Franz Berwald (1796 – 1868): Symphony no 3 in C Major (Sinfonie Singulière)
When once asked what he did for a living and whether he still wrote music, the then fifty-something Franz Berwald replied with a wry smile, “no, I am not a composer, I am a glass blower.” He was not speaking in jest.
Despite being regarded today as one of Sweden’s finest composers, as well as the first great Scandinavian symphonist, Berwald’s musical career was something of a disaster. Largely shunned by his home city of Stockholm (a rift for which he bore his fair share of the blame), he was often forced to earn a livelihood by other means. Notoriously arrogant and intolerant of those who thought differently to him, he had a talent for alienating potential friends or supporters. In addition to this, his openly derisive attitude towards Sweden’s (admittedly backwards-looking) musical life meant that very little of his best music was performed in the country during his lifetime.
Berwald was so successful at provoking general hostility towards himself that he almost succeeded in writing himself out of the history books altogether. For much of the twentieth century he remained an astonishingly obscure figure even in his own country. When in 1946 the Swedish postal service was faced with a choice between putting the image of Berwald or the Fourth Farmer’s Congress on their latest postage stamp, they opted for the farmers.
But things had not always been that way. As a young man, many had expected great things from Berwald. He had a naturally innovative mind and a deep fascination with the nuts and bolts of composition. In addition, he was blessed with a superb instinct for instrumental colour and texture. He was just somewhat less blessed with humility, as well as an understanding of the process by which most artists progress and make their mark on the world.
When one of his early compositions was critiqued a little too vigorously for Berwald’s taste, he took it so personally that he published a biting response, laying to general waste the reviewer and his musical credentials. While the ensuing public slanging match had a certain entertainment value, it did Berwald’s reputation little good, not least at such a formative stage of his career. With such antics, the young composer gradually drove a wedge between himself and the musical establishment of Stockholm, a rift that would never fully heal in his lifetime.
Berwald’s zealous self-regard might be partly explained by his family background, as he hailed from a proud and illustrious clan of court musicians, whose German origins were traceable back to the late seventeenth century. Franz’s own father, a violinist in Stockholm’s Royal Opera Orchestra, taught him his instrument from a young age. By the age of ten. Franz was good enough to be performing in public, and at the age of thirteen he would find employment in the court orchestra of king Carl XIII.
Despite this excellent musical apprenticeship, Franz’s academic education was somewhat more sketchy, and nor did he receive much formal instruction in composition or music theory (perhaps why he struggled to defer to technical rules in many of his early compositions). Having once attended a decent private school, he managed to get himself expelled after throwing a large piece of wood at one of the teachers. In later life, he might well have fantasized about doing something similar to certain Swedish music critics.
Although Berwald’s declining professional fortunes would later put him in touch with the hard realities of life, his family was comfortably enough off in his youth. During summer vacations, he would enjoy travels around Scandinavia and Russia, while in 1818, he raised sufficient capital to set up his own musical periodical, the Musikalisk Journal, in which he published some of his earliest music.
In the same year, he managed to organize a concert of his own music, including a Fantasia for orchestra, a Concerto for Two Violins and a String Quartet. Even at the age of 22, Berwald’s individuality and tendency to do things very much his own way, was noted by a reviewer: “A young man of some promise”, declared the latter before adding a note of admonition, that his music “modulates often and sometimes in a manner that leaves one wishing that this young and undoubtedly talented composer would acquaint himself more thoroughly with the rules of harmony and composition.”
Two years later he wrote a Violin Concerto, whose unorthodoxies and novelties provoked laughter in the concert hall. A year later came the notorious review for his Quartet for Piano and Winds which caused the young composer to blow a fuse. Yet in many ways it was a fair critique: “Franz Berwald, who with his earlier appearances, first as violinist and later as composer, raised great expectations among the public that through diligence and continued studies he would become an excellent artist, seems inclined to counter this hope by getting lost on detours…” The reviewer continued, “it appears that Mr. Berwald, in chasing after originality and striving to impress with grand effects, has diligently exiled everything melodic from his compositions… these most recent pieces seemed nothing more than constant summersaults from one isolated thought to another….” The underlying problem with the piece, concluded the critic, was Berwald’s fragmented melodic style as well as his unidiomatic use of the wind instruments.
While the highly inventive Quartet was decades ahead of its time in many ways, the reviewer was not a million miles off the mark in other respects: what was still missing from the music was an overall sense of architectural unity, as well as a more satisfying integration of its diverse materials.
Not that the 25-year-old Franz Berwald was in any mood to entertain the idea that he might not yet be the finished article. “I was dumbfounded to read the review Argus has offered the public of my recent compositions,” he ranted a few days later in the Almänna Journalen. Admittedly, he “anticipated that these works, composed in my own unique style, would leave a less than favourable impression” and that the reviewer “should keep in mind that all experiments based on an unusual system, with innovative instrumentation and innovative use of instruments, will always in the beginning run into widespread difficulty.” But Berwald could not resist adding that the reviewer “should at least not try to impress us with inaccurate representations, and certainly not presume to detail the special attributes of an art form that he clearly does not understand [and never mind] if he has the ability to read sheet music, which I seriously doubt.”
Sensing his honour was at stake, the “bewildered” reviewer hit back at Berwald’s “rigid tone”, again questioning the Quartet’s lack of coherency and its questionable technique: “However, what must and indeed does engender bewilderment, is the explanation that his compositions are rooted in a new system that he himself has invented…. The question is whether this music is grounded in any system at all.” When the reviewer claimed that the piece “violates all established rules”, Berwald responded that “he begs the question whether art or artists should submit to these frightening standards, where every innovation is condemned and where all is subordinate to what has come before.” In a final I-answer-to-no-one-but-my-Art flourish, Berwald concluded: “Music is an art form whose boundaries exist only in time. To appoint oneself as exclusive judge of it is an absolute absurdity.”
The good and the great of Stockholm’s musical life quickly found themselves taking exception to the young upstart, with his loud mouth and his difficult music, not least when he would in turn describe them all as “dilettante-ridden, cliquish, and bigoted.” Berwald had by now developed a passionate aversion to the city’s court musicians, whom he felt all too easily traded their creativity and individuality for comfortable positions.
In general, declared Berwald, there were too many soft-minded artists in Stockholm. A few years later he would write in his typically combative way, “Art may be coupled only with a cheerful frame of mind. The weak-willed should have nothing to do with it. Even if interesting for a moment, in the end every sighing artist will bore listeners to death. Therefore: liveliness and energy – feeling and reason”. But when Berwald continued to turn out his unusual and sometimes challenging scores, it became easier for local audiences to disparage them rather than attempt to understand them. And having once been so enterprising at getting his early works performed, Berwald was soon struggling to get his stuff played anywhere in Sweden.
Having decided that his musical destiny probably lay abroad and not at home, Berwald eventually petitioned the king for a grant to study in Berlin, before moving to the city in 1829. Here he met Felix Mendelssohn, spending Christmas with the young composer and his family, even as the diplomatic Mendelssohn made mention of Berwald’s problematic personality in letters to his friends.
Berwald hoped to write an opera for the Berlin stage, but after several projects had failed to get off the ground, he found his funds running low, and his career almost flatlining. He was already approaching forty, with surprisingly little to show for his musical efforts (it didn’t help that he had by now disowned most of his early works). Having burned so many bridges back in Stockholm, he lacked the stomach to return there anytime soon.
Faced with similarly unpromising circumstances, most other nineteenth century composers would not have regarded the idea of opening an orthopaedic clinic as the logical next step. But Berwald was nothing if not a man who liked to be different. Founded in 1835, his Berlin-based institute used some of the most advanced techniques of the time, offering cures for paralysis, indigestion, constipation, consumption, gynecological diseases and even certain derangements of the nervous system. Berwald played a full part in the running of the clinic and some of the orthopaedic apparatus which he invented for the patients were still in use decades after his death* The institute did so well that its founder was eventually able to sell the business in 1841 and support himself on the profits for several years afterwards, all the while attempting to re-ignite his musical career.
*Berwald’s competence in the field of bone-setting was really nothing short of extraordinary. As with writing music, he had little in the way of formal training, yet evidently possessed a brilliantly adaptable and quick-learning brain.
For a time it looked as if Berwald’s fortunes might finally be turning around. Now living in Austria, he found the country more artistically welcoming – he was even inducted into Salzburg’s Mozarteum in recognition of his talents. After a series of premieres at a Vienna concert in 1842, one reviewer noted, “[Berwald’s] new compositions are of great interest, notably for the originality of their material, their ideas and the disposition of their elements, and also of the treatment of the forms, and the composer’s use of the manifold possibilities and the power of the orchestra.” But when Berwald dared to have his First Symphony premiered back in Stockholm, it was to receive the now customary cold shoulder – “the work’s most distinguishing characteristic was its incomprehensibility” was a typical reaction.
