New Perspectives on Wilhelm Stenhammar: A Symposium 10–12 November 2021

Leah Broad

Stenhammar in the Theatre

Between 1916 and 1922, Stenhammar wrote seven incidental scores. Six of these were for productions directed by Per Lindberg (1890–1944). Trained by Max Reinhardt, Lindberg was considered one of the most radical and progressive directors in Sweden, and he met Stenhammar as the artistic director of the Lorensberg Theatre in Gothenburg. 

This paper explores the collaboration between composer and director, focusing in particular on the 1920 production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and 1922 Romeo and Juliet. It argues that these theatre productions offer a unique, multimedia perspective on debates about ‘modern’ culture in 1920s Sweden. The conception and reception of these productions demonstrates that Stenhammar was actively involved with movements to create a socially engaged ‘modern’ theatre that was accessible and popular, moving away from socially elite forms of drama that had been dominant in Sweden before World War I.

Anders Carlsson

Stenhammar’s Importance for the Founding of the Orchestra School and the School for Choral Singing at the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra

When the Gothenburg symphony orchestra founded an orchestra school and a school for choir singing in 1916 and 1917, one automatically thinks that this was done with directives from the great artistic director Wilhelm Stenhammar. However, there are no documents found that support this idea. Instead, we must assume that it was the board that argued for these new schools. Factors that supported the process were: (1) the necessity to satisfy the conditions laid down in Pontus and Göthilda Fürstenberg’s will; (2) the aim of ensuring the recruitment of musicians and counteract the strong influence of foreign musicians; (3) the wish to create a larger employment base and thus job security for the orchestra’s own musicians; and (4) the ambition to provide support for the recruitment of musicians to other orchestras in the country.

In addition to these factors, there was also also strong pressure from members of the Swedish parliament to create orchestra schools outside of Stockholm. A liberal philanthropic outlook, long established in Gothenburg, concerning the need for educational support for the less well-endowed was also of great importance. At the same time, there was also a significant deterioration in the city’s choir life so that there was no longer a choir for the orchestra to collaborate with. In 1904, Wilhelm Stenhammar’s cousin Elsa Stenhammar had formed her own choirs in the city, both under the auspices of the Cathedral and within the labour movement. Elsa Stenhammar offered to transfer this activity, which was at a very high musical level, in its entirety to the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. In this way the orchestra’s school for choral singing could be launched without any pedagogical or administrative work.

Christina Ekström

Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Musical Paternal Heritage: Life and Work of Per Ulrik Stenhammar

This presentation aims to contribute new perspectives on Wilhelm Stenhammar’s musical paternal heritage, centring on his father, Per Ulrik Stenhammar (1829–1875). Parallel to his profession as an architect, he also devoted his life to music as a musician and a composer. The presentation will examine his work in the service of music. His musical oeuvre includes vocal music and, to a lesser extent, instrumental music. Nearly 100 of his vocal compositions have been published, several of them posthumously. His oeuvre also includes unpublished and unfinished works, including a chorale book and two oratorios. Per Ulrik became a member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1868. An analysis has been made of sources including unpublished and published compositions, letters and notes, family chronicles, correspondence, and contemporary journals. The results show that Per Ulrik was engaged in several of the emerging musical environments in his time – the pietistic organisation Evangeliska Fosterlandsstiftelsen as well as the art music scene in Stockholm – and that his solid musical knowledge combined with his social and cultural capital made his work as a musician and a composer possible. The examination revealed that these aspects can be added to the musical paternal heritage of Wilhelm Stenhammar.

Joel Eriksson

On the Orchestration in Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Serenade

Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Serenade in F major Op. 31 is often referred to as one of the most important Swedish orchestral works from the late-romantic era. In this lecture I will highlight the orchestration of the work and compare it with other contemporary and older orchestral music to give a context to Stenhammar’s orchestral style. I will also touch on other works from

Stenhammar’s mature period such as the G minor symphony and the second piano concerto.
Stenhammar’s work as conductor gave him practical knowledge of the orchestration of a large number of works, and it is reasonable to assume that he learned from and was influenced by the repertoire with which he worked. My research questions will be: (1) what influences from contemporary and older repertoire can we see in Stenhammar’s orchestration? (2) Can we discern a personal style of orchestration in Stenhammar’s work? I will highlight the state of research by giving a brief picture of what is said about the subject in Bo Wallner’s seminal work Wilhelm Stenhammar och hans tid.

