A national composer with a complex

Thus Uppsala’s hopes of playing a leading role in Swedish musical life came to nothing, and from then on Alfvén had to make do with the Akademiska Kapellet’s meagre resources. When Alfvén took over, the orchestra consisted of only 24 players: a fluteplayer, an oboist, a clarinettist, thirteen violinists, three viola-players, four cellists and the bassplayer Carl Ruff who owned a music shop and was the only professional musician. The rest were amateurs, that is to say, they did not get paid. Restaurant and cinema musicians were hired for the three or four annual concerts, as well as some skilled military musicians from the infantry and artillery regiments in Uppsala who could also play stringed instruments. On occasion the players numbered 40-50 musicians, and Alfvén quite often called in members of the Royal Opera Orchestra, as for example on the 1st March, 1914, when he presented the challenging Brahms symphony which he loved above all, namely the Second Symphony, to the residents of Uppsala.

It was not until 1933 that he dared confront his own musicians with the same challenge. In the anniversary publication The Akademiska Kapellet during 350 years, one of the orchestra’s permanent members and soloist on repeated occasions, the flute-player and future professor of philosophy Ingemar Hedenius, later recalled how strongly Alfvén was affected by the music he performed: When we rehearsed Brahms’s symphony, and got to that place, he broke off, and was so moved that he had tears in his eyes. He said, ‘it is so fan t a s tic ally beautiful: Just that passage, which he had imitated in his own second symphony. I liked him for that.

This was the sentimental inside aspect of the concerts, so to speak, but there was also a more cynical exterior. In a copy of a programme which has been preserved in the university library’s fragmentary collection, an irritated concertgoer has noted the following: Skandalously badly rehearsed and badly performed beyond all measure; several times the whole thing was on the verge of collapsing completely. In all probability the person who wrote these words was the music historian Carl-Allan Moberg, who openly attacked Alfvén’s reactionary programme policy, but who on the other hand had reduced Alfvén’s workload by taking over the compulsory weekly lectures.

Hedenius offers the following explanation: