Ludvig Norman (1831 – 1885): Symphony no 2 in E Flat Major
There was a time in the mid nineteenth century when Sweden seemed to have a talent for turning out neurodivergent symphonists.
One of them was the mercurial figure of Franz Berwald, whose sincere determination to improve his country’s music was sadly unmatched by any diplomacy or tact. He was so good at winding people up that there was eventually no-one left in Stockholm willing to employ him. Forced to seek pastures new, Berwald supported himself through a series of unlikely second careers, ranging from glass-blower to orthopedic doctor. But he also found the time to write four of Sweden’s best symphonies from the Romantic era.
Berwald’s career overlapped with another significant figure in his country’s symphonic journey, Ludvig Norman, a man just as singular as Berwald, and just as dissatisfied by Swedish music. Although slightly better at not torching every bridge he crossed, Norman remained painfully shy and awkward, an awkwardness almost certainly exacerbated by undiagnosed Tourette’s Syndrome (then an entirely unknown condition). Just for good measure, he was also plagued by severe depressions throughout his life. To a degree it’s surprising he got anything done at all, never mind managed to carve out a relatively successful career.
Norman may well have developed his resilience from a childhood containing its fair share of hardship. His father Johann, a bookseller, had died suddenly when Ludvig was just nine, leaving his family in dire poverty. His mother Fredrica Amalia did her best to balance the books, but life for the Norman family was certainly tough for a while.
Ludvig, on the other hand, was already making such progress with his musical studies that he was hailed a genius in the making. By the age of six he had been dubbed “lille kapellmästaren” – the little bandmaster. He began composing his own music, with some of his first works, including a set of songs, published when he was just eleven.
By the age of fourteen he was performing regularly on the piano and bringing in much needed income for his mother. Ludvig’s particular gift was for improvisation and he would often extemporise highly complex music on themes suggested by his audience. One music critic commended the precocious teen’s “freedom and fire” along with the “sense and calculation” he brought to his playing.
By now, the uncommonly talented Norman was showing signs that he could be uncommon in other ways. He was already well known for his distinctive physical mannerisms, as a childhood friend recalled years later:
Norman would suddenly screw up his eyes, tap his nose rapidly with a finger, flutter the fingers of his other hand, jump up and down and make strange sounds through his nose or throat. Sometimes he would rush forward with his arms spread out like wings and then stop abruptly, ending in hearty laughter. [This] could happen when Norman was particularly happy or particularly sad.
In his earlier years, Norman’s various idiosyncrasies – now widely believed to have been undiagnosed Tourette’s – were easier to pass off as youthful eccentricity. But in later life, when he was a well-known musical figure in his homeland, his involuntary tics, both physical and verbal, could cause much embarrassment and puzzlement in polite company.
The problem may first have affected Norman during an otherwise highly successful four years in Germany, where he enrolled as a student at the Leipzig Conservatory. With the city’s musical values still predominantly shaped around its famous past Kapellmeisters, JS Bach and Felix Mendelssohn, Leipzig was probably an ideal finishing school for a classically-minded young composer like Norman.
Norman received exemplary tuition in both composition and piano from the institute (one of his teachers was the legendary piano virtuoso, Ignaz Moscheles). But he also excelled at his studies to the extent that he began to draw attention from further afield. When Robert Schumann, a former professor at the Academy, happened upon some of the Norman’s youthful compositions, he was so impressed that he wrote him a warm letter of appreciation, including an invite to visit him in Düsseldorf. Schumann would go on to help publish two of Norman’s early piano works in 1851, and more flatteringly still, write approvingly of him in his legendary Neue Zeitschrift für Musik essay from 1853, entitled “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) – the same article that helped introduce Johannes Brahms to the wider musical world.
Despite such encouraging progress, all was not well with the young composer himself. Within months of arriving in Leipzig, he was complaining that the Conservatory did not live up to its reputation, while also admitting to a friend that “I prefer to keep to myself, and do not want to acquire many acquaintances.”
By the following year his mood had darkened alarmingly, as he confessed in another letter: “I have for some time been so desperate that I have made a decision which, with God’s help, I hope to carry out.” This would be the first of many suicidal allusions Norman would make in his personal correspondence, even if there is no direct evidence that he ever tried to take his life. In the same letter he went on to say that he hoped never again to endure what he had during his first year in Leipzig, without specifying exactly what his suffering had been about.
But even as Norman could turn dangerously in on himself like this, he responded much better when his object of dissatisfaction was something external. Then he could be a revelation. Having returned to Stockholm after four years in one of Europe’s elite musical centres, he was shocked by the seemingly backwards standards of his country’s own music. But rather than stand around and complain, Norman was determined to get stuck and do what he could to improve matters. In this he would prove to be something of a force of nature in the Swedish capital for at least the next twenty years.
Norman’s musical activism took many forms. He wrote concert reviews and essays, advocating structural reforms and higher artistic proficiency, while establishing himself as a regular contributor to the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet and the music journal Ny Tidning För Musik. He also taught piano, organized concerts and founded musical societies. He campaigned for better programming and made great efforts to bring the wider European musical scene to Stockholm.
After the warm support he had received from Schumann in Germany, Norman was keen to reciprocate by programming his mentor’s music in Sweden. This initially proved to be a disaster, and not least after the Stockholm premiere of Schumann’s Piano Concerto (with Norman conducting) had caused a collective meltdown among the city’s conservative elite. Completely undeterred, Norman used the backlash to publicly critique the provincial tastes of the city, before demanding a total “shake-up” of the local music scene. He also continued to programme concerts not only of Schumann but of Franz Schubert, thus transforming them from obscure foreign names into core staples of the Swedish concert repertoire.
Although Franz Berwald would surely have agreed with many of Norman’s critiques, the latter was still much better expressing himself without alienating every other musician in the land. As a sign of his more general acceptance, Norman was invited to join the staff at the Stockholm Academy of Music in 1857, and soon after he was teaching classes in composition, orchestration and score-reading.
Proving himself to be just as progressive when it came to gender, Norman eagerly championed equal opportunities for female students at the Academy, despite the institution having only just accepted them for the first time – and then only very grudgingly and with strict limitations on what they were allowed to study. Norman had no time for such nonsense, giving of his time equally to both male and female students, and with several of the latter going on to break major gender barriers in Scandinavian classical music.
These included Elfrida Andrée, whose intensive composition lessons with Norman between 1859 and 1861 would help fuel her early orchestral and chamber music writing. Andrée would later go on to become Sweden’s first female cathedral organist (at Gothenburg Cathedral) and a highly accomplished symphonic conductor. Aside from Andreé, Norman also taught Valborg Aulin, later celebrated for her masterfully crafted string quartets, and Helena Munktell, who became the first Swedish woman to write an opera.
Outside of the Academy, Norman continued his impressive career rise, and by the age of 30 had been appointed chief conductor of the Stockholm Royal Opera, a position that made him one of the most influential musicians in the country. Under his direction the opera orchestra would attain unprecedented standards, while Norman also programmed the first Swedish performances of Wagner operas – despite his own personal aversion to the great German master, he was wise enough to recognize his significance to European art. Along with that, he organized important Swedish premieres of other famous contemporary operas such as Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Georges Bizet’s Carmen.
Throughout all of this activity, Norman found the time to compose steadily, if not quite prolifically. An early, Schumann-esque Symphony from 1857 remained unperformed until he was well into middle age. He had better luck at gaining a hearing for various chamber works, including sonatas, trios and a couple of string quartets. But even as Norman acquired considerable authority as a performer, teacher and administrator, his compositions were greeted with respect rather than love. Critics recognised his craftsmanship and his command of musical form, but the music did not always communicate easily with its audience. Happily, his best work still lay ahead.