Daniel Grimley

Stenhammar’s Affective Landscapes

Less than thirty seconds after the music has begun, the bustling orchestral figuration that launches the opening movement of Stenhammar’s magical Serenade, op. 31, gives way to a strangely suspended passage of sonorous horns, gently swaying strings, and mysterious woodwind murmurs. As with many such moments in the work, the listener feels imaginatively transported to a completely different time and place, without any firm sense of how they have arrived or how they re-emerge once more on the other side.

In the opening volume of his landmark study of the composer and his music, Bo Wallner lists ‘timbre, tranquillity, expressivity and at the same time their artful articulation’ as typical traits of Stenhammar’s work and suggests that there is ‘no nordic romantic who has so intensively listened to silence and has composed it in the design of his form’. In this talk, I will add the concept of affect to Wallner’s list, following Erik Wallrup’s definition of affect as mood, atmosphere, or ‘stämning’. Hearing Stenhammar’s music affectively, particularly through his powerfully transformative responses to landscape, sheds renewed light on vital questions of place, material, and subject position. The Serenade will provide the framework for beginning to sketch an affective methodology for interpreting Stenhammar’s work and that of his contemporaries more broadly.

Sverker Jullander

Stenhammar the Pianist

The relative sparseness of Stenhammar’s compositional output stands in stark contrast to his busy concert activities as a pianist and conductor. However, he did not aspire to be an international touring ‘star’; most of his pianistic activity took place in Sweden and centred in the first place on chamber music and lied accompaniment. His repertoire, especially of chamber music, was exceptionally broad, and though he did give some recitals with only his own works, this was an exception rather than the rule. As a piano recitalist, he was especially noted for his Beethoven interpretations.

In the present paper I will discuss a few aspects of Stenhammar as pianist, departing from two questions: what did he play; and how did he play. For the latter, more difficult, question, two very different kinds of sources are available: written accounts (for instance press reviews) and preserved recordings, including piano rolls.  The first kind of material is by far the richest but also the most difficult to interpret, given its often general and highly subjective, sometimes contradictory, character. Recordings, on the other hand, though being ‘hard evidence’, are in Stenhammar’s case very few in number and therefore hazardous to use in support of generalising conclusions. We must also ask to what extent sounding documents constitute evidence of the particular qualities of Stenhammar the pianist (in relation to his contemporary colleagues), and not only of the general performance practice of his time, in many respects different from that of today.

Annika Lindskog

Landscape, Language and Location: Cultural Contexts and Connections in Four Stenhammar Songs

‘Lovely to meet you, orchid’ is the opening phrase of a published translation of one of Stenhammar’s most popular songs. With the linguistic transfer a number of nuances have been adapted (e.g. the specific type of flora and fauna), altered (particularly in stylistic lexical choices), or even lost (the connotations of the place-setting for example). Not wishing to critique any translational effort, the paralleling nevertheless serves to point up the layers of meaning embedded in song settings relating to a specific cultural context.

In any musical performance a transfer takes place - apart from performative interpretations, a shift occurs also in temporal, historical and geographical contexts. As such cultural cross-overs play out, they bring with them sentiments and sonorities not only particular to the composer, but also to the environment in which they were conceived. Considered thus as geographical representations, they might be understood as ‘active, constitutive elements in shaping social and spatial practices’, which in turn can be ‘read’ also through texts and images ‘as testimony of human agency’, as Denis Cosgrove has suggested.

In the songs of Stenhammar we encounter an intimate sensitivity to the expressivity of the language they set alongside an inherent connection to local settings and landscapes of high cultural relevance. As both landscape and language resonate through the songs, they remain highly contextualised by their own historicity and the sense of place they communicate. This paper will attempt to ‘read’ four of Stenhammar’s songs through close consideration of their textual and culturally contextualised expressivity, paying particular attention to the negotiation and transfer of the meaning of place, space and landscape they enact.

