Oil painting by Karl Wilhelm Norgren, 1837. (Skoklosters slott).  

Childhood and student years

Eric Gustaf Geijer was born at Ransäter Manor, Värmland, the eldest son of Brukspatron (industrialist) Bengt Gustaf Geijer (1748−1814) and Ulrika Magdalena Geijer, née Geisler (1760−1823). His happy childhood years are described in his autobiographical Minnen. He and the younger children were educated at home by tutors, and he and his favourite sister Jeanne-Marie were given piano lessons by a maternal aunt who also lived on the manorial estate. Music was particularly cherished, and Geijer names as his musical mentor a distant relative, Bengt Gustaf von Rappolt, who lived at Risberg, near Uddeholm, and copiously adapted music for the family’s two keyboard instruments (claviers). Geijer also included another relative, Stina af Geijerstam, a skilful pianist, among the musical benefactors of his early years. She lived at Frösvidal in Närke, and the family invariably stopped off there en route between Stockholm and Värmland. In Minnen he writes: ‘So by the age of sixteen, despite never having left the place of my birth, I possessed a real musical education. − Already at that time I felt the urge to essay composition, without knowing the rules of it.’

As the eldest son, Erik Gustaf was the obvious heir to the estate and its concomitant ironworks (bruk). He studied at high school in Karlstad, with Anders Piscator as his music teacher, and in 1799 matriculated at Uppsala University. After failing his MA in 1803 and applying unsuccessfully for a tutorship, that summer he secretly entered a competition announced by the Swedish Academy, calling for a tribute to Sten Sture the Elder (a rebel leader in the 15th century, when Sweden was ruled by Denmark). He was awarded the Grand Prize of the academy. His life now instantly took an academic turn, and he continued his studies in Uppsala, graduating in 1806. In 1808 he defended his thesis for a docent (senior lecturer) appointment, but nothing came of it. As tutor to Johan Fredrik von Schinkel, whose father was a Commissioner at the Board of Trade, he accompanied his pupil on a journey to England in 1809−10.

Senior lecturer in history, eminent poet and emergent composer

In 1810 Geijer became senior lecturer in history (an unsalaried appointment) at Uppsala University, and in 1811 he helped to found Götiska Förbundet (the Geatish Society), a society dedicated to historical learning but also, following Sweden’s loss of Finland, to a revival of patriotism. Geijer edited its journal Iduna, in which, that same year, he published a succession of poems, including the widely noted ‘Vikingen’ and ‘Odalmannen’, which he also set to music. His ‘Den lilla kolargossen’, also set to music, appeared in 1814 in Atterbom’s Poetisk Kalender, followed in 1816, and in the same journal, by an empathic setting of Atterbom’s ‘Anderöst’. Other songs written by Geijer at about this time include three notable settings of words from Bengt Lidner’s operatic libretto Medea, the best known of them being ‘O yngling! om du hjärta har’, which gained almost instant popularity. In 1812 Geijer published a hymn booklet, Försök till Psalmer, containing new hymns to traditional tunes, and in 1813 he published the first Swedish translation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

There are signs of Geijer wanting to devote himself to music entirely. During his early Uppsala years he is said to have had lessons from the University Director Musices, Lars Fredric Leijel, and in the years preceding his English journey he studied under Pehr Frigel. During the journey itself he wrote two major piano compositions, a sonata and a fantasy, in order, as he puts it, to verify the feasibility of what he had learned. Later in Uppsala he made contact with the new Director Musices J. C. F. Haeffner, who among other things set the Geatish Society’s verse manifesto ‘Manhem’ to music. Haeffner also supplied the arrangements for Svenska Folk-Wisor från Forntiden (Ancient Swedish folk songs), published jointly by Geijer and A. A. Afzelius between 1814 and 1818.

Professor and mentor to the Royal Family

Geijer began giving public lectures on Swedish history in 1815, as a deputy for Professor Erik Fant. Quite sensationally, for those days, his lectures attracted audiences between 200 and 300 strong. Listeners in the spring of 1816 included the visiting German authoress Amalia von Helvig, who made a profound and lasting impression on Geijer, but that summer he was able to marry Anna Lisa Liljebörn, to whom he had been betrothed for seven years. Her father was a distinguished amateur cellist and had also been part of Geijer’s inner circle in Värmland. Geijer was appointed Professor in 1817, remaining so until 1846.

Among other duties, he was now made responsible for the education of members of the Royal Family, and his association with Crown Prince Oscar resulted, in 1819, in a sonata in C for piano duet, dedicated to the Crown Prince. That year Geijer wrote his first violin sonata, a well-crafted work in classical vein to which, however, Geijer never added a finale, and in 1820 came another sonata for piano duet, this time in F minor, dedicated to the memory of Stina af Geijerstam’s daughter Anna Lisa Löwenhielm who, until her untimely death, had played together with Geijer a great deal. This even more cogently worked-out and firmly constructed sonata was published the same year. A piano trio by Geijer had already been performed in 1816, at a concert in Uppsala, and in a series of concerts there in 1822 he was able to present two newly written string quartets, in G minor and B-flat major respectively, the latter of which is one of his most full-bodied compositions ever.