In 1864, and at the very height of his career, Norman married Wilma Neruda, a brilliant, Moravian-born violinist who had already established an international career. The marriage was initially a happy one, producing two sons, while Ludvig found a teaching position for Wilma at the Academy. As a further sign of harmony, husband and wife worked closely together to establish a new chamber concert enterprise.
Things only started to go wrong when Wilma made it clear that she was not ultimately willing to sacrifice her career for a life of domestic duty. Not long after she had resumed making concert tours abroad in 1868 – and started an affair for good measure – the marriage fell apart. The two separated a year later, with Wilma subsequently taking her two sons and relocating London, where her career continued to flourish.
But if Wilma appeared to come out of the marriage in relatively good shape, for Norman the separation would prove to be utterly devastating, as well as a major turning point in his life. Reflecting upon their separation to a friend, he admitted that “I have no longer been able to bear the terrible suffering and sorrow that have weighed upon me these last months”, before making another of his suicidal allusions: “I have taken the desperate, but only possible, decision to shorten my life – because I stood in the way of her happiness.”
That Norman regarded separating from his wife a form of suicide said much for his state of mind. And even as he remained busy over the next few years, privately he was a complete wreck. When Edvard Grieg came to visit in 1873, he described the composer as a “lonely, abandoned man in his home.” Norman would now often talk about the past, and how certain music could “remind me of the time when I was still happy.”
But as Norman’s period of melancholia began to run into years, there were also some who felt that he could wallow a little too much in self-pity. As the Swedish singer Fredrika Stenhammar (otherwise a friend) commented, Norman was “as much of an egoist as one can well be” – something that led him towards becoming “sad with the whole world – and with himself”.
Norman’s depression was doubtless not helped by his own physical health beginning to unravel. He was now prone to rheumatic pains, which reduced his quality of life and began to limit him in his work. He also suffered from increasing bouts of extreme tiredness. By 1879, Stenhammar would observe that Norman was often “unusually drowsy and sleepy” – before adding, a little facetiously, that his operatic performances were slowing down as a result.
At the same time, the symptoms of Norman’s probable Tourette’s were proving ever more difficult to deal with. His involuntary motor and vocal tics could feel like a considerable social handicap, and not least when they were so ill-understood in his day. They were certainly torture for a man whose professional life required him to stand before orchestras, teach students, meet performers, conduct public rehearsals and occupy prominent positions in Stockholm society.
With all of that said, it would be wrong to say that Norman’s quirks, neurological and otherwise, only brought him misery. He never lost a playful and mischievous side to him, apparent since his youth. He could be sharp-witted and sarcastic, and often tease people, even to the point of getting their backs up. His repeated mickey-taking of his friend and colleague, the composer August Söderman, eventually led to a serious falling out between the two men. Thankfully they would make up, and after Söderman’s untimely death in 1876, Norman made further amends with a beautiful tribute piece performed at Soderman’s funeral.
Another contemporary once noted Norman’s way of compulsively shouting nonsense at a cab driver during a long journey. Norman would come out with made up words like “heliohonkonken” or else absurdist remarks such as “Cimarosa med sin lilla blåsa” (Cimaroso has a small bladder), which he would then repeat over and over again. At one point, Norman’s friend had to intervene when the irate cab driver looked ready to punch his ticcing friend on the nose.
Somehow Norman found a way to push on bravely through these difficult years, and not least with his compositions, which were by now reaching new levels of mastery. In many ways, his creative work would show the very best of him during this period, as a man coming to accept, at least in an artistic sense, the various sorrows of his life. He may have allowed his lost marriage to break him, but he never allowed it to destroy his creativity.
It was in the immediate aftermath of his marriage breakup that he produced one of his finest works, the String Quintet in C Minor. He never quite wrote anything else like it, and its emotional intensity, complex polyphony and exquisite craftsmanship all show the composer somewhere near the top of his game. Yet for Norman the music was always integrally linked with his sadness. When summing up the work to Grieg in 1875, Norman described it as a “tendenstycke*, [which] ends in despair, like my whole life.”
