soul is transformed into a dove and flies heavenward with angel-doves.
At the end, a distraught Karin kneels in prayer as the chorus sings the verse about her soul.
Despite the obvious melodic and narrative framework provided by the ballad,
the opera’s heroine cannot be the Little Karin. Even more so than with The Bride of the
Mountain King, the majority of the plot is crafted outside the confines of its source song
text. Leaving aside the obvious differences stemming from the introduction of a whole
cast of new characters, key moments in the ballad lack equivalents in the opera. To begin
with, King Erik is unmarried when he meets Karin (who is engaged to another man);
their love turns out to be mutual; the spiketunnan is a passing threat, almost a throwaway
line, that is not carried out; and Karin’s death, while perhaps implied by the text of the
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final chorus, is completely absent from the sparse stage directions.
Nevertheless, opera-Karin struggles to differentiate herself from her alter ego;
she is terrified of suffering the same tragic fate. In the midst of good news, for example,
she catches herself wondering:
In the end, won’t things turn out for me like it says in the song? I have admired the young king . . . who knows what my lot will be? “They put little Karin in the spike-filled barrel . . .” Yes, let them throw me in the barrel! I love him.
Skall det till slut med mig ej gå som det i visan stor? Jag unga kungen aktat på . . . hvem vet hvad lott jag får? “De satte liten Karin i spiketunnan in . . .” Ja, må de kasta mig i spiketunnan! Han är mig kär.261
She sings the folksong excerpt (in quotation marks above) unaccompanied, with nothing
to mediate between her voice and the fate she fears. Her soon-to-be-declared love for
Erik helps her temporarily disassociate herself from her legendary predecessor, but in
the following scene, she again falls into lockstep with her doppelgänger, placing herself
exactly in Little Karin’s position as she sings another fragment of the song in her half-
hearted attempt to refuse Erik’s suit.262
In this imagined operatic version of a documented historical episode, elements of
history and legend intermix to form a romantic conglomerate indebted, above all, to
Hedberg’s invention. Just as Karin and her fellow characters prove themselves unable to
clearly differentiate between her legend and their lives, so too did opera audiences of the
nineteenth century grow up in a society where lines between history and legend were
blurred. From purported factual roots for folksong texts to the invention of “Viking”
261 Act II, Scene 3: Ibid., 159–61. 262 Act II, Scene 4: Ibid., 177.
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traditions in the Gothic Society and the re-characterization of past relations with
Norway as brotherly rather than hostile, notions of history’s relationship with
contemporary expressions of Swedish culture were very much in flux. Little Karin
reflects this state of mutability.
Conclusion
On the theatrical stage, Swedish folk music played various roles during the course of the
long nineteenth century. Initially, it made little headway as Gustaf III established official
support for Swedish opera in the 1770s and 1780s, with vernacular librettos about
historical topics of national significance set to music in the reigning French and Italian
styles. Only in venues for comic theater did tunes of the type that would later be
categorized as “folksong” gain a foothold.
Three decades after Geijer and Afzelius published their folksong collection in the
1810s, a second wave developed, in which traditional tunes served as auditory props
alongside physical props to signal rural milieus. Often, this type of work included urban
characters visiting the countryside (or, less commonly, vice versa); viewers were invited
to imagine folk music as belonging to both peoples in a “vertical” conception of Swedish
nationality, rather than as the property of the rural poor in a social construction of
primarily “horizontal” allegiance to one’s class even across national boundaries.263 Much
like the published transcriptions of folk music, arrangements in these works provide a
263 Karin Hallgren makes a similar argument about how the (primarily spoken) repertoire at the Smaller Theater helped define a new middle-class identity including “an element of national feeling”; see Hallgren, Borgerlighetens teater, 283.
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stylized version of song and dance usually masquerading as authentic performance.
Many popular titles were performed not only in Stockholm and other main population
centers, but even on tours throughout rural regions, widening their potential audience to
encompass large segments of the domestic population.
In the second half of the century, the third wave developed, in which individual
ballads provided both plot and musical material for full-length lyric operas. In these
stories, history and legend intermingled freely, much in the way they did in the
ideological constructions of national-minded Swedes who “revived” (invented) older
medieval and Viking customs and fabricated a traditional brotherhood with Norway in
place of a relationship historically more charged with discord than fraternity. Because
production costs were higher for opera and venues more limited, especially outside the
capital, this type of piece had less widespread exposure than the previous category and
catered primarily to serious fans of music and history, along with others among the
upper class who wanted to be seen at the theater.
Onstage, offstage, and in the pit, folk music presented two main images to
audiences: a stylized tableau of peasant entertainment modified for outside eyes, and an
imaginary medieval-supernatural world providing context for well-known ballads. The
vast majority of audience members were Swedes, and thus potential participants in the
forging of an egen (“own”) national identity. Nearly all original operas, sångspel,
vådeviller, and plays were strictly local goods, designed for domestic production and
limited for linguistic reasons to performance in Scandinavia. A few, however, such as
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Hallström’s The Bride of the Mountain King, were performed further abroad.264
The present study concerns works by composers who lived most or all of their
lives in Sweden. A pertinent topic for future study is the portrayal of Sweden in operas
written by foreign composers for audiences elsewherer. A well-known example of
Swedish folksong in foreign opera is Ophelia’s mad scene in Act IV of Ambroise
Thomas’s Hamlet (1868) set in neighboring Denmark, where the composer used the
melody of “Necken’s Polska” in tribute to famed soprano Christina Nilsson, who
originated the role. Other titles worthy of inquiry include Der Schwedensee (Emmerich,
1874), which places the ghost of a murdered Swede at the center of a story with elements
from Der Freischütz and Der fliegende Holländer, and Die Folkunger (Kretschmer, 1874),
which centers around the historical figure of Magnus Ladulås (Magnus III, r. 1275–90).265
Regardless of the type of theater, overtures consistently offered composers the
locus of greatest musical flexibility, free from constraints of words and plot. As has
commonly occurred across Europe, several overtures developed independent lives as
concert overtures, whether as originally written or in subsequent arrangements for other
types of ensembles, a topic that will be taken up in more detail in Chapters 5–7, where
the focus turns to ways in which composers wrote and listeners heard national ideas in
instrumental works.
264 Gademan cites performances in Munich and Copenhagen in 1876, two years after the Stockholm premiere, and a few later performances in Hamburg and Stuttgart; see Gademan, “Den bergtagna,” 18. 265 For reviews, see respectively “Der Schwedensee: Romantische Oper in Drei Akten [review],” The Monthly Musical Record 5 (January 1, 1875): 11; and “Foreign Correspondence: Music in North Germany (From Our Special Correspondent),” The Monthly Musical Record 5 (November 1, 1875): 155–56.
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5 Abstractions: Variations and fantasies for piano
Given the limited reach of the Swedish language outside Scandinavia, instrumental
music offered composers the best possibilities to create and market music suitable both
for domestic and international consumption. Translations of songs and, in a few cases,
entire operas, along with the occasional contrafactum in another language, allowed
other, mostly German- and English-speaking audiences limited access to vocal music,
but only a small portion of the available repertoire was ever translated, published and
distributed for use abroad. In contrast, instrumental music—whether for a single player,
a chamber group, or a larger orchestra or wind ensemble—was readable by trained
musicians throughout the spheres of influence of western music.
Prior familiarity with traditional melodies was a bonus for domestic audiences,
but not at all a prerequisite for their international counterparts. Music for folk dances,
with their characteristic rhythms, was especially popular on concert stages; audiences
could just as easily enjoy Scottish, Slavonic, or Swedish dances adapted for orchestras.
Songs, too, found new life in expanded, wordless forms as themes cycled through
variations and successive sections of fantasias. In short, instrumental music referencing
folk themes allowed Swedish composers to project images of their country to insiders
and outsiders alike. Ostensibly Swedish-sourced material was shaped using familiar
central European generic conventions to create a body of works celebrating the country’s
idealized folk heritage via ballads, songs, and dances, a vision strongly influenced by the
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first collections of traditional vocal and instrumental music published in the mid-1810s.
Folk music and art music have interacted in instrumental compositions since
long before those terms existed. For example, as noted earlier, Telemann wrote stylized
representations of peoples (such as Turks, Swiss, Portuguese, and residents of Moscow)
in his so-called “Völker-Ouverture” without recourse to examples of actual musics from
these groups.1 Decades later, Haydn is believed to have incorporated folktunes into a
number of pieces; for example, songs thought to be of Croatian origin underlie parts of
Symphonies Nos. 103 and 104 and are so thoroughly integrated into classical style as to
disguise any hint of their folk origins from contemporary listeners—not that audiences
in London, where the symphonies premiered, would have had reason to be familiar
with tunes from distant Croatia.2 Elsewhere with Haydn, folk music took on national
resonance. The melody for his song “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” and its associated
“Emperor” String Quartet, op. 76, no. 3, are likewise thought to be based on a Croatian
folksong; Haydn’s version of the tune later assumed national importance (though not for
Croatians) through its use in various incarnations of Austrian and German national
anthems.3
1 Telemann, Overture (Suite) in B-flat Major, TWV 55:B5. 2 In general, Haydn’s compositions for London have a high proportion of his overall folksong quotations, according to Rosemary Hughes, who located a total of thirty-one quotations in his oeuvre, thirteen of which occurred in seven of the London symphonies; see Hughes, “Haydn and Folk-Song,” Music & Letters 31, no. 4 (1950): 384. 3 For a discussion of the melody as anthem in Austria and Germany, potential political subtexts underlying arguments for and against Croatian folk sources, and sketches showing Haydn’s development of the melody, see Albrecht Riethmüller, “Joseph Haydn und das Deutschlandlied,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 44, no. 4 (1987): 245–246, 252, 258. Not all were pleased by this borrowing; the revelation of the potential Croatian source in the 1890s “annoyed certain ‘patriotic’ gentlemen in Austria,” according to “Folk-Songs in Symphonies,” The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular 34, no. 609 (November 1, 1893): 652.
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Haydn also foregrounded an interest in folk music more directly through his
approximately four hundred settings of traditional songs from Scotland and elsewhere
in Britain (ca. 1792–1804), many of which included included elaborate introductions and
postludes and were designed for a chamber ensemble of piano, violin, cello, and one or
two voices.4 However, as Richard Will points out, the term Volkslied was slow to catch on
generally even in German-speaking countries, let alone as a foreign cognate (as observed
earlier with respect to Envallsson’s use of nationalmusik instead of folkvisa in his musical
encyclopedia of 1806); similarly, the primary editor of the Scottish songs, George
Thomson, did not use the word “folksong” in the published volumes or in
correspondence with Haydn.5
For Matthew Riley and Anthony D. Smith, a more accurate starting-point for
hearing nationalism in folk-inspired art music is Beethoven’s output of ca. 170 settings of
folksongs from Ireland, Scotland, and other national backgrounds, many of which were
also prepared for Thomson under the same chamber music specifications given to
Haydn a decade or two earlier.6 However, Beethoven wrote more complex settings, with
motivic development in the introductions, resolution of lingering tensions in postludes,
4 On the specifications for which Haydn composed many of these arrangements, see Richard Will, “Haydn Invents Scotland,” in Engaging Haydn: Culture, Context, and Criticism, ed. Mary Hunter and Richard Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 61. According to Barry Cooper, Haydn “subcontracted” a small number of settings to some students, although it is not clear whether these are included among his “nearly 400 settings”; see Cooper’s entry, “Folksong Settings,” in Haydn, ed. David Wyn Jones, Oxford Composer Companions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 102–3. 5 Will, “Haydn Invents Scotland,” 46, n. 8. 6 Matthew Riley and Anthony D. Smith, Nation and Classical Music: From Handel to Copland (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2016), 51.
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and a wider harmonic palette, including opportunities for “bold harmonization.”7 By
grafting the creativity of the individual genius-composer onto raw material that was
believed to be of collective origin, Beethoven demonstrated—according to Riley and
Smith—the first notable step in the joining of folk-nationalist expression with the
Romantic cult of originality.8
Long before writing these settings of predominantly British folksongs, Beethoven
had already experimented with a set of variations for solo piano on a Swiss folksong (on
“Dursli und Babeli,” WoO 64, 1790–92). Using these variations and other representative
piano pieces on folk themes by major composers as models, I show how Swedish
composers inherited existing methods for writing for figurative, harmonic and free
variations, upon which they often imposed a regularized pattern of development.
Elaborate treatments of folk melodies for solo piano
As folksongs became fixtures in urban, amateur musical spheres, the next mode of
interaction was for composers to expand upon the inherently small amount of musical
material found in a strophic song to create larger compositions. Given the popularity of
arrangements for piano and voice, compositions for solo piano soon began to proliferate
as well. The simplest category, settings of a single strophe or iteration of a dance
melody, are omitted in the present discussion because of their general similarity to the
7 In comparison, Haydn’s introductions and postludes for Thomson’s collections typically included brief quotations and new material following rhythmic patterns established in the source tune, but no substantial motivic development; see Cooper, “Folksong Settings,” 102. 8 Beethoven also made a setting of a Swedish song, “Lilla Carl”; see Barry Cooper, Beethoven’s Folksong Settings: Chronology, Sources, Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 26–27.
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piano-vocal settings examined earlier.9 It also becomes apparent that, while folktunes
sometimes appear in sonata-like forms in instrumental works, this is not the case for
piano literature, as I have not been able to locate a single example of a nineteenth-
century Swedish piano sonata on a folk theme.10 Rather, composers concentrated on two
other forms for solo piano compositions: variation sets on a single tune, which allow
multiple incarnations of the same material in a loosely structured, sectional form; and
fantasies (or, in one case, a capriccio) treating one or more melodies with more open
structures, which have more flexibility for substantial motivic development and
extended passages of newly composed material linking together episodes elaborating on
the source tune(s).
While simple piano arrangements were published in large numbers throughout
the century, extended pianistic treatments of Swedish folk melodies flourished for about
two decades, from the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s. In part, this coincides with the
increasing presence of pianos in middle-class homes beginning in the middle of the
1800s.11 In addition, it is likely that, in this era when the only option to hear sounding
9 One exception worth highlighting is Ludvig Norman’s Dalvisa (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquist, 1860); at just two pages, the piece is slight, yet the tune comes from Norman’s own transcription, showing that even the most classically oriented of composers occasionally skipped the mediating step of published anthologies and drew more directly from aural experience. Separately, Norman published a set of thirty folktune arrangements for piano: Svenska folkvisor satta för piano (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquist, 1867). 10 A prime example of this phenomenon elsewhere is Brahms’s First Piano Sonata, op. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1854]), which quotes both the melody and the text of an altdeutsches Minnelied from Zuccalmaglio’s 1838 collection Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Originalweisen at the beginning of the second movement; see Thomas Schmidt-Beste, The Sonata (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191–92. 11 The ready availability of instruments in middle-class Swedish homes first increased with the manufacturing of cheap guitars in the 1820s and 1830s; towards the middle of the century, the piano became more and more common, even as the eighteenth-century clavichord maintained its status as a popular
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music was to be physically present at the site of music-making, broader public interest
in folksong surged in the mid-1840s thanks to increased performance opportunities
discussed in earlier chapters: male choirs in Uppsala began to give public concerts,
followed shortly by their counterparts in Lund, and a string of popular divertissements,
sångspel, and other plays with music gave folk melodies a place of prominence on the
theatrical stage. Furthermore, choirs and theatrical troupes “broadcast” this music on
tours to many locations across the country, giving even far-flung audiences the
opportunity to hear versions of traditional melodies on a grander scale than just playing
and hearing piano-vocal arrangements in the home. Variations and fantasies on
folktunes let composer-performers capitalize on the popularity of the piano music by
scaling up to larger works, some of which were published for popular consumption at
home and abroad as well.
“Little Karin” is the undisputed queen of both genres, with three sets of
variations and three fantasies by composers active in Sweden, in addition to a set of
variations by the German-Danish composer Friedrich Kuhlau, for a total of seven
compositions. The only other tunes I have located with multiple pianistic treatments in
the 1800s are “The Song of Värmland” and “Necken’s Polska,” each of which serves as
subject for three pieces. Table 5.1 lists nineteenth-century piano compositions with more
than cursory use of Swedish folksongs; the letters F/V/O indicate fantasy, variations, or
keyboard instrument well into the 1800s. See Leif Jonsson and Martin Tegen, “Musiklivet privat och offentligt,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 101, 103.
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other structure.12
Table 5.1: Extended treatments of Swedish folksongs for solo piano
Composer Title
Structure13 Year
Folktune(s)
Passy, Edmond Grande fantasie suivie d’un rondo sur des airs nationaux suédois, op. 6
F 1819 Liten Karin, unidentified, Neckens polska, Traditions 1.9, “Dahlarne”
Kuhlau, Friedrich Variations sur l’ancien air suédois: “Och liten Karin tjente . . .”
V 1826 Liten Karin
Van Boom, Jan Introduction & variations sur l’air suédois “Och lilla Karin tjente . . .,” op. 16
V 1830s- 1840s?
Liten Karin
Van Boom 3 Fantaisies de salon sur des airs suedois, No. 3, op. 62
F 1846 Jord och himmel jag
Norman, Ludvig Fantasi öfver folkvisan “Liten Karin”
F 1846 Liten Karin
Lönngren, Knut Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor
F 1846–50
Liten Karin, En gång i bredd med mig, Jag ska gå vall hela dagen all
Hallström, Ivar Variationer öfver folkvisan: “O Wermeland du sköna”
V 1848 Värmlandsvisan
Berwald, Franz Fantasi över två svenska folkvisor
F 1850s? Värmlandsvisan, unidentified
Van Boom Beautés musicales III, op. 40, no. 3: “Dalkarls Polska”
F 1850s? Traditions 1.19, “W_göth”
Van Boom Grande fantaisie brillante: sur des airs nationaux Suedois, op. 20
F 1850 Sinclairsvisan, Svensk folklek från Skåne, Värmlandsvisan, Simon i Sälle
12 For an overview of Swedish piano literature, see Martin Tegen, “Piano- och kammarmusiken [1810–70],” in Musiken i Sverige III, ed. Leif Jonsson and Martin Tegen, 309–20, and Anders Edling, “Piano- och Kammarmusiken [1870–1920],” in ibid., 413–30. Two other major piano composers, Adolf Fredrik Lindblad and Jakob Adolf Hägg, are not listed here because they did not write fantasies, variations, or other extended pieces based on folktunes; however, each published straightforward settings of folk melodies for piano. 13 F = fantasy; V = variations; O = other.
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Composer Title
Structure13 Year
Folktune(s)
Berens, Hermann Klaenge aus Norden: Schwedische
Nationalweisen: No. 1, “Liten Karin”
V 1851 Liten Karin
Van Boom Beautés musicales II, op. 40, no. 2: “Neckens Polska”
F 1854? Neckens polska
Norman Capriccio für pianoforte, op. 8
F 1857 Och mins du hvad du låfvade Kersti du, kom du
Hallström Variationer öfver “Liten Karin”
V 1860s? Liten Karin
Norman Dalvisa, upptecknad och satt för piano
O 1860 Dalvisa
Josephson, Jacob Axel Du gamla, du friska, du fjällhöga Nord, Fantasi öfver en svensk folkvisa
F 1861 Du gamla, du friska
Hallström Tre svenska folkvisor lätt varierade
V 1863? Polska från Jemtland, Glädjens blomster, Neckens polska
Hallström Variationer over den svenske folkevise “Sven i Rosengård?”
V 1864 Sven i Rosengård
“Little Karin” offers a lens through which to examine how composers expanded small
source material into larger forms, both in a comparative context with parallel activity by
trend-setting composers in continental Europe and as individual works worthy of
analysis in their own right.
Nineteenth-century variations for piano
During the 1800s, piano literature continued to grow in popularity in response to several
trends: more and more middle- and upper-class households purchased pianos for
domestic education and entertainment; technological developments allowed builders to
craft sturdier instruments that could withstand more vigorous playing and fill larger
349
sound-spaces; and local talent and traveling virtuosos gave public performances in
increasing numbers.14 In tandem with these developments, the long-established genre of
keyboard variations renewed its relevance as a popular, modern mode of writing.15
In his study of variation forms over a period of nearly four centuries, Robert U.
Nelson differentiates between two overarching categories: “structural variations” (a
more “conservative” type, by which the basic structural essence of a theme is preserved)
and “free variations” (which bear “a comparatively tenuous relationship to the theme”
through substantial changes in melodic and harmonic structure).16 Within the structural
type, Nelson designates three further categories. The cantus firmus variation, in which a
theme appears with little or no embellishment within shifting accompanimental settings,
such as in many of Bach’s chorale preludes, is relatively uncommon among Swedish
variation sets for piano.17 More prevalent is what Nelson calls the “melodico-harmonic
variation” typical of Viennese classicism, in which a melody is ornamented, sometimes
to virtuosic degrees, while maintaining the approximate harmonization of the basic
14 See Leon Plantinga, “The Piano and the Nineteenth Century,” in Nineteenth-Century Piano Music (see Chapter One, n. 68), 1–6. 15 Gerhard Puchelt observes that, unlike the character piece, which first established itself after 1830, and the sonata, which declined sharply in relevance after the mid-1850s, the variation set is the only piano genre to have maintained a high profile throughout the entire nineteenth century; Variationen für Klavier im 19. Jahrhundert: Blüte und Verfall einer Kunstform (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), vii. 16 Robert U[riel] Nelson, The Technique of Variation: A Study of the Instrumental Variation from Antonio de Cabezón to Max Reger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 9–23. 17 I hypothesize that the cantus firmus variation is more effective in contexts of timbral diversity where an unadorned melody can cut easily through the texture. This is more easily achieved with the organ or ensemble writing than for solo piano. For example, Albrecht Riethmüller ascribes Haydn’s use of this technique with respect to the melody for “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” in his String Quartet No. 62 in C Major (“Kaiser”), Hob. III:77, to the simple fact that the melody can be passed from instrument to instrument; see Riethmüller, “Joseph Haydn und das Deutschlandlied,” 264. Nevertheless, several mainstream European composers whose sets are analyzed in the following pages do include cantus firmus variations for piano.
350
subject. A third type, the “harmonic variation,” also keeps close to the original harmonic
structure, but the theme itself is largely replaced by new melodic or textural material.
From a chronological perspective on the historical development of variation
technique, Nelson applies three labels relevant to nineteenth-century Swedish piano
variations: the “ornamental variation” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
(chiefly of the melodico-harmonic type), the “character variation” (an innovation of the
1800s in which the expression of the theme changes “profoundly” from variation to
variation), and the “free variation” that emerges around 1875.18 Although Nelson
discusses these types at length as separate entities in individual chapters, I have found
that variation sets on Swedish tunes tend as a rule to employ a more eclectic mixture of
these types, as do a number of pieces by more well-known European composers. Table
5.2 lists the non-Swedish variation sets referenced in the following analysis. When
possible, variations with themes based in folk material have been selected; major
composers who wrote no such variation sets are represented by simple themes with
certain folk-like qualities.
Table 5.2: Representative variation sets by European composers on folk and other themes
Composer Title Year written/pub. Folk tune?
Beethoven Six Variations on a Swiss Song, WoO 64 (“Dursli und Babeli”)
ca. 1790–92/1798
yes
Seven Variations on “God Save the King,” WoO 78 1802–03/1804 Six National Airs with Variations, Op 105 1818–19/1819 yes
18 A fourth type, the basso ostinato variation, is not found in Swedish compositions; for Nelson’s chronological typology, see The Technique of Variation, 3–6.
351
Composer Title Year written/pub. Folk tune?
Schubert Thirteen Variations on a Theme by Anselm Hüttenbrenner (D 576)
1817/1867
Chopin Introduction and Variations on a Swiss Song, “Der Schweizerbub,” (IVa/4)
1824/1851 yes
Variations on a Theme of Moore (IVa/6), 4 hands 1826/1865 yes Schumann, R. Variations on the Name “Abegg”, op. 1 1829–30/1831 Mendelssohn Variations in E-flat Major, op. 82 (MWV U 158) 1841/ 1850 Schumann, C. Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20 1853/1854 Brahms Variations on a Hungarian Song, op. 21, no. 2 1853–56/1862 yes Grieg Ballad in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian
Folk Melody, op. 24 1875–76/1876 yes
Liszt “Ranz des vaches” from Trois morceaux suisses, S156/R8 (2nd version)
rev. 1876–77, pub. 1877
Before Swedish examples are examined in more detail, representative variation sets—
when possible, on folk melodies—by composers who helped shape the genre will be
considered as a basis for comparison.
Ornamental variations by Beethoven and Schubert
The long shadow of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, op. 120 (1819–23) has
obscured two lesser-known sets of variations that date from approximately the same
time: the Six National Airs with Variations, op. 105 (1819) and Ten National Airs with
Variations, op. 107 (1819–20). Written for piano with optional flute or violin, these
variations can be analyzed alongside variations for solo piano because the piano parts
provide complete-sounding textures in themselves, with the flute or piano adding
material that is welcome, but not necessary on a basic level.19 Ranging in scope from
three to six ornamental variations, plus a coda in a few cases, the National Airs were
19 See Barry Cooper, Beethoven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 266.
352
intended for the burgeoning market of music for amateur pianists—or, at least, that was
the idea of George Thomson, who commissioned the variations. When Thomson felt that
a few were “too difficult and unsuited to the Scottish lady amateurs who were his
intended market,” he asked Beethoven to write a few additional, simpler pieces, one of
which was eventually printed in the op. 105 set as as “Air Autrichien” (no. 3).20
This setting of the traditional Austrian tune “A Schüsserl und a Reindl”—
presumably written with an extra dose of concern for the limited piano abilities of its
target audience—contains more variations (six) than the other five pieces published in
op. 105, showing that, while brevity was generally of interest in these variations for
amateurs, longer pieces had their place as well. This “Air Autrichien” also proves a
counterexample to a point that will be made later on. In general, the continuum of
compositional complexity of individual variations would seem to increase in the order
shown in Figure 5.1, as more and more elements of the original tune and its harmony are
varied or discarded.
cantus firmus melodico-harmonic harmonic free
CF1 MH2 H3 F4 simplest most complex
Figure 5.1: Variation types and relative complexity
Here in “Air Autrichien,” however, Beethoven demonstrates that the third category, the
harmonic variation in which the original melody is jettisoned altogether, need not
20 Ibid., 267.
353
necessarily imply a great degree of “original” invention; writing in the Viennese
Classical tradition in which he was so thoroughly grounded, he maintains the
ornamental style of variation without greatly changing the emotional character of each
successive iteration. Example 5.1 shows the first four measures of the theme and each of
its six variations. The theme’s outline is audible in the four melodico-harmonic
variations (I, III, V and VI), while it is not readily apparent in the harmonic variations (II
and IV), which maintain only the chord structure of the theme’s initial presentation.21
21 Beethoven, Sechs variirte Themen für Pianoforte allein oder mit Flöte oder Violine, op. 105, in Beethovens Werke, Serie 14 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1862–90]). To illustrate this point, imagine an exercise in which one is tasked with deriving a proto-theme from each individual variation; hypothetical proto-themes derived from variations I, III, V and VI are likely to be much closer to the actual theme than are their counterparts extracted from variations II and IV.
354
Example 5.1: Beethoven, “Air Autrichien” (op. 105, no. 3), mm. 1–4 of theme and each variation
Theoretically, harmonic variations offer composers extra opportunities to
translate freedom from melodic constraints into permission to do something “new” with
source material in a way that is not possible in melodico-harmonic variations. Other
compositions in this analytical excursion do exhibit this principle, to the extent that I
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develop a quantitative scale later on, a “variation score” that measures relative levels of
manipulation of source material in a variation set. However, Beethoven’s two harmonic
variations display more or less mechanical deconstructions of the theme, establishing its
tonic-subdominant-dominant-tonic harmonies without referencing its melodic
characteristics; variation II in particular demonstrates the technique I call a “motivic
template,” in which material is shaped into recognizable patterns that continue over
long periods.22 Textures remain simple in II and IV, and the level of originality, from the
nineteenth-century perspective of the cult of genius, is low. The variations on “Air
Autrichien,” op. 105, no. 3 show that categories of variation techniques are executed
differently depending on the contexts of composition and intended performer(s).
Almost three decades before the op. 105 variations on national airs, Beethoven
wrote a set of six variations on the Swiss folksong “Dursli und Babeli,” WoO 64 (ca.
1790–92, pub. 1798). This early work provides a baseline for comparison with other
simple variation sets in the corpus: its eleven-bar theme is followed by six variations
(three cantus firmus and three melodico-harmonic) of equal length, the last of which is
slightly extended by a three-bar coda. Classical ideals of balance and proportion guide
the variations, disguising the theme’s asymmetric phrase lengths and demonstrating
basic principles of ornamental variation that are to be found, on occasion, long into the
subsequent century. The first “Dursli und Babeli” variation also includes the second-
most common feature across all of the variation sets consulted in this project: the
22 Other instances of motivic templates are found in many preludes in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 846–69.
356
tendency to begin the process of rhythmic diminution by introducing triplets as a
prominent feature of the first variation (Example 5.2).23
Example 5.2: Beethoven, “Dursli und Babeli” Variations (WoO 64), mm. 1–3 of theme and Variation 1
Lest Beethoven’s variations be stereotyped as simplistic, one should keep in
mind that the variations on the Swiss song are a youthful work, while the National Airs
were commissioned with certain specifications catering to the market for people with
modest piano skills. In contrast, his Seven Variations on “God Save the King,” WoO 78
(1802–03, pub. 1804), take as their subject another well-known melody primarily spread
through oral tradition (though as a royal anthem in a number of countries, rather than as
a traditional folksong). These variations were conceived as a more substantial work and
display much greater variety in character and place heaver technical demands on the
performer than his variations on actual folksongs do.
Schubert’s closest brush with variations on a folk theme comes in the form of his
Thirteen Variations on a Theme of Anselm Hüttenbrenner, D. 576 (1817, pub. 1867). The
theme is lifted from the slow movement of Hüttenbrenner’s String Quartet in E Major,
op. 12 (1817); the first half of the melody moves primarily within the span of a fourth,
23 The most common feature is the presence of a variation in the opposite mode. Excerpt: Beethoven, Six variations faciles d’un air suisse (Bonn: Simrock, [1798]).
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357
with one extension to a fifth, although the chromatic rising scale in the second half of the
tune is more characteristic of art music than German folksong of the era. The order in
which the successive variations unfold provides a useful introduction to a principle that
appears with regularity in Swedish variation sets: an internal division into two “halves”
(which may be of unequal length), with the first half dominated by more restrictive
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Figure 5.2: Schubert, “Hüttenbrenner” Variations, D. 576, structure
In this case, the first eight variations are dominated by a string of four and a half
melodico-harmonic variations, framed by three cantus firmus variations and a half-
variation dedicated to the harmony of the initial statement. The slightly shorter second
half consists of four harmonic variations, followed by an extended final variation with
melodico-harmonic and freer passages.
Character variations by Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn
The next wave of variations is exemplified by three composers known for their character
pieces. Chopin offers two relevant examples: the Introduction and Variations on a Swiss
Song, KK IVa/4 (“Der Schweizerbub,” 1826–27, pub. 1851) and the Variations on a Theme
of Moore, KK IVa/6 (1826) for two pianos. These sets share key structural similarities with
358
Schumann’s “Abegg” Variations, op. 1 (1830, pub. 1831) and Mendelssohn’s Variations
in E-flat Major, op. 82 (1841, pub. 1850) on original themes with certain folk-like
qualities. In part, similarities among these works are due to growth in the genre of the
character piece, which Nicholas Temperley defines as short works often published in
collections and “designed to convey a specific allusion, atmosphere, mood, or scene”:
these composers and many of their contemporaries moved beyond the idea of
“ornamenting” a tune and its basic harmony to transforming it for radically different
effects.24
In addition, these works all have a substantial coda or final variation, a feature
that Swedish composers eagerly adopted. The idea was not new; Beethoven, for
example, includes significant codas or finales in the “God Save the King” Variations and
two of the six op. 105 variations. But the scope of the codas or extended final variations
in every one of these four sets of character variations—the average lengths of which are
almost four times the lengths of the respective themes—marks this as an important locus
of compositional energy. While most codas develop the theme via cantus firmus or
melodico-harmonic techniques, all also include extended passages of freer composition,
as composers synthesize elements heard earlier and channel energy into virtuosic
showmanship.
24 Nicholas Temperley, “Character Piece,” The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2011, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e1302.
359
Cyclical visions of Clara Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, and Liszt
A slice of compositional activity from the third quarter of the 1800s includes pieces
expanding the number of variations to as many as thirteen or fourteen—a far cry from
Beethoven’s thirty-one Diabelli Variations, but still twice as many as most pieces
surveyed here. By this time, the concept of character variations is firmly entrenched, as
composers strongly vary the mood of individual sections. Moreover, free variations
appear in greater numbers, incorporating elements of the theme but departing from both
the melodic and harmonic structure of the source passage. Perhaps as a counterbalance
to these greater compositional liberties, it becomes common to introduce cyclical
elements as a means of unifying pieces.
In the present corpus, the first piece to end with its beginning comes slightly
earlier, when Mendelssohn begins the last ten bars of the Variations in E-flat Major
(1841; Example 5.3) with a series of imitative entries on the theme’s opening motive and
concludes with a verbatim statement of the last four measures of the source harmony,
only slightly reharmonized from the opening.25
25 Felix Mendelssohn, Andante con variazioni, op. 82, edited by Friedrich August Roitzsch (Leipzig: C.F. Peters, n.d. [ca.1880]), 251.
360
Example 5.3: Mendelssohn, Variations in E-flat Major, op. 82, last 10 mm.
Instead of the typical process of deconstruction, by which a theme is successively
changed, Mendelssohn’s variations present a curious type of reconstruction: after the
initial statement of the theme, three harmonic variations pay little heed to the original
melody. The fourth variation, of the melodico-harmonic type, refers to the melodic
contour, but not until the beginning of the fifth (and last and longest) variation does the
theme return in recognizable form, now in a much busier context than its original
statement. The passage quoted above in Example 5.3 represents the final re-building of
the theme, effectively bringing listener and performer alike back home after a journey to
distant places.
Liszt makes a similar statement in “Ranz des vaches” from Trois morceaux suisses,
S156/R8 (2nd version), by altering a fragment of the theme at the end. The piece
originated as the Improvisata sur le Ranz des vaches in 1835–36, but Liszt heavily revised
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361
and reissued it as Ranz des vaches, Mélodie de Ferd. Huber avec variations in 1877.26 Despite
the appellation “variations,” the revised version maintains a number of formal liberties
more in keeping with the earlier “improvisata” label, such as the insertion of a lengthy
unrelated countermelody between the statement of the full theme and its first
unnumbered variation, as well as other interpolated passages.27 In all, the revised
version has four unnumbered variations, typically with some elements of melodico-
harmonic variation technique but otherwise leaning strongly towards freer writing that
references isolated elements of the theme. On the final page, following a recurrence of
the unrelated countermelody, an Allegretto passage brings back a metrically altered
variant of the theme’s opening motive (Example 5.4).28
26 The Swiss composer Ferdinand Huber later chronicled his surprise at learning that Liszt had used several of Huber’s published folksongs as the basis for piano arrangements and larger works; for an excerpt from Huber’s memoirs, including details on his eventual meeting with Liszt, see Karl Nef, Ferdinand Fuerchtegott Huber, ein Lebensbild (St. Gallen: Zollikofer, 1898), 9–10. Details on the background of the song Liszt borrowed, “Der Ustig wott cho,” are found in Walter Rüsch, Die Melodie der Alpen: Gedanken über Ferdinand Fürchtegott Huber, 1791–1863 (Zürich-Zollikon: E.A. Hofmann, 1942), 14–16. 27 For more on the earlier Improvisata that underlies the variations, see Ben Arnold, “Piano Music: 1835–1861,” in The Liszt Companion, ed. Ben Arnold (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 77. 28 Franz Liszt, Trois morceaux suisse, 1. Ranz de vaches, in Neue Liszt-Ausgabe, Series 2, vol. 14, edited by Imre Mező and Imre Sulyok (Budapest: Editio Musica, 1990), 24, 39.
362
Example 5.4: Liszt, Trois morceaux suisses, “Ranz des vaches,” beginning of theme and last 15 mm. of piece
But starting in the third measure of this last Allegretto, intervals from the original rising
arpeggio are gradually expanded, turning this potential restatement of the theme into a
mini variation on the original first two measures.
Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20 (1853, pub.
1854) return to a straightforward statement of a reharmonization of the complete theme
on the penultimate page, bringing the listener (almost) back to the starting point while
acknowledging that, due to the variation process, “home” is no longer the same place
from which one departed. As with the example above by Chopin, several bars of closing
material separate the recurrence of the theme from the very ending of the piece.
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In contrast, Grieg brings back the first half of the theme at the very end of his
Ballade in the Form of Variations on a Norwegian Melody, op. 24 (1875–76, pub. 1876), in a
version nearly identical to that of the initial statement (which itself overlaps with the
theme’s last four bars). But as pianist Einar Steen-Nøkleberg points out, the seeming
sameness of the final section belies the transformational journey that has taken place; he
suggests that the performer approach the restatement “perhaps as a recollection of what
you understood the first time, a reminder of the melody and the harmonies that were
the foundation of the entire composition.”29 Between the initial statement and its
eventual recollection, Grieg apparently struggled to form the path, re-writing variations
in his sketchbook and shuffling the sequence (which, according to Steen-Nøkleberg, was
“helter-skelter at first”) before reaching the definitive structural arrangement.30 In the
final published version, he carries motion forward from the eleventh variation (Più
animato) to the twelfth (Meno allegro e maestoso) without pausing on a cadence; by
bridging the otherwise obligatory gap, Grieg joins two sections together into the flow of
a single unit.
Brahms, too, cycles back to the beginning in his Variations on a Hungarian Song,
op. 21, no. 2 (1853–56, pub. 1862), to end with a louder, thicker-textured statement of the
opening theme. The first eight variations proceed in more or less typical fashion,
29 Einar Steen-Nøkleberg, Onstage with Grieg: Interpreting His Piano Music, trans. William H. Halverson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 116–17. 30 Ibid., 105–6.
364
variously using cantus firmus, melodico-harmonic, and free variation techniques.31 The
presence of more than one variation in the opposite mode, while not common, is not
completely without precedent; for example, Schubert’s thirteen Hüttenbrenner
Variations include three such variations. But Brahms’s unusual decision to write six of
his thirteen variations in the opposite (minor) mode (and, furthermore, to string them
together at the very beginning as variations one through six) lends a layer of cohesion
across almost half of the piece. Similarly, Brahms links the final five variations together
with the extended final Allegro—literally. Example 5.5 shows the endings of the theme;
of variation eight, the last variation to settle on the tonic on the last beat; and of
variations nine through thirteen, which end with open-ended dominant harmonies,
ready to launch immediately into the next variation.32
31 Brahms had a famously conflicted relationship with variation techniques. Elaine R. Sisman revisits Brahm’s epistolary statements on the subject and analyzes the tension as a result of his dual roles as critic and composer in “Brahms and the Variation Canon,” 19th-Century Music 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1990): 132–53. 32 Brahms, Variations on an Original Theme, op. 21, no. 1, in Klavierwerke, vol. 1, edited by Emil von Sauer (Leipzig: C. F. Peters, n.d. [ca. 1910]), 152–161.
365
Example 5.5: Brahms, Variations on a Hungarian Song, ends of the Tema and vars. VIII-XIII
Starting in variation nine, the mixed 4/4 and 3/4 meter of the Hungarian tune is replaced
with standard meters (first 6/8, and then 2/4 in subsequent variations). At this same
juncture, variations cease to land unambiguously on the tonic in the last beat of the last
measure, as had occurred in all previous variations; instead, open-ended sonorities on
the last beat, often layered over a tonic pedal, propel motion directly into the next
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variation in a sort of formal perpetuum mobile.
Variations on “Little Karin”
Among the variations on “Little Karin,” a pattern emerges similar to that found in
Schubert’s Hüttenbrenner Variations: after an initial statement of the theme, variations
in the first half typically follow what Robert Nelson calls a “scheme of progressive
rhythmic animation” inherited from Baroque variations, cloaked in the guise of
occasional cantus firmus or, more commonly, melodico-harmonic variations with
successively diminished note values.33 In the second half, the composer approaches the
subject with more flexibility, from character and harmonic variations to freer variations
incorporating motivic development and phrases that spin off into original material,
including occasional brief cadenzas. In addition, the quintessential interruption of
continuity in the schema—a variation in the opposite mode—invariably occurs in this
latter portion of the piece. Usually, a two-part coda (slow-fast) rounds out the ending,
although the relative proportions of these two sections varies substantially. Analysis of
the “Little Karin” variations will begin with the opposite-mode variations: the process of
transposing the melody from minor to major forces composers to make serious
decisions. After that, the four pieces will be discussed individually in more detail.