Mattias Lundberg

Stenhammar and the Swedish Modernists

Wilhelm Stenhammar may with some justification be called the musical ‘grandfather’ of Swedish composers in the self-defined ‘Monday Group’ of modernists. This group of composers born around 1920 (Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Ingvar Lidholm, Sven-Erik Bäck and others) acknowledged Hilding Rosenberg as something of a father figure, and Stenhammar was arguably the only late-romantic Swedish composer who gradually became ‘their own’. The high regard in which Stenhammar was held may be understood as a combination of what was perceived as shared aesthetic ideals (according to which Stenhammar was styled as a ‘classicist’), and an attempt to balance the ideals of ‘tradition’ and ‘technical proficiency’. Bo Wallner, who through pedagogical and editorial activities shaped much of the musical discussions of ‘new music’ in the latter half of the 20th century, was for large parts of his life preoccupied with Stenhammar, culminating in an authoritative study of his life and works (1991). The way in which Stenhammar was contrasted to Hugo Alfvén, Ture Rangström, Kurt Atterberg and contemporary peers (who significantly, unlike Stenhammar, were still alive when the modernists established themselves) still affects the general view of Stenhammar in Swedish music life today.

Dan Olsson

Wilhelm Stenhammar and Folk Music 

The decades around the turn of the 20^th century witnessed an increased interest in folk music and popular culture among artists and intellectuals in Sweden. In relation to folk music this led musicians and scholars to record a large amount of songs and dance tunes performed by tradition-bearers, a development that started a tradition of research in folk music. Furthermore, folk music became an important source of inspiration for composers who in a variety of ways began using folk musical material in their compositions.

Hugo Alfvén’s and Wilhelm Peterson-Berger’s relation to folk music is well documented – by themselves as well – and analysed. Wilhelm Stenhammar too was affected by the contemporary interest in folk music (folk melodies can be found in some of his compositions), but unlike Alfvén and Peterson-Berger he did not publish his thoughts regarding the genre. Although there are musicological studies of Stenhammar’s use of folk music in his compositions, these have mainly taken the form of analyses of individual works containing folk melodies, and a more complete picture of his views on folk music is thus still lacking. My paper will address issues concerning the composer’s relationship with the folk music movement of his time, and the general characteristics of his use of elements from folk music in his compositions.

Signe Rotter-Broman

Stenhammar, a European Modernist

As conductor, pianist and composer, Wilhelm Stenhammar’s contributions to Swedish musical life around 1900 are well acknowledged. But Stenhammar’s musical prospect and activities reached far beyond the Swedish borders. My paper focuses on these border-crossings: I ask for Stenhammar’s experiences in Europe and their consequences for his music and his self-image as a composer. Based on sources related to my work on Stenhammar’s string quartets and to my recent research on music and world exhibitions, I discuss Stenhammar’s Copenhagen network with Henrik Hennings in the foreground, his relationship to Berlin’s musical life, and his self-concept as modernist in the light of recent research on music and modernism.

Joakim Tillman

Wagnerian Elements in Stenhammar’s Early Operas 

According to Stenhammar, his worship of Wagner started with Lohengrin when he was fifteen years old, and a year later, in 1887, Die Meistersinger impressed him greatly. The strong impression of Wagner was reinforced during his piano studies in Berlin in 1892–1893, where, for the first time, he heard the Ring and Tristan und Isolde, and before leaving Germany he wrote to his mother that he had become a passionate Wagnerian. This presentation will demonstrate how this influence manifested itself in Stenhammar’s two early music dramas, Gildet på Solhaug (1892–1893, Stuttgart 1899) and Tirfing (1897–1898, Stockholm 1898).

Wagnerian influence is a complex phenomenon that may concern a number of different aspects. In his study of French fin-de-siècle opera, Steven Huebner points out that it is manifest both on a broad level of aesthetics and dramaturgy, and on a more local level, revealing the effect of individual operas, and even individual passages. This presentation will demonstrate how Stenhammar appropriated Wagnerian conceptions, techniques and stylistic features, but also how he alluded to specific works, especially in Tirfing, where the text by Anna Boberg is reminiscent of Wagner’s poems in several respects.

Anne Reese Willén

Musical Life in Sweden during the Age of Stenhammar

In his monumental biographical work on Stenhammar, Bo Wallner declares that an account of only life and work would be too narrow to understand his achievements as one of the greatest composers, conductors and pianists in Swedish music history. Therefore, Wallner’s work explores not only the biography and works of Stenhammar, but also the age in which he worked. Wallner is right in pointing out that this was an important time for development in the musical life in Sweden, and this paper will explore this further.

