Elfrida Andrée (1841 – 1929): Piano Quintet in E Minor
In an era when women weren’t supposed to play church organs, compose symphonies, or express political opinions, Elfrida Andrée did all three – while also moonlighting as a feminist agitator and Sweden’s first female telegraph operator.
She battled Sweden’s Parliament to change laws that restricted women’s employment rights, musical or otherwise, became the first female cathedral organist in Europe, and wrote everything from organ symphonies to suffragette cantatas, sometimes in the teeth of open sabotage from male colleagues. Over a career spanning seven decades, she taught, composed, performed, conducted and tirelessly campaigned for women’s rights, all the while defying a system heavily rigged against her gender.
Elfrida’s unusually determined approach can surely be traced back to her childhood on the Swedish island of Gotland, which in the 1840s was a hotbed for progressive politics. Her father, Andreas, was a doctor, amateur musician, and committed radical liberal. He would infect his daughters, Fredrika and Elfrida, with many of the same values, including strong (and entirely unfashionable) ideas about gender equality.
Andrée senior also took pains to offer his daughters unstinting support during their formative years. When Fredrika, the elder daughter, earned a place at the Leipzig Music Conservatory, he packed up and accompanied her for the duration of her studies.* When his younger daughter Elfrida was accepted into Stockholm’s Academy of Music, at the tender age of fourteen, the entire Andrée family was relocated to the Swedish capital.
*Fredrika would go on to become one of Sweden’s top opera singers in the 1860s and 1870s.
It was probably just as well they were around there to offer support, as Stockholm would immediately throw up some unpleasant challenges in Elfrida’s path. For one thing, the Music Academy had only just agreed, somewhat grudgingly, to admit female students. But when Elfrida then announced she wanted to study the distinctly “unfeminine” church organ, it was too much for the Academy professors, who promptly barred her from attending the official classes. Elfrida’s father was eventually forced to step in and to cut a deal with them, allowing his daughter access to tuition on a semi-unofficial capacity, rather than as a full academy student.
Even more absurdly, Elfrida was prohibited from attending her diploma examination two years later, unless registered as an external candidate. More tense negotiation was required before Elfrida was able to sit the exam and obtain her diploma, becoming the first woman in Sweden to do so.
Her triumph was sadly short-lived. From the moment she started to apply for jobs, the church authorities recoiled with horror at the idea of a young lady in an organ loft, and closed ranks. When one of Elfrida’s old organ teachers suggested her as a stand-in for a church in Stockholm, he was met with such fierce opposition from the clergy (who claimed that the “sight of a woman on the organ stool would be indecent and disruptive of devotion”), that the matter was quickly dropped.
It was much the same result when Elfrida made a formal application to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, requesting the right to apply for and maintain an organist position. Her letter was forwarded to the influential Archbishop Henrik Reuterdahl, a man who belonged to the most conservative faction of Sweden’s Parliament. He put up every possible obstacle to block her proposal.
Once notified that her application had been unsuccessful, Elfrida wrote home in despair:
Has Dad read in the newspapers that my application for the right to apply for an organist position has been rejected? On the advice of the Archbishop it was refused! That this should annoy me and all women who have ambition, is natural… We girls will then be oppressed in every way! Without becoming a seamstress or a teacher, the artist career is the only thing that is open to us. I want to work and strive for a goal, but what is to be done when there is such a small field to work on?
Although professional women organists had started to appear in certain parts of Europe, they were still strictly forbidden by law in Sweden, a strange ruling, apparently based on a remark made by St Paul some two thousand years earlier, that women “must be silent in church”.
Elfrida’s organist career might well have stalled indefinitely had she and her father not been made of such stubborn stuff. They now entered into a four-year long battle with the Swedish Parliament in order to attain a legal amendment allowing the appointment of women organists.
It helped that Andreas Andrée was friends with the member of Parliament (and chairman of a music society in his hometown on Gotland), Daniel Söderberg, with the latter becoming a key ally. Söderberg duly proposed a new bill, saw that it was debated in Parliament, and generally stirred up so much fuss that the whole thing became a minor national scandal. Newspapers reported on it. People argued about it in coffeehouses. And perhaps a few older parishioners shook their heads and muttered that the end times were upon them.
Thanks to Söderberg’s dogged efforts, Parliament finally relented in 1861. The law was changed, women could become organists, and Elfrida had effectively won herself the right to have a professional career.
Her first posts were at the Finnish Reformed Church and the French Reformed Church in Stockholm – notably both foreign congregations, perhaps because Swedish churches still needed time to get over their collective shock at the new Parliamentary ruling. She also began teaching singing in city schools and training other women for the same organ diploma she had fought so hard to earn.
And then, in an extraordinary side-step, Elfrida Andrée decided to become a telegraph operator.
It’s not entirely clear as to why she did so, whether out of curiousity, to broaden her career options, or even to stick it to another male-only profession. Whatever the reason, the director-general of the Swedish Telegraph Agency, Pehr Brändström, was having none of it. In response to Elfrida’s application, he sent a fourteen-page letter explaining that they didn’t need women, didn’t want women, and could she please not bother them again.