Berwald wrote four symphonies in all during these years, but sadly none of the others were even performed in his lifetime. Of the four, the Third in C Major (subtitled Sinfonie Singulière by its composer) is perhaps the finest: it is certainly one of the most underrated of early romantic symphonies. Berwald shows such mastery at assimilating the symphony’s diverse range of material into a seamless whole that it is sometimes easy to miss just how unconventional a work it is – its subtitle, “Singulière” (singular, original), is perfectly apt.
Aside from its unusual structures (often shaping the music into elegant palindromes) the symphony is full of Berwald’s characteristically quirky rhythms and harmonic patterns, as he deliberately weakens the traditionally close tonal relationship between the tonic (I), dominant (V) and subdominant (IV) chords, replacing them with something freer and more modal sounding. Above all, the work’s spacious and translucent orchestration clearly anticipates the later symphonies of fellow-Scandinavians, Wilhelm Stenhammer, Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius.
The first movement is built on three deceptively simple ideas – the rising fourths figure which opens the piece, a folk-like melody and four note motif (mainly heard in the development section) – which are then developed and transformed in various inventive ways. Although nominally in sonata form, Berwald reverses the order of the first and second subjects in the recapitulation section, helping to create a tighter symmetry in the movement’s overall shape.
The second movement is a fusion of the traditional inner movements of a symphony – a slow adagio and fast scherzo, with Berwald placing the scherzo inside the adagio and interrupting it at a key moment. The slow section also contains a stately theme, majestically played out on strings, woodwind and timpani which again sounds uncannily like a page of Nielsen or Sibelius – an imaginative piece of scoring that Berwald would only ever have heard in his inner-ear.
The final movement (initially in C Minor) opens with a rapid, syncopated theme, before the music proceeds at breakneck speed, with Berwald presenting his ideas effortlessly and fleet-footedly, while signaling a now virtuosic grasp of instrumental colour. The stately theme of the slow movement makes a glowing re-appearance, before the piece ends in a blaze of C Major chords.
Tragically unperformed in Berwald’s lifetime, the Symphony’s eventual premiere (in Stockholm) would be made to wait until 1905, 37 years after Berwald’s death. Upon hearing the work, the Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger would hail Berwald as “our most original and modern composer.”
Berwald might have preferred to stay out of Sweden for the rest of his life, had the 1848 revolutions across Europe not forced him back to his homeland. Work was again a problem: although now in his fifties, his troubled reputation still preceded him, and no major musical establishment would touch him.
At this point, he sidestepped, once more with surprising efficiency, into another second career, this time managing a glassworks in Ångermanland in northern Sweden, before being appointed director to a brick-making manufacturing business. He still made some time for composition, now reeling off a series of chamber works. And still a little encouragement arrived from abroad. One of the most glowing testimonies Berwald ever received came during a pilgrimage to see Franz Liszt in Weimar, where the latter played through Berwald’s First Piano Quintet in front of its composer. Liszt subsequently told him, “You express yourself with invention, skill and agility, your developments and recapitulations are masterfully executed, your style both elegant and harmonically original. If I must pronounce on your work I would say that its most outstanding qualities are its lively invention and an exquisite feeling for development. Thus you satisfy the demands of the art without once abandoning common sense.”
Berwald had to wait until he was an old man before his country would show him anything like the same recognition. After the (relative) success of his opera, Esetrella de Soria, which Berwald wrote in his late sixties, he was awarded the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, before being elected professor of composition at Stockholm’s Academy of Music. Even then, one of Berwald’s musical enemies (a Bach expert whom Berwald had humiliated by mischievously sending him a “lost” Bach fugue that was actually his own handiwork) had himself carried from his deathbed to the college to vote against Berwald’s appointment. In the end it took an intervention from the king to confirm that Berwald could have his professorship.
Sadly, the Academy’s newest staff-member did not have much time in which to enjoy his triumph as he died from pneumonia less than a year later, at the age of 72. Although his country’s musical elite – and not least the likes of Ludvig Norman, Tor Aulin and Wilhelm Stenhammer – would all do their best to promote Berwald’s music at the turn of the twentieth century, he would remain at best something of a niche figure in the country. It is only a surge of new Berwald recordings from the 1990s onwards that have finally started to bring his music to the wider attention it has deserved for so long.
Although less directly involved with the restitution of Berwald’s name in Sweden, Carl Nielsen made no secret of his admiration for the composer – and not least his single-mindedness in the face of persistent discouragement – once penning his own glowing tribute in 1911:
Neither the media, money nor power can damage or benefit good Art. It will always find some simple, decent artists who forge ahead and produce and stand up for their works. In Sweden, you have the finest example of this: Berwald.