In theory, converting a minor-mode melody into a major-mode variant is a
matter of altering the key signature in the direction of adding three sharps and
33 For Nelson’s discussion of Baroque antecedents for variations of the Classical and Romantic periods, see The Technique of Variation, 81.
367
correcting occasional pitches with accidentals, such as adding leading tones for
secondary dominants implied by the new melody. Despite the apparent simplicity of
“Little Karin,” each of the four variation sets derives a different solution for this
problem. Example 5.6 shows Hæffner’s original minor-mode version on the top staff, my
suggested simplest major transcription immediately below, and the actual versions used
by four composers on the remaining staves. In three cases, as labeled, melodies have
been simplified to the nearest eighth-note in order to facilitate comparison, and all
entries have been transposed to C major (or minor, in the case of Hæffner’s original) for
the same reason. Brackets indicate passages that differ substantially from the simplest
major transposition.
Example 5.6: “Little Karin” melody as transposed for major-mode variations, with brackets indicating substantial deviations from simplest major transposition
My suggested transposition to the major requires only one change in two parallel
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situations: the addition of an F-sharp at the end of mm. 3 and 5, which can function as
either the third in the first chord of a D major - G major progression or the fifth in the
first part of a B major - E minor progression, depending on whether the G’s at the
beginning of mm. 4 and 6 are harmonized as secondary dominants (G major) or
mediants (E minor). Kuhlau comes closest to this solution, though he shifts the melody
down a third for two pitches on either side of the m. 4 barline. Berens inserts even fewer
accidentals: zero. After beginning in C major (in the transposed example), his melody
shifts down a third starting with the pick-up to m. 3, resuming the same pitch levels as
Hæffner’s original—precisely at the point where “Little Karin” begins to have pitches
that can easily be harmonized as major. As a result, only the last 2.5 measures of Berens’
version revert to obviously minor harmonies, a situation that he addresses in the brief
coda to end the entire piece in major.
Van Boom’s melody, by far the most heavily ornamented of the four, has been
the most intensively reduced to obtain its basic form. As originally written, the lyrical
Adagio—in the pianistically complex key of G-flat major—is full of arpeggios and scalar
runs with subdivisions as small as sixty-fourth notes, and new material extends phrases
far beyond what can be directly traced to the source melody; much of the “variation” is
simply newly composed. Since van Boom takes such liberties with melodic structure, the
portion of his variation corresponding to mm. 5–6 in the reduction does not have the
same constraints of connecting with the preceding and subsequent bars of “Little Karin”;
instead of focusing around the pitches G and C, as expected, it temporarily adopts A
369
and E as foci, making the melody sound quite different. Similarly, Hallström also takes
great freedoms; material covering the first two measures of the tune is entirely newly
composed, fitting the source’s approximate contour but using a different collection of
pitches. In place of my option to add F-sharps in mm. 3–5—which proved more
tempting in theory than in reality—Hallström instead lowers the first pitch in m. 3,
which allows him to harmonize mm. 1–4 over a tonic pedal. Looking at these four
examples, it becomes obvious that not all variations are alike, and that some are more
varied than others. In the next section, I introduce a method of measuring the subjective
trait of variation.
Variation score
Despite differences in variation techniques and musical style over the course of the
nineteenth century, it is possible to make an approximate comparison of the relative
level of variation of individual works. To this end, I rank the four types analyzed above
by assigning a number to each variation (cantus firmus = CF1 = 1; melodico-harmonic =
MH2 = 2; harmonic = H3 = 3; free = F4 = 4). While it is generally possible to assign a
variation to a category with a reasonable degree of confidence, some variations contain
traits of two categories; in these cases, the number of the “higher” (more varied)
category is applied. For example, this is nearly always the case in codas or extended
final variations, which typically include one or more CF1 or MH2 iterations of a melody
in addition to substantial freer F4 techniques incorporating fragmentary motive(s) from
the source melody into more general virtuosic flourishes. The “variation score” of a
370
given piece is obtained by averaging the scores of each component variation (and coda,
when present). In general, a higher variation score corresponds to more intense and
original intervention on the part of the composer, although exceptions do exist as
mentioned earlier.34 Table 5.3 lists the variation sets discussed above, together with the
four sets on “Little Karin” (in bold font) in order of increasing complexity.
Table 5.3: Variation sets in order of increasing complexity
Composer Title Variation score
Beethoven “Dursli and Babeli” 1.5 Berens, Hermann “Little Karin” 1.5 Beethoven “Air ecossais,” op. 105/2 1.8 Beethoven “Air ecossais,” op. 105/4 2.0 Beethoven “Air ecossais,” op. 105/6 2.3 Schubert Hüttenbrenner Variations 2.3 Beethoven “Air Autrichien,” op. 105/3 2.3 Chopin Moore Variations 2.3 Beethoven “God Save the King” 2.4 Beethoven “Air ecossais,” op. 105/1 2.4 Brahms Hungarian Song 2.4 Kuhlau, Friedrich “Little Karin” 2.5 Chopin “Der Schweizerbub” 2.6 Beethoven “Air ecossais,” op. 105/5 2.7 Schumann, Clara Theme by Robert Schumann 2.7 Hallström, Ivar “Little Karin” 2.8 Mendelssohn Variations in E-flat Major 3.0 Grieg Ballad . . . Norwegian Folk Melody 3.0 Van Boom, Jan “Little Karin” 3.1 Liszt “Ranz des vaches” 3.5 Schumann, Robert Abegg Variations 3.8
Implications of these rankings with respect to the “Little Karin” variations will be
discussed in more detail as each composition is introduced below.
34 See discussion of Beethoven’s “Air Autrichien” above, p. 352ff.
371
Berens: “Little Karin” from Klænge aus Norden
The Hamburg-born composer, conductor and pianist Hermann Berens the elder
(1826−80) immigrated to Stockholm around the age of twenty. Although he wrote many
large-scale works, including three operas, incidental music for at least eleven plays, and
several orchestral works, the present example is a slight work that fulfills the absolute
minimum requirements for its genre: a statement of the theme is followed by two
unnumbered variations.35 With a low variation score of 1.5, the piece ties with
Beethoven’s treatment of the Swiss song “Dursli und Babeli.” To be fair, Berens does not
market the work as a variation set; it is simply the first of eight pieces in his collection
Klænge aus Norden: Schwedische Nationalweisen für Pianoforte published in Dresden and
Stockholm in 1851. Some of the other songs have singing or prose translations in his
native German, but “Klein Käthchen,” as he titles it, remains untexted. The idea of
singing along to variations would potentially be possible with cantus firmus writing as
used in Berens’ first variation (CF1), but his second variation (MH2) precludes this
possibility: when converting the melody from A minor to A major, Berens shifts a
certain passage down a third (Example 5.6 above, staff 5), altering the melodic contour
in a way that an uninitiated singer familiar only with the regular tune could not predict.
Despite its simplicity, “Klein Käthchen” contains an intriguing feature I have not
found in any other variation set: the initial statement of the theme is itself a string of
35 For a biography in English, see Carl-Gunnar Åhlén, “Hermann Berens d.Ä.,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/berens-hermann/. A more complete and accurate list of works is found in Ander, An Inventory of Swedish Music, 125–36.
372
internal mini-variations. The four sections of the melody (aabb) are each set with a
different texture (aa’bb’), as seen here in Example 5.7.36
Example 5.7: Berens, “Klein Käthchen,” Andante, mm. 1–16
In this short space, Berens superimposes the concept of variations upon the theme itself,
constituting an unusually thorough approach to the genre.
Kuhlau: Variations on the Old Swedish Song “Little Karin,” op. 91
Friedrich Kuhlau (1786–1832) grew up in various northern German cities before
escaping Hamburg for Copenhagen in the wake of an occupation by Napoleonic troops.
36 Hermann Berens, “Klein Käthchen,” in Klænge aus Norden: Schwedische Nationalweisen für Pianoforte (Dresden: Wilhelm Paul, [1851]), 3. The “final” double-bar line at the end of the second system is a printer’s error, but it also unwittingly illustrates the sectional conception of the introduction.
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373
His variations on “Little Karin,” written around 1826, were published in 1828 in Leipzig
and Copenhagen, the same year that his incidental music propelled Heiberg’s play Elves’
Hill (Elverhøj) to its enduring success as a symbol of Danish romantic nationalism. Some
folksongs, particularly ballads, have lengthy histories in both Denmark and Sweden,
and Kuhlau could just as easily have marketed the piece as variations on the Danish
song “Liden Karin”; but the full title of his “Liten Karin” variations includes the phrase
l’ancien air suédois, an emphasis likely chosen in homage to his dedicatee, a
Mademoiselle Sophie Jacobson of Gothenburg. The first half is predominantly MH2 and
CF1 variation types, but the second half switches to mostly F4 and H3, yielding an overall
variation score of 2.5, nestled between Chopin and Brahms. Of particular interest is the
major variation (no. 10), which dissolves into figuration reminiscent of the outer sections
of Bach’s Fantasia in G Minor for organ, BWV 572, providing an example of formal
flexibility in which a fantasia invades variations in much the same way that variations
commonly find their way into more loosely structured pieces labeled “fantasias.”
In all, the tema, eleven numbered variations, and final Tempo di polacca in
Kuhlau’s composition form thirteen clearly defined sections; this matches the number of
verses printed in Geijer-Afzelius’s version of the “Little Karin” ballad, including the
optional final verse.37 The dramatic ballad text contains several features that could easily
be translated into notation via word-painting. For example, the register of the melody in
different variations could indicate whether a given strophe reflects the words of Karin,
37 Geijer-Afzelius, 1:11–13.
374
the king, or the narrator, just as Schubert uses register to distinguish between speakers
in Erlkönig, D. 328. Strophes three and four could pick up on “the gray horse and the
golden saddle” (“grå hästen och gullsadelen”) with hoofbeats or martial rhythms. The
infamous spiked barrel mentioned in strophes nine and ten, and tragically put into
action in strophe eleven, could be illustrated through “spiked” figuration with large
leaps and subsequent “rolling” motion. Stanza twelve would feature doves lifting
Karin’s soul to heaven, and the optional thirteenth stanza would depict ravens dragging
the king down to hell.
None of the seven extended piano compositions based on this ballad—whether
variations or fantasies—actually takes such a literal approach. But the underlying
narrative provides an intriguing justification for Kuhlau’s Bach-like fantasy: in its
position at the end of variation 10, it corresponds to the eleventh strophe (counting the
initial presentation of the theme as the first strophe), and thus it represents the king’s
servants rolling poor Karin to death in the barrel (Example 5.8).38
38 This excerpt is from Friedrich Kuhlau, Variations pour le pianoforté sur l’ancien air suédois: “Och liten Karin tjente wid unga kungens gård,” op. 91. (Leipzig: H. A. Probst, 1828), 10–11. See also Kuhlau and Thomas Trondhjem, Friedrich Kuhlau - Piano Works, Vol. 2, “Les Charmes de Copenhague,” audio CD (Rondo Grammofon 8353, 1998).
375
Example 5.8: Kuhlau, Variations sur l’ancien air suédois: “Och liten Karin tjente . . .” Var. 10, Larghetto con anima, mm. 18–31
Seen in this light, the passage become less of a formal excursion providing
textural contrast and more of a grotesque play-by-play of the ballad’s climactic episode,
in which the five-octave glissando and the seemlingly endless rolling—and thumping—
figuration assume truly horrifying proportions.
Hallström: Variations on “Little Karin”
Ivar Hallström’s undated variations almost certainly predate his 1896 opera on the same
ballad and most likely originated in the later 1860s, closer to the time of his
breakthrough opera Duke Magnus and the Mermaid (1867). His other two sets of
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376
variations on Swedish folksongs date from 1848 (“The Song of Värmland”) and 1864
(“Sven in the Rose Garden”). The “Little Karin” variations are found in a large
autograph volume of eighty-one pieces; many of the pieces are dated, and those dates
that do exist are recorded almost entirely in chronological order, with the nearest dates
on either side of the piece in question narrowing the window of composition to near the
end of the period between 1861 and 1871.39 With a variation score of 2.8, the piece falls
between examples by Mendelssohn, Chopin and Clara Schumann, and until the last
page, the set appears fairly standard. The first three variations use MH2 technique,
although with a bit more freedom than is sometimes accorded to melodies in that
category. Variation four, the major variation, alternates newly composed material with
derivations from the melody, as mentioned above. The fifth and final variation, labeled
Allegro moderato, is really a polonaise, echoing the technique in Kuhlau’s final numbered
39 Ivar Hallström, “Variationer på ‘Liten Karin,’” manuscript score, later 1860s?, Ivar Hallström archive, Kompositioner, bd 2. Samlingsvolym, [no. 32], S-Skma. The variations were posthumously published (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquists förlag, 1907) and are readily available in Magnus Svensson’s revised edition (Stockholm: Levande Musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, 2015). The estimate of the later 1860s is further supported by the biographies of the two dedicatees. The future composer Jacob Hägg (1850–1927), a native of Gotland, lived and studied in Stockholm from 1865–70, providing a geographical point of contact with Hallström during the relevant time period; see Finn Rosengren, “Jakob Adolf Hägg,” trans. Roger Tanner, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hagg-jacob-adolf/. Hugo Beer (1850–?) was the elder brother of the music critic and publisher Georges Wilhelm Beer (1854–1911); young Georges is known to have studied piano with Hallström, among other teachers, and it is very possible that Hugo studied with Hallström as well; see Georges Beer’s obituary in the journal he founded: F. H., “Georges Beer,” Svensk musiktidning 31, no. 12 (September 2, 1911): 90–91. Little is known of Hugo Beer. Nils Castegren reprints a list of the 101 piano students of Marie Louise Öberg, which he presumes to be from slightly before 1870, listing Hägg and both Beer siblings as pupils; “Franz Berwalds kompositionselever vid Musikkonservatoriet 1867–68,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 56, no. 1 (1974): 23. In 1885, a newspaper reported that after living in Moscow for a time, Beer had been convicted of fraud and sentenced to confinement in Siberia; “Stockholmare i Sibirien,” Nerikes Allehanda (November 16, 1885): 2. Given that Hugo did not follow in the musical footsteps of his brother or father, the most likely time for Hallström to dedicate these variations to him would have been when Hugo was in his mid-to-late teens—old enough to have the technique to play them but before he transitioned to his career as a businessman.
377
variation. Hallström’s real contribution lies in the coda (Example 5.9), a fourteen-
measure Andante section appended to that last variation.40 In addition to bringing back
the opening phrase of the theme—and providing an exceedingly rare excursion to a key
so foreign that every pitch requires an accidental—Hallström also gives a retrospective
look at features of three earlier variations.
Example 5.9: Hallström, Variationer öfver “Liten Karin,” [Coda], Andante
40 Hallström, Variationer öfver Liten Karin för piano (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquists förlag, 1907), 8.
2
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378
The first two measures in this example give the tune in a texture in the style of the
original Thema, but the accidentals shift the effective key to A major, the key of the major
variation (no. 4). Rhythmic features of mm. 5–8 are reminiscent of the polonaise of the
last variation, while the figuration in mm. 9–12 follows a motivic template established
earlier at the beginning of the second variation. Instead of merely returning to the
theme, Hallström ends with a textural summary of much that has gone before.
Van Boom: Introduction and Variations on the Swedish Air “Little Karin”
The most complicated of the “Little Karin” variations, van Boom’s Introduction and
Variations, ranks third overall, behind Schumann’s Abegg Variations—a piece chosen here
not for its folk theme, but as the composer’s most relevant work for comparison—and
Liszt’s “Ranz des vaches” Variations. While several fantasies on Swedish folktunes by
this Dutch-born pianist can be dated to various years in the 1840s and 1850s, his
compositions in general are notoriously difficult to order chronologically.41 Perhaps
these variations, which exist as an autograph manuscript, were written near another
Introduction and Variations, op. 7, this time on an original theme (mentioned in
Stockholms dagblad on September 13, 1836), or they could date from closer to when van
Boom gave up public performances in 1847. They first surface in the press in November
1850, when multiple newspapers ran short columns mentioning what they describe as
his “large fantasy” (större fantasie) on “Liten Karin,” which is presumably identical with
the present Introduction and Variations.
41 Edin, “Jan van Boom.”
379
The piece makes the news not in connection with a concert or publication
announcement, but rather because van Boom has dedicated it to Nicholas I of Russia—
and received an extremely valuable ring from the emperor’s minister in Stockholm for
his efforts.42 Emily Green has studied the application of gift exchange theory to the act of
composers dedicating compositions to patrons or fellow composers, observing that such
exchanges involve three parties: giver (composer), receiver (dedicatee), and observer
(audience).43 The gift of van Boom’s dedication was received by the Czar (likely via his
agent, the minister), observed by Swedish news organs, and reciprocated by the receiver
via his agent. But why did van Boom dedicate a set of Swedish variations to the Russian
emperor in the first place? His biography, which is admittedly incomplete, mentions no
tours to Russia, although it is entirely possible he could have concertized in St.
Petersburg at some point. Furthermore, the autograph has no dedication, and I have
found no sign that the piece was ever published, indicating that the dedication may
have taken a different form than the traditional printed message in a score. 44
The primary key signature of six flats immediately signals the complexity of this
piece, which reflects van Boom’s status as the pre-eminent Swedish piano virtuoso of his
generation.45 After early studies with his father, the flautist and composer Johannes van
Boom (1783−1878), Jan studied at least briefly with Hummel and Moscheles. During his 42 Stockholms dagblad (November 11, 2012): 1. 43 Emily Hannah Green, “Dedications and the Reception of the Musical Score, 1785–1850,” PhD diss. (Cornell University, 2009), 25. 44 Jan van Boom, “Introduction et variations sur l’air suédois ‘Och lilla Karin tjente vid unga kungens hof,’” op. 16, manuscript score, 1830s–40s?, Jan van Boom samling, A.5.N2, S-Skma. 45 Born in Utrecht, van Boom moved to Stockholm in 1825 or 1826 at the age of eighteen or nineteen, after an initial concert visit in 1824; he eventually became a Swedish citizen in 1852.
380
first two decades in Sweden, van Boom developed a reputation as both the leading
virtuoso piano performer and an excellent teacher; but during the last several years of
this period, he made no public appearances at all.
When van Boom returned to the stage in March 1842 for a concert including
Chopin’s first piano concerto and two of Liszt’s arrangements of songs by Schubert, he
set Stockholm newspapers abuzz. One column prior to the concert attributed much of
van Boom’s reputation to “his precise, perfect and brilliant performances of the most
difficult compositions by the older [generation of] piano composers.”46 His decision to
make a new “debut” with Romantic repertoire surprised critics, who were intrigued but
not entirely sure what to expect.47 One critic questioned outright whether it was wise for
van Boom—known for his Classical repertoire—to start from scratch and take on the
“miraculous” Romantic school that had developed since the time of his last public
appearance, back before Chopin and Liszt had “twisted pianists’ fingers and taught the
poor two hands to do the work of four.”48 The critic who posed the question was quick
to acquit van Boom honorably for his worthy attempt, though not without finding fault
with the pianist’s tendency to play Chopin too beautifully, without the fire, passion and
touch of the bizarre the reviewer wanted to hear in the performance.49
Van Boom’s “Little Karin” variations include an introduction prior to the initial 46 “… sitt exakta, fulländade och lysande föredrag af de äldre Piano-kompositörernas svåraste kompositioner.” Dagligt Allehanda (March 2, 1842): 2. 47 Ibid. 48 “När vi hörde Hr van Boom sist, fanns ännu ingen mirakulös skola, ingen Liszt eller Chopin hade ännu förvridit pianisternas fingrar och lärt de arma två händerna att göra tjenst för fyra.” “Herr van Booms konsert,” Aftonbladet (March 7, 1842): 3. 49 Ibid.
381
statement of the theme, a feature that is relatively rare in variation sets of the Romantic
era; among the pieces surveyed here, introductions are otherwise only found in Chopin
and Lizst. Chopin’s variations on “Der Schweizerbub” and the theme by Moore, though
written in 1824 and 1826, were not published until 1851 and 1865, respectively; Liszt’s
first treatment of the “Ranz des vaches” (1835–36) came out in print sooner (1836),
though at the time it was still called Improvisata and is not likely to have served as a
direct model. Rather, van Boom picked up on a general idea that was in the air, using
the freedom afforded an introduction unfettered by formal constraints to test out
motivic elaborations and expansions in the short term, without committing to working
out any one idea at full variation length. Some ideas (tremolo chords; lyrical figuration;
syncopated accompanying chords; a motivic sequence with “Little Karin” fragment in
the bass, descending by thirds; sudden key changes) foreshadow later events, while
others never return. In fact, the looseness with which van Boom approaches the
introduction applies to his variations on the whole, which contain formal irregularities
pushing them towards the fantasy. In the scheme below (Figure 5.3), digits indicate
variation numbers (which van Boom does not include in the manuscript). “S” is the
initial statement of the theme, “F” marks passages of free writing, and the “||” symbol
shows the placement of double bar lines, while the letters “ex” show extensions to
certain variations.
Intro || S 1 2 3 4 F || 5ex 6 7ex || 8 || F 8ex/fugue 9 10 || coda(F/8)
Figure 5.3: Van Boom, Introduction & variations . . . “Och lilla Karin tjente . . .”, structure
382
The first four variations follow one after the other in a standard manner, but long
passages of free writing (typically involving motivic manipulation of fragments) disrupt
the form after variations four and eight. Variations five and seven have lengthy
extensions, which are not in themselves unusual, but with variation eight, fantasia mode
takes over. After the theme is heard in lightly figured (MH2) form, a two-page free
passage follows (F4), including sequential treatment of fragments, before variation eight
is restated—with an added extension—and then, a three-part fugue using the same
figuration as variation eight (Example 5.10).50 This figuration returns prominently in the
free-form coda as well.
Example 5.10: Van Boom, Introduction & variations . . . “Och lilla Karin tjente . . .” Fugue after restatement of var. 8 on subject of ornamented var. 8 theme, mm. 1–16
50 Van Boom, “Introduction & variations sur l’air suédois,” 20.
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Beethoven set a precedent for fugal writing in folksong variations in “Air
Ecossais,” op. 105, no. 1, where the piano provides a foundational three-part fugue, to
which the flute or violin, if present, provides an optional fourth voice; in general,
however, fugal variations are much more likely to be found in variations on themes that
are either original or derived from non-folk sources.51 If cantus-firmus writing preserves a
basic theme, and melodico-harmonic variations maintain enough elements to serve as a
sort of artificial parallel to the natural process of variation inherent to oral tradition, the
fugue is antithetical to what is known about traditional folk practice of this period.
Ballads do not lend themselves to singing in the round, and even if they did, the
resulting imitative entries are far from equivalent to successive entries of a fugal subject
at different pitch levels, where intervals are adjusted as needed. The decision to include
a fugue, together with other unusual features such as the presence of the introduction
itself, the appearance of extended free passages, and the dominance of figuration from
variation eight across so much of the last portion of the piece, mark van Boom’s
Introduction and Variations on “Little Karin” as fundamentally different from its
counterparts.52
51 Examples include Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses; Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, op. 24 take this process a step further by including a fully fledged fugue as the latter portion of the composition. 52 By the time Knut Håkanson (1887–1929) wrote his Ten Variations and Fugue on a Swedish Folksong (10 variationer och fuga över en svensk folkvisa), op. 37 in 1929, folk melodies were fair game for more contrapuntally rigorous treatment, including two Goldberg-like variations labeled as canons at the fourth and the seventh. Originally published by the Musikaliska Konstföreningen (Stockholm, 1930), the piece has recently been reissued in a revised edition: Magnus Svensson, ed. (Stockholm: Levande Musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, 2017).
384
Fantasies on “Little Karin”
Nomenclature aside, van Boom’s “variations” share formal characteristics with
the three fantasies on the same melody. First used during the Renaissance to denote a
free-form sectional instrumental composition deriving from the composer’s fantasy, the
term fantasia (or fantasy) has been applied to different types of flexible-form
compositions over time. Looking ahead to the nineteenth century, two primary types of
keyboard fantasy developed. On the serious side, composers used fantasias as vehicles
for combining thematic development with virtuoso writing not subject to the strict
formal scheme of sonata writing; fantasias became larger, sometimes included cyclical
elements, and in some cases approached the scale of lengthy multi-movement forms,
with central composers such as Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann leading the way.
But “fantasia” came to apply to a second type of piece as well, the virtuosic treatment of
one or more popular-source themes; opera was the most prominent source, but folk
melodies also generated fantasias, and this is the type to which Swedish composers
responded when writing their fantasies on traditional melodies.53 Other than Edmond
Passy’s early example from 1819, extant fantasies are clustered between 1846 and 1861;
see Table 5.1 above, entries marked “F[antasy].”
53 Occasionally, operatic tunes and folksongs overlap, as in the Danish composer Fritz Andersen’s (1829–1910) Fantasy on Hallström’s Bride of the Mountain King (Den Bjertagne fantasi: Opera af Ivar Hallström; Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, n.d.), which includes the eponymous folksong as the third of three melodies from the opera. However, Andersen’s fantasy clearly violates Luis de Milan’s dictum cited earlier in this paragraph, as large portions of the first five systems (p. 6) are more or less lifted directly from Hallström’s piano score (pp. 308–9), rather than filtering through Andersen’s own creativity. In the end, Andersen completes what Hallström’s character Ulf could not (see Chapter Three above, p. 332): instead of breaking off in the middle of the third strophe (second variation) as Ulf does, Andersen carries the melody to its completion.
385
Van Boom is by far the most active in this genre, with four entries, followed by
Ludvig Norman (his pupil) with two. Other familiar names include Edmond Passy
(1789–1870), the first Swedish virtuoso pianist of international rank (a generation older
than van Boom) and prominent teacher of pupils including Ivar Hallström; Hermann
Berens, whose music for Korp-Kirsti and brief variations on “Little Karin” have been
examined above; and Franz Berwald (1796–1868), the prolific composer in forms large
and small who otherwise interacted surprisingly little with Swedish folk music. Jacob
Axel Josephson (1818–80) held the post of Director musices at Uppsala University for over
thirty years, while Knut Lönngren (1816–74) was Cathedral Organist and Director
musices at the secondary school in Växjö for almost as long.
Unlike variation sets, which treat a single melody, fantasies offer the option of
using multiple source tunes, which is the case in just over half of the pieces surveyed
here. As a result, a broad selection of tunes is included, from older ballads and song-
games to fiddle tunes and lyrical songs that had more recently entered anonymous folk
traditions. Fantasies on just one or two melodies have space for more variations, while
those treating several tunes make more limited use of variation technique.
Continuing the close examination of pieces based on “Little Karin,” Passy and
Lönngren both privilege this ballad by placing it as the first of multiple tunes, while
Norman centers his entire fantasy around this single song. In all three fantasies, the basic
idea of theme and variations is present; Passy and Norman even label certain passages
as numbered variations, explicitly linking their fantasies with the variation genre. Yet
386
variations are embedded within a larger complex in which two other features—motivic
development of fragments and virtuosic writing for its own sake—also take on central
roles. All three composers begin with introductions based on fragments of the main
motive, a section that is relatively rare in “pure” theme-and-variations writing. In
addition, each of these pieces contains passages of free writing, which either use
fragments from the melody or display unrelated brilliant virtuosic passagework,
features that sometimes occur in variations, but much less commonly.
Passy: Grande Fantaisie Followed by a Rondo Allegretto vivace for Piano on Swedish National Airs, op. 6
Edmond Passy wrote his Grande fantaisie around 1819 and then spent two years traveling
across Europe in the early 1820s, performing the piece in several German and French
cities before eventually committing to a final, published version: Fantaisie pour le
Pianoforte sur des airs nationaux suédois (Breifkopf & Härtel, ca. 1825–26).54 The full title of
the autograph, Grande / Fantaisie / Suivie d’un Rondo Allegretto Vivace / pour / le Forte Piano
/ Sur des Airs Nationaux / Suédois, op. 6, may have received an upgrade some time after
its composition, as “Grande” was apparently added later, written in a different, slightly
lighter ink than the rest of the title.
The concept of a grande fantaisie was not unknown in Sweden prior to 1819; a
Grand Fantaisie militaire by the French-German composer Daniel Steibelt (1765–1823), a
resident of St. Petersburg since 1809, is advertised in several newspapers over the period
54 Martin Edin, “Edmond Passy,” trans. Jill Ann Johnson, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2015, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/passy-edmund/.
387
1818–20.55 It is reasonable to expect that Passy may have met Steibelt personally while
living in St. Petersburg from about 1814 to 1817 and studying with John Field, and Passy
is known to have included Steibelt’s music in his repertoire. However, the term grande
fantaisie came into much more common use in the 1830s; Liszt wrote the first of his six
grandes fantaisies for solo piano in 1829, and the four that were published during his
lifetime first appeared in print between 1834 and ca. 1838. Likewise, Chopin wrote his
Grande fantaisie sur des airs polonais, op. 13 between 1828 and 1830 and published it in
1834, the same year in which the Grande fantaisie et variations sur ‘Norma’, op. 12 by
Sigismond Thalberg (1812–71) was issued. Perhaps Passy added the adjective Grande
around this time in order to capitalize on popular trends from continental Europe.
Passy’s grande fantasie uses four tunes in succession: the ballad “Little Karin”; an
unidentified fiddle tune; the now-familiar “Necken’s Polska” (a melody first published
in Traditions 2, no. 15); and a fiddle tune labeled as coming from Dalarna (Traditions 1,
no. 9), which became one of the more popular folk tunes in works for the stage. The two
songs widely associated with texts, ”Little Karin” and “Necken’s Polska,” each have one
statement and two labeled variations, followed by freer writing, while the two
instrumental-only tunes move directly to freer writing after the initial statements.
55 Steibelt spent the last fourteen years of his life as a musician and composer in St. Petersburg. On the way there, he traveled through several cities on the eastern side of the Baltic Sea, rather than the alternate sea route via Stockholm; however, his relative proximity to Sweden from 1809 to 1823—in the shared space of the fringes of northern Europe—may have increased interest in his works. For a basic biography, see Frank Dawes, Karen A. Hagberg, and Stephan D. Lindeman, “Steibelt, Daniel,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), last modified 2001, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/26624. The first notice of his Grand Fantaisie militaire in Sweden appeared in Dagligt Allehanda (August 5, 1818): 4.
388
Overall, the ballad occupies a larger space than the other tunes, mainly because it also
provides material for the introduction. In fact, the introduction serves as an expanded
variation with interpolations occuring before the standard statement of the theme itself.
Unlike typical introductions, which mix one or more fragments from a theme
with more generic virtuoso writing, Passy strategically employs fragments in the order
in which they appear in the intact tune:
free writing (16 mm.) “And little Karin served…” (6 mm.) “in the young king’s court.” (3 mm.) “She shone like a star…” (4 mm.) free writing (5 mm.) “among all the small maidens.” (5 mm.). Furthermore, the type of motivic development in each section corresponds with
the appropriate words in the first strophe of the ballad, which was printed earlier in
Example 4.20. Below, Example 5.11 shows the second half of Passy’s introduction, the
portion associated with the entire ballad melody.56 Boxed text indicates the first
occurrence of each motive associated with a phrase of the text.
56 Edmond Passy, “Grande fantasie suivie d’un rondo sur des airs nationaux suédois,” op. 6, Manuscript score, ca. 1819, Z/Sv, Passy, E, Op: VI, 1941/469, S-Skma.
389
Example 5.11: Passy, Grande fantasie suivie d’un rondo sur des airs nationaux suédois (op. 6), Introduction, mm. 17–39
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[example continued from previous page]
In the first part, “And little Karin served,” the gesture for the word “served”
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confirmed by a register change leaping up on the word “star” (stjerna). From this point
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phrase four, “among all of the little maidens,” is hinted at through pitches in key
structural points marked with arrows, although the open-ended dominant harmony on
the final chord precludes the arrival of the expected last pitch of the song (F). This
systematic approach to the “Little Karin” tune in the introduction to the earliest
extended piano essay on the ballad is not matched in any of the later compositions on
the subject.
Norman: Fantasy on the Folksong “Little Karin”
Documentary evidence suggests that the melody to “Little Karin” inspired particularly
successful improvisations. A newspaper report of an improvisation performed by
fourteen-year-old Ludvig Norman in February 1846—the same year in which he copied
out his Fantaisie—praises the young pianist’s “good ideas and a resourcefulness to
combine them successfully that is truly far beyond his age.”57 Evidently, the Karin
melody brought out the best of Norman’s ability, as the reviewer goes on to say that the
other improvisation he performed that day, on several popular opera tunes, betrayed his
youthful inexperience.58 Similarly, an article from 1834 speaks well of an improvisation
by the organist Gustaf Mankell, which won the reviewer over despite his personal
antipathy towards variations on the whole: “In general, we do not care for the variation
genre, and it is especially unsuitable for organ. But [Mankell’s] treatment of Little Karin
57 “[Improvisationen . . . ] röjde både goda idéer och en fyndighet att lyckligt kombinera dem, som verkligen är långt öfver hans ålder.” “Herr Fröbergs soiré till förmån för den tolfårige violoncellspelaren A. Widerberg,” Aftonbladet (February 24, 1846): 2. 58 For further accounts of Norman’s abilities as an improviser, including praise by Erik Gustaf Geijer for the “musical instinct” (musikalisk instink) of then nine-year-old Norman in 1841, see Herman Glimstedt, “Ludvig Normans brev till Ludvig Josephson,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning särtryck (1931): 8–10.
392
was rather successful; this did not entirely strike us as the case with the famous drinking
song” that Mankell also chose as a subject of variation.59
Norman’s improvisation-turned-fantasy is clearly a student piece. The cover of
the unpublished manuscript is copied out in decorative Gothic lettering, with the name
of the dedicatee, “Demoiselle A Örnberg,” embellished with extra care.60 Formally, the
piece most closely resembles the variations by his teacher, Jan van Boom. To be sure,
Norman’s introduction is much less ornate—Norman was recognized as a piano
prodigy, but his playing was never on a level with van Boom, and certainly not yet by
age fourteen; but both pieces share a structure of mostly clear-cut variations, with some
longer transition passages of freer writing, and both bring back a complete, slow
statement of the theme immediately prior to a final Presto flourish.
Lönngren: Fantasy on Swedish Folksongs
If Norman’s Fantasy was a short-lived phenomenon covered in passing in the press, even
less is known about the Fantasi öfver Svenska folkvisor by Knut Lönngren (1816–74).
Educated at the Royal Academy of Music, Lönngren served as organist at
Skeppsholmskyrkan for several years before assuming the post of cathedral organist in
Växjö in 1848, where he also taught music at the secondary school, became an assistant
telegraph operator in 1859, and founded the Växjö Song Association (Växjö sångförening)
59 “Variationsmaneret älska wi i allmänhet icke, och minst lämpar det sig för Orgel. Behandlingen af ‘Liten Karin’ war doch rätt wäl lyckad; icke alldeles så föreföll det oß med den bekanta dryckeswisan [Swearne fordomdags].” Dagligt Allehanda (May 26, 1834): 2. 60 Possibly Aurora Magdalena Örnberg (1816/18–1907), wife of Finnish-Swedish poet Emil von Quanten (1827–1903).
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for male choral song the following year.61 The Fantasi can be dated to between 1846 and
1850, although it is unclear whether it pre- or post-dates his move to Växjö in 1848. The
third tune, “I Want to Go Herding” (“Jag vill gå vall”) sets the early boundary in 1846.62
In June 1850, Lönngren’s wife, Fanny Lönngren (née Grell, ?–1879), performed the piece
in a public concert.63
Chopin cast a long shadow across nineteenth-century piano music, and his
influence reaches to Lönngren’s introduction, the longest section of which transforms
“Little Karin” into an unlabeled polonaise. Lönngren draws heavily on the fantasia’s
ability to depart from established forms. Like Passy, he includes a small number of
variations on each tune; but he does not number them, and he does not treat the tunes
strictly in a one-at-a-time medley format. Unfortunately, the overall structure is unclear,
as the manuscript is missing one or more pages after the tenth page.64
The most ingenious passage is also among the simplest in texture: Lönngren
61 Very little is known about Knut Lönngren today; the detailed obituary in his local newspaper refers to him as “one of our community’s most beloved members” (“en bland [detta samhälles] älskligaste medlemmar”).61 Lönngren was not alone in his dual roles as Cathedral organist and telegraph operator; the composer Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929) held the same occupations. Organist at the Finnish Church in Stockholm since 1861, Andrée started working as a telegraph assistant in 1865, until she was appointed as Cathedral organist in Gothenburg two years later. Andrée’s achievements are all the more remarkable considering that she was not only the first woman granted permission to hold any organist position (let alone Cathedral organist) and a member of the first class of women allowed to train as telegraph assistants—she was also instrumental in causing these legal changes to come about. See Eva Öhrström, “Elfrida Andrée,” trans. Roger Tanner, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/andree-elfrida/. 62 Dybeck, Svenska vallvisor och hornlåtar, 30–31. 63 Wexjöbladet (May 31, 1850): 2. 64 The music jumps suddenly from a harmonic variation on the second tune, “En gång i bredd med mig” in 3/4 time, to an in medias res return of a motive from “Little Karin” in 4/4 or 12/8 with no change in time signature. Knut Lönngren, “Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor componerad för piano forte,” Manuscript score, [1846–50], Sv. Saml. Pfte 2/h, P/Sv, S-Skma.
394
notes the harmonic similarity between the other two tunes used and superimposes the
one upon the other, exchanging registers at the mid-point so that one song begins in the
soprano and ends in the tenor, while the other song moves in the opposite direction
(Example 5.12).65
Tune A: En gång i bredd med mig presten skall fråga dig om du vill hafva din utvalda vän. Om du då sviker mig, lik mycket gör det mig, nog får jag den igen, som älskar mig.
One day, when you stand beside me, the priest will ask you if you will marry your beloved. If you should deceive me then, it’s all the same to me; I’ll be able to find another who loves me.66
Tune B: Jag vill gå vall Hela dagen all Uppå den långa måsen. Dagen är lång, Magen är svång, Lite’ la’ mor i påsen.67
I want to go herding All day on the great marsh. The day is long, My stomach is famished, Mother put little [food] into my bag.
Example 5.12: Lönngren, Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor, 5r, systems 5–6
Initially, Tune A, “One Day, When You Stand Beside Me” takes precedence; this section
65 Knut Lönngren, “Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor,” 5r. 66 The published English singing translation by Henry Grafton Chapman takes unusually great liberties, entirely changing the song’s message: “When thou stand’st up with me, / Will the priest ask of thee, / If thou wilt take me, to love me alone. / Shouldst thou deceive me then, / Never thenceforth again / Should I find any to love, no, not one.” Hägg, Songs of Sweden, 66. 67 I am grateful to Jörgen Adolfsson and the Center for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research (Svenskt visarkivet) for assistance interpreting dialect vocabulary.
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follows an initial statement of and a variation on that melody; it begins here in the right
hand; and its pitches are unaltered. Tune B, “I Want to Go Herding,” is subordinate,
beginning in the tenor and having just a few altered pitches when compared with
Dybeck’s published version. However, the three measures of untexted melody at the
end of “I Want to Go Herding” stand alone as their own section, marked off by double
bars and unencumbered by the otherwise predominant “One Day.” Earlier, it has been
argued that the constructed variation in the manner of art music is related on some level
to the natural process of variation inherent in the transmission and performance of folk
music. The idea of layering two unrelated songs, however, has no precedent in
traditional practice. In this fantasy, Lönngren takes his source materials one step further
away from the remaining vestiges of folk practice (as they were understood at the time)
and towards the process of musical abstraction.
Conclusion
Variations and fantasies for piano provided composers the simplest, most
economical means for expanding a folk melody into a large-scale work, whether
standing by itself or in conjunction with a small number of other tunes. The widespread
availability of pianos in middle- and upper-class homes meant that music for the serious
amateur pianist had a substantial market, while the popularity of folksongs in general—
spurred by early anthologies, and augmented by choral, theatrical and concert
performances—ensured an interest in complex solo treatments in the mid-1840s through
at least the mid-1860s. Analysis of variations on “Little Karin” by Hermann Berens, Ivar
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Hallström, Jan van Boom, and Friedrich Kuhlau has demonstrated a wide variety of
variation styles that fits well into the spectrum of variation sets by the major nineteenth-
century contributors to the genre, from Beethoven through Brahms. Fantasies on the
same melody by Edmond Passy, Ludvig Norman and Knut Lönngren mix examples of
variation-type writing with free composition. Notably, the piano sonata—another genre
in which themes are stated and then developed, and which offers opportunities for
borrowed and original themes to interact with passages of freer writing—was not at all a
locus for folk themes. While some variations and fantasies developed melodies or
fragments thereof in passages reminiscent of sonata development, the strict model of
exposition-development-recapitulation does not occur. A similar demarcation of forms
obtains in orchestral music on folk themes, where single-movement pieces such as
rhapsodies and overtures were strongly favored over multi-movement symphonies.
When writing larger compositions based on traditional music, composers established—
and then followed—their own traditions.
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6 Dancing in the chamber: Instrumental music for small ensembles
Of all the types of music studied in this project, chamber music remains the most
resistant to the influence of folk material. String quartets and other configurations of
one-on-a-part music for a small number of performers were cultivated throughout the
century, yet the number of pieces traceable to traditional Swedish melodies is small.
Furthermore, documentary evidence of chamber music activity is notoriously sparse,
especially regarding any specific work, as most “performances” consisted of groups of
musical friends playing through pieces for their own enjoyment, without leaving behind
concert programs, reviews, or other official documentation for researchers to study.1
Both spheres of performance for chamber music—private and semi-private
gatherings in individual homes, and public performances on concert stages—are loci for
other types of compositions based in traditional music. Countless volumes of folksongs
arranged for voice(s) and piano or solo piano saturate the former, while orchestral music
based in folk themes, sometimes written in conjunction with theatrical works, was
plentiful in the latter. One specialized type of chamber music ensemble, the male
quartet, operated within both private and public spheres and enjoyed an ever-growing
repertoire of folksong arrangements. Yet instrumental chamber music resisted this
1 Marie Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music: Composers, Consumers, Communities (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 6–7. In Sweden, chamber music research benefits from the exceptionally well-documented gatherings hosted by wholesaler Johan Mazer in the 1820s and early 1830s; see below, p. 400.
398
trend; among the seventeen examples of chamber music using Swedish folk melodies
that I have located, the most common type is for a single solo instrument (violin or cello)
with piano accompaniment—a clear parallel to pieces for solo voice with piano, and not
the “conversation among equals” often ascribed to the string quartet, the most highly
regarded of chamber genres.2
Hitherto in the present analysis, folksong has dominated the narrative of folk-
derived music in nineteenth-century Sweden, a trend mirrored in scholarship of this
field at large; in the case of chamber music, however, the primary source of inspiration
comes from instrumental dance tunes. Ballad melodies, the staple for so many
compositions based in folk music, are quite rare in chamber music; only one
composition in the present corpus—a set of simple settings for piano trio by Bengt
Wilhelm Hallberg (1824–83)—uses ballads of the type originally published in Hæffner’s
musical supplement to Geijer-Afzelius (1814–18).3 In addition, melodies from other types
of texted folksongs are only of secondary importance; close associations between
theatrical and orchestral music may have encouraged the creation of orchestral
renditions of vocal music, but chamber music had no such natural connections.4
2 Mara Parker expands Goethe’s familiar paradigm of quartet as conversation to distinguish four different types of discourse (lecture, polite conversation, debate, and conversation) in quartets during the half-century prior to the present study; see her monograph The String Quartet, 1750–1797: Four Types of Musical Conversation (Routledge, 2016), xi–xiii. 3 Hallberg’s manuscript contains settings of a single strophe of each of ten folksongs, including two ballads. In addition to a fairly standard “Little Karin,” Hallberg uses a melodic variant of “Sven in the Rose Garden” that is rather different from the familiar one published in Geijer-Afzelius, citing an unpublished manuscript by “Fru W[endela] H[ebbe]” as his source. Bengt Hallberg, [“Folkvisor i arr. för piano, violin och violoncell. Defekt”], manuscript score, 1844 or later, Bengt Hallberg samling, S-Skma. 4 Marie Sumner Lott points out an important exception, the arrangement of entire operas and other stage works for string quartet, a practice that is little-known today; however, this does not seem to have been a
399
Composers do use melodies from a few other well-known folksongs not associated with
dance tunes, including the famous “Song of Värmland,” but only three of these appear
in more than a single chamber composition.
In chamber music, weakened voices give way to dancing feet. The primary
source of tunes I have identified in instrumental chamber music is the anonymously
published four-volume set Traditions of Swedish Folk-Dances (1814–15) traceable to Arvid
August Afzelius and Olof Åhlström.5 This collection, which has received much less
scholarly coverage than the Geijer-Afzelius ballad collection, provides the first known
instance of publication for tunes found in nine of the fourteen chamber pieces that can
be securely dated to after its publication; seven pieces use one tune, one uses three, and
one uses five different tunes first printed in Traditions.
In her study of string quartet iconography in the 1800s, Nancy November argues
that French quartet activity generally embodied the drama of a “theater piece” while
German quartet activity tended to center around the ideal of a “pure” or “true” string
quartet that, like a Cabinetstück, was “an exemplary artwork reserved for the private
contemplation of a connoisseur . . . in a choice, secluded collection, the Kunstkammer,
removed from the public’s gaze.”6 I propose that a subset of Swedish chamber music
common practice for Swedish theatrical works. See The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 46. 5 Traditions is available in a modern facsimile edition containing all four volumes of the original, with an afterword by Bengt R. Jonsson: Afzelius and Åhlström, Traditioner av svenska folkdansar. 6 Nancy November, “Theater Piece and Cabinetstück: Nineteenth-Century Visual Ideologies of the String Quartet,” Music in Art 29, no. 1/2 (2004): 144.
400
repertoire charts a different path and can be likened to a stylized dance floor, a site of
potential—though not actual—movement to music. After introducing typical performers
and performance situations, I analyze selected repertoire to show how composers
integrated traditional melodies into various types of chamber compositions, with a
special focus on dance melodies.
Contexts for performance
Chamber music in Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, was largely an activity cultivated by
men belonging to the upper and middle classes.7 Some practitioners were professional
musicians, such as Christian Friedrich Müller (1752–1827), concert master of the Royal
Court Orchestra, who participated in a performance of his own “violin quartet” in a
benefit concert for clarinettist Bernhard Crusell in 1801.8 Many others were talented
amateur musicians who earned a living through other professions, of which the
wholesale trader Johan Mazer (1790–1847) is a prime example.9
Mazer, a capable cellist in his own right, hosted regular chamber music
gatherings at his summer home on Djurgården. Thorough records systematically
document 342 meetings between 1823 and 1832, according to a journal that lists the date,
the repertoire performed, and the performers for each individual piece.10 Over these ten
7 Jonsson and Tegen, “Musiklivet privat och offentligt,” 113. On this situation in (German-speaking) Europe more generally, see Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 4–9. 8 “Spectacler,” Dagligt Allehanda (February 5, 1801): 2. 9 For more on Mazer and his chamber music activity, see Jonsson and Tegen, “Musiklivet privat och offentligt,” 113. 10 “Musikalisk journal för Bolaget på Djurgården,” journal, 1823–1832, Mazerska kvartettsällskapet archive, Ö1, Vol. 2, S-Skma. After Mazer’s death, chamber music activity continued in the form of the Mazer String
401
years, a total of fifty-four performers were involved, including well-heeled amateurs
(such as Johan Anders Biörck, a judge and member of parliament ), music teachers and
composers (Adolf Fredrik Lindblad), members of the Royal Court Orchestra (Andreas
Randel), and visiting musicians (the German pianist-composer Karl Schwenke).11
Although string quartets in the Viennese Classical spirit dominated Mazer’s repertoire,
music for other configurations and by more contemporary composers was also read.
Most known chamber pieces based on Swedish folk music had not yet been
composed by 1832, when the journal ends, but Mazer took on this repertoire on at least
one documented occasion, with the performance of some “Svenska visor par Bd.
Romberg” listed in the journal on June 29, 1829. Romberg has a similarly titled
Divertimento über schwedische Lieder possibly written as early as 1813, but it was not
published until either 1825 or as late as 1837, and its scoring for cello and piano does not
align with the five perfomers listed. More likely, the piece in question is his flute quintet
on an unidentified “Finnish and Swedish” theme.12
While the men who played at Mazer’s gatherings and in so many other chamber
Quartet Society (Mazerska kvartettsällskapet), which continues to this day—as does the Eugène Sundberg Quartet Society (Eugène Sundbergs kvartettsällskapet) founded in Gothenburg in 1884 in the spirit of its predecessor in Stockholm. 11 In addition to Mazer’s gatherings, Signe Rotter discusses other avid chamber music organizers and participants in Sweden, primarily Stockholm; see Signe Rotter, Studien zu den Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 27–30. 12 Divertimento per flauto con accompagnamento di due violini viola e violoncello sopra un tema Finlandico et Sueco, op. 27 (Lipsia: C. F. Peters, [1817]). The Djurgården journal lists [Andreas] Gehrman [cello], [Olof] Willman [violin], [Per Wilhelm] Grubb [viola], [Axel Gottlieb] Bergström [violin?], and Mazer [violin] as performers. Bergström is known to have played violin and cello; perhaps one of the three violinists played the “flute” part. For more on Bergström, see Tobias Norlind, Allmänt musiklexikon (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1916), 1:88.
402
music contexts were of different backgrounds, they shared a common gender. Likewise,
in her memoirs, upper-class salon hostess Malla Silfverstolpe reports listening to
quartets on several occasions beginning in 1814, always performed by men.13 The near-
complete domination of string chamber music by men continued through at least the
1870s, and maybe even the 1890s, according to Marie Sumner Lott, who summarizes the
situation in much of German-speaking Europe as follows: “Despite a few noteworthy
exceptions, women musicians typically participated in chamber performances as
pianists, as singers, or as listeners,” rather than as string players.14 Following this model,
eleven-year-old Emelie Uggla’s participation in a concert performance of a Beethoven
quintet in Stockholm on February 22, 1831, was possible because she was a pianist.15 But
there were some “noteworthy exceptions” as well, such as the two female violinsts who
were invited to perform in one of Mazer’s gatherings.16
13 Malla Silfverstolpe lists the performers by surname alone, a practice she reserves for men; when referring to a woman by surname, she invariably includes a title, such as “Mrs.” (fru) or “Countess” (grefvinnan). The quartet performers identified by name are [Olof] Willman, Wennerberg, Ekbäck, von Mehlen, [Adolf Fredrik] Lindblad, Lundholm, Moberg, [Jakob Axel] Gillberg, and Ström. Malla Montgomery-Silfverstolpe, Memoarer, 2:219, 3:105, 3:181. 14 Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 15. Later in the century, several Swedish women—including Elfrida Andrée, Valborg Aulin, Amanda Maier-Röntgen, Helena Munktell, Laura Netzel, and Ika Peyron—actively fostered chamber music as composers, although I have only found one example that quotes folk music, the Schwedische Weisen und Tänze für Violine und Clavier, op. 6, jointly credited to Maier-Röntgen and her husband, Julius Röntgen (1882). 15 Although a brief review in Aftonbladet (February 24, 1831, p. 4) specifies a quintet, Jonsson and Tegen list the piece as a piano quartet in E-flat major. This could be the Quintet in Eb for piano and winds, op. 16, of which Beethoven also made an arrangement for piano quartet; both versions were published in Vienna in 1801. 16 Eva Block mentions two women, but does not name them, in “Johan Mazer,” Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (1985–87): 25:294, accessed February 1, 2018, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/Presentation.aspx?id=9216. One likely candidate is Lovisa Charlotta Borgman (1798–1884), who performed publicly in the 1820s before marrying Johan Anders Biörck, a regular participant in Mazer’s gatherings; see Martin Tegen and Leif Jonsson, “Musiken, kulturen och samhället — En översikt i decennier,” in Musiken i Sverige III (see Chapter One, n. 16), 26.
403
Another exception is the Czech-born violinist Wilma (Wilhelmina) Neruda
(1838–1911), who first traveled to Stockholm in 1861 on an extended Scandinavian tour
with her two string-playing siblings. They adapted their repertoire for local audiences,
as evidenced by the “Swedish folksongs, arranged for two violins and cello” that they
performed in a public soirée in Stockholm in 1862.17 Upon marrying Ludvig Norman,
she settled in Sweden around 1864, often performing in chamber music soirées
alongside her teaching duties at the Royal Academy of Music.18 Although her ties with
the country diminished after she separated from Norman and moved away from
Stockholm in 1870, her fame as a performer continued to increase.19
Chamber repertoire
In the nineteenth century, chamber music based on Swedish folk themes falls into three
stages that relate in part to trends on the continent, while also diverging from central
European developments. Figure 6.1 shows the approximate date of composition for each
piece, as well as the number of performers and whether or not the work was published
(which, in some cases, occurred quite a while after its initial composition). Vertically
stacked numbers show that two pieces appeared in the same year.
17 The performance was announced in Aftonbladet (February 8, 1862): 1. 18 “Neruda, bömisk musikerfamilj. 1. Vilhelmina (Wilma),” Nordisk familjebok: Konversationslexikon och realencycklopedi, 2nd ed., ed. Theodor Westrin (Stockholm: Nordisk familjeboks förlag, 1909), 19:793–4. 19 See, for example, the engraving of Madame Norman-Néruda performing as first violinist in a quartet with Louis Ries (violin 2), Ludwig Straus (viola) and Alfredo Piatti (cello) originally printed in The Illustrated London News (March 1872) and reprinted in November, “Theater Piece and Cabinetstück,” 144.
404
2, 3, 4, 5 number of performers (duo, trio, quartet, quintet) italics foreign composer who did not settle in Sweden
__ work eventually published, perhaps at a later date ( ) work presumed lost
Figure 6.1: Chamber works on Swedish folk melodies for two to five players
Using a more restrictive definition of chamber music as compositions for three to
eight players, Marie Sumner Lott has shown that, in German-speaking regions, chamber
arrangements of folk music only really became a factor in the last thirty years of the
century, thanks in large part to the thirteen volumes of settings of German and other
European folksongs by Moritz Kässmayer (1831–84).20 This trend holds true for Sweden,
as the two duos by Prussian-born Max Bruch on Swedish dances date from the last
decade of the century. Another German contribution is visible at the beginning of the
timeline, with three pieces by Bernhard Romberg—one written by 1813/14, one
published in 1817, and a third that potentially dates between 1813 and the 1830s. None
of these three pieces references tunes printed in Geijer-Afzelius or Traditions; in fact, one
certainly predates the publication of both collections, and the other two might possibly
as well. As an outsider writing without the aid of anthologies and before the concept of
“folk music” had coalesced in Sweden, Romberg gathered his tunes from unknown
20 Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 73.
1810
1815
1820
1825
1830
1835
1840
1845
1850
1855
1860
1865
1870
1875
1880
1885
1890
1895
1900
2 2 3 2 5 2 2 2 3 5 5 (3)2 2 2 4 2
405
sources. Of at least eight separate melodies, I can only identify two; the others may come
from pieces such as those in Carl Envallsson’s lost collection of “Swedish National
melodies” used in light musical plays in the later 1700s.21
Once the “outside” compositions by German composers are accounted for, the
main period of activity by Swedish composers shrinks to approximately 1831–64, with
the larger ensembles (trios and quintets) falling in a narrower band between 1844 and
1864—significantly earlier than occurred in German lands.22 However, the interval
between the initial major folk music publications in 1814 and the uptick in chamber
music compositions based thereon is thirty years, the same length of time that passed
between the first publication of German anthologies with music in the early 1840s and
the systematic production of folk-based chamber music beginning in the 1870s.
Although the number of chamber works based on Swedish folk themes is
limited, the selection of melodies used is unusually broad. Whereas published piano-
vocal collections and male choral performances helped steer the public toward a limited
number of “top hits” among folksongs, tunes for dancing had a broader base from
which to draw with less widespread public agreement about favorite numbers. In
contrast to piano fantasies and variations, which typically treat the most well-known
songs, chamber music more commonly introduces tunes with presumably lower rates of
21 The identifiable tunes are Bellman’s Fredmans Epistel no. 34, “Ack vad för en usel koja” (“Oh, What a Wretched Hut”) and the “Poultry-woman’s Song.” For Envallsson’s collection, see Massengale, “Carl Envallsson and Swedish ‘National Music,’” 381–82. 22 Justification for listing Oscar Byströms Quartetto Svedese under the date of its revised version (1895) rather than its initial version (1856) is given below, p. 414.
406
audience familiarity.23 Table 6.1 lists instrumental chamber works based on Swedish folk
melodies, including pieces by the German composers Bernhard Romberg and Max
Bruch; when possible, tunes referenced have been identified.
Table 6.1: Chamber works based on Swedish folktunes
Composer Instruments
Title Date Tune(s) [? = unidentified tune or tunes]
Romberg, B. 2: vc pf
Capriccio über schwedische Volkslieder, op. 28
1813? “Ack, vad för en usel koja,” ?
2: vc pf Divertimento üb. schwed. Lieder, op. 42 1813? “Hönsgummans visa, “ ? 5: fl + SQ Divertimento Finlandico et Sueco, op. 27 1817 ? Ahlström, J. N. 2: vc pf
Capriccio sur un air suedois, op. 3
by 1831?
“Sinclairsvisan”/”La folia”
Randel, A. 2: v pf
Potpourri sur des airs Suédois
by 1831
Traditions 1.9, ?
2: v v Fantasie öfver Wermländska Polskor 1837 ? 2: v pf Fantasie öfver Svenska Folkvisor 1843 “Om sommaren sköna,” “Värm-
landsvisan,” Trad. 1.15, 1.19, 2.15 (“Necken’s polska”), ?
Berens, H. 5: SQ + pf
Fantasi öfver svenska visor
1848
“Och minns du,” Trad. 1.15, 1.19, “Friarevisan,” ?
Hallberg, B. W. 3: v vc pf
[Folkvisor i arr]
1844 or later
“Så tager jag,” “Liten Karin,” “Om dagen,” “Gangarpilten,” Trad. 4.3 (“Domaredansen”), “Sven i Ro-sengård,” 3 non-Swedish tunes, ?
5: fl + SQ Divertissement af Svenska Folk-Melodier 1854 Trad. 4.3 (“Domaredansen”), “Om sommaren sköna,” Lilla Carl, Värmlandsvisan, Trad. 2.15 (“Neckens polska”), ?
Norman, L. 2: v v Daldans after 1858? Trad. 1.15, 1.19 3: v v vc Folksongs for piano trio 1862 composition lost? 3: v v vc Dalvisa 1863 “Dalvisa”
23 This parallels an important difference between participatory vocal and dance music derived from folk sources in this era: a person must know the words and the melody of a given song in order to sing along, while a dancer need only recognize the rhythmic pattern and phrase structure belonging to a known dance type; foreknowledge of a particular melody is irrelevant.
407
Composer Instruments
Title Date Tune(s) [? = unidentified tune or tunes]
Maier-Röntgen, 2: v pf
A. Schwedische Weisen und Tänze, op. 6 (with J. Röntgen)
1882
Trad. 2.15 (“Neckens polska”), Ahlström24, Rosenberg25
Bruch 2: v pf
Swedish Dances, op. 63
1892
“Mandom, mod,” “Jössehärads-polska,” Trad. 1.1,3,13,16; 2.8. ?
2: vc pf Four Pieces for Cello, op. 70 1896 Trad. 1.8 Byström, O. 4: SQ
Quartetto Svedese
1895
“Oss kristna bör tro och besinna,” “Den blomstertid,” “Lætabundus”
In all, seven extant works for three or more players have been identified, which will now
be presented in more detail.
Trios: Hallberg, Norman (and Schubert)
For a long time, it was thought that Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-Flat Major, op. 100
(D929) quoted a Swedish folksong. The misleading evidence comes from a recollection
by Leopold von Sonnleithner (1797–1873), a personal friend of Schubert:
The famous singer, Josef Siboni, at that time director of the Conservatory in Copenhagen, had a pupil, Herr [Isak Albert] Berg, a young [Swedish] tenor of remarkable talent. . . . This Berg (who later on was Jenny Lind’s first teacher) came to Vienna in the winter of 1827–28 and had an introduction to the Misses Fröhlich (former pupils of Siboni’s) at whose house he often sang to a small circle. He sang Swedish folksongs extremely well, and Schubert, who heard him on one of these occasions, was quite enchanted with these Swedish songs. He asked for a copy of them and used the best of them as themes for the E-flat Trio.26
24 Nos. 160, 167, 171, and 216 in Jakob Niklas Ahlström, 220 Svenska folkdansar arrangerade för forte-piano, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Gust. Rylander, 1840–42). There is some overlap between these tunes and those in Rosenberg’s collection in the following note. 25 Nos. 20, 31, 59, 70, 84, 109, 139 and 147 in A. G. Rosenberg, 160 polskor, visor och danslekar, upptecknade i Södermanland 1823–1835 samt satte för pianoforte, andra uppl. (Stockholm, 1876). 26 Quoted in Christopher H. Gibbs, “Schubert’s Tombeau de Beethoven: Decrypting the Piano Trio in E-Flat Major, op. 100,” in Franz Schubert and His World, ed. Christopher H. Gibbs and Morten Solvik (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 264. Emphasis added. The original passage from which Gibbs makes this translation is found in Otto Erich Deutsch, Schubert: Memoirs by His Friends, trans. Rosamond Ley and John Nowell (London, 1958), 115.
408
Christopher H. Gibbs has shown that knowledge of the identity of the quoted song or
songs was soon lost, and scholars mistakenly connected the dots in Sonnleithner’s
statement to conclude that Schubert used one or more Swedish folksongs in that trio,
until Manfred Willfort revealed the actual source in 1978: an art song called
“See, the Sun Is Setting” (“Se solen sjunker”).27
Early on, there was some knowledge, apparently later lost, that Isak Albert Berg
(1803–86) had written the song. This attribution is corroborated by the Center for
Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research (Svenskt visarkiv), which reports that “Se solen
sjunker” is said to have been sung by Berg in Vienna in 1827 and inspired Schubert’s
second movement of the piano trio; that the song’s manuscript is owned by the
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna; and that the Center has no direct knowledge of
the song (despite its substantial folksong holdings), which is known to them only
through requests by patrons for more information.28 If Berg composed the song during
his sojourn abroad and did not bring a copy when he returned to Stockholm to embark
on his successful career as a court singer, it likely would have dropped off the radar
altogether were it not for Schubert’s borrowing.
Now that the authorship of Schubert’s source has been established, the folksong
topos returns obliquely, in the form of melodic similarity. Berg’s song (Example 6.1, top
half) contains many features not typical of Swedish folksong as understood in the 1820s,
27 Ibid., 264–66. 28 “Se solen sjunker ner bak höga bergens topp,” Visarkivets webbkataloger, accessed February 1, 2018, https://katalog.visarkiv.se/lib/views/visolat/ShowRecord.aspx?id=1025785.
409
such as the descending octave leaps in the first line and the even more technically
challenging leaps of an ascending minor tenth in the second line. Yet the first four
measures present a simplified version of a folksong melody (“Thus I Take My Rifle”)
that almost certainly predates its first appearance in print in 1855 (Example 6.1, bottom
half).29
“Se solen sjunker,” Isak Albert Berg
“Så tager jag min bössa,” folksong
Example 6.1: Berg, “See, the Sun Is Setting,” and the folksong “Thus I Take my Rifle”
Even if Schubert did not directly borrow a folk melody, perhaps there were bits and
pieces of one underlying the composed song that inspired portions of the Piano Trio in
E-flat Major.
Moving to domestic production, the trios by Bengt Hallberg and Ludvig Norman
29 A facsimile of Berg’s autograph is reprinted in Gibbs, “Schubert’s Tombeau de Beethoven,” 265. The melody of the second example has been transposed down from G minor: “Thus I Take My Rifle” (“Så tager jag min bössa”), in Ahlström, 300 Nordiska folkvisor, 42.
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differ substantically in format, scope, and target performers, although each is restricted
to settings of a single stanza or iteration of a tune. Hallberg sets ten songs—the first
seven of which are Swedish—for violin, cello and piano. These trios leave behind no
paper trail other than the autograph, and an exhaustive search of newspaper databases
has yet to turn up any reference to public performance.30 The manuscript, which is
incomplete (No. 10, “Bohemian Hymn,” cuts off mid-phrase at the bottom of the last
extant page), does not appear on Hallberg’s Swedish Musical Heritage page, where the
surprisingly lengthy list of compositions by this little-known composer is limited to
“preserved complete compositions.”31 The piece cannot even be dated more securely
than a terminus post quem of 1844.32
Unlike the piano fantasies on multiple tunes analyzed above, Hallberg’s ten
settings stand as separate entities that are not elaborated upon or stitched together in
any way. In general, he treats the three instruments as independent forces; the melody is
nearly always in the violin and only rarely doubled by the piano, and the cello usually
has its own bass line that does not duplicate the left-hand part of the piano. “Little
Karin” (Example 6.2) demonstrates a typical texture, in which the violin and cello form a
harmonically sufficient outer framework, while the piano fills in the inner voices.
30 Hallberg, “[Folkvisor i arr.].” 31 Sverker Jullander, “Bengt Wilhelm Hallberg,” trans. Nicole Vickers, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hallberg-bengt-wilhelm/. 32 No. 8, purportedly from “Arabia,” traveled a circuitous route from Friedrich Burgmüller’s ballet music for La Péri (1843) via the Variations sur un thême arabe by Henri Herz (1844). Hallberg, [Folkvisor i arr.].
411
Example 6.2: Hallberg, “Little Karin” for piano trio, no. 2 in [Folksongs, Arranged]
As with the rest of Hallberg’s trio settings, no individual part in “Little Karin” presents
any technical challenges for the performer; the arrangements are well-suited to
Hausmusik as a three-dimensional instrumental counterpart to the settings for piano and
voice that were so popular among amateur musicians. Even though his selections are
more firmly anchored around texted folksongs than is generally typical of chamber
music as a whole, Hallberg does include one of the few texted dances originally printed
in Traditions (4.3), the so-called “Judge’s Dance” (“Domaredansen”), helping to raise the
profile of dance music in chamber contexts.
Unlike with Hallberg’s trios, both the date and the intended performers for
Norman’s Dalvisa, his trio setting of a single song, are clear: he signed the autograph
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“Copenhagen, January 2, 1863,” just four days before the Neruda siblings (including his
future wife, Wilhelmina) performed a concert in that city.33 A Swedish paper ran a notice
a few weeks later, confirming that the trio played “a potpourri of Swedish folksongs
arranged by [Royal Court Orchestra] concertmaster Ludvig Norman”—very possibly
the same trio settings performed without attribution already in 1862.34 This time,
however, the folksongs included the brand-new arrangement in question, “a dalvisa that
Mr. Norman himself had transcribed after having heard it on a market-square in
Stockholm.”
Norman’s 36-measure Dalvisa, the beginning of which is given in Example 6.3, is
hardly a bravura tour-de-force; nevertheless, it bears hallmarks of the professional
training of the musicians for whom it was written. Both violins have double stops
requiring simultaneous finger placement on adjacent non-open strings. Even the cello
part, which often serves as a pedal and has no technically difficult pitches to navigate,
must still interpret an expressive range of dynamics varying from a height of forte (at
one point enhanced with an fz marking) down to, in the piece’s final measures, ppp.
33 Ludvig Norman, “Dalvisa,” manuscript score, Norman-samling B-Kv, S-Skma; Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning (January 10, 1863): 2. By April of that year, the couple was publicly engaged: ibid. (April 7, 1863): 2. 34 “Syskonen Neruda . . . spelade . . . ett potpourri öfver svenska folkvisor, arrangeradt af kapellmästaren Ludvig Norman. Deri var inlagt en dalvisa, som hr Norman sjelf upptecknat efter att ha hört den på ett torg i Stockholm.” Aftonbladet (January 23, 1863): 3. Norman had previously published a piano version of the Dalvisa: (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquist Musikhandel, [1860]).
413
Example 6.3: Norman, Dalvisa (1863) for string trio, mm. 1–10
Surviving trios by Hallberg and Norman demonstrate the variety of tune sources
available to composers, from texted songs to dances to self-made transcriptions of tunes
heard in public. Unlike the string quartet (which, judging from the paucity of
nineteenth-century works based in Swedish folksong, was viewed as a conservative
genre with little space for such innovations), the string trio had more flexibility to
experiment with contemporary trends, especially the turn to traditional music on the
theatrical stage in the 1840s.
Quartets: Byström (and Stenhammar and Graener)
If surviving chamber music based on Swedish folk themes is somewhat rare, the corpus
of string quartets is very small indeed. The Austrian composer Moritz Kässmayer, with
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linguistically or politically with Austria and Germany, stretched his repertoire to include
a volume of Norwegian folksongs, but did not make a Swedish collection. 35 Neither did
anybody else. Only one contender appears in the entire nineteenth century, the
promisingly titled Swedish Quartet of 1895; yet it is doubtful that its composer would
35 Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 43–44.
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have considered it to be based on “folk” music.36
In 1856, Oscar Byström (1821–1909) wrote a three-movement String Quartet in C
Minor. In 1895, he added an additional movement (“Intermezzo”) between the original
second and third movements and retitled the work Quartetto Svedese.37 In an unusual
move, the newly augmented quartet derives its national title not from folk music in the
nineteenth-century sense, but rather from old church music on both sides of the
Reformational cleft: two chorales first published in 1695, followed by a sequence from
1490.38 Although the composers of these tunes were long-since forgotten by the 1800s,
the melodies had long histories in print that set them apart from the majority of so-called
folk tunes, which had historically been taught and learned by ear without recourse to
notated versions.39 Furthermore, Byström conceived of the tunes he quoted as “old
Swedish religious songs” (“gamla svenska andliga sånger”), as he called them in a letter
to the editor of Swedish Music Journal (Svensk Musiktidning) reporting on the premiere of
36 The Swedish Quartet presents a curious reversal from Dvořák’s “American” Quartet; that composer has claimed to draw on American Indian and Negro influences, but scholars have been hard-pressed to confirm stylistic traits from these musics in the quartet. David Beveridge, “Sophisticated Primitivism: The Significance of Pentatonicism in Dvorák’s American Quartet,” Current Musicology 24 (25–36): 27. 37 On the original Stråkkvartett i c-moll, see Lennart Hedwall, Oscar Byström: Ett svenskt musikeröde från 1800-talet, Kungl. Musikaliska akademiens skriftserie 99 (Hedemora: Gidlund, 2003), 130–38. 38 Byström quotes the chorales “Oss kristna bör tro och besinna” (“We Christians Should Believe and Consider” and “Den blomstertid nu kommer” (“The Time of Blossoms Is Now Arriving”) from The Swedish Hymnal of 1695 (Den svenska psalmboken), the first official hymnal of the Church of Sweden; and the sequence “Lætabundus” from Gradual suecorum (1490). For more on the final version (1895) of the quartet, including the additional movement, see ibid., 360–62. 39 Even in musically illiterate congregations, cantors typically had access to printed melodies, although Dalarna is famous for its development of richly ornamented folk chorale (folkliga koral) melodies in individual congregations; for more on folk chorales, see Margareta Jersild and Ingrid Åkesson, Folklig koralsång: En musiketnologisk undersökning av bakgrunden, bruket och musiken, Skrifter utgivna av Svenskt visarkiv 14 (Hedemora: Gidlund i samarbete med Svenskt visarkiv, 2000).
415
the revised quartet by the Mazer Quartet Society on October 10, 1895.40 Yet lines between
old church music and “folk” music have always been blurred, and the Quartetto Svedese
is no exception.
The second chorale that Byström quotes, “The Time of Blossoms Is Now
Arriving” (“Den blomstertid nu kommer”), is one of the most familiar hymns today
even among non-churchgoing Swedes due to its association with end-of-the-year school
ceremonies; in more recent times, its melody, which has never been traced to a known
composer, has officially been recategorized as a folksong by the Church of Sweden.41
Furthermore, the chorale tune that opens the “Intermezzo” movement, “We Christians
Should Believe and Consider” (“Oss kristna bör tro och besinna”), bears strong
similarities to the folksong “King Gustaf is Riding to Dalarna” (“Konung Göstaf rider till
Dalarne”) as printed in Hæffner’s supplement to Geijer-Afzelius. The hymn and the
song are not identical, yet they seem to be cut from the same stylistic cloth. Example 6.4
shows the first half of “King Gustaf” aligned above the first half of Byström’s setting of
“We Christians.”42
40 Mazer’s letter is reprinted in Hedwall, Oscar Byström, 361. 41 The most recent official hymnal, Den svenska psalmboken med tillägg (Stockholm: Verbum, 2006) lists the melody to no. 199 as “Swedish folksong/1693” (“svensk folkvisa/1693”). 42 The melody for “King Gustaf is Riding to Dalarna” has been transposed down a step to match Byström’s quartet (Stockholm: Hans Ahlborg Musik, n.d. [after 1995]); the original version, a modal melody notated in A minor with suggested raised sevenths, is found in Hæffner, Musik-bilagor to Geijer-Afzelius, 40. This excerpt is from Oscar Byström, Quartetto Svedese, facsimile of manuscript copied by Lars G. Johnsson, 1995 (Stockholm: Hans Ahlborg Musik, n.d.). See also Oscar Byström and Frydénkvartetten Qvartetto Svedese, audio CD (Musica Sveciae MSCD510, 1987).
416
King Gustaf is riding to Dalarna, He will consult with his Dalecarlian men.
Example 6.4: Byström, Quartetto Svedese, iii. Intermezzo, mm. 1–7, and a similar folksong melody from Geijer-Afzelius
Rhythmic differences aside, the two melodies begin in virtually the same manner, and
while they later diverge, especially in their second halves, they still maintain a certain
kinship. “King Gustaf” is not the source for the chorale in the quartet; but viewed from
an opposing perspective, the chorale in the quartet could, had it acquired a set of secular
words and been transcribed by a nineteenth-century collector, easily have entered the
“folk” tradition alongside “King Gustaf.”
Despite the links with folksong posited above, Byström maintains a certain
distance from nationalist undercurrents in this Swedish Quartet. Unlike major texted
works that trade on introducing vernacular words to established genres, such as
Schubert’s Deutsche Messe, D. 872 (1827), Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem (1865–68), or
Johan Helmich Roman’s Swedish Mass (Svenska mässan, ca. 1752), the Quartetto Svedese
adopts Italian, the lingua franca for music, as its language for everything from the title to
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417
musical markings to tune labels.43 The most accessible version of the score today, which
was copied out for the Mazer Quartet Society in 1995, even includes Byström’s
dedication to that same group, also issued in Italian, on its cover: “Quartetto / Svedese /
composta e dedicata / alla Società di Quartetto di Mazèr.”44 Although the piece was
intended for a domestic musical organization, it others the concept of “Swedish” into a
linguistically foreign category. Lennart Hedwall has called the third movement a
“strange bird” (“främmande fågel”) in the context of the quartet as a whole; the same
could be said of this quartet with respect to the larger body of Swedish chamber music
of its era.45
Only in the 1900s did conscious quotations of Swedish folksong enter the string
quartet, with at least three examples in the second half of the first decade. While these
twentieth-century quartets—two by Wilhelm Stenhammar, and one by the German
composer Paul Graener (1872–1944)—lie beyond the chronological scope of this study,
all three provide fascinating examples of the magnification of a short, strophic song into
larger instrumental forms. Even more so than symphonic pieces of earlier decades,
which were largely written for ensembles with theatrical connections, this merging of
folksong with the string quartet—the most absolute of genres—represents one extreme
in the multi-dimensional continuum of interactions between art and folk music.
43 Even the two chorales fall under the label “Cantici Svedesi (1695)”; the sole linguigstic exception is the sequence, “Lætabundus,” which is listed by its original Latin title. 44 Byström, Quartetto Svedese; this facsimile is freely available for download from IMSLP (International Music Score Library Project) and Swedish Musical Heritage. 45 Hedwall, Oscar Byström, 361.
418
Stenhammar’s String Quartet No. 4 in A minor, op. 25 (1904–09; dedicated to
Sibelius), famously uses the ballad “Young Hillevi” (“Ung Hillevi”) as the theme for its
variation-form finale, and the text of the first strophe is printed at the top of the page,
making this borrowing transparent.46 Friedhelm Krummacher has analyzed several of
the variations, which generally tend more towards harmonic than cantus firmus or
figural types, yet the significance of the tenth and final variation has gone unremarked.47
The source text printed in Runa in 1842 had six strophes, eliminating the possibility of a
one-on-one narrative correspondence between strophes and variations.48 Rather, the
culminating variation addresses the ballad’s contrasting themes of waiting and
journeying, stasis and motion, before exploding in a glorification of the omkväde, the
simple three-note refrain “among roses” (“ibland rosor”).
In the tenth variation, the tune re-emerges as a cantus firmus, signaling a cyclical
return to the initial statement and referencing the knight’s repeated question to young
Hillevi: “How long will you wait, if I depart now”? Yet the stasis of this cyclical return 46 “And the knight spoke to young Hillevi: How long with you wait, if I depart now? — among roses” (“Och riddaren han talte till unga Hillevi: hur länge vill du vänta, om jag bortreser nu? — ibland rosor”). Wilhelm Stenhammar, Stråkkvartett Nr. 4, op. 25 (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, [1912]). The text is the first strophe of the ballad as originally printed in Richard Dybeck’s journal Runa 1 (1842): 37. However, Signe Rotter has pointed out that contemporary audiences and critics, who did not have access to the text and tune in question, typically commented on the tune’s similarity with the first few measures of “Little Karin” and assumed the rest was newly composed rather than a lengthy quotation of an existing complete tune; see Rotter, Studien zu den Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar, 254–55. See also Stenhammar Quartet, Stenhammar: String Quartets Nos. 3-4, audio CD (BIS 1659SA, 2013). 47 Friedhelm Krummacher, “Volks- und Kunstmusik um die Jahrhundertwende: Zu Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar,” in Musik im Norden: Abhandlungen zur skandinavischen und nordeutschen Musikgeschichte, ed. Siegfried Oechsle et al. (New York: Bärenreiter, 1996), 148–53. 48 A later edition of Runa contains an alternate textual variant; Stenhammar is not likely to have based his thoughts on this version, as the strophe he quotes is the second rather than the first strophe in this variant, and furthermore, three words are different. Runa: En skrift för nordens fornvänner, 2, no. 2 (1875). Signe Rotter posits that Stenhammar’s likely direct source was a handwritten setting for male chorus by Knut Byström; Rotter, Studien zu den Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar, 257–58.
419
to the ballad melody is disrupted by a wild harmonic journey, as each instrument
successively presents one of the tune’s four phrases at a pitch level one step higher than
the key area established in the previous phrase: D minor — E minor — A major (relative
major of F-sharp minor) — B major. Freed of the burden of chronological narrative, this
strong sense of motion symbolizes both journeys implied by the fragmentary ballad: the
knight and Hillevi riding away together on the same saddle, and Hillevi’s metaphysical
journey to her death in the “seventh kingdom.” As the full tune concludes, the omkväde
breaks out at three different pitch levels in succession, leading the first violin ever higher
towards the seventh-position stratosphere (the “seventh kingdom”?) and calling grand
attention to the plainest element of the ballad. By integrating this supposedly ancient
melody into his Fourth String Quartet, Stenhammar implemented an innovation that
previous generations of Swedish quartet writers had not attempted.
In his next String Quartet No. 5 in C Major, op. 29 (1910), Stenhammar turned to
a different ballad, “The Knight Finn Komfusenfej” (“Riddaren Finn Komfusenfej”),
which he had learned from his grandfather rather than a printed source.49 Krummacher
briefly analyzes the five variations on this melody as examples of progressively
increasing figurative variation; most variations capture the humor of the text, with its
string of amusing character names (like Ms. Hiccup and Ms. Hope-in-Bloom), but the
very end of the piece dissolves into nothingness.50 The tune breaks into shorter and
49 Wilhelm Stenhammar, Stråkkvartett N:r 5, op. 29 (Stockholm: Abr. Hirschs Förlag, [1920]). See also Stenhammar Quartet, Stenhammar: String Quartets Nos. 5–6, audio CD (BIS 2009, 2013). 50 Krummacher, “Volks- und Kunstmusik um die Jahrhundertwende,” 156–57.
420
shorter fragments, until the solo viola whispers the last four notes at a ppp dynamic.
Krummacher draws attention to Stenhammar’s illustration of the song’s ending:
an extraordinarily long mare is carrying a festive party of nine(!) people on her back, but
she quickly tires, and then Sir Komfusenfej himself dies (“då märra ho’ tröttna, och
Fusenfej dog”).51 However, Krummacher misses Stenhammar’s own commentary about
the song’s ending: the composer divulges that while he wrote the quartet to illustrate the
song as he had learned it as a child, he later encountered a printed version of the text,
which differed slightly from his version.52 While most of the differences in the text
published in the newspaper Santa Claus (Jultomten, 1899) are minimal, its title character
suffers a much less drastic fate—instead of dying, Komfusenfej ends up taking over after
the horse tires out and hauling the wedding party himself. Drog (“hauled”) and dog
(“died”) both fit the rhyme scheme of the text; but because drog appears in print,
Stenhammar assumes it to be more valid, belonging to “a variant that is most likely
older, and which I therefore quote here, even though it does not suit my composition.”53
Yet Stenhammar’s tragic ending may be more historically legitimate than the
composer believed it to be. An article from 1924, three years after the publication of the
quartet (and thirteen years after its composition), acknowledges the existence of both
endings and asserts that Komfusenfej’s death is the original version. According to this
51 The text and melody are printed, along with a few sentences of commentary by Stenhammar, in Stråkkvartett N:r 5, [i–ii]. 52 Signe Rotter provides an excerpt from a letter by Stenhammar to his publisher, Adolf Noreen, confirming the presence of Komfusenfej’s death at the end of the quartet movement; see Rotter, Studien zu den Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar, 326. 53 “. . . en läsart, som torde vara den ursprungligare, och som jag därför här anför, ehuru den ej passar till min tonsättning.” Stenhammar, Stråkkvartett N:r 5, [ii].