The beginning of the 20th century in Sweden is characterized by a growing infrastructure within concert life through the establishment of symphony orchestras and concert halls, which offered new possibilities for professional work in the field of music. The last decades of the 19th century, on the other hand, was a period with few active composers. Thus, the new generation of composers who made their debuts in the final years of the century were eagerly awaited. This paper will give an overview of the concert life and repertoire of the period and will discuss the context in which Stenhammar worked, to provide insight in his role as a composer, conductor and pianist and how he secured a position as a central figure within this context.

Albin Axelsson and William Dahl

Albin Axelsson and William Dahl are two young promising Swedish pianists. Both are currently studying at Ingesund School of Music with Mikael Kanarva as teacher. They have participated in master classes for internationally recognized artists and performed both as soloists and chamber musicians. Both have been successful in piano competitions. William became the second prize winner in the 12-14 year old class at the Steinway Piano Festival in 2014. In 2021 Albin and William won the first prize in the international piano competition arranged by the Gothenburg Piano Festival.

Leah Broad

Leah Broad, PhD, is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. She specialises in twentieth-century music, particularly focused on Britain and the Nordic countries. She has writing on Nordic music published and forthcoming in Music & Letters, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and in books with Oxford University Press and Boydell & Brewer. She is currently writing a group biography of four women composers which will be published with Faber & Faber.

Anders Carlsson

Anders Carlsson, PhD, is a musicologist and has, among other things, written about the development of bourgeois public music life in Gothenburg, especially with regard to orchestral formations. He has been active at the University of Gothenburg as a research coordinator at the Academy of Music and Drama, but also as director of the University’s organ research centre GOArt and head of the School of Craft and Design.

Christina Ekström

Christina Ekström, PhD in Musicology, assistant professor the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, works currently as a singer and the programme director of several programmes in the field of Church music Her research interests are primarily related to aspects of the Moravian Church, such as music aesthetics, musical performance, hymnology, emotional culture, and musical pedagogy. She received a pedagogical prize from the University of Gothenburg in 2015. In 2019 she received the Harald Göransson Prize from the Royal Academy of Music, Sweden for her extensive and versatile studies of music in the Moravian Church.

Joel Eriksson

Joel Eriksson (born 1969 in Eskilstuna) studied music composition at the University of Gothenburg and at the Royal Academy of Music, London. In 2010, he received his PhD on the dissertation Chiselled Music from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. He currently works as a Senior Lecturer in music theory at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

Daniel Grimley

Daniel M. Grimley, PhD, is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, where he is also currently Head of Humanities, and a Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. His books include Delius and the Sound of Place (Cambridge, 2018) and Sibelius: Life, Music, Silence (Reaktion, 2021), and with Philip Bullock he recently edited a volume entitled Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890–1930 (Boydell, 2021).

Magnus Haglund

Sverker Jullander

Sverker Jullander, PhD, is Senior Professor of Musical Performance at Piteå School of Music (Professor and Chair 2006–2018), Luleå University of Technology, and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Swedish Journal of Music Research, Chair of the Research Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and Chair of the Göteborg International Organ Academy. Dr Jullander is active as a musicologist, church musician and concert organist, and has given organ recitals in many European countries, in addition to CDs and radio broadcasts. He has published extensively, mainly on the organ and church music of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and has edited many scholarly publications.

Annika Lindskog

Annika Lindskog is Lecturer in Swedish and Scandinavian Studies at University College London (UCL), where she teaches language and cultural history. She has previously written on Stenhammar and Peterson-Berger, as well as Delius, Vaughan Williams and Brahms among others, and has most recently co-edited a volume on Introduction to Nordic Cultures, based on a departmental core course she ran and developed for many years, and to which she contributed texts in particular on Carl Linnaeus and the Kalevala. She attended the Piteå School of Music, Luleå University of Technology, as part of her undergraduate studies, and is a highly active singer in many choirs in London and surrounds. She also acts as a language coach to professional singers and ensembles who wish to attempt the Swedish (and sometimes Nordic) repertoire.

Mattias Lundberg

Mattias Lundberg is Professor of Musicology at Uppsala University. Following studies in musicology, Latin and art history, he received his PhD in musicology at the University of Liverpool in 2007. Between 2006 and 2011 he was in charge of the Swedish section of Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) and was a member of its coordination team 2007–2008. He has published extensively on many different musical topics, with an emphasis on Early Modern church music, and is the author of a book on Luther and music. A member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, Dr Lundberg was entrusted with the task of writing the history of the Academy for its 250-year jubilee publication (2021). He is well known to the general public through his participation in several series broadcast on Swedish national radio, including ‘The History of Music in Sweden’ – for which he was awarded ‘Stora radiopriset’ (The Great Radio Prize) – and ‘Ask the Music Professor’.

