How Sweden lost a great composer

Heril Steemøen says:

Perhaps not, but they do have Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Sven-Erik Bäck and Wilhelm Stenhammar.

David K. Nelson says:

I am always happy to see attention paid to Allan Pettersson and his music, music which I (and I suspect many others) first got to know via Dorati’s recording of the Symphony No. 7. I’d be prepared to second his nomination as Sweden’s best, although I do like what I have heard of Stenhammar. As for the Barefoot Songs it is important to realize that the pastoral and pleasant impression that the title imparts has nothing to do with the texts. (God is walking barefoot on thorns and thistles. And you get rather deeply into the song “You Are Lying” before it becomes evident that the “you” who does so much lying is God, who tramples flowers and kills them.)

But while Pettersson’s early upbringing was difficult in the extreme, I do think N.L. reaches too far in trying to construct a class-based rejection by Sweden of Pettersson and his place in Swedish music. And I take issues with some statements of fact in the review as well.

He took up violin at 12 and then was a student at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Stockholm. He won a Jenny Lind Stipend to further his viola studies in Paris, and then joined the Stockholm Concert Society Orchestra (we now know it as the Stockholm Philharmonic) in its viola section while intensifying his studies of composition. He later studied composition in Paris (Liebowitz and Honegger). He left the orchestra over issues of health, and his health was to get much worse, crippling. He won the Swedish Radio Symphony prize in 1960: a commission for a new work, a performance, publication of the work (“Mesto” for strings), and a recording. A decade after leaving the orchestra he was given a state prize with a guaranteed income, and then the Prize of the City of Stockholm. In the mid 1970s these honors were elevated to living quarters provided by the government. Then came an honorary professorship (his health would have made actual university teaching impossible).

There was indeed about a period of neglect once his performing career was over, but this is not the biography of shunned individual. And even that era of neglect was not total. A CD from Swedish Society Discofil has two pieces taken from older LPs. The Symphony No 2 was recorded in 1966; the prize-winning commission “Mesto” for string orchestra was recorded in 1961. That is just an example of attention (and respect) paid to the composer well before the Dorati recording.

Moreover, the Stockholm Philharmonic did not ban his music “for all time” after the dispute over the program for their US tour, but just the reverse. It is Pettersson who banned them from performing his music “for all time” – a ban he later lifted.

If Pettersson could not afford a piano that is unfortunate and no credit to Sweden, but the fact is that after his Symphony No. 5 he could barely manage to write notes on paper. much less compose at an instrument which was never primary to him. The premiere of his Symphony No 7 was the last time his illness permitted him to even attend a premiere.

By no means am I suggesting Allan Petersson was pampered — that would be absurd once you know his biography — but the big issue was not class-based neglect and shunning, but rather a horrible illness that in turn made Petersson a VERY challenging person to deal with, as the Stockholm Philharmonic learned, or even to describe, as many would-be commentators learned when he would lash out at their words of praise or analysis. He was a sick person surrounded by healthy people and he regarded healthy people as unimaginative. As he himself wrote “I feel I have more in common with criminals — so-called criminals — than with other people. Not because of their criminality but because of their desire for freedom and their agony, suffering, sense of exclusion ….”