421
source, the verb hauled is one of several “changes to the old text that are not at all
improvements” that have regrettable been introduced in a recent illustrated version of
the story.54 Looking beyond that author’s preferential bias, both versions probably
existed side-by-side as two strands of the same tale in oral tradition, a condition
supported by the fact that the two printed versions of Komfusenfej’s death—that quoted
by Stenhammar, and the one printed in 1924—are themselves worded differently,
sharing fewer than half of the same words in the last two lines.
The same year as Stenhammar’s Quartet No. 5, the German composer Paul
Graener (1872–1944) wrote his Quartett über ein schwedisches Volkslied (Spinn Spinn, Lieb
Töchterlein), op. 33 (Vienna: Universal-Edition, 1910).55 Graener sets the third verse of a
song typically titled “Folksong from Ösel,” an island in present-day Estonia that was
part of Sweden at the height of territorial expansion in the long seventeenth century (see
map, Figure 1.1); its text and melody begin to appear in sources for solo voice and for
male chorus in the later 1800s. In the string quartet, Graener includes a German
translation of the text in two places (on the inside front cover and when the full tune is
quoted in the first movement), ensuring that performers will know the song’s meaning
and providing channels for this information to be shared with listeners. Unlike
Stenhammar, who confines each folksong to a single movement, Graener distributes
54 “Skada är att den gamla texten undergått åtskilliga förändringar som ingalunda äro förbättringar.” Gurli Linder, “Böcker för barn och ungdom julen 1923,” Biblioteksbladet: Organ för sveriges allmänna biblioteksförening 9 (1924): 131. 55 Paul Graener is little known today, in part due to his membership in the Nazi party (he joined in 1933 and held high offices in the Reichsmusikkammer). See Erik Levi, “Graener, Paul,” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2001), http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/11578.
422
references across all four movements. Despite their different approaches to these
quartets, however, both composers helped break a final barrier, the introduction of
traditional Swedish song to the genre with the strongest resistance to folk influence.
Quintets: Romberg, Hallberg, and Berens
While three quintets based on Swedish folktunes have been identified, the following
discussion will focus on a specimen by Hermann Berens, whose pieces for theater and
solo piano have been examined earlier. The first of these quintets, Bernhard Romberg’s
Divertimento . . . sopra un tema Finlandico et Sueco, op. 27, was mentioned above in
conjunction with a likely performance by Mazer’s circle; published in 1817, it does not
contain any recognizable traditional melodies, and depending on when it was written, it
predates some or even all of the Geijer-Afzelius folksongs (1814–18) and possibly even
Traditioner (1814–15) as well. Almost four decades later, Bengt Wilhelm Hallberg wrote a
Divertissement of Swedish Folk Melodies for a quintet with flute, strings and piano (1854),
which joins together seven tunes with a few brief transition passages of freer writing.56
Fitting chronologically between Romberg and Hallberg’s pieces, Hermann
Berens’ Fantasi öfver svenska visor (1848) for piano quintet is the most sophisticated
example of folk-music writing for five players. This single-movement work weaves
together several disparate melodies in a manner similar to the piano fantasies discussed
earlier. In so doing, it also calls attention to two of the most commonly quoted
instrumental dance tunes even as it uses them in an atypical manner. 56 Bengt Wilhelm Hallberg, “Divertissement af svenska folk-melodier för quintett af flöjt, violin, violoncell och piano,” manuscript score, 1854, Bengt Wilhelm Hallbergs archive SE/LUB/924, kapsel 4, S-L.
423
Although Berens does not include the word “folk” as part of the title, four of the
five identified tunes are of folk origin.57 Among these, the pairing of two fiddle melodies
originally published in Traditions exemplifies the ubiquity of folkdance tunes in chamber
pieces. Discounting the early contributions by Romberg, which may predate the
widespread establishment of the concept of “folksong” in Sweden, thirteen of the sixteen
pieces from the 1800s surveyed here include at least one dance tune; among these
thirteen, three incorporate this same pairing of Traditions 1.19 and 1.15, making it the
most commonly set folk tune(s) in chamber writing. For at least fifteen years, these two
melodies enjoyed widespread popularity in theatrical-orchestral music, vocal music,
solo piano music, and chamber music.58 However, a fundamental split between the
purported regional origin of the tunes in Traditions and their association with a different
region in most of these settings problematizes the tendency to locate tunes as local to
specific regions. Example 6.5 shows the two melodies, which are labeled in Traditions as
originating in West Gothland.
57 The four tunes are “Do You Remember What You Promised” (“Och minns du, hvad du lofvade”), “The Suitor’s Song” (“Friarevisan”), and nos. 15 and 19 from vol. 1 of Traditions. In addition, Berens quotes O. Westermark’s melody to the popular song “King Charles, the Young Hero” (“Kung Karl den unge hjälte”), and he uses at least one other unidentified tune likely of popular origin. 58 A texted version appears for the first time in Ahlström and Boman, Walda swenska folksånger, folkdansar och folklekar (Stockholm: Abr. Hirsch, [1848]): 8:1. An English newspaper added singing translations in English and German in 1847 to what it called “a Swedish song of [Lind’s] own composition, when only a child”; it is possible that Lind wrote the text, though the tunes first appeared in print at least six years before her birth. “Mddle. Jenny Lind,” The Illustrated London News (April 24, 1847): 272.
424
Example 6.5: Two fiddle tunes from Traditions, vol. 1
In this first-level source, the tunes are printed non-adjacently, separated by other entries
from three different regions. When used in subsequent art-music contexts, however, the
tunes are almost invariably joined together; no. 19 appears first, followed by no. 15.
Furthermore, Dalarna replaces West Gothland as the supposed region of origin. Table
6.2 lists instances of the melodies as components of other compositions.
Table 6.2: Works using a pair of fiddle tunes from Traditions, vol. 1
Year Arranger Work Genre 1814 Afzelius & Åhlström Traditions, vol. 1, Nos. 15 & 19 solo piano 1843 Berwald, J. F. Ett National-divertissement theater 1843 Randel Fantasy on Swedish Folksongs violin/piano 1845 Ahlström & Boman Song on a Polska from Dalarna texted voice/piano 1848 Berens Fantasy on Swedish Folksongs quintet with flute/
piano 1850 Foroni Overture to Ett National-divertissement theater 1850s? Van Boom Beautés Musicales III, op. 40, no. 3:
“Dalkarls Polska” solo piano
after 1858? Norman Daldans two violins
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425
The quintet by Berens stands apart from the other works using these tunes in two
ways. First, it is the only version that does not use labels, plot lines, or other means to
connect the tunes with a local geographical region.59 Second, rather than quoting both
tunes in their entirety, it omits the first half of Traditions 1.15, corresponding to the upper
system in Example 6.5.60 As a relative newcomer to Sweden—Berens arrived at the very
most two years, and possibly as little as two months, before writing this fantasy—the
composer knew that the melodies were famous, but was perhaps less bound by received
tradition than were the other composers who used them with full knowledge of Johan
Fredrik Berwald’s stage music for Ett National-divertissement in 1843.61
Berens’ first documented appearance in Stockholm occurred on December 8,
1847, when he and four string players who also hailed from Hamburg performed their
first of approximately eighty weekly-to-biweekly concerts as a piano quintet.62 The
autograph for this quintet is dated shortly thereafter (January 10, 1848), and the ink was
scarcely dry when a notice ran on January 14 announcing a performance two days later
59 Randel’s Fantasy on Swedish Folksongs also has no textual references to geography; however, it can be traced to Dalarna by association. Randel was assistant concertmaster when Berwald’s Ett National-divertissement premiered on February 6, 1843, in honor of the 25th anniversary of the reign of King Karl XIV Johan; these dances appear immediately after a song by a”Morakarl,” i.e. a man from Mora in the district of Dalarna. Randel’s duo appears to be largely the same as a second score, called the Pot-pourri för Violin öfver Svenska National-Visor, which he wrote in honor of that same event. Since five of the six melodies in Randel’s duo, including Traditions 1.19 and 1.15, also occur in Berwald’s music, these tunes likely assumed connections with Dalarna by their close proximity to the premiere of Ett National-divertissement. 60 Norman’s “Daldans” does not include the second portion of Traditions 1.15, but the piece exists as a sketch with empty measures and breaks off mid-thought; manuscript score, n.d., Norman-samling B-Kv, S-Skma. 61 Another indication that Berens had been in Sweden for a shorter rather than a longer time before writing the quintet is that the title written above the first staff of music is in German (Fantasie uber schwedische Lieder); at a later date, somebody bound the manuscript and affixed a label to the front cover, now with the title in Swedish. Berens, “Fantasi öfver svenska visor för piano, 2 violiner, alt-viol & violoncell,” manuscript score, 1848, Hermann Berens d.ä. archive, Autografer, S-Skma. 62 For more on Berens’ quintet, see Åhlén, “Hermann Berens d.Ä.”
426
of the fancifully-named “Svenska Nationalmelodiernas Triumf,” a Grand Fantasy
Concertante for piano quintet.63 Starting with the Allo moderato on page 18, Berens takes
the two dance tunes on a whirlwind tour through a dizzying number of textural changes
over the course of fifty measures (Example 6.6):
Pass
age
show
n in
Ex
ampl
e 6.
6 mm. 1–8 solo violin with piano accompaniment
mm. 9–16 piano quintet
mm. 17–20 string quartet dominated by violin 1
mm. 21–27 solo piano mm. 28–40 piano quintet verging on piano chamber concerto mm. 41–44 solo violin with piano accompaniment mm. 45–50 piano quintet verging on violin chamber concerto
63 “Norra Paviljongen,” Dagligt Allehanda (January 14, 1848): 1. The quintet was repeated in several subsequent concerts.
427
Example 6.6: Berens, Fantasy for Quintet, section based on Traditions, mm. 1–28
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428
For actual dancing purposes, such drastic textural changes would be distracting; but
when physical motion is stilled and the tunes are borrowed for other musical purposes,
versatile changes in texture are a successful technique to make a limited amount of
material sound fresh as it cycles through multiple times. Rather than accompanying
dancers around the floor, the tune itself twirls from instrument to instrument and genre
to genre, though always safely within the confines of common-practice writing.
Conclusion
The translation of folk melodies of various European peoples for chamber ensembles has
been called “bringing . . . the countryside into the city.”64 This metaphor is as compelling
as it is oversimplified; as with most intersections between folk and art musics of this era,
the idea of the “countryside” was already heavily mediated through published
anthologies, smelling more of ink and paper than of cows and fields—or sweaty bodies
whirling around in dance after dance. Chamber music based on Swedish folk-dance
melodies side-steps the raw energy of couples turning, leaping, and stamping their way
around the grass-packed earth in Anders Zorn’s famous painting of Midsummer Eve in
Dalarna in 1897, where skirts swirl, the flag billows in the breeze, and individuals
standing on the sidelines might well join in on the very next number (Figure 6.2).65
Zorn’s motion leaps off the canvas.
64 Sumner Lott, The Social Worlds of Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music, 47. 65 Anders Zorn, Midsommardans, oil on canvas, 1897, NM 1603, National Museum, Stockholm. The public-domain image reproduced here is from “File: Midsommardans,” Wikimedia Commons, last modified September 8, 2016, accessed February 1, 2018, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Midsommardans_av_Anders_Zorn_1897.jpg.
429
Figure 6.2: Zorn, Midsummer-Dance (1897)
430
Figure 6.3: A folkdance group poses for a photograph at the Spring Festival, Skansen outdoor folk museum, Stockholm (1904)
Somewhat differently, in chamber music, the treatments of tunes mostly from printed
anthologies calls up the wooden dance stage at the outdoor museum Skansen, around
which costumed dancers pause for a photograph during the Spring Festival in 1904
(Figure 6.3).66 Dance is a potential, though not a present condition at the moment.
66 “Folkvisedanslaget, den första ringen, vid Skansens vårfest 1904, på sommarteatern å nedre Solliden,” black-and-white photograph, 1904, NMA.0052947, S-Sn. The public-domain image reproduced here is from “Folkvisedanslaget,” Nordiska museet, last modified April 13, 2016, accessed February 1, 2018, https://digitaltmuseum.se/011013850394/folkvisedanslaget-den-forsta-ringen-vid-skansens-varfest-1904-pa-sommarteatern. The following year, the group was renamed “Folkvisedanslaget” (“folksong-dance group”), and it still exists today with a mission for furthering the Scandinavian tradition of singing ballads while dancing in a ring or chain; see “Så här såg det ut 1904,” Folkvisedanslaget, accessed February 1, 2018, http://folkvisedanslaget.se/folkvisedanslaget.html.
431
7 Magnifying folk music for the orchestral stage
Along with the first wave of interest in Swedish folk music in the 1810s, some
transcribers, arrangers, and editors expressed concerns about the irreparable damage
done to traditional music in the process of transcribing, adapting and marketing it for
domestic use.1 Some thirty years later, these concerns rose to the forefront once more, as
ballads and dance tunes moved beyond domestic spheres and theatrical productions to
take on a starring role as main attractions on the concert stage. The organizer of a series
of folk-music concerts, the enthusiastic amateur ethnographer Richard Dybeck, faced the
national-romantic paradox of wanting to share Sweden’s folk-music heritage with
modern urban citizens, yet needing to disfigure the musical object in order to make it
palatable to general audiences.
In many respects, orchestral music is the opposite of archetypical Swedish folk
music. In place of individual or collective performers singing or playing variants of
material learned by ear, orchestral music synchronizes large numbers of musicians with
differentiated roles, each of whom is responsible for interpreting passages of written
notation in order to bring to life a sonic tapestry woven by an individual composer,
whose name is usually known. In an age prior to recording, traditional music existed for
the pleasure of those who performed it, those who danced to it, and other people who
happened to be within earshot at the time of musicking, while symphonic music was
1 For a discussion of Geijer’s preface to Geijer-Afzelius (1814), see Chapter Two, p. 60.
432
designed for performance for various types of public and private audiences.
In a century in which the symphony assumed gigantic proportions—both
literally, in terms of the length of works and the size of the orchestras that played them,
and metaphorically, thanks to Beethoven’s shadow looming large over his would-be
successors—folk-inspired symphonic repertoire occupied an outsized position in the
cultural-natural imagination.2 From a modern perspective, the oft-repeated claim that
the incorporation of folk melodies into orchestral writing represents a “highest stage” of
the “domestication” of traditional music into art music sounds like an overreaching
value judgment, one that both demeans the source melodies as being naturally inferior
and devalues other genres of art music as insignificant. Even in the nineteenth century,
at the height of fashion for the adaptation of traditional music to fit the needs and
expectations of art music aficionados, some oppositional voices argued vehemently in
favor of the esthetic and moral supremacy of the former over the latter.3
This pair of conflicting views corresponds with two broad categories of
repertoire: straightforward orchestral settings of individual tunes, and more symphonic
treatments in which melodies and fragments thereof are subject to manipulation as
elements of longer single or multi-movement forms.4 In addition, a middle ground exists
2 See, for example, Riley and Smith’s assertion: “From a nationalist perspective, the integration of folk music into symphonic forms meant the absorption of the Volksgeist into one of the highest forms of art music and a perfect vehicle for the mobilization of the nation’s educated citizens through culture.” Nation and Classical Music, 64. 3 Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 107. 4 Straightforward arrangements will not be treated here in further depth. Examples include the following: August Söderman, Svenska folkvisor och folkdanser (1870); Johan Svendsen, 2 Swedish Folk-Melodies, op. 27, 1876 (Christiania, 1878); Elfrida Andrée, “Svenska folkmelodier behandlade för stränginstrument,”
433
in the form of multiple arrangements strung together with little to no connecting
material. This hybrid genre, appearing as collections of ceremonial music or various
types of dances, makes up a sizable portion of the orchestral repertoire based on
Swedish folktunes, yet it is rarely acknowledged in literature, let alone analyzed in
depth. Most of these pieces were intended for Richard Dybeck’s folk-music concerts;
Dybeck reported resistance to his project from mainline composers like Adolf Fredrik
Lindblad, Andreas Randel, and Franz and Johan Fredrik Berwald, and this stigma long
hindered serious interest in the repertoire he commissioned.5 Only since 1980 has the
content of his concerts begun to attract more than cursory attention, revealing that the
collections of orchestral folksong arrangements performed in the 1840s through the
1860s form a noteworthy proto-stage of development of the rhapsody based on Swedish
folktunes that flourished closer to 1900.6
Despite Sweden’s reputation for having had only one professional symphony
orchestra and zero dedicated orchestral concert halls in the 1800s, a number of arenas in
Stockholm offered opportunities for hearing small and large orchestras in performances
organized by individual composers or musicians. 7 Most prominently, theaters such as
manuscript score, n.d., Elfrida Andrée samling, XI: Folkvisebearbetningar Kaps. 3:1 (microfilm Xe-R 102), S-Skma; and Winkler, “Femtio svenska folkdansar,” manuscript score, n.d., KT Dansmusik 56, S-Skma. 5 Dybeck, “Självbiografiska anteckningar,” 38. 6 See n. 3 and n. 15. 7 For a study of performance locales during the first half of the nineteenth century, when Stockholm made a transition from primarily royal-supported musical activity towards more public entertainment outlets, see Hallgren, “Stockholms rum för musik under 1800-talets första hälft.” Owe Ander focuses on the concert
434
the Royal Opera and the Smaller Theater (the Mindre teatern, which engaged its own
musical ensemble upon opening in 1842) hosted concerts in addition to staged works,
and concerts featuring orchestral music were also held in the Riddarhussalen, the
Kirsteinska huset (built 1805), and in churches such as the Storkyrkan and
Ladugårdslandskyrkan. On the lighter side, several cafés and restaurants, like the
Pavilion operated by the Davidson brothers (opened 1839) in the Barnhusträdgården at
the north end of town and the more centrally located De la Croix Salon (opened 1844),
offered music by standing chamber or military orchestras as well as ad hoc and touring
groups.8 During its first year of operation, the De la Croix Salon hosted an encore
performance of a seminal event, the first “Evening Entertainment of Nordic Folk Music”
(Aftonunderhållningen medelst Nordisk Folkmusik) organized by Richard Dybeck, who
rejected the status quo of symphonic supremacy.
Orchestral repertoire in Richard Dybeck’s evening entertainment concerts
A tireless collector of and advocate for Scandinavian folk culture, Richard Dybeck was
determined to persuade residents of Stockholm (and, later, Uppsala and Västerås) of his
conviction that the sounds of “these old notes from our forests, mountains and valleys
activity of the Royal Court Orchestra, the Royal Academy of Music and the Musical Society (Musikaliska sällskapet) around the turn of the nineteenth century in “Amphions of the North,” 14–17. 8 In addition, other cities and towns had various spaces to host musical and theatrical performances, whether put on by local musicians or traveling troupes. In addition, some medium-to-large towns such as Gothenburg and Norrköping had regular series of “folk concerts” put on by local Workers’ Societies (arbetarföreningar). For a thorough study of nineteenth-century musical life in Gothenburg, see especially Carlsson, “Handel och Bacchus eller Händel och Bach?”
435
. . . are as far from today’s prized art music” as “the heaven is from the earth.”9 His
unprecendented series of fifteen full-evening performances consisting entirely of
arranged folk music in the years 1844–70 completed what Geijer, Afzelius, Hæffner and
Åhlström had variously initiated in 1814: the total assimiliation of traditional music into
art music, not only into the genre of solo song with piano accompaniment, but into all
sorts of chamber and full orchestral ensembles as well.
Dybeck reports that his interest in folk culture developed already as a child
hearing the ballads sung by his mother and the work-music of women tending animals,
finding old stone formations in the woods, and paying careful attention to the botany
and geography of his district.10 After studying in Uppsala, he embarked on a ten-year
legal career but preferred to spend his summers walking around rural Västmanland in
search of folk culture. After quitting his job in 1841, he turned his full attention to
antiquarian research, traveling the country extensively. An amateur expert in ancient
objects, regional clothing, and dialects, folktales and folksongs, Dybeck published his
findings in the journal Runa, which he issued irregularly between 1842–50 and 1865–76.
Many of the songs he transcribed and printed in Runa were subsequently made into
arrangements for his concerts, which led him to the dilemma of the national-romantic
folk music enthusiast of his era: in order to spread knowledge of and appreciation for
this music, he had to transform and recontextualize it for audiences in a foreign, urban
9 “[D]essa gamla toner från våra skogar, berg och dalar, hvilka toner likväl, ‘så långt som himlen är från jord,’ skilja sig från dagens beprisade konstmusik.” Richard Dybeck, “Öfversigt,” Runa: Antiqvarisk tidskrift 5 (December 1844): 127. 10 For Dybeck’s autobiography, see “Självbiografiska anteckningar.”
436
culture. To resuscitate traditional music, he had to maim it.11
Dybeck’s concerts, officially advertised as “Evening Entertainments with Nordic
Folk Music,” present a distinctly bilateral understanding of the term Nordic. Perhaps not
surprisingly, Swedish pieces make up most of the repertoire, and Norway also figures
prominently.12 Yet despite the fact that the majority of concerts took place during the
mid-1840s through mid-1860s, when cooperative Nordic sentiment was at its height, not
a single piece is labeled as being of Finnish or Danish origin (with the exception of a
certain “Faroese song: Sigurds qväde” in the 1844 programs).13 Broadly inclusive in
name, the concerts focus solely in practice on the heritage of Dybeck’s own nation and
its partner in union, further adding to the fabrication of a naturally harmonious
Swedish-Norwegian cultural history.
Anna Johnson has studied Dybeck’s ideology, finding that his interest in folk
culture led him to present not only an “alternative musical form” (“alternativ
musikform”), but also an “alternative way of life” (“alternativ livsform”) that appealed
to citizens already primed to romanticize rural customs.14 In 1981, she issued a call for
more detailed research on Dybeck’s folk-music concerts, which she herself addressed in
a brief paper in 1993, where she proposed that the rhapsody-like arrangements
commissioned by Dybeck had more of an influence on subsequent composers and the
11 Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 115. 12 A newspaper piece from 1866 mentions rumors of expanding the concerts to Gothenburg, Norrköping and Gävle, but apparently Christiania was not under discussion; Nya Dagligt Allehanda (December 29, 1866): 2. 13 Dybeck himself performed the Faroese song on the first concert; by his own account, the song “did not catch on” (“icke slog an”). See Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 25. 14 Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 126.
437
development of folk-like musical styles than has been generally acknowledged.15 More
recently, Eva Danielson and Märta Ramsten have examined the concerts from the
perspective of a single song, the country’s future national anthem, which premiered
there.16 However, even basic details of the concerts have yet to be reported, and little has
been said of the repertoire other than a few select pieces chosen as examples in the
literature above; in addition, developments in technology for searching historical
newspapers have now made it possible to locate rich layers of contemporary
commentary that were simply not available on a broad scale to researchers until the very
recent past. For the first time, I present a chart with dates and locations for all fifteen
concerts (Table 7.1) and show how the works of each of the four arrangers of orchestral
pieces contributed to (or, in one case, worked against) Dybeck’s project and the
development of orchestral repertoire.17
15 Anna Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Folkmusiken förs upp på konsertestraden,” in Hemländsk hundraårig sång (see Chapter One, n. 3), 144–55. 16 For Danielson and Ramsten’s discussion of the Evening Entertainment concerts, see Du gamla, du friska, 24–37. 17 Concert dates and locations have been compiled from isolated mentions in secondary literature on Dybeck cited elsewhere in this chapter and from numerous concert announcements and reviews found through online databases (see Chapter One, n. 88). Attendance figures through 1862 are taken from Dybeck’s own notice in Runa (1865), reprinted in Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 32. Asterisks indicate dates for which reviews indicate that the house was sold out; it is unclear how the 1859 concert was able to fit 180–200 more listeners than the two earlier “sold out” events in the same hall. While reviews rarely mention absolute numbers of attendees, an estimate of 200 in Västerås in 1861 confirms Dybeck’s notation of 212: Västmanlands Läns Tidning (June 6, 1861): 2. However, his claim of 720 attendees in 1847 inflates the number he penned on his own copy of the program: “562 listeners were present. Richard Dybeck” (“562 åhörarne voro närvarande. Rhd. Dbk”). “Folklore I–II, 1 band,” Richard Dybecks samling, F 6 Folkloresamlingen, vol. 11, S-Skva, p. 186. The estimate for 1867 is from Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (March 19, 1867): 2. Attendance for 1868 is extrapolated from an average of the previous concerts at De la Croix’s salon, noting that one brief review mentions a full house (fullsatt): Dagens Nyheter (March 14, 1868): 2. The event in Uppsala in 1870 had as many people as could comfortably fit in the hall; Göteborgs-Posten (February 8, 1870): 1; accounts of other events taking place in the Gille hall indicate that the capacity was at least 500.
438
Table 7.1: Richard Dybeck’s folk-music concerts
Date City Locale Attendance 1 1844 November 18 Stockholm Kirsteinska huset 430 2 1844 December 9 Stockholm De la Croix salong 660 3 1847 March 9 Stockholm De la Croix salong 720 4 1852 April 6 Stockholm De la Croix salong 510 5 1857 March 10 Stockholm De la Croix salong *860 6 1857 May 23 Uppsala Carolina Redivivas stora sal 670 7 1858 March 13 Stockholm De la Croix salong *875 8 1859 March 5 Stockholm De la Croix salong 105618 9 1860 March 17 Stockholm De la Croix salong 810
10 1861 March 9 Stockholm De la Croix salong 760 11 1861 June 2 Västerås Westerås läroverkssal 218 12 1862 March 29 Stockholm De la Croix salong 850 13 1867 March 16 Stockholm De la Croix salong 600 14 1868 March 14 Stockholm De la Croix salong ca. 770 15 1870 February 3 Uppsala Gillesalen ca. 500
Among these fifteen concerts, the programs included a certain amount of
overlap. Concerts 1 and 2 (both 1844) were identical, as were Concerts 5 and 6 (1857 in
Stockholm and Uppsala, respectively). In addition, a review for Concert 9 (1860) points
out that the program had “very few changes” (“endast föga förändringar”) from the
previous year’s event.19 Among the large collection of music from these concerts
preserved in the archives of the Nordic Museum in Stockholm are manuscript scores
and/or parts for ten works for full orchestra (without voice), to which can be added an
eleventh, a piece by August Söderman that was later published. A twelfth orchestral title
is mentioned in a program that does not readily correspond with any extant piece. Over 18 Considering that by the end of the following year, Stockholm’s population was registered as 112,391 inhabitants, a concert attendance of 1056 represents a not insubstantial portion of the city’s bourgeois residents; for population statistics, see Befolkning 1720–1967, 62. 19 Aftonbladet (March 22, 1860): 2. The only program not yet located is Concert 11 (1861, Västerås). However, Dybeck does not seem to have had an orchestra at his disposal in that city, using instead a six-piece brass ensemble; see ibid., 28.
439
half of these pieces achieved significant popularity, appearing in three to five concerts
over spans of four to ten years.20 Table 7.2 (below) divides the orchestral repertoire into
seven typological categories. Each rectangle represents one work, and each name within
the rectangle indicates a performance in the concert indicated in the first column; for
example, Ahlström’s ceremony music was heard on both concerts in 1844. For reference,
conductors’ names are also included on the right-hand side of the table.
1) Ceremonial music (högtidsstycken) is the most enduring category, represented
by three different arrangements performed in eleven of the fifteen concerts; a high
proportion of marches and other music associated with weddings likely enhanced the
popularity of this type, as pieces could be grouped together programatically to form a
“village wedding” scene. Near the end of the series of concerts, ceremonial music
gradually gave way to a different category, the 5) Folk-music overview (folkmusikalisk
överblick) with componenent pieces of various functions. The other major label, 2) Folk
Dances (folkdansar), used a catch-all title for several kinds of dances and was
programmed in slightly over half of the concerts. Other dance types mentioned by
name—4) Polskor, 6) Släng dances, 7) Ring dances, and 3) Dance games—generally
surfaced for shorter periods but did not remain in the repertoire permanently, being
subsumed instead as individual numbers within “folk dance” or “overview” collections.
20 The other five arrangements were less popular over time; three were heard only once, while two others were performed only at the first two concerts, which took place within three weeks of each other and had identical programs.
440
Table 7.2: Orchestral pieces performed at Dybeck’s folk-music concerts, 1844–70
Con
duct
or
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Söd.
Söd.
Ber.
Ber.
Ber.
Ber.
Ber.
Jos.
A
hlst
röm
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jer
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le
S
öder
man
Ber
ens
Jose
phso
n
7. R
ing
danc
es
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
6. S
läng
da
nces
?
5) F
olk-
mus
. ov
ervi
ew
Söd.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
4) P
olsk
as
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Gil.
3) F
olk
gam
es
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
2) F
olk
danc
es
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
1) C
erem
ony
mus
ic
Ahl
.
Ahl
.
Höi
.
Höi
.
Höi
.
Höi
.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Gil.
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Upp
sala
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Väs
terå
s
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Stoc
khol
m
Upp
sala
1844
1844
1847
1852
1857
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1861
1862
1867
1868
1870
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11
12
13
14
15
441
Eager to capture audience attention in his innovative format of evening-length
concerts devoted entirely to folk music, Dybeck faced the challenge of formatting dozens
of fairly short songs and melodies into arrangements with enough cohesiveness to
achieve the consistency of larger forms, yet enough variety to satisfy audiences
accustomed to the mixed-genre concerts typical of the day, where solo songs and choral
works rubbed shoulders with pieces for chamber ensembles and full orchestra. (For
perspective, one announcement notes, “The program is truly gigantic and especially
inviting; it consists of no fewer than forty-three different numbers, divided into three
sections with nine smaller divisions”).21 This systematic formation of longer orchestral
works based on multiple melodies foreshadowed the compositionally more advanced
rhapsodies that emerged on both sides of the turn of the twentieth century. Yet even as
he commissioned arrangements, Dybeck struggled with the very concept, as evidenced
by a letter to his friend and assistant Oscar Meijerberg two months before the first
concert: “But one thing worries me, namely that [the folksongs] will be wrapped in so
many furs (as is the usual case) by whoever ‘arranges’ them that they will become
unrecognizable.”22
The “furs” cocooning the songs consisted of various combinations of strings,
winds, brass, percussion—mostly musicians at Stockholm’s Smaller Theater—and
21 “Programmet är verkligen gigantiskt och serdeles inbjudande; det upptager icke mindre än 43 serskilda numror, i tre afdelningar och nio underafdelningar.” Aftonbladet (March 8, 1847): 2. 22 “Ett gör mig emellertid orolig; nemligen att de af den som ‘rangerar’ dem, blifva så (efter vanligheten) påpelsade, att de icke mer igenkännas.” Quoted in Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 119. Dybeck’s letter to Meijerberg is dated September 13, 1844. For more on Meijerberg’s assistance with obtaining (choral) arrangements for the first concert, see Jonsson, “Ljusets riddarvakt,” 148–49.
442
singers running the gamut from amateurs like Dybeck himself to well-known opera
singers such as Olof Strandberg and Fritz Arlberg. The first concert in Uppsala (1857)
engaged singers from the Uppsala Student Singing Society, who had pioneered the
concept of choral folksong in Sweden, while the program two years later included a
chorus of pupils from the newly expanded educational institute of the Royal Academy
of Music.
In general, the orchestral pieces consist of six to eleven simple arrangements of
material that was not readily familiar to audiences; unlike the choral and theatrical folk
music of previous chapters, which tended to center around well-known favorites, pieces
chosen by Dybeck for orchestral treatment were designed to increase public knowledge
of a broad selection of tunes.23 Audiences were expected not only to enjoy, but also to
learn from the concerts. To this end, Dybeck prepared written programs with
information about the provenance and function of individual pieces in each medley,
sometimes arranged into programmatic scenes, such as this extended description of
Ceremony Music from 1857:
After the introduction, which begins with trumpet signals announcing the arrival of a fairly solemn moment, an old bridal march from Norrland is played, followed by a wedding piece that is performed in northern Westmanland immediately before a wedding. These two pieces make a serious impression, even as they impart a merry character full of expectation. After that comes a bridal march from Leksand that invokes a sadness that is not without deep meaning. Now, a drumroll is heard in the distance, and during a drum-march, one can almost see the spry military conscript boys from East Dalarna approaching, singing their
23 Programs show a delicate balance between old favorites repeated from year to year and new material, which is often advertised in announcement as never having been heard “here” (in Stockholm) before. See, for example, the announcement in Aftonbladet (February 28, 1860): 2.
443
characteristic song, after which, as soon as they have finished marching away, the first notes of a walking tune [gånglåt] from Helsingland with a playful disposition are struck up. The following wedding piece from Gudbrandsdalen bears an impression of the gloom that looks at us from the depth of the forests crowning the mountains of Norway. Then, a Norwegian bridal march makes us aware of its effervescent, joy-bringing strains, and the Orsa-March [the same as the “drum march” heard earlier], in which all of the instruments join in, rounds out this remarkable tone-painting (tonmålning).24
This picturesque description of Leonard Höijer’s Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes
(1847) allowed listeners to imagine a festive context for the largely unknown pieces, a
vision tailor-made for urban citizens accustomed to romanticized depictions of country
life. Ironically, performers did not automatically have access to any of this information,
as the score—and probably the parts—labels each new section with numbers only,
omitting any mention of song-types or locations. Furthermore, since the musicians were
classically trained and authentic performance practice was of little concern (not to
mention impossible, as these fiddle and rustic horn tunes were scored for full orchestra),
there is little reason to believe that regional distinctions would have been audible.25
As some listeners were more invested in entertainment rather than the
educational aspects of the concerts, Dybeck ran a special notice when announcing the
concert of 1859: “I humbly take the liberty to request that concert attendees carefully
24 Quoted in the original Swedish in Ivarsdotter-Johnson, “Folkmusiken förs upp på konsertestraden,” 155. Originally printed in Dagligt Allehanda (March 14, 1857). Although Ivarsdotter-Johnson does not identify the piece, the description exactly matches Höijer’s arrangement titled Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes (see n. 46). 25 It should be kept in mind, however, that classical violin and folk fiddle performance practices seem to have been more similar through much of the nineteenth century than they are today; for example, orchestral vibrato likely came into use as late as the 1920s. See Ander, “Svenska sinfoni-författares karaktäristiska orkester-egendomligheter,” 134.
444
read through the program before the concert.”26 Between 1857 and 1861, he also chose a
surer mode of delivering instructive remarks to his “captive” audiences in the form of
one or more lectures in each concert on topics including Nordic folksong in general,
specific songs performed on the program, and even “On the preservation of our
[ancient] monuments, and remarks on some associated ancient songs,” giving himself
the opportunity to combine two different aspects of his study of folk history.27
Four arrangers provided orchestral music for the concerts, three of whom also
served as conducters. In general, Johan Niclas Ahlström’s four arrangements set the tone
for Dybeck’s conception of simple, straightforward settings joined like beads on a
necklace. Leonard Höijer’s single composition uses more substantial transitions, joining
tunes more intricately together like links on a chain. It is unclear, whether August
Söderman’s piece—which was performed on just one concert—is extant, although
surviving evidence now indicates that his engagement as an arranger of folk tunes was
more substantial than previously documented with certainty. Jacob Edvard Gille was
Dybeck’s most prolific arranger, supplying five pieces for orchestra alone in addition to
numerous others for varied forces with and without voices; by referring to previous
composers’ arrangements in his own versions, Gille helped carry out Dybeck’s long-
term goal of repeatedly exposing audiences to traditional tunes they would otherwise
never have gotten to hear in the first place, let alone become familiar with. 26 “Jag tager mig friheten ödmj. anmoda Konsertbesökande, att före Konserten noga genomläsa Programmet.” Emphasis original. Aftonbladet (February 19, 1859): 1. 27 “Om vården af våra minnesmärken och om några med sådana förbundna fornsvenska sångminnen”; Aftonbladet (March 12, 1860): 1. Dybeck wrote, but did not deliver, the lectures himself; in 1857, and likely in the other years as well, he appointed somebody else to read his text. Aftonbladet (March 11, 1857): 2.
445
Ahlström (four concerts, 1844–52)
As arranger and conductor for the initial concerts, Johan Niclas Ahlström was the first
person to realize Dybeck’s wishes for large-format orchestral arrangements, giving
audiences their first experiences of folk music for that ensemble without the visual
distraction of theatrical staging and dancing. His four collections of orchestral pieces
dominated the first four concerts (see Table 7.2 above), forming templates for future
arrangers to emulate; together, they account for over one-third of the occasions on which
orchestral folk music was programmed in Dybeck’s series.28
Ahlström (and Dybeck, who presumably selected the pieces) draws a sharp
distinction between ceremonial music, which was almost entirely unfamiliar to urban
audiences at the premiere, and folk dances and polskas, of which all were readily
accessible and several were fairly well known. Indeed, the material for the latter was
already close at hand: all fifteen pieces in the two collections of general dances and
polskor use tunes that Ahlström had printed in a major anthology of piano arrangements
a few years earlier. Table 7.3 lists the pieces in each of Ahlström’s four sets of
arrangements, the region indicated, the key, and the tune’s number in his 220 Swedish
Folkdances Arranged for Fortepiano, where applicable.29
28 These numbers do not include orchestral music with voices, such as Ahlström’s arrangement of “Herding-songs and Horn Tunes” for two solo singers in dialogue, with orchestra (premiered March 1847). Dybeck recognized the historical impact of this selection, later recording a note on the score’s title-page: “These are the first of this type of folk music to have been arranged for orchestra, around 1846/47. Dbk.” (Dessa äro de första af detta slags folkmusik som behandlats för orchester, omkr. 1846/47. Dbk.”) Ahlström, “Wallvisor och hornlåtar,” Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:5, no. 19, S-Sn, p. [i]. 29 Item number in Ahlström, 220 Svenska folkdansar arrangerade för forte-piano (abbreviated A220).
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Table 7.3: Ahlström’s four sets of orchestral folksong arrangements, 1844
Title Region Key A220 Högtidsstycken i åtskilliga Svenska landskap 1. Bröllops-stycke Westmanland G — 2. Maj-visa Skåne/Blekinge d — 3. Maj-visa, variant Skåne Bb/g — 4. Gammal “Brud-marsch”/vallsång södra Dalarna g — 5. Gammal “Brud-marsch”/vallsång Upland/Westmanland G — 6. Trettondags-visan Södermanland G — Svenska Folkdansar 1. Hallingen Bohuslän D 164 2. Fiskardansen Bohuslän b 219 3. Skuva-dansen Westmanland G 190 4. Höglorfven Wingåker g 5 5. Höglorfven, variant Wingåker a 6 6. Jössehärads-polska Wermland G 22 7. Nigdansen general G 138 8. Stampdansen general G 212 Svenska folklekar 1. Domaredansen Östergötland G — 2. Ringlek Blekinge a — 3. Ringlek Westergöthland a — 4. Folklek Södermanland e — 5. untitled/unknown Blekinge a — 6. Stabbdansen Dalarna a 36 Svenska polskor 1. Orsa-polska Orsa g 11 2. Neckens polska Kalmar A 49 3. Roslags polska Roslagen F 12 4. Polska Norrbotten g 13 5. Polska (“Tänker du, att jag förlorader är”) Gotland G 161 6. Polska (Friarevisan) Westmanland a 160 7. Polska (Traditions 1.15)30 Westergöthland G 3 8. Orsa-polska Orsa g 11
Ahlström applies a consistent technique across the sets: pieces are strung
together with at most one or two measures bridging transitions. The violin, flute and
oboe carry the majority of melodic lines, although changes in texture cause the aural
30 For a discussion of this melody in other works, see the paragraphs surrounding Table 6.2, p. 424.
447
soundscape to shift often; in the Ceremony Music in particular, the orchestration
alternates between full orchestra (one flute, paired oboes, clarinets and bassoons; paired
horns and trumpets; timpani; and four-part strings, with bass doubling cello) and
smaller ensembles. Finally, although each set has a clear tonal center (usually G),
frequent key or mode changes after individual component pieces also add a sense of
variety. In the settings themselves, which are enshrouded in common-practice
compositional technique, there is little to indicate the folk origin of the tunes other than
the more unusual contours of some of the source melodies.
The brief, seven-bar introduction to the set of eight Svenska polskor (Example 7.1)
dissects the melody, using fragments as organic material in a manner that would later
occur on a larger scale in rhapsodies.31
31 Ahlström, “Svenska polskor,” Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 27 “Högtidsstycken, Folkdansar, Vallkväden m.m.,” S-Sn, p. 28.