This was all the provocation Team Elfrida needed to stir up another cause célèbre. As soon as Andreas heard what had happened, he plucked another influential ally seemingly out of thin air, in this case an MP named Carl Johan Svensén. Following a lengthy back and forth with the Telegraph Agency’s increasingly exasperated director general, a course was eventually created for women who wanted to train as telegraph operators. Elfrida joined the program in 1865 and soon after became the first woman in Sweden to qualify for the job.
In the end, she held her new position for only a few symbolic weeks, long enough to prove the point before returning to her musical career. But she had cut a path for others to follow her, with telegraph operating quickly becoming a highly popular profession for women in Sweden, not least as it offered them another route towards personal and financial independence.
Still in her early twenties, Elfrida continued to work hard at her organ and teaching duties while taking further private tuition from various Academy professors. Aside from advanced studies on the piano and harp (her two other main instruments), she also learned composition from Ludvig Norman, then one of Sweden’s most prominent composers. Not that Elfrida’s education was exhaustive, and it is thought that much of what she subsequently learned as a composer was largely self-taught. She was meticulous in studying the scores of many contemporary Swedish composers (she particularly admired the brilliant but slightly batty Franz Berwald) as well as the older European masters, such as Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, in order to improve her technique.
When her first large-scale compositions started to appear in the 1860s (initially chamber works and later orchestral music) Elfrida immediately showed herself to be a natural – talented and resourceful, and well able to organise her tuneful, clear-cut melodies.
Her Piano Quintet in E Minor of 1865, written when she was just twenty-four, is a case in point. Rather than the earnest, slightly long-winded effort you might expect from a young composer still learning their craft, the Quintet is a polished, confident piece that firmly plants Elfrida in the Schumann-Mendelssohn camp of classical balance and charm.
Every bar of the Quintet seems infused with purpose. There are no wasted notes, no passages where the momentum sags. Each of the three movements feels exactly the right length, with none showing any danger of outstaying their welcome.
The first movement, Allegro Molto Vivace, is built upon two contrasting themes within a conventional enough sonata form structure. But even with the relative gravitas of its E minor tonality, the music fairly fizzes along with exuberance and youthful energy, while Elfrida continually varies the instrumental textures with verve and imagination.
By contrast, the second movement, Andante Maestoso, in B Minor, is something of a heartfelt lament. It also has two main themes, one properly elegiac, the other just a touch brighter, and both are shared skilfully between the instruments, sometimes in simple song-like lines, sometimes in more complex polyphony.
The finale (Allegro Energico), now in the sunny key of E major, restores the upbeat mood, with music that dances in genuinely high spirits. Here the playfulness is particularly infectious, with the piano and strings engaged in breathless dialogue, as if competing to see who can get the last word. Of all the three movements, this is the one most steeped in Mendelssohn, which Elfrida herself acknowledged with a touching inscription at the end of the score: “Mendelssohn is still alive.”
Sadly, though not entirely surprisingly, Elfrida did not succeed in having the work performed. But having sent the score to the Society of Musical Arts, the Quintet eventually found a publisher in the Stockholm-based Musikaliska Konstföreningen, something that did the young woman’s burgeoning reputation no harm.
A major landmark of Elfrida Andrée’s early career was her decision to move to Gothenburg in 1867, a city with a more progressive reputation than Stockholm. Elfrida would end up spending the rest of her life there, and not least after being momentously appointed as the organist of the city cathedral (following an audition alongside six other male candidates). She thus became not only the first woman in Sweden but the first woman anywhere in Europe to hold an organist position in a cathedral. She is said to have fainted with shock when told of her appointment, and perhaps a few of the cathedral clergy had a similar reaction. More astonishing still, only one other Swedish woman has held a comparable position in the 160 years since.*
*Kerstin Ek, who took office at Sweden’s Skara Cathedral from 1987 to 2006.
Her duties were formidable. Sundays meant covering four services, with a total playing time of about seven hours, plus teaching both singing and organ to students during the week. On top of that, she organized concerts, gave organ recitals with a repertoire ranging from Bach to Brahms, and somehow found the time to compose large-scale works of her own.
As a natural extension of her organ playing, Elfrida wrote a wide range of compositions for the instrument, with the highlights being her two Organ Symphonies from the 1890s. The First in B Minor, had a long genesis, beginning life as a sonata in the 1870s before realising its final form in 1891 (need one add: the first Organ Symphony to be written by a woman). A Second Organ Symphony, in E Flat Major, followed soon after, although with the solo instrument this time supported by a 12-piece brass band.
But as Elfrida strived to make her way as a composer outside the walls of Gothenburg Cathedral, the resistance she encountered in the still male-centric musical world of Sweden could range from the obtuse to the actively malignant.