The Malva Quartet: Linnea Viklund, Anna Kroeker (substitute), Maria Jonsson, Maja Molander

The Malva Quartet was formed in 2008 during their studies at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. They continued their chamber music studies with Prof. Friedemann Weigle (of the Artemis Quartet) at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin. Throughout the years they have worked with many composers in Sweden and abroad. Earlier this year they released their first album, Wooden Bodies, which has been rewarded with excellent reviews. The driving force of the quartet is curiosity. They play music that they are passionate about and they want to provide high quality and intensely communicative musical experiences. They love to collaborate with other artists and they have a playful approach to music making and concert creation. The Malva Quartet embraces sound in all its forms, both harsh and melodic. They cherish the treasury of repertoire created for the string quartet for three centuries while placing a distinct emphasis on music by composers of today.

Dan Olsson

Dan Olsson has studied music at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater, Hannover, Germany, and musicology and history at the University of Gothenburg. He is active as a violinist and folk musician, and works as lecturer in music history and ethno¬musicology at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. He has published articles on, among others, Franz Berwald and early Swedish folk music research.

Signe Rotter-Broman

Prof. Dr. Signe Rotter-Broman, born in 1968, studied musicology, history, and Scandinavian studies in Frankfurt am Main and Kiel, Germany. She received her Ph.D. from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, with a dissertation on Wilhelm Stenhammar’s string quartets (Studien zu den Streichquartetten von Wilhelm Stenhammar [= Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 47], Kassel etc. 2001). In 2010 she completed her habilitation thesis on compositional techniques in polyphonic songs from the late Trecento (Komponieren in Italien um 1400. Studien zu dreistimmig überlieferten Liedsätzen von Paolo und Andrea da Firenze, Bartolino da Padova, Antonio Zacara da Teramo und Johannes Ciconia, Hildesheim etc. 2012]. Since 2012, she is Professor of Musicology at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. Her current research interests focus on the relationships between the world exhibition movement, music, and modernity around 1900, with a special focus on Northern Europe.

Martin Sturfält

Swedish pianist Martin Sturfält enjoys an international career as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and recording artist. He performs a large repertoire ranging from the baroque through to the present day, but increasingly it is his passion for the music of his native country that is earning him recognition. His recordings of music by Wilhelm Stenhammar and Adolf Wiklund on the Hyperion label have been met with critical acclaim internationally. Martin has performed extensively throughout Europe and Asia with performances at all major venues in Sweden as well as at London’s Purcell Room, Barbican Hall, Royal Festival Hall and Wigmore Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. As a concerto soloist Martin has appeared with among others the NHK Orchestra in Tokyo, the Hallé Orchestra and all Swedish symphony orchestras, collaborating with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Thomas Dausgaard, Sir Mark Elder, Andrew Manze, Vassily Sinaisky and Alexander Vedernikov.  

Joakim Tillman

Joakim Tillman is Professor of Musicology at Stockholm University, where he teaches courses in music analysis, nineteenth- and twentieth-century music history, film and game music, and opera. He has published in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes, including the article ‘Topoi and Intertextuality: Narrative Function in Hans Zimmer’s and Lisa Gerrard’s Music to Gladiator’ in Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle, ed. Stephen C. Meyer (New York: Routledge, 2017), and he is co-editor of the book Contemporary film music: Investigating cinema narratives and composition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has done extensive research on Wagner’s influence on the operas of Swedish composers Andréas Hallén, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, and Wilhelm Stenhammar. His current research is focused on contemporary Hollywood film music.

Anne Reese Willén

Anne Reese Willén holds a PhD in musicology from Uppsala University with a thesis on the institutionalization and professionalization of the musical life in Stockholm 1840–1890. She is currently working as a researcher at the Department of Musicology at Uppsala University on the project ‘Canon and concert life: Formation Processes within the Musical Life of Stockholm 1848-1914’, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This project explores how structures within the concert life and the musical repertoire are formed in relation to canon formation, contemporary aesthetical debate, and ideas of Bildung and commercialisation. It also problematises conceptions of canon formation as well as the relation between centre and periphery in the European musical life of the 19th century.  Dr Willén’s research interests are mainly in the field of music history, the musical life in Sweden, 19^th- and early 20^th-century music, musical canon, and music aesthetics.