448
Example 7.1: Ahlström, Svenska polskor (1844), Introduction, mm. 1–7
The opening measure of the tune (bottom system) appears intact in the orchestral
introduction, but inserted smoothly at the end of a phrase as a culminating, rather than
an initial gesture; parts of three others measures are altered and repeated. This brief
passage treats the “Orsa-polska” melody as raw material for building a folkton style
based on identifiable building-blocks of a traditional tune, a rare moment in Dybeck’s
programmatic concerts yet a hallmark of more abstract orchestral treatment.
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449
Anna Johnson has observed that Dybeck’s concerts attracted their own unique
audience.32 A review from 1860 put words to this idea, which was already in circulation:
It has been said that Dybeck’s concerts have their own audience, a somewhat mysterious statement not followed up by further definition that can probably be assumed to be positive, if the intent is to characterize this audience’s divergence from certain cliques, whose lack of independent and own judgement . . . causes them to shrug their shoulders and look down on a concert consisting purely of domestic compositions, while they are delighted, or at least pretend to be, to listen to a watery, but spicy and artfully put-together musical product of foreign mediocrity.33
This statement, while clearly polemic in its agreement with Dybeck’s side of the
controversial folk-verses-art-music divide, is nevertheless backed up by contemporary
observations on audience sizes. Dybeck’s concerts, including those conducted by
Ahlström, are routinely described as fairly full, completely full, and sold-out, even with
would-be listeners turned away at the door.34 In contrast, Ahlström himself organized
two little-known concerts in 1845 also consisting entirely of folk music for mixed
ensembles.35 Reviews of his second concert report the relatively poor audience size with
varying levels of tact:
“The audience at this concert was fairly large.”36
“The audience at this interesting event was not as numerous as one had a reason 32 See Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 116–17. 33 “Man har talat om att hr Dybecks soiréer skulle hafva sin egen publik, hvilket något mystiska och utan närmare definition åtföljda yttrande väl äfven skulle kunna antagas för godt, ifall meningen dermed är att beteckna denna publiks skiljaktighet ifrån vissa kotterier, hvilkas brist på sjelfständig och egen omdömeskraft . . . kommer dem att rycka på axlarne och med ringaktning se ned på en soiré med idel inhemska tonstycken, under det de falla i förtjusning, eller åtminstone så låtsa, vid åhörandet af en vattenhaltig, men pikant och konstrikt sammansatt musikalisk produkt af någon utländsk medelmåtta.” Aftonbladet (March 22, 1860): 2. 34 See attendance records in Table 7.1 above, p. 438. 35 June 10, 1845, and October 25, 1845. 36 “[D]enna var teml. talrikt besökt.” Dagligt Allehanda (October 27, 1845): 2.
450
to hope.”37
“Director Ahlström’s concert last Saturday had a smaller audience than anticipated . . . Mr. Ahlström invites the general public to hear the beautiful melodies of their own country, which should be equally as dear to the young as to the elderly — and yet the house is no more than half-full; but the reason for this debacle can be sought in this unsettled moving period, as well as in the ever-increasing shortage of money, etc.38
The locale, De la Croix’s salon, was the same used by Dybeck for all Stockholm concerts
after the hall for the premiere event in November 1844 had proven to be too small.
Although a notice for Ahlström’s first concert claims that much of the material had
never been performed at any concert previously, this cannot be entirely true; the
advertised categories of folkdansar, folklekar and polskor match the piece-types that
Ahlström supplied for Dybeck’s initial concerts, and there was likely more overlap than
acknowledged in the press.39 Furthermore, several of Ahlström’s soloists also
participated in Dybeck’s concerts over the years. The main differences, then, are two:
Ahlström, not Dybeck, organized the event; and the orchestra consisted of members of
the Hovkapellet, not the Smaller Theater’s orchestra. Did some of the listeners who
typically attended concerts performed by the Hovkapellet stay away because of the
entirely national subject-matter of the compositions? Was Ahlström simply not able to
match Dybeck’s magnetic power to enthuse and attract audiences for such specialized
37 “Denna intressanta tillställning var ej så talrikt besökt, som man haft anledning hoppas.” Aftonbladet (October 27, 1845): 2. 38 “Hr Direktör Ahlströms Musik-soiré, sistl. Lördag, var mindre talrikt besökt än man hade väntat . . . Hr Ahlström inbjuder allmänheten på dess sköna fosterländska melodier, hvilka böra vara lika kära för unga som gamla — och huset blir ändå ej mer än halft; dock torde orsaken, till det senare missödet kunna sökas i den oroliga flyttningstiden, äfvensom i den allt mer tilltagande penningebristen m.m.” Aftonbladet (October 28, 1845): 1. 39 Dagligt Allehanda (June 2, 1845): 1.
451
niche concerts? The latter is likely; but the former is also a viable possibility, according to
a review of a concert conducted by August Söderman in 1859.
On May 9 of that year, Söderman led the orchestra of the Smaller Theater in a
mixed concert beginning with Beethovens Overture to Prometheus and ending with his
own arrangement of Swedish folksongs and dances, which a reviewer judged to be
“harmonized and orchestrated with good taste and discernment . . . and performed with
such liveliness, precision and nuance, that earns much praise for both the director and
the performers.”40 But the reviewer was also troubled by the actions of many audience
members, who left the auditorium during the performance of Söderman’s folk
arrangements; by the time the music eventually stopped, the benches were already half-
empty. If this were a regular phenomenon during the final piece of a program, it would
not have merited a mention; but a sizable segment of the typical audience for a concert
in the Smaller Theater was moved, figuratively and literally, to show their displeasure.
Based on Ahlström and Söderman’s inability to secure and hold the interest of large
audiences, it seems that Dybeck’s concerts did indeed attract their own unique subset of
the concert-going public in Stockholm. A column in 1862 found an apt description: his
loyal audience was made up of “friends of folk music” (“folkmusikens vänner”)—a
group that, it has been demonstrated, was not synonymous with any other typical
concert-going public.41
40 “. . . harmonierade och instrumenterade med mycken smak och urskilning . . . och utförda med en liflighet, precision och nyansering, som lända såväl anföraren som de spelande till mycket beröm.” Aftonbladet (May 10, 1859): 2. 41 “Musik,” Aftonbladet (March 31, 1862): 3.
452
Ahlström’s arrangements for orchestra owe much of their apparent popularity to
the special conditions cultivated by Dybeck. Similarly, the next composer to add to the
repertoire, Leonard Höijer, was affected by Dybeck’s vision, as a combination of Höijer’s
innovations and two layers of revisions attest.
Höijer (four concerts, 1847–57)
Leonard Höijer (1815–84) was the only one of Dybeck’s four arrangers of orchestral
music who did not also serve as director of the Smaller Theater’s orchestra and, by
extension, at Dybeck’s concerts. A composer, arranger, music critic, organist (and
physical education teacher), Höijer is largely known today for his Musik-Lexikon
(1864/1867), the first Swedish dictionary with biographical entries on musical figures,
and his arrangements of traditional melodies: in addition to cooperating with Dybeck,
Höijer also helped publish a second, revised edition of Geijer-Afzelius in 1880 for which
he wrote over 130 new settings alongside or in place of Hæffner’s earlier contributions.42
On the surface, Höijer’s involvement with orchestral arrangements for Dybeck is
small, a single set of Ceremony Music that replaced Ahlström’s initial version after the
first two concerts.43 Yet it remained in the repertory for four performances stretched
across a decade. In addition, Höijer also collaborated with Dybeck to arrange folktunes
for publication, including the published volume Swedish Walking-Tunes (Folk-Marches).44
42 See Gunnar Ternhag, “Leonard Höijer,” trans. Jill Ann Johnson, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hoijer-leonard/. 43 For a programmatic description of this piece, see above, n. 24. 44 Richard Dybeck and Leonard Höijer, Svenska gång-låtar (Folk-marscher) (Stockholm: Abr. Hirsch, 1847).
453
Indeed, this book—which was issued within a year of the premiere of Höijer’s orchestral
arrangement—fulfills a function similar to a proto-recording that pianists could
purchase and “listen” to at home.45 Six of the eight melodies in the orchestral
arrangement are found in the piano settings (exceptions being the two Norwegian
wedding pieces), while the piano settings contain only one melody that Höijer did not
also arrange for orchestra. Table 7.4 shows the title, region, key area, and tune number
within the volume of Swedish Walking-Tunes for piano (SWT), when applicable, for
Höijer’s orchestral Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes.46 Given that the piece was
heard in four of Dybeck’s concerts over a span of ten years, the Swedish Walking-Tunes
for piano and the public orchestral performances would have reinforced each other,
potentially adding greatly to at least part of the audience’s familiarity with the
component tunes.
Table 7.4: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes for orchestra (1847), individual melodies borrowed
Title Region Key SWT Svenska och norska gånglåtar/ Högtids-stycken i svenska och norska landsorter
Gammal brudmarsch Norrland F 5 Bröllopsstycke norra Westmanland F 1 Brudmarsch (“Och inte vill jag sörja”) Leksand d 2 Beväringsgossarne (“Mandom, mod”) Österdalarne a 4 Gånglåt Helsingland a 6 Bröllopsstycket Gudbrandsdalen b —
45 According to the plate number (Hirsch 309), the book dates from 1849; Helmer, “Något om musikaliedatering,” 21. However, it was advertised in newspapers as “new music” already in December 1847; Östgötha Correspondenten (December 18, 1847), 4. 46 Höijer’s manuscript score bears the title, “Svenska och norska gånglåtar”; Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:7, no. 29, S-Sn. However, programs for concerts 3–6 (1847, 1852, 1857, 1857) list the piece variously as “Högtids-stycken i svenska och norska landsorter and Högtidsstycken, svenska och norska.”
454
Title Region Key SWT Norsk brudmarsch unspecified d — Beväringsgossarne (“Mandom, mod”) Österdalarne a 4
Although the sample size is small, Höijer’s arrangement differs from Ahlström’s
early standard in one important way: in addition to framing the piece with both an
introduction and a coda, Höijer almost always adds transition passages between tunes.
In general, the transitions round off the previous tune, introduce the next melody, and
prepare key-changes when appropriate. Example 7.2 shows the transition between the
first two tunes; the basic form of tune 1 is in the top staff, the basic form of tune 2 is in
the bottom staff, and the orchestral transition is in the middle two systems.47
47 Höijer, “Svenska och norska gånglåtar,” 3–4.
455
Example 7.2: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes for orchestra (1847), transition between first two tunes, mm. 41–55
The transition begins with a descending figure in the flute taken from the penultimate
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456
bar of the first melody, which is then answered in altered form by the clarinets as the
key shifts from F major toward its eventual goal, G major. However, E-flats in the
clarinets and strings (mm. 41 and 43) hint that the dominant seventh coalescing around
D (mm. 42–45) will resolve to G minor, rather than the G major required for the second
tune. This temporary evasion occurs as expected in the pick-up to m. 46, where the first
violins bring in the opening figure of the second melody, but in its parallel minor and
altered to match the dotted rhythm found in the tune’s third measure. Using standard
development techniques, Höijer first sequences this fragment up (mm. 46–48) before
using circle-of-fifths motion to bring a fragment-of-the-fragment back down (mm. 48–
50). After a second arrival on the new dominant, D major (m. 51), a brief violin cadenza
delays the eventual entrance of the second melody in G major.
Through transitions such as this, Höijer adds creative flexibility to what was
quickly becoming a standardized genre with little room for compositional input.
However, such features were not necessarily appreciated at the time, as different layers
of editorial markings reflect different approaches to cutting material. Large “X” marks in
red pencil cover the systems carrying this transition passage; but some lines appear
lighter, as if the pencil has been erased. Further reinforcing the cut are an “X” and a
large undulating squiggle in standard gray pencil across the first page of this section
(mm. 41–47), coupled with the word “end” (slut) underneath the double barline between
the first melody and the transition.
The decision to cut the transition won out, but not without controversy, and the
457
piece may well have been performed differently on different occasions. It is difficult to
know whether the cut was merely practical (to save time) or primarily ideological (to
excise material beyond the ordinary); either way, subsequent arrangers avoided such
transitions altogether, likely at Dybeck’s behest. In connection with a later concert,
Dybeck wrote a letter in Aftonbladet, in which he defends himself against negative
opinions. Speaking of a medley of songs, he complains of the modern desire to “make
something” (“göra något af”) of ancient materials in an attempt to improve them,
preferring instead to “act in the fullest manner by doing as little as possible.”48 In
orchestral music, newly composed transition patterns evidently fall into the category of
“doing too much,” and were not desired in Dybeck’s idea-world.
Söderman (two concerts, 1859–60)
The most famous of the arrangers and conductors connected with Dybeck’s concerts,
August Söderman (1832–76) was also involved relatively briefly: in his capacity as
conductor of the Smaller Theater, he led two of the folk-music concerts, the second of
which included his own Folk-Music Overview.49 According to a review from 1860,
Dybeck’s piece had already been heard at the Smaller Theater the previous year, making
it the only orchestral arrangement in Dybeck’s concerts to have premiered elsewhere.50
48 “. . . man härvidlag gör tillfyllest genom att göra så litet som möjligt.” Richard Dybeck, “Ett bref (insändt),” Aftonbladet (May 7, 1859): 3. 49 Ivarsdotter Johnson has uncovered circumstantial evidence that Söderman was also originally meant to conduct in 1858, but that he either declined or was hindered from conducting on short notice, leaving Gille to take over—as he had previously done during Söderman’s leave of absence to visit Germany. See “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 128 (n. 37). 50 Aftonbladet (March 22, 1860): 2.
458
In addition, the music is not included in the Dybeck collection in the archive of the
Nordic Museum in Stockholm, and its identity has proven elusive through the years.
In 1897, a set of eight straightforward arrangements by Söderman was
posthumously published as Svenska folkvisor och folkdansar.51 Söderman’s biographer,
Gunnar Jeanson, was unable to determine whether or not these settings were identical
with the music performed at the the Smaller Theater in 1859.52 Söderman’s page on
Swedish Musical Heritage indicates that the set was “Played at Mindre teatern 9 May 1859,
although uncertain whether this was the first performance,” making the two pieces
identical.53 However, according to the review mentioned in the previous paragraph, the
same arrangement was played in 1859 (Smaller Theater) and 1860 (Dybeck’s concert). If
this is the case, then the early set of arrangements cannot be identical to the set from
1897, as will be shown below.
The full name of the piece in the program for 1860 is Folk-Music Overview: A
Series of Different Types of Pieces from Most Rural Regions of Sweden, such as . . ., at which
point a list of seven regions is appended (Table 7.5, left side).54 Jeanson provides titles for
the eight pieces in the published set from 1870, which are not named in the score itself
51 This set is sometimes called Nordiska folkvisor och folkdansar (Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, [1897]). August Söderman, Roy Goodman, and Symphony Orchestra of Norrlands Opera, “Svenska folkvisor och folkdanser,” in August Söderman, Orchestral Music, vol. 2., audio CD (Sterling CDS1040, 2000). 52 Gunnar Jeanson, “August Söderman: En svensk tondiktares liv och verk,” PhD diss. (Stockholms högskola, 1926), 329. 53 Karin Hallgren, “August Söderman,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2013, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/soderman-august/. 54 “Folkmusikalisk öfverblick. En följd av olikartade stycken från de flesta Svenska landsorter, såsom Jemtland, Dalarne, Westmanland, Östergötland, Småland, Skåne och Blekinge.” Aftonbladet (March 12, 1860): 1.
459
(center column); several of these songs are traditionally associated with certain regions,
listed on the far right.
Table 7.5: Comparison of orchestral sets arranged by Söderman for performance in 1859/60 and publication in 1870
Regions listed in title of orchestral set performed
in 1860 (and 1859)
Titles of tunes included in orchestral set
published in 1870
Region with which tune is traditionally associated, if applicable
Jämtland Dalarna
Västmanland Östergötland
Småland Skåne
Blekinge
Jag sjungit har i dagar Tänker du att jag förlorader är
Alls ingen flicka lastar jag Polska från Öland
Jag gick mig ut en aftonstund Polska från Särna
Som stjernorna på himmelen Polska från Östergötland
Värmland Gotland Öland Särna, Dalarna Östergötland
The lack of obvious correspondence between the content of the two sets makes it likely
that the music performed at Dybeck’s concert was mostly or entirely different from that
published a decade later.55 Traditionally, scholarship has assumed that Söderman
showed little interest in the transcription and harmonization of folk melodies, putting all
of his energy instead into folkton writing.56 Accordingly, his work with Dybeck has
largely been ignored. Table 7.5 proves that Söderman’s role as arranger of orchestral
folksong was larger than has previously been demonstrated with certainty.
Unfortunately, it also indicates that, unless and until Dybeck’s earlier music is found, it
cannot be included in this analysis.
55 The first, second, and fourth numbers in the published version are so strongly associated with Värmland, Gotland and Öland in numerous other publications that it would be strange to find them connected with any other region, and yet none of those three regions are listed in the title of the set performed in 1860. 56 See, for example, a discussion of Gunnar Jeanson and Carl-Allan Moberg’s findings in Johnson, “Att åt ett helt folk dana en sångverld,” 114, 128.
460
Gille (ten concerts, 1857–70)
Jacob Edvard Gille (1814–80) appeared briefly earlier as an arranger of male choral song.
A violinist-violist, organist and conductor in addition to composer, Gille was employed
by number of institutions in Stockholm, including the Humlegård Theater, the Smaller
Theater, the Hovkapellet, the Catholic Church, and (as a clerk rather than a musician) at
the city’s auction house for books.57 Gille wrote a broad variety of secular chamber
music and large-scale orchestral and dramatic works in addition to liturgical and extra-
liturgical religious music.58 According to Karin Hallgren, Gille had a reputation for
catering to public tastes, rather than striving to advance the cause of serious music, and
he was said to be a less capable conductor than Söderman. Nevertheless, Gille was
tapped to fill in for Söderman at the Smaller Theater during the latter’s period of study
in Germany (1856–57), which is how he came to be associated with Dybeck’s concerts.
After conducting the Stockholm and Uppsala concerts in 1857, Gille began to
supply Dybeck with orchestral arrangements in 1858, the final concert he conducted. In
all, he arranged five sets of folk music for orchestra without voices, which cumulatively
account for just over half (18 of 35) of the total occasions on which orchestral settings
were performed.59 Similarly, at least eight of the fifteen concerts programmed at least
57 For a brief discussion of Gille’s life and works, see Karin Hallgren, “Jacob Edvard Gille,” trans. Thalia Thunander, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2015, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/gille-jacob-edvard/. 58 Hallgren gives a revised list of collected works based on Anders Lönn’s work in 1967/69, but Gille’s collaborations with Dybeck go almost entirely unmentioned; only the Svenska polskor: Harmoniserade och arrangerade för orchester, the autograph score of which is listed at S-Skma rather than with the rest of the collection in S-Sn (which has only the parts), is acknowledged. 59 In addition, he arranged numerous other settings for voice(s) with various small and large ensembles.
461
one Gille arrangement for orchestra. When Gille’s dual roles as conductor and arranger
are put together, there are only five concerts—the first four, and the one in Västerås,
where no orchestra was available—that did not feature him or his symphonic settings.
Where other arrangers grouped six to eight pieces into each set, Gille worked
with nine, ten, and even eleven tunes, with few transitions and no introductions. Only
one set has a coda, which had already become firmly attached to the melody in question
by prior tradition. Höijer’s Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes (1847) ends with the
“Orsa-March” (associated with Dybeck’s text “Manhood, Bravery, and Daring Men”),
which became immensely popular through these concerts. When Gille arranged his own
Nordic Ceremonial Music, Walking-Tunes and Marches (1858) to replace Höijer’s Swedish and
Norwegian Walking-Tunes, he evidently felt obliged to maintain the gist of Höijer’s coda.60
In Höijer’s orchestral setting, an 11-bar coda (Example 7.3) revels briefly in the
repetition of altered fragments in low strings and bassoons, starting at ff and continuing
to grow from there, before entering into a sustained diminuendo in the last four bars, as
the imaginary company of soldiers marches off into the distance. In effect, the last two
measures of the “Orsa-March” are prolonged through repetition and augmentation to
fill the entire space of the coda (compare passages inside boxes with dashed lines).61
60 Gille, “Nordiska högtidsstycken, gånglåtar och marscher,” Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:2, no. 36, S-Sn, pp. 60–61. 61 Höijer, “Svenska och norska gånglåtar,” 17.
462
Example 7.3: Höijer, Swedish and Norwegian Walking-Tunes, Coda based on Orsa-March
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Given the beloved status of the melody—a version for voices began every concert
between 1852 and 1860—Höijer’s coda had likely come to be considered an integral part
of the song through its appearance in four consecutive concerts. Gille’s setting retains
the active cello/bass line from Höijer’s coda while completely re-scoring the remaining
voices, giving audiences a same-but-different experience (Example 7.4).62 Now, unison
strings carry the old bass line, bringing it to the forefront. In the midst of primarily
chordal accompaniments, the upper winds sneak into the fourth measure the sort of
artistic, disassociated reference to the source tune that went against Dybeck’s
philosophy. A tie helps disguise the first note, hiding the reference from the casual
listener.
62 Gille, “Nordiska högtidsstycken och marscher,” Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:2, S-Sn, pp. 60–61.
464
Example 7.4: Gille, Nordic Ceremonial Music, Walking-Tunes and Marches, Coda based on Höijer’s coda based on Orsa-March
The Nordic Ceremonial Music, Walking-Tunes and Marches that premiered 1858 was
heard in its initial version only once; already the following year, Gille prepared what at
first glance promises to be a different set of Nordic Ceremonial Music and Marches, dated
1859 on the title page.63 In reality, the two pieces are identical, with the exception of one
number in the middle that has been swapped out in favor of a different tune. Gille’s
Ceremonial Music was the most-programmed of any orchestral piece, appearing annually
between 1858 and 1862.
63 Gille, “Nordiska högtidsstycken och marscher,” Richard Dybeck collection, NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 26, S-Sn.
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Just as he borrowed Höijer’s coda, Gille paid homage to earlier arrangements in
other ways as well, providing continuity for listeners. For example, the second and third
tunes in his Svenska folkdansar (1858) were the first and second tunes in Ahlström’s
similarly-titled arrangement from 1844. Taken together, overlapping source tunes in
arrangements by multiple composers helped create a canon-against-the-canon, that is, a
body of otherwise “unfamiliar”, primarily untexted traditional melodies brought to the
forefront alongside the more famous numbers spread via choral and theatrical channels.
Dybeck’s pedagogical purpose was well served by his most active arranger, a composer
with a good sense of popular taste who provided copious amounts of no-frills music to
deliver traditional tunes in the manner most accessible to audiences of his day.64
Contemporary reviews and other references to these orchestral settings nearly
always refer to pieces by their titles, which in turn usually reflect the type(s) of music
included. Nowhere does the word rapsodi appear, which would come to be associated
with orchestral works; neither are they referred to as fantasier, the familiar label for piano
works treating one or more melodies (often from folk sources or operas) with a great
deal of compositional freedom. The most common descriptors are prosaic, and
appropriate for the basic sectional form deployed: compilation (sammanställning) and
series, sequence or string (följd). On one occasion, the more poetic tone-painting
64 See, for example, this excerpt from a lengthy review in praise of Dybeck’s concept, in addition to the most recent concert: “The orchestration by director Gille seemed to us to possess the essential virtue to hold the pieces together and illuminate the peculiar qualities in each piece, without all sorts of modernization or showing off learned techniques.” (“Instrumenteringen af direktör Gille syntes oss ega den väsentliga förtjensten att väl sammanhålla och belysa det egendomliga i styckena, utan all slags modernisering eller framhäfvande af lärd behandling.”) “Musik,” Aftonbladet (March 18, 1867): 3.
466
(tonmålning) appears—appropriately, in connection with Höijer’s Swedish and Norwegian
Walking-Tunes, the most organically conceived arrangement by virtue of its substantial
transition passages between tunes. This linguistic link with the more traditional genre of
the tone-painting or tone-poem strengthens the idea that the arrangements for Dybeck’s
concerts, so long ignored and undervalued, hold a notable, if short-lived, position in the
history of Swedish orchestral music.
Overview of non-Dybeck orchestral repertoire
Dybeck’s folk-music concerts, while popular and influential, remained outside the
mainstream and occupied just a quarter of the nineteenth century. Other, more
internationally representative orchestral genres—symphonies, overtures, rhapsodies
and tone-poems—proved fertile ground for folk-inspired compositions adhering more
closely to modern developments in musical style. The repertoire in Table 7.6, orchestral
pieces based in folksong written for contexts other than Dybeck’s concerts, spans several
overlapping chronological layers, which will be outlined below.65
Table 7.6: Orchestral works based in folksong not commissioned for Dybeck’s folk-music concerts
Composer Title
Year Folktune(s) [? = unknown]
Crusell, Bernhard Introduction et air suédois varié, op. 12, for
clarinet and piano or orchestra
1804 Goda gosse, glaset töm (popular song, Åhlström)
65 For an overview of Swedish orchestral music, see Martin Tegen, “Orkesterverken [1810–70],” in Musiken i Sverige III, ed. Leif Jonsson and Martin Tegen, 321–28; and Tegen, “Orkesterverken [1870–1920],” in ibid., 431–44.
467
Composer Title
Year Folktune(s) [? = unknown]
Eggert, Joachim Nicolas Symphony in C Major, iv: “Fantasy on a Swedish Folk Song”
1805–1809?
Gustaf’s skål (popular song, Bellman)
Berwald, Johan Fredrik Swedish Songs for Violin with Orchestra
1813 ? (lost)
Ries, Ferdinand Airs nationaux suédois avec variations, op. 52
(written for solo piano 1813; orchestrated later)
1813/ ?
Lilla Carl (Bellman), Skånsk bonddans, Quarndansen
Randel, Andreas Potpourri (or Fantasie) on Swedish folk tunes
for violin and orchestra
by 1831 ?, Traditions 1.9
Rubenson, Albert Hambo-polska for violin and orchestra
1846 ?, unidentified dance
Foroni, Jacopo Tre ouvertures, no. 3
1850 Traditions 1.19 and 1.15, “Per svinaherde”
Gille, Jacob Edvard Midsommarfesten, ii. Tempo di menuetto
1850 ?, polska-like melodies
Pratté, Edvard Fantaisie Romantique öfver svenska folkvisor for
pedal harp with orchestra
1859 or earlier
“Och liten Karin tjente,” “Min far var en Westgöthe,” “Dalpolska”
Rubenson Symphonic Intermezzo [No. 1 in G minor]
1860 “Värmlandsvisan”
Rubenson For the Inauguration of the Royal Academy of
Music building on March 2, 1878; Introduction for Orchestra (on a Swedish Folksong)
1878 “Du gamla, du friska”
Kjellstrand, Johan Fredrik Tomtelek: Nordic Tone-Painting for Orch., op. 31
1880 ?, unidentified polska, or folkton?
Norman, Ludvig Music for the Nordenskiöldfesten, Royal Theater
1880 “Folkmarsch fr. Orsa i Dal-arne” (“Mandom, mod”)
Hallén, Andreas Rhapsody No. 2, op. 23, “Swedish Rhapsody”
1882 “Neckens polska,” “Väfva vadmal”
Norman Festival Overture on National-Patriotic Motives,
for the Royal Opera’s Centenary-Celebration (op. 60, no. 3)
1882 “Du gamla, du friska”
Alfvén, Hugo Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, iv
1897 ?, polska-like melody, spelmanslåt
Hallén Gustaf Wasa’s Saga: Suite for Orchestra (No. 2)
1897 ?, unidentified polska
Alfvén Midsommarvaka
1903 dances transcribed by Alfvén
468
Composer Title
Year Folktune(s) [? = unknown]
Stenhammar, Wilhelm Midvinter: Swedish Rhapsody for Choir & Orch.
1907 folk-chorale “Den signade dag”; polska and gånglåt from Mora
Munktell, Helena Dalsuite
1910 polskor
Aulin, Tor 4 Swedish Dances, op. 32
1913 ?, 4 unidentified dances
Peterson-Berger, Wilhelm Symphony No. 3, “Same-Ätnam”
1913–1915
5 Sami joik melodies
Melchers, Melcher Necken
1916–1919
“Neckens polska”
Atterberg, Kurt The Foolish Maidens
1920 several tunes from 200 Svenska folkdansar (1875)
Lindberg, Oskar En liten dalarapsodi
1926 “Om sommaren sköna,””Lek-sands skänklåt,” “Daldansen”
Alfvén Dalarapsodi No. 3, op. 47
1931 melodies from Dalarna transcribed by Alfvén and others
Kallstenius, Edin Dalarapsodin, op. 18
1931 7 tunes from Dalarna in Svenska låtar, vols. I and III
Vretblad, Patrik Dala-svit
1932 tunes from Dalarna
Atterberg En Värmlandsrapsodi, op. 36
1933 melodies from Värmland, including “Värmlandsvisan”
Kallstenius Dalslandsrapsodin, op. 22
1936 tunes from Dalsland in Svenska låtar
To begin with, the pieces prior to 1814 use an older, pre-Herderian concept of
folksong: Envallsson’s “national music,” those popular tunes known across wide swaths
of the country, including in urban areas.66 With only one exception (Eggert’s symphony),
concerto-like works for an instrumental soloist and orchestra dominate the first half of
the century, all written by composer-performers for their primary instrument.67 At mid-
66 On Envallsson and national music, see above, p. 211. 67 Because of their structural similarity with fantasies and variation sets for solo piano or other instrument accompanied by piano, orchestral works featuring a soloist will not be analyzed here in further detail;
469
century, a shift occurs; fantasies and variations for soloists with orchestra give way to
overtures, intermezzos, rhapsodies, and other single-movement forms.68 The highest
period of activity for new orchestral music not created for Dybeck occurred around
1880, with five compositions appearing within about five years (as opposed to ten
compositions in the preceding seventy-three years, and just two more in the last
seventeen years of the century). Dybeck’s mission to insert a semblance of “authentic”
context into orchestral settings by grouping tunes according to function did not spread
to the larger orchestral world; rather, a new type of program juxtaposing musics
representing the supernatural and the natural worlds appeared around 1880, an idea
borrowed from musical theater.
In the twentieth century, beginning with Hugo Alfvén’s Midsommarvaka (1903),
orchestral treatments of folk music went mainstream, with several examples securing
positions in modern performance repertoire. The selection of pieces listed here is less
exhaustive than for the earlier time period, but it demonstrates the sudden popularity of
another method of grouping multiple tunes: by region of origin. Like Korp-Kirsti and The
Värmlanders in the 1840s, nine of the thirteen pieces written since 1900 focus on the music
of a single region. From Dalarna to Värmland to Sápmi (the land of the Sami people in
the north), orchestral music took listeners on musical excursions to many destinations
indeed, there is overlap between the two genres, as several pieces were originally written with a piano accompaniment, which was orchestrated for further performances at a later date. 68 Edvard Pratté’s Fantaisie romantique öfver svenska folkvisor for pedal harp with orchestra may well have been written long before a mention of its performance in 1859.
470
across the country. However, pieces written after 1900 will be treated in lesser detail
here since they fall outside the temporal boundaries of the present study and have, in
some cases, served as objects of analysis elsewhere.
Symphonies
The symphony on Swedish folk tunes is by and large a twentieth-century phenomenon.
According to many sources, few symphonies of any sort were written in nineteenth-
century Sweden; Lennart Hedwall, author of the most comprehensive study of Swedish
symphonies, notes that this persistent belief has been intensified by the reality that most
symphonies from this time were not published, but are either languishing in archives or
lost to time altogether. But he goes on to affirm that “the music that does exist is many
times better than its tarnished reputation,” which is becoming even more apparent
today than at the time of his writing in 1983, thanks to the availability of more
recordings.69 In all of Hedwall’s coverage of the nineteenth century, no multi-movement
symphony based substantially on a fiddle tune, ballad, or any sort of pre-extant
traditional Swedish music in a Herderian sense is to be found, and even references to
folkton writing are surprisingly few.70 Similarly, Owe Ander’s detailed study of the
symphonies of Berwald, Lindblad and Norman concludes that the works “are not in any
way distinctively ‘Swedish’; traits of national romanticism [such as folk-music
69 “[D]en musik som finns är många gånger bättre än sitt skamfilade rykte.” Lennart Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983), 99. 70 As an aside, one famous symphony bears a close non-musical connection to Sweden: Schumann dedicated his Symphony No. 2 in C Major, op. 61 (pub. 1847) to Oscar I, King of Sweden and Norway.
471
quotations or folkton writing] are almost absent.”71
Some of the more colorful programmatic titles raise expectations for the presence
of folk-music quotations. Most prominently, Jakob Adolf Hägg’s Nordisk symfoni (1871,
orchestrated 1890s?) would seem to be a prime candidate for a portrayal of the common
musical heritage of Scandinavian nations, but it does nothing of the sort.72 The apparent
mis-match between title and content has puzzled musicologists, who have offered
various potential explanations.73 In contrast, the similarly named Nordic Suite I, op. 22
by the Danish composer Ansgar Hamerik (1843–1923) makes copious use of traditional
and folk-style melodies. Written within about a year of Hägg’s piano duet that would
eventually grow into the Nordic Symphony, the second of Hamerik’s five movements
begins and ends with “The Song of Värmland.” Among symphonies written in Sweden
in the 1800s, however, only three viable candidates may be considered, each of which
has its own reservations.
Eggert: Symphony in C Major (ca. 1805–09)
Born in Swedish Pomerania, Joachim Nicolas Eggert studied and worked in various
71 Ander, “Svenska sinfoni-författares karaktäristiska orkester-egendomligheter,” 536. 72 The symphony began as a sonata for piano, four hands, composed in Copenhagen in 1871; only later, perhaps in the late 1890s, was it orchestrated. Finn Rosengren, “Critical Commentary,” in Jakob Adolf Hägg, Nordisk symfoni / Nordic Symphony, Opus 2, ed. Anders Wiklund, Anders Högstedt, and Erik Wallrup, trans. Neil Betteridge (Stockholm: Levande Musikarv, 2013), [162–63]. This is the same Hägg to whom Hallström dedicated his variations for piano on Liten Karin; see n. 39 above. 73 Hedwall draws vague connections with Hägg’s psyche, and also the “basic character” (grundkaraktär) of the work, as made manifest through the individual style that Hägg developed through his Leipzig-school study of Schumann and Gade; Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin, 174. Finn Rosengren also points to a Gade-centric “special Nordic form of Leipzig romanticism,” alongside possibilities that Hägg may have been reflecting on his period of study in Copenhagen, or making reference to cultural Scandinavianism, which continued in some circles even after political will declined sharply in 1864; see Rosengren, “Critical Commentary,” [164].
472
cities in northern Germany before seeking employment in St. Petersburg.74 Forced to
pause his journey hither in Stockholm because of illness, he settled in that city instead,
joining the Hovkapellet as a violinist and building a steady career as a performer,
composer, conductor and teacher. Four years after arriving, he was elected to the Royal
Swedish Academy of Music. Eggert’s output includes four complete symphonies,
assorted chamber music (including over a dozen string quartets) and theatrical music,
and would doubtless have grown much larger had he not succumbed to illness at age
thirty-four.
The fourth movement of the Symphony in C Major, Allegro vivace, was earlier
thought to be a fantasy on a Swedish folk melody, a presumption likely underscored by
Eggert’s interest in transcribing traditional melodies with Erik Drake and Leonard
Fredrik Rääf.75 However, Bertil van Boer and others have shown that the “folk” melody
in question is the popular song and de facto royal anthem during the Gustavian period,
“Toast to Gustaf” (“Gustafs skål”) with words by Carl Michael Bellman, which would
have passed Carl Envallsson’s definition of “national music” even as it would have
failed Geijer and Afzelius’s understanding of “folksong.”76 Writing in a bubbly
74 For Eggert’s biography, see Bertil van Boer, “Foreword,” in Symphony in C Major by Joachim Nikolas Eggert, ed. Avishai Kallai and Jari Eskola (Stockholm: Musikaliska Konstföreningen, 2011), i–ii. A list of works is printed in Ander, An Inventory of Swedish Music, 29-31. 75 Ibid., ii. 76 Bellman’s words became famous in conjunction with Gustaf III’s coup d’état in August 1772, although the melody was already widely familiar before then; for a version of the melody notated in 1785, which varies only slightly from that used by Eggert, see a facsimile excerpt from Baron Fredrik Åkerhielm’s manuscript dance-book reprinted in Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 176. Danielsen and Ramsten also report that the song later became used for a song-game, which the author can confirm, having practiced a dance to “Gustafs skål” in Scandinavian folk-dance classes in Bellingham, WA ca. 2008.
473
Haydnesque style, Eggert puts the melody through its paces in a sonata-form movement
modified by the use of fugal writing throughout the recapitulation. Although “Toast to
Gustaf” is the secondary theme of the sonata, its imprint is found throughout: the
primary theme, written in the character of the primary theme from the Finale of Haydn’s
Symphony No. 88 in G Major, is actually a response carved from the negative
contrapuntal space of Eggert’s borrowed secondary theme, as becomes evident when the
two tunes are layered simultaneously near the end of the recapitulation (Example 7.5).77
Here, the first violins play the basic form of the primary theme, which is only eight
measures long; “Toast to Gustaf” begins in the second violins, but wanders up to the
first violins for its second half, at which point the second violins become purely an
accompanimental voice.
Example 7.5: Eggert, Symphony in C Major, iv. Allegro vivace, mm. 487–502: Simultaneous layering of primary and secondary themes
77 Joachim Nikolas Eggert, Symphony in C Major, ed. Avishai Kallai and Jari Eskola (Stockholm: Musikaliska Konstföreningen, 2011), 139–40; and Eggert, Gérard Korsten, and Gävle Symphony Orchestra, Eggert: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3, audio CD (Naxos 8572457, 2015).
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In addition to this layering of themes, the borrowed tune is also subject to
modification elsewhere in the movement, with a new contour and extension near the
end of the exposition and a fragment that undergoes fugal treatment in the development
and recapitulation—in the latter case, even in a double fugue in conjunction with part of
the primary theme. After Eggert, such contrapuntal elaboration of a Swedish national or
folk tune in the context of abstract symphonic writing did not occur again at any point in
the nineteenth century.
Gille: Midsummer Celebration (1850)
Jacob Edvard Gille’s four-movement Midsummer Celebration: Symphony for Large
Orchestra in F Major, op. 29 (Midsommarfesten: Symphonie för stor orchester), predates his
involvement in Dybeck’s folk-music concerts by seven years or more. Martin Tegen
assumes that at least some of the many polska melodies appearing in the second
movement are Gille’s own inventions, although the imitations—if, indeed, that is what
they are—are, for the most part, stylistically believable.78 In a dose of simulated realism,
the second movement (Tempo di menuetto) both begins and ends with rhythmicized
open A and D strings, invoking a rustic spelman (folk fiddler). Formally, the movement
holds close to the Classical minuet and trio, which are duly labeled in the score, and
each section presents a polska melody in its typical AABB form. It is in the coda, after the
straightforward introduction of a third tune, that Gille takes the most obvious
compositional license, manipulating his source tunes in ways that would not have been 78 Martin Tegen, “Midsommarvaka — Föregångare och efterföljare,” in Hugo Alfvén: En vägvisare, ed. Gunnar Ternhag and Jan Olof Rudén ([Hedemora]: Gidlunds förlag, 2003), 105.
475
desireable in his later work for Dybeck. Example 7.6 shows a piano reduction of an
excerpt from the coda, in which material deriving from earlier tunes is labeled with
brackets and the tune number (“1” is the tune introduced in the minuet, while “3” is the
melody first heard earlier in the coda). Three types of material co-exist here in close
quarters: fragments quoted exactly (square brackets); fragments manipulated from an
earlier tune (dashed brackets); and freely composed music.
Example 7.6: Gille, Midsommarfesten, ii. Tempo di menuetto, Coda, mm. 12–45
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Actual and modified fragments join together in new patterns, referencing what
happened earlier but forming a new style. Although the first three systems have more
derived material than original material, the resulting sound is not folkton; the melody has
too much variety, and not enough repetition or balance to sound like a typical polska.
Such originality became common in single-movement forms in the second half of the
century, but remained rare in weightier symphonies until the 1900s.
Rubenson: Symphonic Intermezzo (1860)
Albert Rubenson (1826–1901), often hailed retrospectively as Sweden’s answer to Grieg,
set for himself the lofty (and overly optimistic) goal of founding a “Swedish school” of
composition; educated in Leipzig, Rubenson played briefly in the Gewandhaus
Orchestra and the Hovkapellet and made a name for himself as a music critic before
becoming manager (1872) and director (1880) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.79
His single full-blown symphony, the Symphony in C Major (1847, rev. 1851), has little to
do with folk music; Lennart Hedwall, who has systematically studied symphonies by
Swedish composers, mentions only “certain reminiscenes of folk-tone” (“vissa
folktonsanklanger”).80 In the first of two three-movement orchestral intermezzi,
however, Rubenson engages more directly with traditional music.