*Although a tricky word to translate exactly into English, a tendenstycke is an artwork written specifically to promote an attitude, agenda or sensibility. Often used around political subjects, we can assume Norman’s own usage had far more personal and intimate overtones.
But even as Norman could make such admissions, it’s clear that he also took considerable solace from his composing. His Second Symphony in E Flat Major, written around a year after the Quintet, is striking for its serene, uplifting, pastoral beauty. This is music filled with fresh air and inspiring rural landscapes, as well as a genuine emotional warmth, almost as if his personal grief had brought a new, humanizing element to his compositions.
Although Norman’s schooling in the sound classical values of Leipzig is detectable in the work, it is not really a Germanic symphony. It remains too light, nimble and mercurial for that, even if it also highly complex music. One immediately unusual characteristic is the extent to which Norman subjects his various themes and ideas to continual development and variation, almost from the moment they’re first heard.
The wonderful first movement (Allegro) showcases this trait, with the music dominated throughout by a spacious and ever evolving theme, heard in many guises against restlessly shifting accompaniments. While Norman rarely allows the movement to rest on any idea or mood for too long, it’s also remarkable how he keeps it all sounding so lucid.
The second movement (Larghetto, con anima) starts off like a beautiful, delicately scored hymn and remains largely introspective and lyrical throughout. The music only briefly sheds its restraint during a majestic middle section, a stirring passage of brass fanfares accompanied by timpani, before the initial serenity is resumed.
With its rumbling, agitated manner, the minor key third movement scherzo (Allegro Feroce) brings the only a hint of genuine unrest to the symphony, even if its overriding lightness of touch puts it more in the Mendelssohn than Beethoven school for scherzos.
The fourth movement (Allegro Maestoso) returns to the quietly uplifting mood of the first, although this time there are two contrasting themes rather than just one – one strident and striving, the other much more steady and subdued. Although there are some anxious moments, the mood is mostly joyous, with the main theme return embellished with warm brass chords and running quavers in the upper strings, helping to bring the symphony to a glowing and satisfying conclusion.
The work was duly premiered two years later in Stockholm, conducted by the composer himself, and it must have offered proof of his unstinting powers. A Third Symphony in D Minor would follow a decade later, further refining the beauty and invention of the Second, although Norman would unfortunately never get to hear it as it was only premiered at a memorial concert a few months after his death.
Norman stumbled on for another decade, still actively involved in Swedish musical life, even if no longer quite the force he had been. One significant moment was conducting the first performance of Franz Berwald’s Fourth Symphony in 1878, decades after the work had been written and sadly a few years after Berwald’s own death. Norman and Berwald, Sweden’s two neurodivergent symphonists, had briefly taught at the Stockholm Academy together in the 1860s. Although the two men were never close, it was typical of Norman to be championing the older man’s music, not least as it was another unfashionable cause in his country’s musical life.
At least public recognition did not entirely desert Norman. In 1883 the Swedish parliament awarded him an annual pension of 2000 kronor for his sterling contributions to Swedish music. At around the same time Norman, now plagued by insomnia, was dreaming of his retirement, even if he did not envisage it lasting very long: “I long now to get away from the great capital and wish to spend my remaining days, which probably and fortunately will not be very many, in a small community in Sweden,” he told a friend.
His death at the age of 53, to a combination of edema and heart disease, was regarded as a shock if not a complete surprise to those who had known the ailing composer during his final years. Some might even have regarded it as a mercy. And yet in the end Ludvig Norman had been a life well-lived. He had done so much to drag Sweden’s music into the late nineteenth century, and even when illness and depression had robbed him of his old dynamism, he had stepped up a gear as a composer and produced many of his best and most notable works. Aside from his two later symphonies, his final years also brought a lively, though non-virtuosic Concertstück for Piano and Orchestra, plus his highly-regarded Overture to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.
A born classical-romantic, Norman ultimately discovered through his creative imagination a vision of perfect, orderly beauty – the same kind of beauty he was tragically never quite able to find in his own life.