Jan Ling HUGO ALFVÉN BETWEEN TWO SYMPHONIES. ABOUT AESTHETIC IDEALS OF MUSIC IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY SWEDEN Programm-Musik - eigentliche Musik! Absolute Musik: - ihre Verfestigung mit Hilfe einer gewissen Routine und Handwerkstechnik jedem nur einigermassen musikalischen Menschen möglich. Erstere: - wahre Kunst! Zweite: Kunstfertigkeit! Richard Strauss1 Swedish composers working with or advocating a programme-music approach or adapting their music to a particular social function or musical taste came under suspicion in the 20th century, sometimes as outright traitors to their art. Composers making common cause with folk music came perilously near the same abyss. One composer who, at various points in his lifetime, was heavily criticised for betraying artistic ideals is Hugo Alfvén.2 All his life, however, he had a faithful audience and devoted following among a large community of music lovers. They moved with him from one stylistic ideal to another. But many leading music personalities felt that Alfvén had attained the peak of his achievement as a composer at the age of 27, with his Second Symphony (Op. 11). After that it was downhill all the way! Alfvén’s very next symphony, the Third, in a totally different style from the Second, was given a cooler reception by reviewers, while a number of critics highly esteemed in Swedish music regarded his Fourth as a disaster in terms of musical morality. Julius Rabe had the following to say in the newspaper GHT in 1920: One can disregard the unpleasant surprise of now, after so many years of revolutionary production in all the arts, suddenly encountering a work so intent on detailed portrayal as to smack of the heyday of naturalism twenty or thirty years ago – all the more so as this is a work of music, an art whose grandest privilege is its capacity for being free and unfettered by all extraneous precedent, and whose progenitor is a man whose activity is based on the city of youth [the university town of Uppsala]. The gravest objection to Alfvén’s new symphony concerns, not its old-fashionedness in spirit and deed, but the whole mentality of this “hymn to love in springtime”. There is not an ounce of strong youthfulness or triumphant grace in this musical imitation of the outward aspect of love. Instead it is banal, devoid of intent or ambition and basically, like all imitative art, sentimental and impotent. To Alfvén’s contemporaries, his compositions were so closely bound up with his personal life that keeping the two apart was not easy. This was due, not least, to Alfvén himself already having stressed, concerning the Second Symphony, that his music is always based on a programme in which the tonal language has been governed by nature, humanity or possibly ideas: it is meant to portray the sea, an outstandingly popular motif among Sweden’s musical “marine artists” and also the visual and audible background to the Fourth Symphony.
1
Richard Strauss, “Poetische Idé”, März 1890 an Johann L. Bella (Richard Strauss-dokumente, 1980, Reclam p. 60). 2 Alfvén’s life and work have been described by Sven E. Svensson (1946) and Lennart Hedwall (1973) in two monographs. In the following pages I will be drawing extensively on these two accounts and on Alfvén’s own memoirs.