79 On Rubenson’s life and works, see Ulrik Volgsten, “Albert Rubenson,” trans. Jill Ann Johnson, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2014, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/rubenson-albert/. Anne Reese Willén analyzes Rubenson’s opinions on the state of music criticism in Sweden in the mid-1850s in Anne Reese Willén, “I huvudstaden, musiklivets härd: Den strukturella omvandlingen av Stockholms offentliga konstmusikliv ca 1840–1890,” PhD diss. (Uppsala universitet, 2014), 78–84. 80 Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin, 141.
477
The first movement of the Symphonic Intermezzo No. 1 in G minor (1860) begins
and ends with a sparsely accompanied solo cello intoning a rising line (Example 7.7) that
closely approximates the opening phrase of the famous “Song of Värmland”: the
familiar, somber notes provide a framework of “Once upon a time . . .” and “They lived
solemnly ever after.”81
Example 7.7: Rubenson, Symphonic Intermezzo (1860), i. Allegro moderato, mm. 1–10
Although the same rising gesture is also repeated at the end of the third movement, the
folksong is more of a generative source for spin-off motives than a self-contained entity;
81 Albert Rubenson, “Symfoniskt intermezzo [no. 1] för orchester,” manuscript score, 1860, Sv. saml. orkester rar, S-Skma, p. 1; and Rubenson, Roy Goodman, and Umeå Symphony Orchestra, “Symphonic Intermezzo in G minor,” in Albert Rubenson: Orchestral Works, audio CD (Sterling: CDS1029, 2000).
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the lack of reference to the song’s final, descending melodic line, or indeed any other
extended quotation or near-quotation beyond the cello line shown here, denies the sense
of closure around a complete melody. In the absence of large numbers of folk-inspired
symphonies, Rubenson’s three-movement Symphonic Intermezzo stakes a claim as one
of few large-scale works grounded in identifiable folk material.82
Hugo Alfvén: Symphony No. 1 in F Minor (1897)
Hugo Alfvén (1872–1960) has long been closely associated with folksong, thanks to his
popular orchestral rhapsodies on folktunes and choral arrangements of folksongs.83
Although his first composition based on pre-extant folk material dates from 1903 (the
rhapsody Midsommarvaka), seeds of folkton writing are present already in some of his
earliest compositions in the 1890s. A prime example is the Symphony No. 1 in F Minor
(completed in 1897, rev. 1903–04 and 1948), which Lennart Hedwall has described as
“Nordic” in character, calling the main theme of the finale “downright polska-esque”
(“rent polskaartat”).84 Hedwall’s detailed description of the symphony brings up several
vague references to folk-like writing; closer analysis uncovers even more concrete
connections.
To begin with, the opening cello solo raises direct associations with a free
82 For a fuller stylistic description of the Symphonic Intermezzo No. 1, see Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin, 142–43. 83 In fact, Alfvén’s perceived associations with folksong have become so rooted in the popular (and scholarly) imagination that Gunnar Ternhag argues for a more sober view, in which works inspired by folk music are understood as an important sub-set, but not the entire body of, his compositions; see “Hugo Alfvén och folkmusiken,” in Hugo Alfvén (see n. 78 above), 61–67. 84 Lennart Hedwall, “Symfonierna: Symfoni nr. 1,” in Hugo Alfvén (see n. 78 above), 71.
479
rendition of “The Song of Värmland”; the rising scale, back-to-back skips of a third and
eventual stepwise fall closely trace the contour of the famous folk melody, even if certain
pitches are altered (Example 7.8, m. 2).85 A melancholy folk mood is established, and it
continues to hold even when the cello line ventures into more original territory as the
rest of the instruments enter.
Example 7.8: Alfvén, Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, op. 7, i. Grave, mm. 1–4, reduction
Looking ahead to the primary theme, Hedwall identifies “a certain folk-music
connection” in the sixteenth-note figure on the third bar. Even more striking, however, is
the resemblance of the descending motive at the beginning of this theme to a typical
polska dance. After a palette-cleansing series of rapid scales in the preceding measure, it
is more than possible—at least in Niklas Willén’s recording with the Royal Scottish
National Orchestra—to hear the entrance of the primary theme as a polska phrase in 3/4
time (bracketed segment in Example 7.9, middle staff), rather than merely a jaunty
dotted rhythm as notated in 4/4 (upper staff).86
85 Hugo Alfvén, Symfoni N:r 1 (Stockholm: Gehrmans, 1994), 4; and Alfvén, Niklas Willén, and Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Symphony No. 1, Festival Overture, Uppsala Rhapsody, The Mountain King, audio CD (Naxos 8.553962, 1997). 86 Ibid.
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Example 7.9: Alfvén, Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, op. 7, i, Primary theme and similar melody
According to this hearing, the falling triad in notes 7–9 of the theme forms an audible
parallel to the falling figure in notes 1–3, creating the sensation of a second downbeat.87
Although there is no evidence that Alfvén used a pre-extant melody, there is no stylistic
reason why these first two measures in the upper staff could not be danced as a polska.
Indeed, they bear close resemblance to the song-polska “I never had such an enjoyable
evening,” as printed by Arwidsson in 1842 (bottom staff).88 Elements of folkton in the first
movement of Alfvén’s first symphony are more tangible than previously demonstrated.
Looking ahead to the twentieth century: Peterson-Berger, Atterberg, and Stenhammar
In the latter third of the nineteenth century, operas and other forms of musical theater
began to appear in which a single folksong provided a storyline as well as musical
content. In symphonic writing, a similar trend caught on in the second decade of the
87 The pitch relations in this falling triad also correspond to the “Grieg motive” familiar from the first three notes of the Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 (1868). 88 The song “Aldrig har jag haft så rolig qväll” has been transposed here from G minor; Arwidsson, Svenska fornsånger, 3:341.
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481
twentieth century, in which composers wrote extended works around clusters of related
melodies. Wilhelm Peterson-Berger’s Symphony No. 3, Land of the Sami. Lapland (Same-
Ätnam. Lappland, 1913–1915), famously expanded the definition of “folk music” to
include traditional joik melodies of the indigenous Sami people of northern Scandinavia,
music that had all but been ignored by Swedish collectors prior to Karl Tirén, whose
phonographic recordings caught Peterson-Berger’s attention an ethnographic exhibition
in Stockholm in 1913.89 The resulting symphony incorporates joik melodies and original
themes in a complex programmatic web that evokes traditional Sami ways of life and
the sublime nature of the “unspoiled” north, even as it celebrates the burgeoning
industrial development in a region poised to propel Sweden to a future of progress—at
the expense of both Sami and nature.90 Same-Ätnam skipped the established order of art
music based on folk themes: it predated the eventual publication of the first Swedish
anthology of Sami music by almost thirty years.
Same-Ätnam parallels the work of Geijer, Afzelius, and other early editors of
89 For more on the background of the symphony, see Kirsten Rutschman, “Preface,” in Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, Symphony No. 3 in F Minor, Same-Ätnam (Lapland) (Munich: Musikproduktion Höflich, 2014), i–iv. See also Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin, 218–21; and Peterson-Berger, Stig Westerberg, and Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester, audio CD (Sveriges Radio: 1982). 90 Annika Lindskog makes a compelling argument that while many analyses focus solely on the joik melodies, the symphony’s engagement with the landscape of the northern Swedish frontier reveals a crucial conflict underlying the North as celebrated in Dybeck’s national anthem text (“You ancient, you free, you mountainous north”) and the North as the land of the future—Sweden’s own America—with a growing mining industry, as symbolized by the railway linking Kiruna with the Norwegian port city of Narvik; “Natures and Cultures: The Landscape in Peterson-Berger’s Symfonia Lapponica,” STM-Online 14 (2011), http://musikforskning.se/stmonline/vol_14/lindskog/index.php?menu=3, text between n. 27 and n. 28. Indeed, the damage wrought in the name of “progress” has become all the more tangible today; subterranean iron mines have destabalized the ground underneath Kiruna, and the town (pop. 18,000) is currently in the process of moving two miles east. See Feargus O’Sullivan, “The Plan to Move an Entire Swedish Town,” The Atlantic, June 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/a-town-on-the-move/392078/.
482
folksong publications while also demonstrating a different trajectory. Following the loss
of Finland in 1809 and the gain of Norway in 1814, early folksong collectors set out to
teach citizens what they framed as their own music, a common heritage singing through
the voice of a collective Swedish soul. Similarly, Peterson-Berger wrote this symphony
shortly after the definitive end of Swedish expansion following the dissolution of the
union with Norway in 1905; having lost all claim to former territories in the east, west
and south, the country’s only option for expansion now lay to the “empty” regions of
the north. Peterson-Berger’s choice of borrowed melodies can be viewed as an attempt to
claim Sami music as a part of general Swedish national, if not cultural, heritage. But
even if the composer showed genuine interest for learning about joik structures and
traditions, Same-Ätnam is hardly a didactic tool.
Although each tune is labeled in the score as “(Tema lappone),” audiences
receive no such explicit signals.91 To be sure, the general source content was made clear
through commentaries immediately before the first performances in December 1917
(Royal Swedish Opera) and March 1918 (Stockholm Concert Society), including a table
of thirteen original and borrowed themes.92 Yet only three of the five joik melodies are
written out in full in the table, the remaining two being abbreviated “etc.,” and matters
are further confused by the lack of obvious characteristics differentiating these five from
91 The score, printed by Elkan & Schildknecht in Stockholm (1922), reached out to the wider world through the international musical language of Italian. The Sami themes are labeled at or after rehearsal numbers 2, 10, 40, 60 and 71. 92 The chart of main themes for the symphony, originally published in Dagens Nyheter (December 9, 1917), is reprinted in Lindskog, “Natures and Cultures”, text following n. 34.
483
the eight themes of Peterson-Berger’s own creation.93 Gunnar Ternhag speaks aptly of
Tirén’s transcriptions and Peterson-Berger’s own original symphonic themes forming a
“musical picture of symbiosis” in which “the listener can hardly identify what is
what.”94 While listening to the symphony, then, the audience’s only recourse is to have
memorized the specific melodies in order to recognize their aural realization in passing,
at best with the assistance of a copy of the thematic chart at hand. Sparks may fly in the
symphony, but they are not sparks of recognition for familiar folktunes; they are the
“sparks” (gnistorna) of a joik translocated into an entirely invented programmatic scene.95
The year after Same-Ätnam, Kurt Atterberg (1887–1974) wrote the first of two
symphonies whose thematic material derives entirely from more “typical” Swedish folk
melodies. Carola Finkel has traced a number of the source melodies for both the
93 In 1942, Karl Tirén eventually published an anthology, Die lappische Volksmusik: Aufzeichnungen von Juoikos- Melodien bei den schwedischen Lappen, mit einer Einleitung von Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (Stockholm: Nordiska museet), which includes most of the themes borrowed by Peterson-Berger; but earlier audiences would have had no printed source to which to turn. 94 “En musikalisk bild av symbiosen finns in symfonins temata . . . Lyssnaren kan knappast identifiera vad som är vad.” Ternhag, “Om sambandet mellan folkmusikinsamling och tonsättning av folkmusikbaserade verk,” 66. 95 Peterson-Berger incorporated the third joik, which he labeled “the sparks,” into a scene, “Winter Night,” which he described as follows: “It is winter, a glitteringly cold, starry evening. Pulled by reindeer, the sled travels with ringing bells over endless expanses of snow. Under the hooves of the reindeer and the keel of the boat-shaped sled, the snow shrieks and bellows like a strange wild beast; in the distance, wolves howl. – But the destination briefly comes into sight from afar, the Lapp-camp, where sparks [the third joik, 12 bars after rehearsal number 40, horn] fly up from the tops of the tents and dance like red fireflies in the translucent darkness. It is still far away – the journey continues across desolate expanses, the snow shrieks, the wolves cry out – but at last, the reindeer make the turn between the tents, and there, upon soft skins, around spark-dancing fire, warmth and rest await.”
“Vinterkväll. Det är vinter och gnistrande kall, stjärnklar kväll. I akkja, efter ren, med pinglande bjällror går färden bort över oändliga snövidder. Under renens klövar och akkjans köl gnisslar och råmar snön som ett underligt vilt djur; långt borta höras ulvar tjuta. — Men där skymtar färdens mål, lapp-lägret, från vars kåtatopp gnistor yra upp och dansa som röda eldflugor i det genomskinliga mörkret. Ännu är det långt dit — färden går ånyo över ödsliga vidder, snön skriker, ulvarna yla — men till sist svänger renen in mellan kåtorna, och på mjuka skinn, kring gnistsprutande eld vänta värme och vila.” Peterson-Berger, Dagens Nyheter (March 19, 1918).
484
Symphony No. 4 in G minor, Sinfonia Piccola, op. 14 (1918) and the Symphony No. 8 in E
minor, op. 48 (1944). Drawing in part on Atterberg’s unpublished memoirs, Finkel
argues that his relatively sparing development of the thematic material is not a result of
a universal insuitability of folk melodies for symphonic development, as critics have
claimed of his work (and as Schoenberg argued in general in the essay “Symphonien aus
Volksliedern,”) but rather a reflection of the composer’s own ideology.96
Atterberg’s Sinfonia Piccola is at least the second occasion on which a composer
took on the challenge of expanding one or more folk melodies into a larger format on a
lark. Early on in his work for Geijer-Afzelius, Hæffner admitted to setting “Sir Tynne”
(“Riddar Tynne”) for two three-part choirs (or soloists) for his own enjoyment.97 The
Sinfonia Piccola was famously written in response to a bet in which Atterberg and
Natanael Berg (1879–1957) challenged each other to write a 20-minute symphonic piece
in a light, optimistic character as a remedy against the melancholy (svårmodig) and
gloomy (dyster) modern music about which critics were continually complaining.98
Although the impetus to write the symphony was somewhat spontaneous, the choice of
thematic material was a deliberate decision, or at least a calculated justification after the
fact. In his undated memoirs, Atterberg reports that his intention was “to make [folk
music] accessible for a larger public in a dose that did not have the character of a dance
96 Carola Finkel, “Swedish Folk Music in Kurt Atterberg’s Symphonies,” in XVI Nordic Musicological Congress, Stockholm 2012, Proceedings (Stockholm: Department of Musicology and Performance Studies, Stockholm University, 2014), 129–30. 97 See Chapter Two, n. 69. 98 Hedwall, Den svenska symfonin, 252; and
485
rondo, a potpourri, or a rhapsody – but rather symphonic form.”99 Prior to 1918,
composers had applied folksong to individual elements of symphonic form—Eggert’s
Symphony in C (1805–09) features a modified sonata-form movement with primary
theme derived from the secondary folk/popular theme, while Gille’s symphony
Midsummer Celebration (1850) applied three different dance tunes to its minuet and trio.100
These examples, however, are the exceptions. Composers prior to Atterberg focused
almost entirely on single-movement forms (primarily the potpourri, overture and
rhapsody), rather than the more clinical symphony.
One other landmark symphony from the second decade of the twentieth century,
the Symphony in G Minor, op. 34 (1915) by Wilhelm Stenhammar, deserves a brief
mention, if only for reasons of clarification. The symphony’s themes bear a closer aural
kinship with, for example, melodies in Vaughan Williams’s (English) Folk Song Suite
(1923/1924) than with Swedish folkton. Rather, Stenhammar’s contribution to symphonic
folk writing based on Swedish sources came slightly earlier in the form of the single-
movement Midvinter: Swedish Rhapsody for orchestra and chorus (1907), with its highly
unusual combination of secular and sacred folk melodies.
99 “. . . att göra den tillgänglig för en större allmänhet i en dosering, som inte hade dansrondots, potpourriets eller rapsodiens karaktär – utan symfonisk form.” Quoted in Finkel, “Swedish Folk Music in Kurt Atterberg’s Symphonies,” 127. Originally written in Kurt Atterberg, “Minnesanteckningar,” manuscript, Kurt Atterberg-Arkivet, III:29b-29c, S-Skma (Gäddviken). 100 Similarly, Andreas Randel’s overture to The Fisherman’s Cottage (1844), discussed earlier in conjunction with theatrical music, first quotes a folksong and then uses a motive derived from the folksong as the primary theme a large central sonata-like section; see Table 4.6, p. 303.
486
Overtures
Foroni: Overture No. 3 (1850)
The Italian-born conductor and opera composer Jacopo Foroni (1825–58), who has been
called a “much-needed shot in the arm for music in Sweden,” spent the last decade of
his life in Stockholm—the majority of his adult life, considering that he died at age
thirty-three.101 Foroni was elected into the Royal Academy of Music already in 1849, the
year of his arrival, and he immediately established himself in Swedish musical life
through his tenure as Hofkapellmästare (1849–52). Foroni became known for introducing
contemporary operatic and orchestral repertoire, including the first Swedish
performance of a work by Wagner (the overture to Tannhäuser), as well as composing
original music.
Foroni’s Overture No. 3 has already made a brief appearance in this study due to
its use of two commonly paired fiddle tunes from Traditions (see Table 6.2). Originally
conceived for theatrical purposes, the overture was written for an 1850 revival of Carl
Wilhelm Böttiger and Johan Berwald’s A National Divertissement (1843), for which Svante
Gustaf Schyberg (1796–1874) updated the text and Foroni supplied additional music.102
Outside the theater, however, Foroni’s new overture became a concert piece in its own
101 On Foroni’s life and works, see Anders Wiklund, “Jacopo Foroni,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2013, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/foroni-jacopo/. Foroni also wrote an opera on a national theme, the abdication of Queen Christina in 1654 (Cristina di Svezia, 1849), although folk music is not referenced. 102 On the revival of Ett National-Divertissement including Foroni’s new overture, see Erik Thyselius, Karl XV och hans tid (Stockholm: Silén, 1910), 67–72.
487
right. Published as Ouverture No. 3 by Ricordi (Milan), the piece, along with Overtures
Nos. 1 and 2, entered the repertoire in Italy.103
In the Ricordi score, connections with Sweden are minimized. The cover is
written entirely in Italian, with the exception of the parenthetical note “(Printed in
Italy)” in the lower right-hand corner. The name of the dedicatee, the composer Otto
Lindblad, is Italianicized to “Ottone Lindblad.” Only the small print at the bottom of the
first page of music identifies the piece as Swedish: “N.B. This Overture written for a
national divertissement in Stockholm is based on two national themes”—although the
location of said themes is not divulged anywhere in the score.104 For Swedish audiences,
however, the quotation of folktunes was an attractive feature, as evidenced by the brief
descriptive language in newspaper concert announcements such as the following:
“Ouverture (A major, on two Swedish national melodies).”105
Whether the overture contains two folktunes, as stated, or also includes a third, is
an open question. The two tunes from Traditions (see earlier, Example 6.5), although
printed separately in that volume one as Nos. 1.19 and 1.15, are often paired in
subsequent compositions, and almost always in that order. Foroni, however, introduces
them separately, referring to Traditions 1.15 before proceding eventually to 1.19, which
would seem to imply that they are considered two separate tunes. However, on two
smaller levels—that of half-tunes, and individual measures—Foroni swaps the order of
103 Wiklund, “Jacopo Foroni.” 104 “Questa Ouverture scritta in occasione d’un divertissement national a Stockholm, si aggira sopra due temi nazionali.” Jacopo Foroni, Tre ouvertures per grande orchestra, no. 3 (Milan: Ricordi, [1850]), 1. 105 “Kongl. Teatern,” Aftonbladet (April 7, 1851): 1.
488
elements such that the second appears before the first, which leaves open the possibility
that he intentially changed the order of two tunes that he considered to be linked.
To begin with, Foroni switches the order of the first two measures in the first
explicit reference to folk material: Example 7.10 shows how the first and second measure
of Foroni’s excerpt (upper staff) derive from the second and first measure, respectively,
of the folk excerpt (lower staff).106
Example 7.10: Foroni, Overture No. 3, mm. 43–50, compared with folk source
The last four measures of the excerpt from Foroni’s overture also derive from the
folktune, but through sequence, an early indication of the variety of ways in which
Foroni manipulates pre-existing material in this piece.
At a medium level, Foroni introduces the second half of Traditions 1.15 in the
excerpt above (pp. 8–10) before engaging with material from the first half of the
folktune, which is delayed until p. 16. A hierarchy thus emerges, in which the use of folk
106 In Foroni’s overture, the melody is played in various octaves by different combinations of flutes, bassoons and clarinets. The excerpt from Traditions 1.15 has been transposed from F major to facilitate comparison. A passing reference to another folk melody, “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” in m. 5, actually belongs to a popular song also quoted by Foroni: “The Ship Journey” (“Skeppsfarten,” words by Johan David Valerius, music by Friedrich Franz Hurka). Martin Tegen identifies this tune in “Midsommarvaka,” 105. However, audiences—especially those in the decades after “The Ship Journey” had faded from popular memory—may well have heard the passage as corresponding to first seven syllables of Dybeck’s famous anthem text.
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489
material begins with the second measure of the second half of a tune that is itself typically
the second half of a two-part complex of tunes (Traditions 1.19 & 1.15); the corresponding
first half arrives at a distance that grows as the level of hierarchy increases. Figure 7.1
diagrams this process on the macro, middle, and micro levels, reading from top to
bottom:
whole tune (half of tune-complex) Traditions 1.15 . . . . . . . . . . . Traditions 1.19 (90 measures later)
/ \ half-tune 2nd half . . . 1st half (38 measures later)
/ \ measure m. 2 . . m. 1 (1 measure later)
Figure 7.1: Foroni, Overture No. 3, three levels of order reversal
Further complicating the numbers is a quotation of the folksong “Peter Swineherd”
(“Per svinaherde”). Unlike the music from Traditions, which is quoted at length, “Peter
Swineherd” makes only two brief appearances: the first half is quoted twice, in mm. 76–
80 and mm. 160–164, while the remainder of the melody never appears at all.
Functionally, the excerpt, which ends on a half-cadence, allows Foroni to modulate
between two distantly related keys (Example 7.11). After a passage in the tonic of A
major, “Peter Swineherd” enters in m. 76 with two measures of unison strings (parallel
minor tonic); in m. 78, strings and winds harmonize a solo flute using the analyzed
harmony, ending on a dominant chord in m. 80.
490
(previous material)
beginning of “Peter Swineherd” excerpt
end of “Peter Swineherd” excerpt
(subsequent material)
A major A minor (i) E major (V) C major
Example 7.11: Foroni, Overture No. 3, mm. 76–80, “Peter Swineherd” quotation, reduction
Were the melodic quotation to continue, the next measure would transition to C major,
the relative major to A minor. Instead, Peter’s melody drops out—but the harmony it
implied lives on, as Foroni brings in the delayed entrance of material related to the first
half of Traditions 1.15—now in C major.107 Whether “Peter Swineherd” counts as the
“half” in a total of 1.5 or 2.5 quoted folktunes, the use of only part of the melody is more
calculated than it appears on the surface.
Foroni was unconstrained by the stylistic guidelines enforced by Dybeck upon
the orchestral compositions that Dybeck commissioned around the same time. Not only
does Foroni chop up, rearrange, and alter motivic fragments, he also sets himself a
technical challenge that he then solves in four different ways. While the polska dance is
nearly always in triple time—including the tunes borrowed by Foroni—this overture is
written entirely in common time. Figure 7.2 illustrates how Foroni redistributes the three
beats of polska melodies to fit four-beat measures by at times filling the fourth beat with
rests, doubling the values of the first beat to fill two beats, repeating the second beat as
107 The second instance of “Peter Swineherd,” mm. 160–64, enables a parallel transposition from E major to G major via E minor and B major.
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the fourth beat, and writing the music out consecutively against the common-time grain,
much as basic swing dance groups the steps into threes which proceed independently of
music grouped in twos and fours.
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 mm. 43–46 rest on beat 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 mm. 47–50 double note value(s) of beat 1 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 2 mm. 81, 83 repeat beat 2 as beat 4 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 mm. 133–38 notate 3/4 music in 4/4 time
Figure 7.2: Foroni, Overture No. 3, four methods of altering 3-beat polska melody
to fit common time
Foroni’s overture ranks as one of the most playful approaches to Swedish folk music in
any nineteenth-century composition. Even when treating minor melodies, the tone
remains light, far from the melancholy mood most commonly associated with traditional
Swedish music.
Rubenson: Festival March (1878), and Norman: Festival Overture (1882)
Albert Rubenson distributed his folk-inspired works evenly across his career as an
orchestral composer. In addition to the Symphonic Intermezzo No. 1 discussed earlier,
which dates from the middle of his oeuvre, he arranged a Hambo-Polska as his very first
orchestral work (1846); and his last, the Festival March, for the Inauguration of the New
Building of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (1878), extensively references Richard
492
Dybeck’s most successful contribution to the folk music repertoire.108 A lengthy piece in
Aftonbladet acknowledges the presence of the tune “braided into” (inflätad) the end of the
Festival March, but motivic references to the song “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (“Du
gamla, du friska”) are actually scattered more extensively throughout.109 Example 7.12
prints the melody with brackets marking fragments that Rubenson incorporates into the
texture of the newly composed body of the piece, before he launches into a full-blown
quotation near the end.110 Immediately following, Example 7.13 shows how Rubenson
uses one of those fragments, the descending tetrachord on “fjellhöga nord”
(“mountainous North,” m. 2), as an imitative point of entry in the strings, doubled by
winds (not shown).
Thou ancient, thou hale, thou mountainous North; / Thou silent, thou joyous beauty! I salute thee, fairest land upon the earth. / Thy sun, they heavens, thy green meadows.
Example 7.12: Dybeck, “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” (“Du gamla, du friska”)
108 Albert Rubenson, “Hambo-Polska,” manuscript orchestral score, 1846, Albert Rubenson archive, S-Skma; and Rubenson, “[Festmarche.] Vid invigningen av K. musikaliska akademiens byggnad d. 2 mars 1878. Inledning för orkester <med begagnandet af en svensk folk-visa>,” manuscript orchestral score, 1878, Sv. Saml. Orkester Rar, S-Skma. Although not technically an overture, the march premiered near the beginning of the inaugural celebration, preceded only by the singing of the royal anthem and a brief greeting. 109 “Musikaliska akademien,” Aftonbladet (March 4, 1878): 3. 110 Dybeck’s text and the folk melody to which he set it first appeared together in his volume Svenska wisor (1847); reprinted in Danielson and Ramsten, Du gamla, du friska, 44.
Du gam la,- du fri ska,- du fjell hö- ga- Nord; Du ty sta,- du gläd je- ri- ka- skö na!- Jag hel sar- dig, vä na- ste-
land up på jord. Din sol, din him mel,- di na- äng der- grö na.- Din sol, din him mel,- di na- äng der- grö na.-
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Example 7.13: Rubenson, Festival March, mm. 12–17, strings only
Stylistically, much of the Festival March resembles Rubenson’s earlier Symphonic
Intermezzo No. 1 (1860) in that it uses short, recognizable phrases from the source tune,
as well as shorter thematic elements derived therefrom. Twice, the full melody seems
primed to enter (chorus of strings, mm. 51–53, and chorus of winds, mm. 96–98), but
each time it abruptly cuts off in the middle of the third measure (as in, “Du gamla, du
friska, du fjell . . .”). The eventual breakthrough of the complete tune, while
harmonically unadventurous, alternates in character between triumphant exclamation
and tender serenade—a variety that goes beyond the typical setting of a single strophe.
Although this march was written for the dedication of a new building, it pertains
to an old institution: the Royal Academy of Music was founded shortly after Gustaf III’s
ascension to the throne in 1771, over a century earlier. The song’s praise for the
“ancient” North (even in its capacity as de facto national anthem, the text famously does
not contain the words “Sweden” or “Swedish”) transfers by association to the Academy,
conferring upon it a timeless sense of History with a capital “H.” Four years later,
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Ludvig Norman, who led the Royal Court Orchestra during the premiere of Rubenson’s
Festival March, wrote an overture on the same melody for another musical-historical
occasion: the one-hundredth anniversary of the Royal Opera.
Published in 1911, Norman’s Festival Overture in C Major on National-Patriotic
Motives, op. 60 makes extensive use of “Thou Ancient, Thou Hale” in two outer sections
framing a central passage based on a different melody, the aria “Noble Shades, Honored
Fathers” from Johann Gottlieb Naumann’s exceedingly popular national opera Gustaf
Wasa (1786). Whereas Rubenson used short motivic fragments through the majority of
his piece, bringing the full melody in only at the end, Norman’s overture takes an
opposing approach: the near-complete melody sounds immediately in the first four
pages, after which it is deconstructed into numerous phrase-length borrowings, which
are manipulated to varying degrees while maintaining their integrity as recognizable
variants of the source. Whether hiding defining moments of the melody in inner voices,
sequencing a phrase to different pitch levels, suddenly pivoting to an unexpected local
modulation, inverting notes, detouring to the parallel minor, or augmenting note values,
Norman keeps the folksong close at hand. The most distinctive refashioning, which
recurs several times, is a syncopated version of the opening phrase, in which the
secondary strong pulse is shifted to the preceding weak beat and marked with an accent
(Example 7.14).
495
Example 7.14: Norman, Festival Overture, mm. 50–57, strings only
Motivic fragmentation notwithstanding, Rubenson treated the tune fairly
conventionally; Norman makes something new and modern of it. His overture in honor
of the first hundred years of the Royal Opera leans forward, pointing towards the next
centennial celebration.111
Tone-paintings and Rhapsodies
In addition to standalone overtures, other single-movement orchestral works use folk
themes for larger, quasi narrative or illustrative purposes. An early example is Franz
Berwald’s Erinnerung an die norwegischen Alpen (1842), a single-movement work
alternately labeled a Fantasiestück and a tonmålning (“tone-painting”), which reportedly
uses a tune that Berwald heard on a trip to Norway in 1827 with Jan van Boom.112
Written and premiered in Vienna, Reminiscence of the Norwegian Mountains was one of
111 In addition to special performances, the organization’s two-hundredth anniversary in 1982 was marked by the publication of a celebratory book on various aspects of the history of Swedish opera and ballet: Klas Ralf, ed., Operan 200 år (see Chapter Four, n. 85). 112 For details on Berwald’s visit to Norway, as well as an excerpt from a newspaper reporting how Berwald encountered the theme in question, see Nils Castegren’s Preface to Franz Berwald, Tongemälde II, ed. Nils Castegren, trans. Brian Willson, vol. IX, Sämtliche werke, Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1970), xiii. In addition, a number of newspapers carried more general references to his borrowing a Norwegian tune; see Franz Berwald, Die Dokumente seines Lebens, ed. Ingmar Bengtsson, Nils Castegren, and Erling Lomnäs, Sämtliche werke, Monumenta Musicae Svecicae (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1979), 233, 249, 251, 355. The purported melody in question, however, has not been located in any other source.
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few works by Berwald to achieve multiple performances in his own country during his
lifetime—and also one of few to engage directly with folk-style. In the following decade,
Liszt’s symphonische Dichtungen set the standard for programmatic orchestral works in
central Europe, drawing variously on mythology, literature, and history as inspiration in
a dozen pieces between 1848 and 1858.
It took another generation for Swedish folk music to feature in rhapsodies in the
1880s; but in the following generation, Alfvén’s rhapsody Midsommarvaka made an
international breakthrough, becoming arguably the most famous piece of Swedish
classical music ever written. Between Berwald and Alfvén, an intermediary stage in the
development of the tone-poem on national subjects has yet to be examined in detail. In
addition to Foroni, Gille and Rubenson, whose works have been discussed above,
Fredrik Kjellstrand and Andreas Hallén made notable contributions prior to Alfvén.113
Kjellstrand: Dance of the House Fairies (Tomtelek, 1880)
In the nineteenth century, elves and fairies figured prominently in numerous musical
representations, with Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op. 21
(MWV M 13) being among the best known and most influential examples. Adolf Fredrik
Lindblad, who maintained a decades-long correspondence with Mendelssohn, reported
on the work’s Swedish premiere in a letter from 1827:
113 For a brief exposition of programmatic works of folkloristic character prior to Alfvén’s Midsommarvaka, see Martin Tegen, “Midsommarvaka — Föregångare och efterföljare,” in Hugo Alfvén: En vägvisare, ed. Gunnar Ternhag and Jan Olof Rudén ([Hedemora]: Gidlunds förlag, 2003), 104–6.
497
Your Overture in E Major was recently performed here by the Philharmonic Society114 – it went poorly, but rather well according to the circumstances – it was received with copious applause, and it found many enthusiasts among my friends, who had been inclined to turn against you after hearing my long speeches (thus do an artist’s friends invariably almost hurt him more than his enemies do) . . . . Now your Midsummer Night’s Dream is being copied out, and in this way the dissemination of your reputation begins anew, that is to say at the North Pole or from the North Pole outwards, it must spread itself across the whole earth.115
In his next letter, Lindblad elaborates slightly on the performance itself:
[I]t went rather poorly after eight rehearsals, and primarily because there were not enough violins. People enjoyed it, in general, very much, but few understood it since the audience was almost entirely unacquainted with the drama.116 The winds were better than I heard them in Berlin, even the English [bass] horn, but, like I said, the violins were too weak. The Crown Prince liked the piece. Your cousin117 may have written more to you about this.118
114 The Harmoniska sällskapet was active as an amateur orchestra and chorus between 1820 and c1849; at the time of this concert, it was directed by Johan Fredrik Berwald. 115 “Deine E-dur Ouvertüre ist letzten gegeben worden in der Philharmonischen Gesellschaft hieselbst – ging schlecht, nach den Umständen aber gut – wurde mit großem Beifall aufgenommen und fand mehrere Enthusiasten unter meinen Freunden, die ich mit langen Vorreden zur Opposition gegen Dich geweckt hatten, (so schaden immer die Freunden dem Künstler fast mehr, als die Feinden) . . . Nun wird deinen Sommer n:[achts] Traum abgeschrieben und somit die ausbreitung deines Ruhmes von Vorne angefangen, d:[as] h:[eisst] beym Nordpol oder vom Nordpol aus muss er sich über die ganze Erde ausbreiten.” Letter from Adolf Fredrik Lindblad to Felix Mendelssohn dated November 29, 1827, Green Books, I:108. 116 Early performances of this overture in Stockholm pre-date the first Swedish translation of the play, which Carl August Hagberg (1810–64) wrote in 1843–44 and published in 1847. Generally, Swedish audiences lagged behind their German counterparts in terms of Shakespeare reception; the first direct Swedish translation of a Shakespearean play, Geijer’s Macbeth (1813), appeared over seventy years after Caspar Wilhelm von Borck’s German version of Julius Caeser (1741); on early Swedish performances and translations, see Kent Hägglund, ‘Shakespeare på Erik Gustaf Geijers tid’, in Macbeth 1813: E G Geijer översätter Shakespeare, ed. Carina Burman et al., Geijerstudier 12 (Stockholm: Instant Book, 2013), 190–234. 117 Mendelssohn’s first cousin, Josephine ‘Peppi’ Benedicks, married a Swede and moved to Stockholm when Felix was a child. For numerous references to Peppi in Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s correspondence with Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, see Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Ewig die deine: Briefe von Lea Mendelssohn Bartholdy an Henriette von Pereira-Arnstein, ed. Wolfgang Dinglinger and Rudolf Elvers, 2 vols. (Hannover: Wehrhahn-Verlag, 2010). 118 “. . . die, nach achtmahliger Probe dennoch ziemlig schlecht ging, und hauptsächlich darum weil der Geigen zu wenigen waren. Gefallen hat sie, im Allgemeinen, sehr, aber verstanden ist sie wenig da fast das ganze Publikum mit dem Drama unbekannt gewesen. Die Bläser waren besser als ich sie in Berlin gehört sogar das Englische Horn, aber, wie gesagt, die Geigen waren zu schwach. Dem Kronprinsen hat sie gefallen. Deine Cousine mag dir wohl mehreres hierüber geschrieben haben.” Lindblad to Mendelssohn,
498
Lindblad’s reports of positive reception in spite of certain performance issues at the
premiere are borne out by subsequent critics; for example, a review from 1833 calls it
“an entirely brilliant and original composition that reveals its composer’s rich fantasy
and keen understanding of the subject, all of which are abilities of a great composer.”119
Some years later, a review in the same paper laments that the excellent (förträffliga)
overtures to A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Egmont were replaced by “less significant”
(mindre betydande) overtures by Weber and Rossini.120 Mendelssohn’s Shakespearian
fairies found a ready welcome in the north.
One of many spirited works written in the long shadow of Mendelssohn’s
overture is Franz Berwald’s tone-painting Elfenspiel (1841). Composed and premiered
while the composer was living in Vienna, the piece is short on references to Swedish
folklore or music. In contrast, the almost entirely forgotten composer Fredrik Kjellstrand
(1826–98) wrote what he called a “Nordic tone-painting,” titled Tomtelek (Dance of the
House Fairies, 1880), that brings Swedish folk influences squarely into the realm of the
tone poem. Just as in Mendelssohn’s overture, the piece hinges on the not-always-easy
coexistence between the supernatural and natural worlds.
dated July 6, 1828, Green Books I:28. I am grateful to Oren Vinogradov for assistance in finnessing the translation of this passage. 119 “. . . en högst genialisk och originell komposition och som hos sin författare röjer både en rik fantasi och en förståndig uppfattning af ämnet, således alla anlag till en stor tonsättare.” Aftonbladet (April 10, 1833). 120 Aftonbladet (October 10, 1844).
499
The title refers to a Swedish house fairy (tomte, pl. tomtar), a benign-to-helpful
creature when accorded the proper level of respect.121 According to a synopsis in Svensk
Musiktidning, which has not yet been reported in the literature, the program is as
follows: household tomtar gather for a noctural barn dance, with different participants
joining in for different tunes. As the general merriment increases, so too does the noise,
waking the humans. The farmer bolts loudly on the barn door; the supernatural revelers
return to more gentle dancing, until they are gradually overtaken by sleep.122
Though no matching source tunes have surfaced, two of Kjellstrand’s themes
have the hallmarks of folkton writing in the style of polska dances: one in E minor,
delicate yet with a touch of sprightly Mendelssohnian mischief (Example 7.15, No. 1),
and a cheerful, more rambunctious tune in B major (No. 2) redolent of a country barn
dance.123
121 While the tomte has become conflated with Santa Clause over time, the creature more generally is a counterpart of the brownie (Scotland) and Kobold (Germany); in Norway and Denmark, it is called a nisse. See Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 328. 122 [Fredrik Vult von Steijern], “Påskdagskonserten,” Svensk Musktidning 1, no. 9 (May 1, 1881): 75. Steijern states that the detailed plot was not made known to audience members at the concert; he prints it on the authority of “authentic communications” (“autentiska meddelanden”) clarifying the composer’s thoughts. Hedwall mentions only a non-specific “barn dance” (“dansgille på en loge”) in the two sentences he devotes to the piece; see Den svenska symfonin, 176. 123 Tegen’s claim that the polska-like tunes are not direct quotations is reasonable, as each melody is constructed of a mixture of typical polska gestures and patterns borrowed from classical musical styles; Tegen, “Midsommarvaka,” 105–6. The example is from Fredrik Kjellstrand, “Tomtelek: Nordisk tonmålning för orkester,” op. 31, manuscript orchestral score, 1880, Part. I:2, Sv. Saml. Orkester Rar, S-Skma, pp. 5–6, 16–17.
500
Example 7.15: Kjellstrand, Dance of the House Fairies (Tomtelek), polska-like themes Nos. 1 & 2
Sandwiched between these two, a third melody, as if straight out of a Viennese waltz,
also joins in the fray in this multi-layered confrontation between the supernatural and
natural worlds.
At the level of the plot, the two groups coexist uneasily in a relationship marked
by discord and disruption. But the music says otherwise. The tomtar dance with
abandon to music from both worlds: the spirit-like opening polska, and the very human
second polska (traditional) and waltz (modern). The faux-traditional folkton melodies
have been so thoroughly taken over by the house fairies as to merge the concepts of folk
music and the supernatural, a sign of changing approaches to folksong. Initially,
collectors valued purported links between folksong and history; a few tunes, such as
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Neckens polska, came to be associated with the spiritual world (thanks, in this case, to
Afzelius’s text), but these were a minority among the overall repertoire. In the middle of
the century, Dybeck shifted attention to include various kinds of rural work songs; but
not until later did supernatural associations attach to orchestral imaginings, as seen here
with Fredrik Kjellstrand and Andreas Hallén.
Dance of the House Fairies remained Kjellstrand’s best-known work, receiving
praise for its lively rhythm and unexpected harmonic directions; it is the only piece
mentioned by name in his brief obituary in Svensk musiktidning.124 It also formed a
turning point, as tone-paintings based on folk-tunes gave way to a rising genre, the
rhapsody, that would dominate the scene from the 1880s onwards.