Songs and chamber music in the drawing-room limelight

Geijer soon came to rank, along with Atterbom and Malla Silfverstolpe, among the leading lights of Uppsala salon circles, and in 1823 they were joined by Adolf Fredrik Lindblad, who had come to Uppsala as a student and initially lodged with Geijer. In 1824 the two published a collection, Musik för Sång och för Pianoforte, containing such songs as the lyrically replete ‘Svanhvits Sång’ (to words from Atterbom’s Lycksalighetens Ö) and ‘Nähe des Geliebten’ (Goethe), plus a clavier divertimento by Geijer. Geijer accompanied Malla Silfverstolpe and Lindblad in 1825 to Germany, where he revived his acquaintance with Amalia von Helvig.

The chamber music works which have now been mentioned ushered in a succession of similar compositions during the 1820s: a piano quintet, a piano quartet, a second piano trio, two violin sonatas and a cello sonata. This prolific output is unequalled in Swedish music of the time, and even if the compositions can be faulted on points of form, they are compellingly tuneful and display an easy familiarity with the traditional idioms. Changes of key between movements may possibly, now and then, betray a degree of uncertainty in the overall grasp, and the piano can be excessively dominant when combined with other instruments, but both the violin sonatas and the cello sonatas are genuine ‘duo sonatas’.

The Lapse (1838), heavy workloads − and minor compositions

In the pre-reform Riksdag (parliament) of the Estates, Geijer represented Uppsala University in the Estate of Clergy in 1828−30 and 1840−41. He declined consecration as Bishop of Karlstad in 1834 and also Karl XIV’s offers of a cabinet post. In his own Litteraturbladet in 1838, Geijer announced his celebrated ‘Lapse’ from the ‘historical school’. Betokening a defection from the conservative to the liberal camp, this is mirrored by his increasingly realist view of literature.

An ever-increasing workload in the 1830s and 1840s kept Geijer from concentrating on more large-scale compositions. A violin sonatina and a third string quartet, both unfinished, and a reworking of the cello sonata into a Sonatina (due to his evidently having mislaid the first movement) are our sole evidence of the same kind of ambition as before. His musical interest now came to focus on vocal compositions, especially solo songs in small format, though with the collection Aftonstunder vid Pianoforte, published in 1840, and with a number of other short piano pieces, he became one of the earliest Swedish exponents of the romantic characteristic piece.

The songs were to a great extent written with the salon circuit in mind, and most of them were published in nine collections between 1834 and 1846. There are also several duets included, most of them written for Geijer’s daughter Agnes and for Ava Wrangel, Malla Silfverstolpe’s niece, who was the leading vocalist in these circles. Occasionally Geijer found himself in a position to write choral music and quartets. Thus in 1835, while on summer holiday at Krusenberg, and again in 1839 he wrote a couple of more extensive choral compositions with piano accompaniment, namely Minne och hopp and Varning, hopp och bön. Best known to posterity, however, are ‘Aftonbetraktelse’, ‘Stilla skuggor’ (to words by Böttiger) and ‘Solens nedgång i havet’.

Geijer − Sweden’s first lied composer

Geijer was an inveterate improviser at the piano, often sitting down at the instrument to resolve problems and to relax. Most of his songs are to words written by himself, but more often than not he would shape words as a mnemonic for a tune he had hit on. Hardly surprisingly, then, many of his song texts are both of an everyday nature and somewhat trite, but, on the other hand, it is remarkable that such enduring poems as ‘Tonerna’, ‘Första aftonen i det nya hemmet’, ‘På nyårsdagen’, ‘Natthimmelen’, ‘Höstsädet’, ‘Tal och tystnad’, ‘På vattnet’, ‘Hvad jag älskar’ and several others originated this way, as adjuncts to a tune he had improvised, albeit they were doubtless polished up for publication.

Several of Lindblad’s songs too are written to words of his own, with words and music apparently created in a symbiosis, and he is also said to have been strongly influenced by Geijer. Geijer, as a rule, would ask Lindblad to vet his song collections, feeling as he did that Lindblad was the superior, more expert musician of them, but the changes which can be detected through comparisons between manuscript and printed versions are not always for the better.

Aside from purely occasional songs, there are several which, like those already mentioned, are confessions of Geijer’s unfaltering belief in God. Others are tributes to Nature, e.g. ‘Salongen och skogen’, or to music, e.g. ‘Min musik’. ‘Söderländskan i Norden’ (dedicated to Mathilda Orozco), ‘Gräl och allt väl’ and ‘Den nalkande stormen’ are popular genre pieces, while ‘Blomplockerskan’, ‘Skärslipargossen’ and ‘Gondolieren’ are role-playing poems typical of the period. There is a melodic directness about such pieces as ‘Reseda’ (dedicated to Malla Silfverstolpe) and ‘Den slumrande lilla flickan’ (to words by Böttiger), and the folksong idiom is not far away in ‘Vallflickans aftonvisa’ and ‘Vallgossens visa’. ‘Mod och försakelse’, dedicated in 1839 to Jenny Lind, is a song about the self-consuming lot of genius, a poem which can also be construed as a self-confession.

Geijer’s short, intensely concise poems make him our first real lyrical poet, and his equally well-formulated songs make him Sweden’s first lied writer.

Lennart Hedwall © 2014
Trans. Roger Tanner