This would especially come to a head at the 1869 premiere of her First Symphony in Stockholm, where many of the players of the orchestra were outraged at the idea of performing a symphony composed by a woman (the first such instance in Scandinavia). They resorted to openly sabotaging the performance, some by not turning up, others by deliberately playing the music incorrectly. As Elfrida herself commented “the musicians did it wrong on purpose”, and with the first violins wilfully playing a bar behind the rest of the musicians in the fourth movement, Elfrida was so upset that she finally left the hall. When the critics then predictably castigated the work as a “chaotic noise” it made her physically unwell. Eventually she roused herself to write the defiant words for which she is now best remembered, and which would serve as a personal mantra for the rest of her life:
How many times have I not felt resentment when it has been written or said, and sincerely, that female names cannot be mentioned in regards to serious musical composition?… Now that is the beginning I want. It would be easier to tear a piece of the rock than to tear away my ideal idea: the elevation of women!
In the event, Elfrida would suffer further tussles with rogue performers, and not least with the premiere of her ballet Snöfrid in 1879. But in that instance, the intrigues against her, instigated mainly by a jealous conductor, largely backfired. Exhorting the musicians not to come to the rehearsal and the choir to sing out of tune only had the effect of turning them all into model professionals. In the event, everyone turned up to give a spirited performance, while a few eager extras were found for the choir. The ensuing success of the premiere duly inspired several other music companies to take on the ballet and perform it around Sweden.
Sometimes Elfrida could be reminded of her station in life in other ways, such as on a pilgrimage to Leipzig in the early 1870s, where she was forbidden, as a woman, from performing on one of the main church organs.
She also received inexplicable opposition when she wrote a string quartet in the 1880s and struggled to get it performed. With the work having been rejected by the (all-male) Sundberg Quartet Society of Gothenburg (Elfrida suspected they hadn’t even looked at the score), it was eventually premiered a few years later at a women’s exhibition in Copenhagen, by a quartet made up of exclusively of female musicians – another first for northern Europe. Even then, a grumpy, reactionary reviewer dismissed the work as being “too advanced for women.”
The reviewer may not have considered that there was next to no chance of Elfrida ever being coerced into writing dainty parlour pieces and sentimental songs – the sort of things women were expected to compose, if compose they must. “The orchestra, that is my goal!” she declared, which in those days was the musical equivalent of a woman declaring she was going to wrestle crocodiles as a career.
In the 1870s, she began working with the newly founded Gothenburg Orchestra, producing large-scale works including a Second Symphony in 1879. The latter fared better than her disastrous First, even if she was still barred, on account of her gender, from stepping onto the podium to acknowledge the audience’s applause.
But recognition was slowly beginning to reach Elfrida for her admirable achievements. In 1879, she was accepted as a member of Sweden’s Royal Academy of Music. A few years later, she entered an International Music Competition held in Brussels and took away several prizes. As an impressed visitor from the Boston Folio reported, “Miss Elfrida Andree, the cathedral organist at Gothenburg, was awarded ‘La Grand Prix’, a old medal and diploma, for an orchestral symphony. There were 77 other contestants. This Swedish lady composer also carried off the prizes for a string quintet and a composition for organ and military band [her Second Organ Symphony] on the same occasion.”
Despite Elfrida’s noble fight for the cause of women, it should be remembered, strange as it may seem today, that not all women of her time wanted to challenge the system in the way she did. Many were simply content to trade in some ambition for a quieter life. For example, her Norwegian contemporary, the composer Agathe Backer Gröndahl, once admitted she did not dare to compose for orchestra, while going on to claim that Elfrida Andrée “was not really of her gender”.
For all her lofty artistic ambitions, Elfrida never lost touch with the outside world. In 1897, she began organising a series of “folk concerts” in partnership with the Gothenburg Workers’ Union. With tickets priced so low that almost anyone could attend, the concerts would prove extremely popular. Elfrida dutifully kept them going for the rest of her life, having organised around 800 of them by the time of her death.
From the 1890s onward, she also threw her considerable weight behind the newly emerging Suffragette movements. In 1911, she composed a “Right to Vote” cantata for choir, soloists, and orchestra, which was performed in Stockholm as part of the International Conference for the Right to Vote.
Then in 1904, at the age of 63, she pulled off something that left even seasoned musicians blinking in disbelief: she travelled to Dresden and conducted a concert of her own orchestral works. No one had ever seen a woman conduct her own music before, and the spectacle seems to have been received with equal parts amazement and confusion.
Elfrida Andrée carried on working into her late eighties, refusing to retire into what one of her biographers has described as “the calm with her cats, the silence of embroidery work.” She lived long enough to see Swedish women granted the vote in 1921 – a victory she had coveted for decades – though sadly her own music had by then slipped completely out of fashion. When she died in 1929, one month short of her 88th birthday, she left behind a life’s work that was, in equal measure, an artistic achievement and a sustained act of social defiance.
History has an unfortunate habit of forgetting remarkable women like Elfrida Andrée, even in spite of what future generations owe to them. Challenging an established social order can be an almost impossible undertaking, and it is all too easy, even for those who suffer, to accept the status quo. It takes both vision and courage to strike blows for lasting change, and Elfrida had bags of both.