Hallén: Swedish Rhapsody No. 2 (1882)
Andreas Hallén (1846–1925) has been credited with a number of “firsts.” The first self-
avowed Wagnerian in Scandinavia,125 Hallén also wrote the first Swedish Lisztian
symphonic poem (Frithiof and Ingeborg, 1872) and orchestral rhapsodies (pub. 1882 and
1883).126 The latter of this pair, the Swedish Rhapsody, op. 23 bears striking similarities to
Kjellstrand’s Dance of the House Fairies, although he never had an opportunity to hear
that piece performed. After studying in Leipzig, Munich and Dresden between 1866 and
124 Aftonbladet (April 19, 1881): 2; and “Dödsfall,” Svensk musiktidning 18, no. 3 (February 1, 1898): 23. 125 Martin Knust, “‘Klappern und wieder klappern! Die Leute glauben nur was gedruckt steht’: Andréas Hallén’s Letters to Hans Herrig: A Contribution to the Swedish-German Cultural Contacts in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning 93 (2011): 58. 126 Andreas Hallén, Rhapsodie No. 1 in F Major, op. 17 (Leipzig: Fr. Kistner, [1882]); and Hallén, Rhapsodie No. 2 in F Minor (Schwedische Rhapsodie), op. 23 (Berlin: Raabe & Plothow, [1883]).
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1871, Hallén returned to Germany—primarily Berlin—from 1880 to 1882, missing the
premiere of Kjellstrand’s tone-painting (Stockholm, April 1881).127
Hallén’s rhapsody attracted immediate attention in the Swedish press. His
hometown newspaper, the Göteborgs-Posten, translated a lengthy German review of the
premiere in Berlin in December 1882.128 This approving critic writes vaguely of Nordic
musical imagery and national motives, describing two scenes that alternate in A–B–A–B
format. The piece begins—in true Wagnerian fashion, one might add—in the depths of a
river, where the tones of the water sprite’s [Necken’s] harp punctuate the gloomy waves.
In contrast, the lively landside portion features a country dance.
The following summer, the Swedish Music Journal ran an even longer, original
review by the critic Adolf Lindgren based on the recently published edition for piano,
four hands (Berlin: Raabe & Plothow, 1883).129 Lindgren acknowledges the centrality of
Liszt for the genre in general and notes that Hallén dedicated the piano score to the
Hungarian composer (who, incidentally, had been elected to the Swedish Academy in
1857); yet he assigns a greater influential role to the Norwegian Johan Svendsen (1840–
1911), whose four Norwegian Rhapsodies (1876–77) applied techniques of thematic
development to their source melodies, much as Hallén does. Without attempting to
assign programmatic meaning to the types of tunes in Hallén’s rhapsody, Lindgren
127 For more on Hallén’s life, see Joakim Tillman, “Andreas Hallén,” trans. Neil Betteridge, Levande musikarv/Swedish Musical Heritage, last modified 2016, accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hallen-andreas/. 128 “Music: Ett nytt arbete af Andreas Hallén,” Göteborgs-Posten (December 30, 1882): 3. The Berlin paper from which the translation was made is not named. 129 A[dolf] L[indgren], “Musikpressen: Andreas Hallén: Rhapsodie n:r 2,” Svensk Musiktidning 3, no. 14 (July 15, 1883): 107.
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expresses a wish for more contrapuntal treatment, of the type that would not occur until
the next generation:
We believe that Hallén would have done well to use one technique more actively than he did, namely counterpoint, especially canonic writing. It is well known that imitation can impart great humor, and that many of our polska melodies can be juxtaposed contrapuntally against each other, or canonically against themselves. This always yields a richer tapestry, a more dramatic conflict, and even the “rhapsodic” elements are bound more firmly together. We state this as a desire, and not as a criticism against the piece, which is splendid just as it is.130
When concertgoers in Stockholm finally got the opportunity to hear the piece in
November 1884, Lindgren’s subsequent review mainly defends the piece against
criticism by voices and ears unfamiliar with the sound-worlds of Berlioz, Liszt and
Wagner; the presence of folktunes is not even mentioned.131
Just as with Kjellstrand’s tone-painting, the undersea spirit world (steeped here
in the familiar “Necken’s polska” melody) is confronted with the mortal world,
represented by a lively polska, the first phrase of which is printed below in Example 7.16
(upper staff).132 There is also a similar issue of unclear boundaries: motives from this
130 “Ett element tro vi att Hallén kunnat med fördel bruka flitigare än han gjort, nämligen det kontrapunktiska, specielt det kanoniska. Kändt är, hvilken humor som kan ligga i imitationen, och å andra sidan huru många våra polskmelodier kunna kontrapunkteras med hvar andra eller och kanoniskt med sig sjelfva. Härigenom uppkommer alltid en rikare väfnad, en mera dramatisk komplikation och äfven det ‘rapsodiska’ får en fastare sammanslutning. Vi säga detta såsom ett önskningsmål, icke såsom ett klander mot stycket, hvilket är förträffligt sådant det är.” Lindgren, “Musikpressen: Andreas Hallén,” 107. 131 A[dolf] L[indgren], “Teater och musik,” Aftonbladet (November 17, 1884): 3. 132 This melody, which is printed in some collections as “Skuva-dance from Westmanland,” was used earlier by Ahlström in his set of Swedish Folk-Dances for Dybeck in 1844 and provides the melody for the well-known drinking/Christmas song “Hej, tomtegubbar!” Although those lyrics address house fairies, it is clearly mortals who are doing the speaking.
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“human” polska cross over into the supernatural side on occasion, while the mortal
domain on land also includes a vaguely spirit-like, unidentified polska (lower staff).133
Example 7.16: Hallén, Swedish Rhapsody (No. 2), two polska themes
The boundaries are not as firm as the German critic implied, as the spirits are all too real
to the humans—and vice versa. In the end, where Kjellstrand gives the last word to his
(sleeping) tomtar, Hallén’s watery supernatural soundscape ultimately gives way in the
final pages to life on solid ground.
From the beginning, Hallén subjects his melodic material to rigorous motivic
manipulation, as shown below in Example 7.17.134 The solid square bracket indicates a
direct quotation from “Necken’s Polska” (for the complete tune, see Example 4.13
above); dashed brackets show material adapted from that same melody. The dotted
brackets mark phrases derived from the “human” polska (see Example 7.16 above).
133 This tune does not appear in any of the major nineteenth-century printed collections and has not yet been identified; Tegen groups it together as part of “Hej tomtegubbar!”, but the two tunes are unrelated. Tegen, Orkesterverken [1870–1920], 436. This excerpt is from Hallén, Rhapsodie No. 2 (Schwedische Rhapsodie), 28–29. 134 Ibid., 3–7.
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rounds out the clarinet/bassoon phrase (mm. 13-16, dashed bracket). At this point, the
landside world begins to intrude, in the form of the first phrase of the eventual “human”
polska, though in this initial incarnation for horns, it is slowed and rhythmically adjusted
to the point that it is not immediately recognizable to uninitiated ears (mm. 17–24, two
dotted brackets).
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may be overambitious to classify Hallén’s practice as leitmotivic and attempt to assign
specific meanings to each recurring phrase. Nevertheless, his pervasive de- and re-
construction of fragments from the source tunes, together with his timbrally diverse
deployment of the newly created variants, is a prime example of the abstraction of folk
music onto the largest available musical canvas.
Conclusion
The most uniquely Swedish contribution to orchestral literature based in folk themes
evolved via an unexpected route on a journey not charted by the country’s most
“serious” composers.136 The amateur historian and folklore enthusiast Richard Dybeck,
who advocated for the study of various types of herding music ignored by most
previous collectors, developed the genre of orchestral medleys of tunes united by a
common function, such as celebrating a wedding or tending livestock in the hills during
135 Andreas Hallén, Hans-Peter Frank, and Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, Hallén: Swedish Rhapsody No. 2 / Isle of the Dead / Harald the Viking Final Scene, audio CD (Musica Sveciae MSCD621, 1993). 136 August Söderman, whose legacy in the present day is far larger than that of Dybeck’s other collaborators (Johan Niclas Ahlström, Leonard Höijer, and Jacob Edvard Gille), was also the least active in the folk-music concerts.
507
the summer, far away from the home community. Although his folk-music concerts
appear dubious at best according to the anachronistic standard of modern
ethnomusicological norms, he nevertheless fulfilled a meaningful educational role at the
time by explicitly teaching audiences that the (arranged) music to which they were
listening was not in fact at home in the concert hall, but rather originated in different
communities for particular purposes. Dybeck obliquely inserted the idea of “folk” back
into “folk music” (although actual practitioners of traditional music remained sidelined).
Absent Dybeck’s commissions, orchestral works from the first half of the century
almost universally fulfilled a common function of their own, which was showcasing the
talent of their composer-performers as virtuoso soloists in concerto-like works. The
content was of less concern; where multiple tunes are used, there is no internal logic
guiding their selection. Overtures, rhapsodies, and other programmatic and non-
programmatic single-movement works dominate the second half of the century, with a
minor trend surfacing in the 1880s in which the natural and supernatural worlds are
developed and musically confronted.
One mode of organization that would ultimately prove the most popular of all
lies just outside the scope of the present project: geography. Annika Lindskog has
credited The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige,
1906), Selma Lagerlöf’s innovative geography textbook masquerading as a children’s
adventure story, as contributing to the rising sentiment for developing the northern
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lands when Peterson-Berger was crafting his “Same-Ätnam” Symphony.137 According to
this model, the story (in which a naughty young boy, transformed into a tomte as
punishment, learns about each corner of his country while flying northwards with
migrating geese) was commissioned by a parliamentary body to assist with the process
of once again re-imagining Sweden after a major territorial loss—an official counterpart,
as it were, to Tegnér’s Svea (1812) following the loss of Finland. In the same year as Nils
Holgersson, Anders Zorn selected his home district, Dalarna, as the site of the first
performance competition for folk musicians, recognizing the presence of many tradition-
bearers in the region. As behind-the-scenes work commenced on Swedish Tunes (Svenska
låtar, 1922–40), the 24-volume collection of primarily instrumental melodies was
organized by region. The many rhapsodies, suites, and other orchestral works after 1900
devoted to specific regions, many of which are listed near the end of Table 7.6 above,
will prove fruitful ground, figuratively and literally, for future study.138
137 Lindskog, “Natures and Cultures,” n. 20. 138 Such a project could broaden to include similar works in other genres, such as those listed in Ternhag, “Om sambandet mellan folkmusikinsamling och tonsättning av folkmusikbaserade verk,” 71.
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8 Conclusion: Reflections
As creators of the first published volumes of Swedish folk music in 1814, Afzelius,
Geijer, Hæffner and Åhlström knew their work was important, but they could not have
envisioned the enormous influence that their undertakings would have over the course
of the following century and beyond. Initially, these actors were motivated by a desire to
indoctrinate citizens in a carefully curated, constructed view of their national heritage.
Following the lead of Herder and his disciples in collecting examples of rural folksong,
Scandinavian scholars and amateur enthusiasts took a step ahead and pioneered the
process of publishing collections of texts together with melodies for the purpose of
spreading knowledge of purportedly ancient songs among the contemporary
population.1 Folksongs became used as didactic tools in school textbooks, both for
literary and musical purposes, ensuring that generations of children were exposed to the
same famous titles. Furthermore, Richard Dybeck’s folk-music concerts (1844–70) were
pedagogically enhanced through descriptive program notes and, in some cases, lectures.
In all of these cases, folksong was portrayed as a valuable element of cultural heritage in
danger of disappearing in the wake of social changes wrought by modern
industrialization; to survive in future generations, collectors believed, folk music had to
be systematically and explicitly taught.
1 In Denmark, melodies also appeared in large numbers in print in 1814, in the fifth and final volume of Werner H. Abrahamson, Rasmus Nyerup, and Knud Lyne Rahbek’s Udvalgte danske viser fra middelalderen (Copenhagen: J. F. Schultz, 1812–14).
510
Parallel to this educational mission, purveyors and consumers of sheet music
and performances of arrangements of folk music traded on a second key motivation:
entertainment. Amateur musicians read through collections for their own amusement
and that of their friends; students serenaded the objects of their affection in the streets at
night; people of various classes went to the theater, thanks to a wide range in ticket
prices. Over time, many men (and, eventually, also women) participated in choirs
associated with universities, workers’ groups, and other institutions; performance data
suggests that folksongs were a popular segment of these choral repertoires. Even
Dybeck’s concerts, despite their pedagogical program, were first and foremost designed
to amuse; their very name, aftonunderhållningar, translates as “evening entertainments,”
underscoring the transfer of function of the music being performed. Instead of singing
herding songs (vallvisor) while tending sheep, his Stockholm-based singers sang an
idealized fictional portrayal of country customs to their fellow urban citizens.2
Some proponents of folksong combined these two aims into a third focus:
teaching others about Swedish heritage. Not known abroad at the time for an especially
rich literary or musical heritage, Sweden found an advocate in those who prepared
examples of folk culture for export to other markets. A few early articles with musical
examples in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, followed by Adolf Fredrik Lindblad’s
piano-vocal collection Der Norden-Saal (1826) published with German singing
translations in Berlin, added to a process begun a half-century earlier with Herder’s
2 In modern times, the aftonunderhållningar could well bear the following disclaimer: “No animals were herded in the making of this concert.”
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translations of Scandinavian folksong texts. Throughout the 1800s, German-speaking
lands remained an influential market for serious Swedish composers, both commercially
(the Swedish population could not support very many composers) and with respect to
artistic reputation (composers and artists alike found that success in Germany eased the
difficult task of establishing a reputation back home). The singers Jenny Lind and
Christina Nilsson became famous for including folksongs in their concert programs,
spreading knowledge of select titles across continental Europe, England, and as far as
the United States. In addition, anthologies and more elaborate treatments of folksong
regularly included titles and/or song translations in German, French or English to
facilitate accessibility in international markets; in at least one unusually polyglot case, a
collection of 200 folk dances for piano uses all three of those languages, plus Swedish, on
the cover.3 By producing folk-based works for consumption and performance abroad,
editors sought to entertain distant audiences even as they promoted the idea that
Sweden, too, had a distinguished cultural history worthy of international recognition.
Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did a fourth incentive begin to
emerge: interest in hearing traditional music performed according to traditional practice,
rather than dressed up (or, more properly, swaddled beyond recognition) in classical
style. From Geijer’s introductory essay in 1814 onwards, many people paid lip service to
the impossibility of accurately capturing performance and stylistic details in traditional
3 While the translator capably rendered the German (200 Schwedisch National-Tänze für Piano) and French (200 Danses nationales suédoises pour le piano) titles, the English was less elegant: 200 Swedish National Dances to Piano. See 200 svenska folkdansar arrangerade för piano, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Abr. Lundquist, 1875).
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notation, but not until spelmän were hired to perform at Skansen in the 1890s were
traditional musicians brought into the equation. Anders Zorn’s folk music competitions
in the early 1900s celebrated performance practice and set in motion a system of
performance badges that continues to this day, even as he set his own boundaries on
what counted as proper “folk” music, thereby strongly shaping public and academic
perceptions of instrumental folk music.4 Starting with Yngve Laurell and Karl Tirén in
1913, the new era of phonographic field recordings arrived in Sweden, producing aural
documents that facilitated the study, preservation, and teaching of traditional
performance practices.
As national romanticism wore off in the early twentieth century, so too did
widespread interest in Swedish folk music. In the 1970s, a folk revival movement
appropriated traditional music as a standardbearer for leftist politics in Sweden, much
as had occurred slightly earlier in the United States.5 According to David Kaminsky,
scholars and musicians denounced the national-romantic idea of an unbroken tradition
of ancient folk music as “ideological fiction,” preferring instead to celebrate the diversity
of regional traditions; crucially, folk music came to be viewed as a genre with traits that
could be taught at the conservatory level, thereby “undermin[ing] folk music’s
established Herderian function of linking Swedish ethnicity to Swedish land.”6 More
4 For new research on the Zorn Auditions, see Karin Eriksson, “Sensing Traditional Music through Sweden’s Zorn Badge: Precarious Musical Value and Ritual Orientation,” PhD diss. (Uppsala universitet, 2017). 5 On the 1970s Swedish folk music revival, see David Kaminsky, “Keeping Sweden Swedish: Folk Music, Right-Wing Nationalism, and the Immigration Debate,” Journal of Folklore Research 49, no. 1 (2012): 74–75. 6 Ibid., 77–78.
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recently, however, folk music has been partially appropriated by the extreme right,
which espouses yet a different take on national heritage as the property of (certain)
citizens—to the exclusion of all other people. Kaminsky notes that many folk musicians
today have to negotiate a complex space between practicing their traditions and
rejecting politicized dialogue that applies these traditions to distasteful purposes.7
In the nineteenth century, Sweden witnessed firsthand the European
phenomenon in which folk and art music began to coalesce into separate categories that
continually interacted with each other in the form of compositions drawing on both
traditions. Expressions of folk culture in nineteenth-century art music were as much a
product of their time as was the type of “folk music” served up as raw material to be
adapted in art-music compositions: idealized, stereotypical, and earnest. In the absence
of a figurehead national composer, folk music became the single most important marker
of “Swedish” music in practically all of the major classical genres.
Since 1900, notions of folk and art music have continued to change; at the
extremes, ethnic folk musics have celebrated fusions with all sorts of outside
traditions—the antithesis of Herder’s collective voice of a culturally homogenous
people—while art music has, in some cases, divested itself of every semblance of beauty,
order and tradition prized by earlier generations. Yet the two categories have never
been, and will never be, truly separate. Each generation invents new dialogues.
In Sweden, as elsewhere, this conversation continues. A recent pair of CDs by the
7 On the modern debate over ownership of Swedish folk music, see ibid., 81–83.
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fiddler and National Folk Musician (riksspelman) Lisa Rydberg and concert organist
Gunnar Idenstam asks and fancifully answers the question of what type of music might
have resulted had Bach crossed paths with Swedish folk musicians.8 In an explanatory
text in English, quoted here at length, Rydberg and Idenstam discuss their conception of
this hypothetical meeting:
With our classical training as a base and with our feet firmly in the Swedish folk music tradition, we invite Father Bach to dance his own dance side by side with the Swedish “polska.” There is much common ground—melody lines, harmony sequences, accentuations, ornamentations and rhythmic inclinations—all giving a common shape or feeling to both kinds of music.
During the Baroque period the distinction between “classical” music and “folk” music was not as clear as it is today. There was a living tradition of dances, only sometimes written down. During the 18th century it was an accepted part of a church organist’s work in Sweden to play dance music with local folk musicians at weddings and other celebrations. It’s a tantalizing thought that these musicians, often of foreign heritage, who could play notated music, maybe—just maybe—could have taught a Swedish folk musician a minuet, a bourrée or a courante from their homeland. Maybe even something from the hands of Johann Sebastian . . . And in what way, one wonders, would a Swedish fiddler have played Bach?
. . .
We have also, out of pure desire, taken such great liberties that we’ve changed the basic character in certain movements by Bach and turned a few minuets into a pols - a form from western Sweden of a fast polska with the second beat in the bar coming early. This feels natural to us since we’re not claiming, foremost, to be true to the time, but have instead chosen to focus on the feeling of the music
8 Lisa Rydberg and Gunnar Idenstam, Bach på svenska, audio CD (Gazell Records GAFCD 1092, 2007); and Rydberg and Idenstam, Bach på svenska: Tyska klockorna, audio CD (Bromma: Gazell Records GAFCD 1118, 2014). A riksspelman, or National Folk Musician, is a person who has been awarded a silver or gold Zorn badge at the Zorn trials (Zornmärkesuppspelning) for folk musicians. Others are now following in Rydberg and Idenstam’s footsteps; Erik Rydvall (nyckelharpa), Olav Luksengård Mjelva (hardanger fiddle) and Max Baillie (fiddle) have recently released short videos of pieces by Bach in Nordic folk style, and the group may be in the process of developing a commercial recording; see “Here’s some incredible Bach played on Nordic instruments,” Classic fm, February 12, 2018, accessed February 13, 2018, http://www.classicfm.com/composers/bach/nordic-folk-baroque-cello-suites/.
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and find that meeting point.
Bach and the Swedish folk musicians… what if they really did meet?9
Rydberg and Idenstam initially justify their hybrid music by pointing out stylistic
similarities; indeed, given that many polska melodies are direct descendants of Baroque
style first transmitted to Sweden through channels of nobility, the similarities of melody,
harmonic structure, rhythms and ornamentation are more than accidental. The
performers also claim to pay homage to the lack of clear distinction between “classical”
and “folk” musics in Bach’s time. Finally, however, they bring up what is perhaps their
main motivation: the pleasure of melding characteristics from one style of music into
another to see how it sounds.
Example 8.1 pairs a transcription of Rydberg’s interpretation of the third
movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, BWV 1042 (upper staff) with Bach’s
notation (lower staff).10 The recording is from Rydberg and Idenstam’s album Bach på
Swedish (Gazell Records, 2007), which itself is a play on the earlier album Jazz in Swedish
(1964), Jan Johansson’s popular and influential hybrid of Swedish folktunes in jazz style.
9 Lisa Rydberg and Gunnar Idenstam, “Bach på svenska,” accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.idenstam.org/text_music_bachsv.htm. 10 Rydberg’s part has been transcribed from “Allegro assai (sats III) ur Violinkonsert i E-dur BWV 1042,” track 4 on the album Bach på svenska. The bottom staff comes from Wilhelm Rust, ed., Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, Vol. 21 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1874), 34. For a video of a performance by Rydberg and Idenstam in June 2009 at Confidencen Slottsteater, Stockholm, see “Lisa Rydberg & Gunnar Idenstam - Allegro assai (J.S. Bach, “Bach på svenska”),” last modified October 15, 2009, accessed February 1, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OktS1iT-hk. I am grateful to Katharina Uhde for her assistance in transcribing the bowings in this example.
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Example 8.1: Rydberg and Bach, Violin Concerto in E Major (BWV 1042), iii. Allegro assai, mm. 1–16
Besides adding trills and grace notes, Rydberg also substantially alters the rhythm:
Bach’s even sixteenth notes become triplets and uneven pairs in complex groupings such
that two consecutive beats rarely have the same pattern. Also, the second beat
continually enters earlier than it does in Bach’s grid, as indicated by tied notes and
asterisks—an example of the application of the pols style from western Sweden that
Rydberg and Idenstam mentioned above.11 These modern musicians have opened a new
chapter in the story of folk-based art music. Generations of composers have long altered
folk melodies to fit classical practice. Now, in the twenty-first century, the paradigm is
turned on its head, as Bach’s music is adapted to fit norms of traditional Swedish music.
11 In his study of asymmetrical rhythmic structure in Norwegian folk music, Mats Johansson focuses on two related styles, the pols and the springar, which share characteristics of irregular pulses; he notes that the structure in which the first beat is short, the second is long, and the third is of average length is typical of some regions near the southern border with Sweden and as far west as Valdres. See Mats Johansson, “Rhythm into Style: Studying Asymmetrical Grooves in Norwegian Folk Music,” PhD diss. (The University of Oslo, 2009), 13. Independently, Carol O., an experienced Scandinavian fiddler and dancer, also notes similarities between Rydberg’s interpretation and the Norwegian style Valdres springar, with a “very sharp and early beat 2 that brings the dancer up suddenly”; personal correspondence with author, January 2018.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Glossary of Swedish terms
Aftonbladet Evening Page newspaper
Akademiska kapellet Academic Chapel: the orchestra associated with Uppsala University, founded in 1627
Allmänna sången Uppsala Student Singing Society, male chorus founded in 1831; the word allmän (“public”) refers to the open invitation for all students—not just students from a particular nation (see below)—to join; still active today, as a mixed chorus
ballad ballad, the first kind of “folksong” collected during the nineteenth century, when it was believed to be of medieval origin
Bollhusteatern Ball House Theater near the royal palace in Stockholm; demolished 1793
bondeståndet peasant estate
convent conventions held during the first four months of 1792, in which Uppsala university students originally from different regions of Sweden gathered to discuss topical issues
dalkulla a younger, unmarried woman in the rural province of Dalarna
folksång a patriotic song in honor of the king or the nation, not to be confused with the English term folksong; see folkvisa below; however, terminology was somewhat fluid in the nineteenth century, and contemporary literature occasionally uses folksång to refer to folksongs
folkton folk style, folk idiom
folktro folk-belief
folkvisa folksong
faelleskonsert Danish term for a joint concert between two or more Scandinavian university choirs in the mid- to later 1800s
Förbättringssällskapet för svenska språket
Society for the Improvement of the Swedish Language (founded 1782)
518
hembygd rural region or village of one’s birth, or from which one’s family originated; similar to German Heimat
Hovkapellet the Royal Court Orchestra
hovkapellmästare Hofkapellmeister, primary conductor of the Royal Court Orchestra; duties changed over the course of the century, from primarily a composer who led from the harpsichord to a dedicated conductor standing in front of the orchestra
kör choir
Kungliga dramatiska teatern
Royal Dramatic Theater (primarily spoken plays)
Kungliga operan Royal Opera (primarily musical plays); this is a modern term for the institution usually referred to as the kungliga teatern (see below) during the nineteenth century
Kungliga teatern Royal Theater (mixed repertoire)
Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Lunds Studentsångförening
Lund Student Singing Society, the primary male chorus in Lund during the nineteenth century; still active today
lur a natural horn made of wood and birch bark, in use in Scandinavia since the middle ages; abbreviation for the full name, näverlur (birch bark lur); distinct from the Bronze-Age metallic lur
manskör male choir / male chorus
Mindre teatern Smaller Theater, in operation between 1846 and 1908, when it was demolished; in scholarship, the name “Mindre teatern” sometimes encompasses the theater’s first four years of existence; see Nya teatern below
nation “nation”: academic and social organization, one for each major province or region within Sweden, to which students were obliged to belong based on their background; loosely based on the system of nationes developed at the Sorbonne in Paris; continues to the present day, although membership is no longer obligatory
Nya teatern New Theater, founded in Stockholm in 1842; changed name to Mindre teatern (Smaller Theater) in 1846
519
omkväde the refrain of a ballad, which may occur at the end of a strophe, in the middle, or in both locations
Par Bricole a Bacchanalian fraternity with a strong history of male choral song during the nineteenth century
polska dance type popular in many regional variants throughout the nineteenth century; usually in triple time; thought to have been imported from Poland
revy revue (topical theatrical piece with many contrafacta on popular songs)
riksdag parliament
röst/röster voice/voices
sällskapsvisor “society songs” sung predominately by men in social settings
Södra teatern Southern Theater, in operation since 1853 (expanded 1859)
sångspel Singspiel, operetta
spelman folk musician; typically a fiddler, but may refer to other instrumentalists as well
studentsång more or less organized choral song among university students
Skansen outdoor museum of Swedish folklife founded in Stockholm in 1891; first site of traditional musicians performing traditional repertoire for Stockholm audiences, as opposed to classically trained musicians performing arrangements
Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning
Swedish Journal of Music Research
Svenska Akademien Swedish Academy (Literature)
Svenskt biografiskt lexikon
Swedish Biographical Encyclopedia, standard reference work
Svenskt visarkiv Center for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research
Sverige Sweden
tomte Brownie; small supernatural creature or house fairy; typically benign when treated with due respect
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underjordiska small creatures under the earth (“under jorden”) who live parallel lives to humans aboveground, according to folk belief; typically benign when treated with due respect
vallvisa herding song sung by rural shepherds
visa simple song, often strophic in nature
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Appendix B: Folksong titles in English translation
This list is compiled primarily from sources of arrangements for male chorus, supplemented with a small number of additional songs mentioned by name in this dissertation. The few texts in other Scandinavian languages are set to melodies believed to be of Swedish origin. A (name) indicates the author of a text of known origin. In cases when a song is more familiarly known by its first line than its title, the first line has been added to the alphabetical list, with the title below as a cross-reference, following the “=“ sign B indicates a ballad.
Swedish title B English translation Å jänta å ja’ (Dahlgren) My Gal and I Allt under himmelens fäste All Under the Heavenly Firmament Axel och Valborg B Axel and Valborg Beväringsmarsch från Rome i Dalarne Military March from Rome in Dalarna Bonden och kråken B The Farmer and the Crow Brudstassen The Wedding Finery De sju gullbergen B The Seven Gold Mountains De två konungadöttrarna B The Two Royal Daughters De två systrarna B The Two Sisters Den bergtagna B The Bride of the Mountain King1 Den första gång i verlden The Very First Time Den lillas testamente B The Little One’s Testamente Den öfvergifne The One Who Was Abandoned Den underbara harpan B The Wondrous Harp Der stod två jungfrur i rosengård B Two Maidens Stood in the Rose Garden Det står ett ljus i Österland There’s a Light in the East Domaredansen The Judge’s Dance Du gamla, du friska = Till svenska fosterjorden
Thou Ancient, Thou Hale
Du har sörgit nu igen You Have Wept Once More Dufvans sång på liljeqvist B The Dove’s Song on the Lily-Branch En gång i bredd med mig One Time Alongside Me Födelsedagen The Birthday Folkmarsch från Orsa i Dalarne (Dybeck) Folk-March from Orsa in Dalarna
1 Literally, “Den bergtagna” translates as “The Mountain-Taken” or “The Mountain-Kidnapped”, and it is sometimes translated as “Spellbound.” The translation “The Bride of the Mountain King” is used here, as it fits the storyline well; in addition, while the ballad is unrelated to the episode of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” in Grieg’s incidental music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the similarity of this translation makes the ballad feel slightly familiar to anglophone readers.
522
Swedish title B English translation Förbi är ljuflig sommar (Sandell) Sweet Summer is Over Först skall det vara krona och krans First, Let There Be a Crown and a Wreath Friarevisa Suitor’s Song Gammal Dalvisa: Om lycka och ära (Fahlcrantz) Old Dalarna-Song: Of Fortune and Honor Gammal Dalvisa: Om sommaren sköna Old Dalarna-Song: In Beautiful Summer (Wallenius) Glädjens blomster (Östberg?)2 Flowers of Joy Grefvens döttrar vid Elfvabolid B The Count’s Daughters at Elvabolid Hafsfrun B The Mermaid Här jag ensam går och vankar Here I Wander Alone Harpans kraft B The Harp’s Power Herr Helmer B Sir Helmer Herr Peder och [fru] Malfred B Sir Peter and [Lady] Malfred Herr Peders sjöresa B Sir Peter’s Journey by Sea Herr Thorer B Sir Thorer Hertig Fröjdenborg och Fröken Adelin B Duke Fröjdenborg and Miss Adelin Hertig Silfverdal B Duke Silfverdal Hillebrand B Hillebrand Hofwet B The Court Hönsgummans visa (Carelius) The Poultry-woman’s Song Inga liten kvarnpiga B Inga Little Mill-Maid Jag gick mig ut en aftonstund I Walked out one Evening Jag ser uppå dina ögon I See in Your Eyes Jag sjungit har i dagar (Dahlgren?)3 For Days I Have Sung Jag unnar dig ändå allt godt I Wish You Well Nevertheless Julvisa. Guds son är född Christmas Song. God’s Son is Born Jungfruköp B Maiden-Purchase Jungfrun i blå skogen B The Maiden in the Blue Forest Jungfrun och sjömannen The Maiden and the Sailor Kämpen Grimborg B Champion Grimborg Kersti du, kom du Kersti, Come Here Klockan är tio slagen The Clock Has Struck Ten Konung Eric och spåqvinnan B King Eric and the Fortune-Teller Konungabarnen B The Royal Children Kör upp i Dalom (Dal-Wisa) Drive up into the Valley (Dalarna-song) Kristallen den fina Fine Crystal Lilla Dora Little Dora Lilla Greta Little Greta Lilla Rosa Little Rosa Lindormen B The Lind-Worm Liten Karin B Little Karin Liten Kerstin befriar sin broder B Little Kerstin Rescues her Brother
2 See Chapter Three, n. 154. 3 See Example 4.5 above.
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Swedish title B English translation Liten Kerstins bröllop och begrafning B Little Kerstin’s Wedding and Burial Liten vallpiga B Little Shepherd Girl Med sin silfverhjelm With his Silver Helmet Mandom, mod och morske män = Folkmarsch från Orsa
Manhood, Bravery, and Daring Men
Naar morgenrøden luer = Paa fjeldtoppen
When Morning Dawns
När jag var en liten gosse When I Was a Little Boy När jag var ett litet barn When I Was a Little Child Neckens polska (Afzelius) Dance of the Water Sprite O konungarnas kung (Dybeck) O King of Kings O! den som hade vingar Oh, He Who Had Wings Och flickan hon går i dansen A Maiden is Dancing Och inte vill jag sörja I Do Not Want to Sorrow Och jungfrun gick åt killan The Maiden Went to the Well Och jungfrun gick sig åt ängen The Maiden Went to the Meadow Och liten wallpiga hon tullade vall B The Little Shepherdess Kept Her Sheep Och mins du, hvad du lofvade Do you Remember What You Promised
Me? Om dagen i mitt arbete By Day, When I Am Working Om lycka och ära = Gammal Dalvisa: Om lycka och ära
Of Fortune and Honor
Om sommaren sköna = Gammal Dalvisa: Om sommaren sköna
In Beautiful Summer
Öster om dalom en stjerna upprinner A Star Rises East of the Valley Oväntad bröllopsgäst B Unexpected Wedding Guest Paa fjeldtoppen (Borgaard) On Top of the Mountain Per Svinaherde B Peter Swineherd Per Tyrssons döttrar i Vänge B Peter Tyrsson’s Daughters in Vänge Pröfningen B The Trial Riddar Olle B Sir Olle Riddar Tynne B Sir Tynne Så draga vi upp till Dalom igen Thus Go We up to Dalom Again Så tager jag min bössa Thus I Take My Rifle Sju år de va förflutna Seven Years Had Passed Skadis klagan (Afzelius) Skadi’s Lament Skön Anna B Beautiful Anna Som stjärnan uppå himmelen Like the Star in the Heavens Sorgens makt B Sorrow’s Power Spinn, spinn! Spin, Spin! Staffansvisan B [Saint] Stephen’s Song Stige Lilles bjudning B Little Stige’s Party Stolts Botelid stalldräng B Noble Botelid Stable-Boy Sven i Rosengård B Sven in the Rose Garden Sven Svanehvit B Sven Swan-white
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Swedish title B English translation Tänker du, att jag förlorader är Do You Think that I Am Forlorn? Till Österland (Margit tänker vid sländan) To the East (Margit Thinks at the Spindle) (Rydberg) Till Österland vill jag fara To the East Will I Go Till svenska fosterjorden (Dybeck) To the Swedish Motherland Tofva lilla B Little Tova Två turturdufvor (Böttiger) Two Turtledoves Ur forntida djup (Dybeck) From Ancient Times Uti vår hage In Our Meadow Vallevans förklädning B Vallevan’s Disguise Vallvisa Shepherd’s Song Värmlandsvisan (Fryxell/Dahlgren) The Song of Värmland Vårvindar friska (“Euphrosyne”=Nyberg) Fresh Spring Breezes Vedergällningen B Revenge Vi ska ställa till en roliger dans We Shall Put on a Merry Dance Wäktare hvad lider tiden Watchman, What Time Is It? Walborgsmässdans Walpurgis Dance Wallgossen The Shepherd Boy Widrik Werlandsons kamp med Högben Rese B Widrik Werlandson’s Battle With Long-
Legs the Giant
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Appendix C: List of arrangements of folksong for male chorus to 1900
Anon[ymous] x2, x3: two or three distinct anonymous arrangements have been located.
Title Arranger(s) Å jänta å ja’ Heise Allt under himmelens fäste Klint Axel och Valborg Hæffner? Beväringsmarsch från Rome i Dalarne Anon, Gille Bonden och Kråken Cronhamn Brudstassen Cronhamn De sju gullbergen Boman Den Bergtagna Anon x3, Hæffner, Mankell Den första gång i verlden Laurin Den underbara harpan Hæffner Der stod två jungfrur Anon Det står ett ljus i Österland Broddén, Jahnke Domaredansen Anon x2, Boman Du har sörgit nu igen Klint Dufvans sång på liljeqvist Anon, Hæffner, Mankell En gång i bredd med mig Anon, Mankell Födelsedagen Behrens? Folkmarsch från Orsa i Dalarne Anon, Cronhamn, Gille, Höijer, Laurin, Lewerth Förbi är ljuflig sommar Anon Först skall det vara Mankell Friarevisa Anon Gammal Dalvisa Hæffner Gammal Dalvisa sommaren Hæffner Glädjens blomster Jahnke, Rinnman Hafsfrun Anon, Åkerberg Här jag ensam går och vankar Düring? Herr Peder och [fru] Malfred Hæffner Herr Thorer Anon Hertig Fröjdenborg och Fröken Adelin Hæffner Hertig Silfverdal Anon, Hæffner Hillebrand Hæffner Hofwet Anon Jag gick mig ut en aftonstund Anon, Prince Gustaf Jag ser uppå dina ögon Anon x3, Cronhamn, Mankell, Tullberg Jag sjungit har i dagar Söderman Jag unnar dig ändå allt godt Boman Julvisa. Guds son är född Söderman Jungfruköp Anon, Hæffner
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Title Arranger(s) Jungfrun och sjömannen Hansen Kämpen Grimborg Hæffner Kersti du, kom du Mankell, Warholm Klockan är tio slagen O Lindblad Kör upp i Dalom (Dal-Wisa) Rinnman Kristallen den fina Anon, Cronhamn, Mankell, Tullberg Lilla Dora Dannström Lilla Greta Jahnke Liten Karin Anon x2, Hæffner, Mankell, Tullberg Liten Kerstins Bröllop och Begrafning Cronhamn, Hæffner Med sin silfverhjelm Mankell När jag var en liten gosse Anon x2 När jag var ett litet barn Anon Neckens polska Anon, Boman, Laurin?, O Lindblad, Tullberg O konungarnas kung Gille O! den som hade vingar Söderman Och flickan hon går i dansen Söderman Och gossen gick sig ut i morgonstund Dahlgren/Randel? Och inte vill jag sörja Wetterling Och jungfrun gick åt killan Lewerth Och jungfrun gick sig åt ängan Söderman Och liten wallpiga hon tullade vall Anon Och mins du, hvad du lofvade Anon, Arlberg, Boman, Klint x2, Peterson-Berger Om dagen i mitt arbete Boman Öster om dalom en stjerna upprinner Nordblom Oväntad bröllopsgäst Anon, Boman, Lewerth Paa fjeldtoppen Hartmann Per Svinaherde Anon Per Tyrssons döttrar i Vänge Mankell Pröfningen Hæffner Riddar Olle Söderman Riddar Tynne Hæffner Så draga vi upp till Dalom igen Jahnke Så tager jag min bössa Anon, Klint, O Lindblad? Sju år de va förflutna Anon Skadis klagan Anon, Cronhamn, Hæffner ?(unlikely), Robergsson Skön Anna Cronhamn Som stjärnan uppå himmelen Edgren Sorgens makt Boman, Cronhamn, Mankell Spinn, spinn! Anon, Jahnke Staffansvisan Prins Gustaf Stolts Botelid stalldräng Cronhamn Sven i Rosengård Anon x2, Mankell Sven Svanehvit Mankell Tänker du, att jag förlorader är Arlberg, Söderman
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Title Arranger(s) Till Österland (Margit tänker vid sländen) Widéen Till Österland vill jag fara Hedin/Wetterling?, Lewerth, Nenus Till svenska fosterjorden Anon x2, Arlberg, Gille, Lewerth, Laurin, Ahlström,
Höijer Tofva lilla Anon Två turturdufvor Boman Ur forntida djup Gille Uti vår hage Lutteman Vallvisa Söderman Värmlandsvisan Anon, Cronhamn, Gade, Hæffner/Nordblom,
Josephson, Lewerth, Mankell Vårvindar friska Jahnke Vi ska ställa till Anon Wäktare hvad lider tiden Anon Walborgsmässdans Anon Wallgossen Anon Widriks Werlandsons kamp med Högben
Rese Anon, Cronhamn
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Appendix D: Correspondence between the publishers Abraham Hirsch and Abraham Bohlin, April–September 1872
The following unpublished correspondence pertains to a legal dispute concerning songs for male quartet that the publisher Abraham Bohlin reprinted prior to asking the copyright owner, the publisher Abraham Hirsch, for permission. This is a one-sided conversation; these six letters from Hirsch to Bohlin are preserved in the manuscript division of the National Library of Sweden (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7), while Bohlin’s letters are lost, other than a few quotations that Hirsch copies out in his responses.1 Also included is a letter from the composer Hermann Berens to Bohlin (letter no. 4 below), in which Berens gives knowledge of the disagreement and makes it clear that he sides with Hirsch in the matter. Hirsch mentions his conversation with Berens in his next letter to Bohlin (letter no. 5).
1) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, April 30, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, April 30, 1872 Mr. Abraham Bohlin, Örebro My honorable brother,
Yesterday I had a conversation with the composer of O God Who Steers the Fates of Men [Wennerberg] about H., and he explained, what he has said many times before, that not he, but I have the right to decide whether somebody may reprint the pieces of his that I have published.
Since I thus find that I do not have to pay for permission to use anything by him until my dear brother [Bohlin] has given his word in this matter, you should not take it badly if I now explain that the reprinting of compositions by Wennerberg or Lindblad that are my property will be prosecuted under the law.
This is not prompted by any envy as a publisher, since I wish all possible success for your proposed vocal quartet collection for use in higher education, even though I do not think this will happen, but it is absolutely necessary to fight against the hitherto ingrained idea that the re-printing of original songs is permitted, and that it does the composer a favor. From this point forward, I will continually express the view that every type of reprinting should be prosecuted, and in so doing, I hope to do some good.
Don’t be angry now at your old friend Hirsch
* * * * *
1 I am grateful to Sven Nyholm for assistance translating certain uncommon words.
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(Stockholm den 30 Apr 1872 Herr Abr. Bohlin, Örebro Min heders Bror,
I går hade jag ett samtal med komponisten till “O Gud som styrer folkens öden”
[Wennerberg] om H., och han förklarade dervid, hvad han många gånger förut gjort, att icke han utan jag äger att bestämma om någon får eftertrycka hans hos mig utgifna stycken.
Då jag således finner att jag icke har att inlösa något af honom till K. Bror gifvet löfte i detta afseende, så får du icke taga humör om jag nu förklarar att ett eftertryck af Wennerbergs eller Lindblads tonstycken som är min egendom, kommer att lagligen beifras.
Detta är icke dikteradt af någon förläggareafund, ty Din tillämnade Sång Qvartett samling för den högre skolan önskar jag all möjlig framgång, ehuru jag ej tror derpå, men det är absolut behöfligt att motarbeta den hittills inrotade föreställningen att eftertryck af original_sånger är medgifven och att dermed göres komponisten en tjenst. Jag kommer härefter att beständigt uttala den åsigt, att hvarje art af eftertryck bör beifras, och hoppas jag att dermed uträtta något godt.
Blif nu ej ledsen på gamle Vännen Hirsch)
2) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, May 14, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, May 14, 1872 Dear Brother!
My dear friend, my previous letter to you was not prompted by greed or jealousy as a publisher; it shouldn’t be necessary to say anything more about that. I have decided that I should prosecute re-printing in whatever form to the extent I am entitled. For among us publishers, especially among music publishers, there is such a carelessness with respect to copyright that it is completely inexplicable. For example, it has happened and continues to happen that vocal quartets are published in arrangements for piano before they have even been published in their original form. For example, another publisher printed a solo piano version of the vocal quartet Sing! Sing! by Söderman in the collection Recollections of the Latest Student Concerts; the original quartet came out much later. These things must be brought to order at some point. That you reprint quartets by Wennerberg and Lindblad and afterwards, out of courtesy, ask for permission to have done so, is a perfect example of how my stated opinion about music copyright is correct.
When we met, dear brother, I told you not once, but many times, that you may include one quartet by Wennerberg and one by Lindblad in your planned anthology, but then you mentioned in the same breath that you intended, as far as I understood, to include all of the quartets by these two men in your anthology, and I protested against
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this. Now you inform me lightly that they have already long since been printed, and
in this case I must protest all the stronger. Now to arrive at the best solution I can think of, I suggest that you remove the
pages with Wennerberg and Lindblad and any others that may have the same type of content. I will gladly share your resulting losses from printing and paper, and you must tell me the full amount. I must act in this manner because the other music publishers have received orders that from here on out, I will prosecute every reprinting of my property.
If we can make these arrangements, I will be delighted and will always confess that you are the last person that I would want to have a feud with.
With friendship and respect, Abr. Hirsch
* * * * *
(Stockholm den 14 Maj 1872 Bästa Broder!
Min käre vän, icke var mitt förra bref till Dig dikteradt af snickenhet eller någon förläggare afund, derom torde något vidare icke vara behöfligt att säga. Jag har ansett mig böra beifra eftertryck, i hvad form som helst, så vidt jag dertill är berättigad. Det råder nämligen hos oss förläggare, isynnerhet hos musikförläggare, en sådan nonchalance i fråga om egenderätten att det är rent oförklarligt, så t ex har händt och händer ännu, att Sång-Qvartetter utkommer i arrangement för Piano innan desamma äro utkomna i sitt ursprungliga skick. Så t ex utkom hos annan förlaggare “Sjung! Sjung!” sångqvartett af Söderman i samlingen “Minne af sednaste Student-Konserter” arrat för piano ensamt, Original-Qvartetten utkom långt sednare. Någon ordning i dessa ting måste en gång äga rum. Att Du eftertrycker qvartetter af Wennerberg och Lindblad och derefter, för artighets skull, gör en förfrågan om tillåtelse dertill, visar ju bäst, att mitt yttrande om åsigtes af musikförlagsrätten är riktig.
Vid vårt sammanträffande, K. Bror, yttrade jag, icke en utan flere gånger, att Du i din tillämnade Anthologin må införa en qvartett af Wennerberg och en af Lindblad, men då nämnde Du i ett andetag, samtlige i Odinslund och Lundagård intagna qvartetter af dessa Hrr, ämnade, så vidt jag förstod, att intages i din Anthologi, och deremot protesterade jag.
Nu upplyser Du ganska legert att de redan längesedan äro tryckta och i så fall måste jag än kraftigare protestera.
För att nu komma till det bästa slut jag vet, föreslår jag, att Du borttager de blad som upptaga Wennerberg och Lindblad och andra af möjligen samma halt. Den förlust i tryck och papper som dermed är förenad vill jag gerna dela, och Du må utan förskoning säga mig beloppet. Jag måste så handla emedan de öfriga Musikförläggarne hafva af mig fått en tillsägelse att jag hädanefter kommer att beifra hvarje eftertryck af min
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egendom. Om vi få saken så arrangerad, så är jag förtjust och skall alltid erkänna att Du
vore den sista som jag skulle vilja ligga i fejd med. Med wänskap och Aktning Abr. Hirsch)
3) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, May 18, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, May 18, 1872 Dear Bohlin,
With your second letter on the 15th of this month concerning the fatal quartet question, my suggestion to remove the printed pages containing my quartets has been rejected. The reasons are, 1) the economical division with two or more songs on the same page, and 2) that the quartets are arranged according to content, so that if one of them is removed, another of the same character must be added, which would entail great difficulties.
Since you therefore do not consider yourself able to accept my proposal, you provide two of your own. —The first of these proposals is contained in the following statement of yours: “— — — Your permission to use some [quartets] from your collection Odinslund and Lundagård. For such permission, I would be willing to give reasonable compensation. — The other proposal comes from this statement of yours: “If you do not want to agree to this, then later I will make a proposal to you to take on the whole print run of this collection.”
Both of these proposals are vague and do not contain anything definite. Therefore, I should like to know how many of these songs have already been printed, and which ones they are, regardless of the source they were taken from. Preferably, I would like to have the complete proofs.
As for the remainder of your letter, it would take me too long to refute it here, but I would at least like to say, that my “misunderstanding” of your first letter—that you had printed several of my songs before seeking [demanding] my permission to do so, has not been corrected in the slightest by your explanations. Our conversation took place on April 21 or 22, and this first letter of yours is dated May 1, so that would mean that the work would have had to proceed at a rather quick pace during this short interim period. As for the statements by the many great lawyers, there might be cause to bring their attention back to point 9(?) in the ordinance regarding freedom of the press (which I assume they have read before): “Whoever prints or reprints a text without the written permission of the author or the owner of his copyright shall forfeit the edition, or pay a fine equal to its full value to the copyright owner.”
All the same, I do not at all want to guess in advance whether you might not be freed from all responsibility in this case by the judge, [and if this occurs] I won’t feel aggrieved even for a moment. What I am trying to do now, is to make sure that we begin
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as friends and end as friends with respect to this judicial case, just as I ought to be interested in the Swedish court of law’s pronouncement on literary (music) copyright.
With true respect and friendship, Abr[aham] Hirsch
* * * * *
(Stockholm den 18 Maj 1872 Käre Bohlin!
Med ditt andra bref af den 15 dennes, rörande den fatale qvartettfrågan, förkastas mitt förslag att borttaga de tryckta bladen som upptaga mina qvartetter. Skälen äro, 1) den ekonomiska indelningen med två och flera sånger på samma sida, 2) att qvartetterna äro grupperade efter innehållet, så att om en af dem utgår en annan af samma karaktär måste intagas, hvilket skulle medföra ganska stora svarigheter.
Då Du således icke anser Dig kunna antaga mitt förslag, kommer Du sjelf fram med tvenne andra. — Det första af dessa förslag skall innefattasi följande Ditt yttrande: “— — — Ditt tillstånd att för denna samling begagna några ur Din samling Odinslund och Lundagård. För ett sådant begifvande vore jag villig lemna[?] någon skälig godtgörelse.” — Det andra förslaget framgår ur foljande Ditt yttrande: “Skulle Du ej vilja gå in härpå så skall jag, senare, framställa ett förslag till Dig att öfvertaga hela förlaget af här tryckta samling.”
Begga dessa förslag äro sväfvande och innehålla intet bestämdt. — Jag skulle derföre vilja veta hela antalet af i denna stund färdigtryckta sånger, och hvilka de äro, oafsedt hvarfrån de äro hämtade. Helst ser jag att få ett fullständigt korrektur.
Hvad nu det öfriga innehållet af Din skrifvelse beträffar, så skulle det föra mig för långt att här ingå i en vederläggning deraf, så mycket vill jag dock nämna, att min “missuppfattning” af Ditt första bref, att Du nämligen hade tryckt ett flertal af mina sånger innan tillåtelse dertill bilfvit mig affordrad, på intet vis af Dina förklaringar bilfvit rättad. Vårt samtal egde rum den 21 eller 22 April, och det ifrågavarande Ditt första bref är daterat den 1:a Maj, således under denna korta mellantid skulle arbetet framskridit ganska betydligt. Hvad vidare angår de många stora juristers yttranden, så torde det kanske vara skäl att ånyo fästa deras uppmärksamhet vid en punkt i 9:o[?] uti Tryckfrihets förvordningen: (hvilken jag antager att de förr hafva läst) “Hvilken som eljest skrift trycker eller eftertrycker, utan författarens eller hans rätts-innehafvares skriftliga tillstånd, miste upplagan, eller böte dess fulla värde, egarens ensak.”
Jag vill likväl för ingen del på förhand afgöra huruvida icke du uti ifrågavarande fall går fri från allt ansvar inför domestal, och deröfver skall jag icke ett ögonblick harmas. Hvad jag nu åsyftar är, att vi som vänner börja ock som vänner sluta ifrågavarande tryckfrihetsåtal såväl som jag bör vara intresserad huru svensk domstol förklarar den litterära –(Musik)rätten.
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Med sann högaktning och vänskap Abr Hirsch)
4) Hermann Berens to Abraham Bohlin, May 25, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:2)
Stockholm, May 25, [1872] My dear friend!
Unfortunately, I can only give you few and unsatisfactory answers to your many and detailed questions, although I have gone to great lengths to be helpful to you in a more substantial manner. The questions raised in your memo you will find answered here, partly by Bauck, and partly by Cronhamn, both of whom I have consulted on your behalf. There are no unprinted quartets for male voices in the Academy’s Library, with the exception of [Eric Arrhén von] Kapfelman’s manuscript collection, which is said to contain some quartets, but in such an incomplete and unreadable condition that nobody can decipher them; moreover, a few years ago they were given to Captain Lagercrantz, a pupil of the deceased composer, who still has them; since male quartet song in Sweden dates only from the beginning of the 1800s (since Hæffner’s arrival), no valuable compositions of this type exist other than those which have already been included in the older printed collections, and since you have access to these yourself, no research was done in the Academy’s library. Regarding your dispute with Hirsch, I have spoken with him in private on this topic;2 an error has been committed in this matter, namely, that you did not seek the original publisher’s permission before you typeset several compositions by Wennerberg, Josephson and others, and above all that you did not at that time, nor have you yet, notified him which or how many songs of each author you intend to include (or, in part, already have included) in your collection. Hirsch, who is as every bit as much a gracious, honest and right-thinking person as you yourself are, does not mean to ruin your speculation, but rather to finally make the extent of a publisher’s rights be legally defined, and one cannot think ill of him for attempting once and for all to settle this important matter; when he with respect to you has gone so far as to offer to share the costs for removing the songs for which he has copyright from your collection, one can hardly ascribe evil intentions to him. —Cronhamn has nothing against your inclusion of his “Popular Song: Brothers, Have You Heard” in your collection, provided that you have the publisher’s permission.
Thank you for your kind invitation to Orebro, which we would gladly have accepted had we not already made other plans for the summer holidays; next week I am expecting my beloved brother Adolph from Lübeck, who intends to stay with us for 14 days; when he returns, he will send us our Robert (who is working for him); when he in turn has left us, the entire Berens family will go to Reuterskiöld’s at Gimo in Uppland in 2 See the next letter in this appendix for Hirsch’s side of this meeting.
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the middle of July, where I will serve as teacher until the first of September, when my position at the Academy resumes. How much of these plans will be fulfilled lies now in God’s hand, for in my sickly condition, I dare not make plans to do anything amusing. – With the heartiest greetings to you, the Dahlgrens, the Bäckströms and Evelina, your devoted Herman Berens [p.s.] I have a collection (score) printed in 1828 by A[lbert] Methfessel that is called: Allgemeines Commers-Liederbuch enthaltend ältere und neue Burschen- Trinks- Volks- und Kriegs-lieder, with texts; if you would like to borrow it for your purposes, just let me know, and I will leave it with d’Aubigné.
* * * * *
(Stockholm d. 25 Maj [1872] Min gode vän!
Tyvärr kan jag endast lemna få och otillfredställande svar på Dina många och utförliga frågor, fastän jag har gjort mig mycken möda att vara Dig behjelplig på ett mera omfattande sätt.
De å Promemorian uppställda frågor finner Du besvarad på denna, dels af Bauck, dels af Cronhamn med hvilka jag confererat å Dina vägnar.
I Akad: Bibliothek finnas inga otryckta Qvartetter för mansröster, undantagandes en manuscript-samling af [Eric Arrhén von] Kapfelman som lärer innehålla några Sång-qvartetter men dessa voro uti så ofullbordadt och oläsligt skick, att ingen kan dechiffrera dem; de lemnades för öfrigt för några år sedan till en den aflidne författarens lärjunge Kapt. Lagercrantz, i hvars händer de ännu finnas; som Mans-Qvartett-Sången i Sverge daterar sig först från början af 18 hundra-talets början (sedan Hæffners hitkomst) existera inga andra värdfulla kompositioner i denna väg, än de som finnas upptagna i de äldre trykta samlingarna, och som Du har tillgång till dessa sjelf, återstodo inga forskningar i Akad: Bibliothek.
Om Din tvist med Hirsch har jag privatim samtalet med densamme; ett fel är härvidlag begått, nemligen att Du icke förr än Du lät sätta flera komp: af Wennerberg, Josephson e.c.t: begärde Originalförläggarens tillstånd, och framförallt att Du hvarken då och ej heller ännu för honom uppgifvit, hvilka eller huru många Sånger af de och de författare Du ämnar (eller till en del redan har) upptaga uti Din samling. Hirsch som är en lika gentil, hederlig och rätt-tänkande och rätt-älskande person som Du sjelf afser mindre att tillintetgöra Din spekulation fastmera att änteligen få gränserna för en förläggares rättigheter lagligen bestämda, och då kan man ju ej förtänka honom, att han engång försöker få denna vigtiga angelägenhet på klar fot; när han vis à vis Dig har gått så långt att erbjuda sig, att dela omkostnader för borttagandet ur Din samling af de stycken på hvilka han har förlagsrättighet, så kan man ju icke tillskrifva honom fiendtliga afsigter. — Cronhamn har ingenting emot att du upptager hans
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“Gassenhauer: Bröder hördes I” uti Din samling, förutsatt att Du har förläggarens tillstånd.
Tack för din vänliga bjudning till Örebro, hvilken vi med nöje hade antagit såvida vi ej redan uppgjort andra planer för Sommer-ferierna; nästa vecka väntar jag min älskade bror Adolph fr: Lübeck som ämnar skänka oss 14 dagars vistelse här; när han återvänder, skickar han oss vår Robert (som är engagerade hos honom); när han i sin tour lemnar oss begifver hela familjen Berens sig medio July till Reuterskiölds på Gimo i Upland, der jag skall fungera som lärare till den 1sta September, då tjensten vid Akad: återbörjar. — Huru mycket af dessa planer kommer att fullbordas, ligger i Guds hand, ty med mitt sjukliga tillstånd vågar man ej göra opp några roliga planer. — Med de hjertligaste helsningar till Dig, Dahlgrens, Bäckströms och Evelina låtar Din
tillgifne Herm: Berens
Jar har en samling (Partitur) tryckt 1828 af A. Methfessel kallad: Allgemeines Commers-Liederbuch enthaltend ältere und neue Burschen- Trinks- Volks- und Kriegs-lieder, med Text; vill Du låna den för Ditt ändamål så skrif ett ord, och jag lemnar den till d’Aubigné.)
5) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, May 30, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, May 30, 1872 Dear Bohlin,
I would not trouble you with another letter right now, if our friend Hermann Berens had not come to see me a few days ago and, as weak and frail as he is, he acquired full knowledge of the question that has arisen between us regarding the reprinting of songs that I have previously published. You must not think ill of him for having agreed that I am entirely correct in this matter.
I am awaiting the copy I requested of all the songs that have been printed as well as a proof copy of those that have been typeset but not yet printed—in other words, everything that has been typeset so far—since I have no idea whatsoever which songs belonging to my publishing house are intended to be included in the collection you are putting together. As soon as I have received this information, you will hear from me again.
Always friends, Abr[aham] Hirsch
* * * * *
(Stockholm den 30 Maj 1872 K Bohlin!
Jag skulle icke falla dig nu besvärlig med brev, om icke vår gemensamma vän
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Herman Berens varit hos mig för några dagar sedan och, så svag och klen som han är, tog fullkomligt kännedom om den fråga som uppkommit oss emellan, rörande eftertryck af på mitt förlag utkomna sånger. Du får icke tycka illavara att han måste gifva mig fullkomligt rätt.
Jag har afaktadt det begärda exemplaret af alla redan tryckta sånger och derjemte ett afdrag af de uppsatta men ej tryckta, med ett ord allt hvad som intill denna dag är uppsatt, ty det är mig aldeles obekant hvilka sånger af mitt förlag äro ämnade att intagas uti Din under arbete varande samling. Så snart jag fått denna uppgift skall Du vidare få höra af mig.
Alltid wänner— Abr Hirsch)
6) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, September 12, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, September 12, 1872 Dear Bohlin,
I have received your letter of August 27, along with eight printed half-sheets of your song collection, which includes 35 numbers and is supplemented by a handwritten list of contents with 106 numbers. I freely admit that I have learned much more from all of this than I had previously been aware; for example, the list shows that, after the first eight half-sheets, you have been more scrupulous with respect to including songs for which I own the copyright. Nevertheless, I allow myself to call attention to nr. 64 and nr. 91.
You have been so kind as to offer me the entire edition of your collection, which is made up of 28 half-sheets of paper in a little over 300 copies “for a sum not less than 4500 riksdalar banco and not exceeding 5000 riksdalar banco.” Two reasons prevent me from accepting this offer; one has to do with with the expensive publishing costs, and I beg permission to tell you the other on another occasion.
Since I therefore cannot assume the publishing of this edition, you await my proposal for another settlement, but I will not do anything of the sort right now. But it is certain that after this matter has been settled, you will voluntarily take back all accusations that I have verbally and in writing insulted you. With respect to this point I must add that I would be grateful if I could find out to whom I have supposedly in written and verbal form made unwarranted comments about you.
I ask to be permitted to wait until your collection is completely finished, so that I may issue my final claim at that time.
As for the preface, which which contains something about my songs, I ask you most kindly to leave such matters out and that not a word appear in print about that which has up until now been between us.
Adding assurance of my continued esteem and friendship signs
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your friend, Abr[aham] Hirsch
* * * * *
(Stockholm den 12 Sept 1872 Käre Bohlin
Jag har fått emottaga Din skrifvelse af den 27 sist. Augusti jemte 8 tryckta halfark af Din sångsamling, hvilka upptaga 35 nr och som kompletteras af en skrifven förteckning angifvande 106 N:r. Gerna medgifves att jag af allt detta fått veta bra mycket mer än hvad förut varit fallet, så t. ex. framgår af förteckningen att Du efter de åtta första halfarken varit mera nogräknad med upptagandet af sånger till hvilka jag äger förlagsrätt. Jag tillåter mig likväll att fästa uppmärksamheten vid N: 64 och 91.
Du har vänligast erbjudit mig hela upplagan af Din samling, utgörande 28 halfark och något öfver 300 ex “för en summa ej understigande 4500 RB, ej öfverstigande 5000 RB.” Tvänne skäl hindra mig att antaga detta tillbud; det ena grundar sig på den dryga förlagskostnaden, det andra beder jag att vid annat tillfälle få nämna.
Då jag således icke kan öfvertaga förlaget väntar Du af mig förslag till annan uppgörelse, men något sådant har jag nu icke att göra. Säkert är det dock att sedan saken en gång är utagerad skall Du godvilligt återtaga alla beskyllningar att jag muntligen och skriftligen chikanerat Dig. Härvid måste jag tillägga, att jag vore tacksam att få veta till hvilken jag skriftligen och muntligen på oberättigadt sätt skall hafva uttalat mig om Dig.
Jag beder att få afvakta tiden då samlingen är komplett färdig, för att derefter komma med mitt slutpåstående.
Hvad företalet vidkommer, som skulle innehålla något om mina sånger, så beder jag på det allra vänligaste att sådant utgår och att intet ord i tryck nämnes om hvad som hittills varit oss emellan.
Tilläggande en försäkran om min fortfarande aktning och vänskap tecknar vännen Abr Hirsch)
7) Abraham Hirsch to Abraham Bohlin, September 16, 1872 (S-Sk Ep. L. 20:7)
Stockholm, September 16, 1872 Dear Bohlin,
A few lines in response to your note with today’s mail. You continue to claim that the legal right to publish songs or other compositions belonging to other publishers in a [new] anthology is on your side. Since you — and this is said without flattery — are a much more competent and experienced man than I am, and yet you still have your same opinion in our dispute, it seems to me to be proper and desirable to come to a definite conclusion in this matter. Let us, for the sake of it, in all peace and friendship,
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find a decision in the court’s ruling on copyright. I have never brought up the question about Wennerberg’s quartets, which you
again claim to have received permission to use and which you do not seem to believe are my property. The honorarium he received and such are delicate things which I would prefer not to discuss. But I should at least tell you this much, that I am happy to be able to say that no Swedish composer has been paid for his compositions as well as my dear, dear friend Wennerberg. With respect to Laurin’s “My Life is a Wave,” my publishing house issued a volume of songs for one voice dedicated to his sister; the 6th song is the one in question, thus originally for solo voice. Several years later, a volume “7 Songs for Four Male Voices,” and there the song appears for four voices. My publishing house bought this up, too. By the way, I have copyright for all of the original songs in the collection Odinslund and Lundagård.
But this response is not intended to do anything other than to renew my request that not a single word about our unsettled matters appear in the preface or in any other way in your collection.
[Your] friend, Abr[aham] H[irsch] [p.s.] My eyes are worse.
* * * * *
Stockholm 16 Sept 1872 K. Bohlin
Några rader med anledning af din skrifvelse med dagens post. Du påstar fortfarande att den juridiska rätten, att utgifva sång- eller andra
kompositioner i en antologi hvilka tillhöra annan förläggare, är på din sida. Då du, utan smicker sagdt, är en långt mera kunnig och erfaren man än jag, och alltjämt har samma åsigt i vår tvistefråge, så synes det mig vara rigtigt och önskligt att en gång komma till något bestämdt i denna sak. Låt oss för sakens skull, i all frid och vänlighet, få ett utslag uti domstols beslut om förlagsrätten.
Jag har icke någon gång vidrört den frågan om Wennerbergs Qvartetter, som Du förnyade gången påståt fått lofte [lov?] att begagna och hvilka Du tycks anse icke äro min fulla tillhörighet. Det honorar han fått och dylikt äro ömtåliga ting hvilka jag helst icke diskuterar. Så mycket bör jag dock meddela Dig, att det är mig en stor glädje att kunna säga det ingen svensk tonsättare fått så bra betalt för sina tonverk som just min mycket värderade wän Wennerberg. Hvad Laurins “Mitt lif är en våg” vidkommer så utkom på mitt förlag ett häfte sånger för en röst tillegnade hans syster, den 6:e sången är den i fråga varande, således ursprungligen för en röst. Åtskillige år sednare utkom ett häfte “7 fyrstämmiga Manssånger” och der återfinnes sången för fyra röster. Äfven detta köpte ju mitt förlag. För ofrigt har jag förlagsrät till alla original sånger i samlingen Odinslund och Lundagård.
Detta svar åsyfter dock icke annat, än förnyad anhållan derom att intet ord i företal eller på annat sätt om vårt mellanhafvande ingår i Din samling.
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Wännen Abr H
Mina ögon sämre.)
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Works Cited Note: All URLs are valid as of February 1, 2018 unless otherwise noted.
Swedish library and archive sigla Archival collections Scores, recordings, and images Primary literature Secondary literature
Swedish library and archive sigla1
S-L Lunds universitetsbibliotek Lund University Library S-Ls Linköpings stadsbibliotek Linköping City Library S-Sk Kungliga biblioteket National Library (Stockholm) S-Skma Musik- och teaterbiblioteket Music and Theater Library (Stockholm) S-Skva Letters, Kungliga Vitterhets-,
historie- och antikvitetsakademien Royal Swedish Academy of History and Antiquities (Stockholm)
S-Sm Musikmuseet Music Museum (Stockholm) S-Sn Nordiska museet, Arkivet Nordic Museum, Archives (Stockholm) S-Su Stockholms universitetsbibliotek Stockholm University Library S-Uu Uppsala universitetsbibliotek Uppsala University Library,
Carolina Rediviva
Archival collections
Allmänna sången arkiv [Uppsala Student Singing Society]. NC 82. S-Uu.
Felix Mendelssohn’s correspondence (“Green Books”). M. Deneke Mendelssohn Collection. Oxford. Bodleian Library.
Lunds studentsångförenings arkiv [Lund Student Singing Society Archive]. LSS:s deposition. S-L.
Richard Dybeck [music commissioned for folk-music concerts]. Acc. 46.573. S-Sn.
Scores, recordings, and images
200 svenska folkdansar arrangerade för piano. 2 vols. Stockholm: Abr. Lundquist, 1875.
1 “Online Directory of RISM Library Sigla,” accessed February 1, 2018, http://www.rism.info/en/sigla.html.
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[Afzelius, Arvid August, and Olof Åhlström]. Traditioner av svenska folkdansar. 4 vols. Stockholm: Kongl. Priviligierade Not-tryckeriet, 1814–15. Facsimile edition with afterword by Bengt R. Jonsson. Stockholm: Bok och bild, 1972.
Ahlström, Jakob Niklas. 220 Svenska folkdansar arrangerade för forte-piano. 2 vols. Stockholm: Gust. Rylander, 1840–42.
———. 300 Nordiska folkvisor. Stockholm: Askerberg, 1855.
———. “Englebrekt och hans dalkarlar.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1846. Ahlströmska samlingen, Sh 8:38 Musikalier. S-Sk.
———. “Högtidsstycken i åtskilliga Svenska landskap.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1844. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 27, item 1. S-Sn.
———. “Svenska folkdansar.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1844. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 27, item 5. S-Sn.
———. “Svenska folklekar.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1844. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 27, item 6. S-Sn.
———. “Svenska polskor.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1844. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 27, item 8. S-Sn.
———. “Urdur eller Neckens dotter: Feeri-skådespel.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1851. Ahlströmska samlingen, Sh 8:29 Musikalier. S-Sk.
Alfvén, Hugo. Symfoni N:r 1. Stockholm: Gehrmans, 1994.
Alfvén, Hugo, Niklas Willén, and Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Symphony No. 1, Festival Overture, Uppsala Rhapsody, The Mountain King. Audio CD. Naxos 8.553962, 1997.
Atterberg, Kurt, Neemi Järvi, and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Orchestral Works, Volume 1: Symphony no. 4 “Sinfonia piccola” / Suite no. 3 / Symphony no. 6 “Dollar Symphony” / En värmlandsrapsodi. Audio CD. Chandos 2013.
Beethoven, Ludwig. Sechs variirte Themen für Pianoforte allein oder mit Flöte oder Violine, op. 105. Beethovens Werke, Serie 14. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1862–90].
———. Six variations faciles d’un air suisse. Bonn: Simrock, [1798].
Berens, Hermann. “Fantasi öfver svenska visor för piano, 2 violiner, alt-viol & violoncell.” Manuscript score, 1848. Hermann Berens d.ä. archive. Autografer. S-Skma.
542
———. “Korp-Kirsti.” Manuscript vocal and orchestral parts, 1863. Kungliga dramatiska teatern, KDT N20:2. S-Skma.
Boman, Petter Conrad. “Ljungby Horn och Pipa.” Manuscript score, 1858. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, L19. S-Skma.
Brahms, Johannes. Variations on an Original Theme, op. 21, no. 1. In Klavierwerke, vol. 1, 152–61. Edited by Emil von Sauer. Leipzig: C. F. Peters, n.d. [ca. 1910].
Byström, Oscar. Quartetto Svedese. Facsimile of manuscript copied by Lars G. Johnsson, 1995. Stockholm: Hans Ahlborg Musik, n.d.
Byström, Oscar, and Frydénkvartetten. Quartetto Svedese. Audio CD. Musica Sveciae MSCD510, 1987.
Cronhamn, Jöns Peter. Svenska folkvisor satta för mansröster. Stockholm: Sundel, 1841.
Du Puy, Jean Baptiste Edouard. “Föreningen.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1815. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, F14 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 182:3). S-Skma.
Eggert, Joachim Nikolas. Symphony in C Major. Edited by Avishai Kallai and Jari Eskola. Stockholm: Musikaliska Konstföreningen, 2011.
Eggert, Joachim Nikolas, Gérard Korsten, and Gävle Symphony Orchestra. Eggert: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3. Audio CD. Naxos 8572457, 2015.
Ekermann, Agnes. Från berg och dal: Samling af svenska folkvisor och folklekar. Stockholm: Norstedt, 1878.
“Folkvisedanslaget, den första ringen, vid Skansens vårfest 1904, på sommarteatern å nedre Solliden.” Black-and-white photograph, 1904. NMA.0052947. S-Sn. Image downloaded from “Folkvisedanslaget.” Nordiska museet. Last modified April 13, 2016. Accessed February 1, 2018. https://digitaltmuseum.se/011013850394/folkvisedanslaget-den-forsta-ringen-vid-skansens-varfest-1904-pa-sommarteatern.
Foroni, Jacopo. Tre ouvertures per grande orchestra, No. 3. Milan: Ricordi, 1851.
Gille, Jacob Edvard. “Folkdansar för orchester med Polskor äfvenledes för orchester.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1858. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:7, no. 28. S-Sn.
———. “Folkmusikalisk öfverblick: Visor och dansar m.m. uppställda af Dybeck samt Harmoniserade och satta för orchester.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1861. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 25. S-Sn.
543
———. “Nordiska högtidsstycken och marscher arrangerade för orchester / Gånglåtar och marscher.” Manuscript orchestral parts, 1859. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:6, no. 26. S-Sn.
———. “Nordiska högtidsstycken, gånglåtar och marscher ordnade af Dybeck samt harmoniserade och arrangerade för orchester.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1858. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:2, no. 36. S-Sn
———. “Svenska polskor harmoniserade och arrangerade för orchester.” Manuscript orchestral parts, 1859. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:7, no. 33. S-Sn.
———. “Svenska ringdansar / Svenska polskor arrangerade för orchester.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1862. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:7, no. 34. S-Sn.
Hæffner, Johann Christian Friedrich. Svenska folk-wisor satte för fyra mans-röster. Upsala: Palmblad, 1832.
Hägg, Gustaf. Songs of Sweden: Eighty-Seven Swedish Folk- and Popular Songs. Translated by Henry Grafton Chapman. New York: G.S. Schirmer, 1909.
Hägg, Jakob Adolf. Nordisk symfoni / Nordic Symphony, Opus 2. Edited by Anders Wiklund, Anders Högstedt, and Erik Wallrup. Translated by Neil Betteridge. Stockholm: Levande Musikarv, 2013.
Hallberg, Bengt. “Divertissement af svenska folk-melodier för quintett af flöjt, violin, violoncell och piano.” Manuscript score, 1854. Bengt Wilhelm Hallbergs archive SE/LUB/924. Kapsel 4. S-L.
———. [“Folkvisor i arr. för piano, violin och violoncell. Defekt”]. Manuscript score, 1844 or later. Bengt Hallberg samling. S-Skma.
Hallén, Andreas. Rhapsody No. 2 (Schwedische Rhapsodie), op. 23. Berlin: Raabe & Plothow, [1883].
Hallén, Andreas, Hans-Peter Frank, and Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra. Hallén: Swedish Rhapsody No. 2 / Isle of the Dead / Harald the Viking Final Scene. Audio CD. Musica Sveciae MSCD621, 1993.
Hallström, Ivar. “Variationer på ‘Liten Karin.’” Manuscript score, later 1860s? Ivar Hallström archive. Kompositioner, bd 2. Samlingsvolym, [no. 32]. S-Skma.
———. Liten Karin: Opera i fyra akter med libretto av Frans Hedberg. Edited by Anders Wiklund, Anders Högstedt, and Erik Wallrup. Translated by Roger Tanner. Stockholm: Levande Musikarv, 2014.
544
http://www.swedishmusicalheritage.com/composers/hallstrom-ivar/SMH-W3507-Liten_Karin.
Hallström, Ivar, Alan Hacker, Umea Symphony Orchestra et al. Den Bergtagna. Audio CD. Sterling Records, 1998.
Hallström, Ivar, and Frans Hedberg. Den bergtagna = Bergkönigs Braut; Klaverutdrag med svensk och tysk text. Translated by Eugène Peschier. Stockholm: Abraham Lundquist, n.d.
———. “Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun.” Manuscript score for chamber orchestra, 1867. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, H17 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 208:2). S-Skma.
———. “Stolts Elisif: Skådespel i 5 handlingar.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1870. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, S49 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 294:3). S-Skma.
Hallström, Ivar, Niklas Willén, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra et al. Duke Magnus and the mermaid = Hertig Magnus och sjöjungfrun. Audio CD. Marco Polo 8.225214–15, 2003.
Höijer, Leonard. “Svenska och norska gånglåtar för orkester.” Manuscript orchestral score and parts, 1847. Richard Dybeck collection. NM 46.573, F1:7, no. 29. S-Sn.
Kjellstrand, Fredrik. “Tomtelek: Nordisk tonmålning för orkester,” op. 31. Manuscript orchestral score, Part. I:2, 1880. Sv. Saml. Orkester Rar. S-Skma.
Kuhlau, Friedrich. Variations pour le pianoforté sur l’ancien air suédois: “Och liten Karin tjente wid unga kungens gård,” op. 91. Leipzig: H. A. Probst, 1828.
Kuhlau, Friedrich and Thomas Trondhjem. Friedrich Kuhlau - Piano Works, Vol. 2, “Les Charmes de Copenhague.” Audio CD. Rondo Grammofon 8353, 1998.
Lewerth, C. J. Gammalt och nytt: Fyrstämmiga sånger för mansröster. Stockholm: Beijer, 1872.
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Littmarck, C. G. R. “Nerkingarne: Folkkomedi med sång i 3 akter af Anrep.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1871. T/SV-Ä. S-Skma.
Lönngren, Knut. “Fantasi öfver svenska folkvisor componerad för piano forte.” Manuscript score, [1846–50]. Sv. Saml. Pfte 2/h, P/Sv. S-Skma.
Lundh, L. Aug. 20 svenska folkvisor i not- och sifferskrift: Till folkskolornas tjenst. Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1881.
545
Mendelssohn, Felix. Andante con variazioni, op. 82. Edited by Friedrich August Roitzsch. Leipzig: C.F. Peters, n.d. [ca. 1880].
Norman, Ludvig. “Daldans.” Manuscript score, n.d. Norman-samling B-Kv. S-Skma.
———. “Dalvisa.” Manuscript score, 1863. Norman-samling B-Kv. S-Skma.
Passy, Edmond. “Grande fantaisie suivie d’un rondo sur des airs nationaux suédois,” op. 6. Manuscript score, ca. 1819. Z/Sv, Passy, E, Op: VI, Grande Fantaisie, 1941/469. S-Skma.
Peterson-Berger, Wilhelm, Stig Westerberg, and Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester. Audio CD. Sveriges Radio: 1982.
Randel, Andreas. Värmlänningarna: Tal-, sång- och dansspel: Arrangement för piano med överlagd text. Stockholm: Nordiska musikförl., n.d.
Rosenberg, A. G. 160 polskor, visor och danslekar, upptecknade i Södermanland 1823-1835 samt satte för pianoforte. Andra uppl. Stockholm, 1876.
Rubenson, Albert.”[Festmarche.] Vid invigningen av K. musikaliska akademiens byggnad d. 2 mars 1878. Inledning för orkester <med begagnandet af en svensk folk-visa>.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1878. Sv. Saml. Orkester Rar, S-Skma.
———. “Hambo-Polska.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1846. Albert Rubenson archive, S-Skma.
———. “Symfoniskt intermezzo [no. 1] för orchester.” Manuscript score, 1860. Sv. saml. orkester rar. S-Skma.
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———. Bach på svenska: Tyska klockorna. Audio CD. Audio CD. Bromma: Gazell Records GAFCD 1118, 2014.
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546
Söderman, August. “Folkunga-Lek: Historiskt romantiskt skådespel i 5 akter.” Manuscript orchestral score, 1864. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, F42 (microfilm KT FILM Nr 190:3-4). S-Skma.
———. Nordiska folkmelodier harmoniskt behandlade för mansröster. Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, 1865.
———. Svenska/Nordiska folkvisor och folkdansar. Stockholm: Elkan & Schildknecht, [1897].
Söderman, August, Roy Goodman, and Symphony Orchestra of Norrlands Opera. “Svenska folkvisor och folkdanser.” In August Söderman, Orchestral Music, vol. 2. Audio CD. Sterling CDS1040, 2000.
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———. Stenhammar: String Quartets Nos. 5–6. Audio CD. BIS 2009, 2013.
Svenska folkvisor. Stockholm: Hedbom, 1839.
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———. Necken, eller, Elfspelet: Romantisk opera i tre akter. Manuscript orchestral score, 1844. KT Operetter och Tal-pjeser med musik, N3 (KT FILM Nr 126:1, 127:1). S-Skma.
Vogler, Georg Joseph. Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe: Lyriskt drama i tre akter. Facsimile of the vocal score by Per Conrad Boman. Edited by Martin Tegen. Monumenta Musicae Svecicae 7. Stockholm: AB Nordiska Musikförlaget, 1973.
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Biography Born in Bellingham, WA, Kirsten Santos Rutschman earned a BA with distinction in
German Studies and a minor in Music (Stanford University, 2004); an MA in Language
and Culture in Europe (Linköping University, Sweden, 2005); and a Certificate in
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (Western Washington University,
2006), where she taught academic English as a second language in the Intensive English
Program. Kirsten returned to Sweden to study organ at Hjo Folkhögskola (2010–11). En
route to the PhD in Musicology at Duke University (2018), she earned an AM (2013).
In 2015–16, Kirsten conducted research in Stockholm, supported by the Fulbright
Commission, the American-Scandinavian Foundation (Thord-Gray Memorial Research
Fellowship), the Lois Roth Endowment, and Duke University. In North Carolina, her
work has been generously supported through a merit-based James B. Duke Fellowship
(Graduate School); a Graduate Teaching Fellowship (Graduate School & Department of
Music); a Graduate Award for Research and Training (Duke Center for International and
Global Studies); and a Summer Study in the Arts Grant (Vice Provost for the Arts).
Kirsten’s paper “Folksong Against the National Grain: Inventing Pan-
Scandinavian Identity” received the AMS Southeast Student Presentation award in 2017.
Her publications include “Swedish Opera in Translation: Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe,”
Ars Lyrica 22 (2013): 95-130; score reviews in Nineteenth-Century Music Review; and score
prefaces for Musikproduktion Höflich (Munich). She is a member of the Society of Duke
Fellows and a 2018 Building Future Faculty Fellow at North Carolina State University.