Childhood and student years

It is a rare Swedish violinist who has never had Tor Aulin’s Fyra akvareller on her music stand. His third violin concerto is one of only a handful of Swedish solo concertos in the standard repertoire. But Aulin was a musician whose priorities lay much less with composition than with ensuring the dissemination of what he considered great music, an endeavour that has made him one of Sweden’s most important public music educators.

The cultural idealism that propelled him can be traced back to his childhood in Stockholm, where he was born on 10 September 1866. Admittedly, Tor Aulin was only three years old when his father, Lars Axel Alfred Aulin, docent of ancient Greek, died. But there are parallels: his father authored a number of text books for beginners in Greek and he promoted the knowledge of languages any which way he could. He had also been a skilled amateur violinist and a keen member of the Mazerska kvartettsällskapet (Mazer String Quartet Society). His mother Edla (née Holmberg) came from a family that very much revolved around music and was herself a trained singer; disease thwarted her plans, however, so instead she became an accomplished pianist.

His maternal uncle Konrad was also a proficient amateur violinist and made sure that Tor and his sister Valborg both developed musically. Valborg Aulin became a pianist and composer, while Tor Aulin’s life was staked out by his gift for the violin. He enrolled at the Kungliga Musikkonservatoriet (Royal Conservatory of Music) in Stockholm at the age of 11, where his teacher was Carl Johan Lindberg (a former student of Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim).

Aulin secured a job for himself in 1881 with the orchestra of the Dramatiska Teatern (the Royal Dramatic Theatre) at the tender age of 15, which gave the family some financial relief. But when one of the leading lights of the Belgian-French violin school, Emil Sauret, visited the capital in 1883 and heard the 17-year old Tor Aulin play, his fortunes changed and by 1884 he was studying with Sauret in Berlin. Here he stayed until 1886, during which time he also studied composition for Philipp Scharwenka.

Violin virtuoso and first violinist

It was a fully fledged virtuoso that returned to Stockholm in 1886. Aulin soon made a name for himself as the leading violinist in Sweden, with a repertoire that included concertos by Max Bruch, Felix Mendelssohn and Henri Vieuxtemps. Two years later, in 1888, he had his Nordic breakthrough with concerts in Copenhagen, Helsinki and Kristiania (Oslo). He also performed in St Petersburg late that autumn. Earlier that year he had been made concert master of the Sveasalen orchestra and in 1889 he was made concert master of the Hovkapellet (Royal Court Orchestra), a position he held until 1902.

The accompanying pianist on some of these concert trips was Emil Sjögren, who dedicated his famous second violin sonata in E minor to Aulin. Aulin composed his only violin sonata (op. 12 in D minor) in 1892 in emulation of Sjögren’s melodious yet passionate style, albeit with much more gusto. At the premier in Stockholm, the piano part was played by Ida Åqvist, who would become his wife in 1895 in a marriage that lasted only three years.

During the same early period of Aulin’s career as a professional musician, he also took time to form the Aulinska kvartetten (the Aulin quartet) in 1887, a seminal event in the music life not only of Stockholm but of Sweden as well. Chamber music was rather neglected in the 1880s, but with the formation of the quartet and its concerts in the auditorium of the Vetenskapsakademien (Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) it once again became all the rage. Beethoven was the cult icon (that is no hyperbole) but in the often thematically devised programmes, a new lease of life was given to the works of Franz Berwald and Ludvig Norman, while the classical quartets of Joseph Haydn and W.A. Mozart were performed side by side with newly composed works by Swedish composers.

Then, when Wilhelm Stenhammar joined the quartet, an ensemble was created that travelled the country on a musical educational mission unsurpassed in scope and significance, inspired by the belief that even small rural churches in sparsely populated parishes deserved to enjoy classical music of the highest quality.

Orchestral development in Sweden

Tor Aulin hit a slump in the 1898/99 season at a time when the dissolution of his marriage coincided with his dalliance with a married woman, singer Anna Bendixson. The moral outrage this sparked brought society’s condemnation crashing down onto the couple, and Tor Aulin fell into a depression. But his friends in the quartet and Stenhammar stood by him, and once he was remarried he was able to resume work.

His new brother-in-law, mathematician Ivar Bendixson, introduced Tor Aulin to liberal minded circles and his educational mission can be seen in relation to this environment. His conservative friend Ture Rangström described Aulin in a memorial as ‘a “man of the left”, a liberal in heart and soul, the people’s and the working man’s friend’. His desire to build new musicals structures is evident from his work as a conductor. In 1900 he formed the Svenska Musikerföreningens (the Swedish Musicians’ Society) orchestra, whose concert takings went to pensions and medical care for impoverished musicians. He was one of the fathers of Stockholms Konsertförening (the Stockholm Concert Society), formed in 1902, and its conductor until 1909. From 1907 he conducted the orchestra of the Dramatiska Teatern and led the Sydsvenska filharmoniska sällskapet (Southern Sweden Philharmonic Society), and he co-founded the Göteborgs orkesterförenings orkester (Gothenburg Orchestra Society orchestra) in 1905. As a conductor, he was a champion of the music of Franz Berwald, which earned him the privilege of conducting the premier of his rediscovered Sinfonie singulière in 1905.

While at the Dramatiska Teatern he was asked to write, at the insistence of the playwright himself, stage music for August Strindberg’s Mäster Olof for the official opening of the new theatre building in 1909. Strindberg wanted to make Aulin ‘his’ composer, and from the early years of the decade inundated Aulin with suggestions, which included turning Ett Drömspel and Spöksonaten into operas. Aulin felt he was not up to the task, but he did become one of Strindberg’s ‘Beethoven boys’, who would congregate at the author’s home.

Final years

When the Konsertföreningen descended into crisis in 1909 and interest in the string quartet’s concerts waned, a disgruntled Tor Aulin turned his back on Stockholm and headed for Gothenburg as Stenhammar’s conducting partner. If he had not done so, the two friends would, remarkably, have been leading the orchestras in Sweden’s two largest cities. That same year, Aulin teamed up with violinist and bannerman for Swedish music Henri Marteau to embark on a series of six concerts in Germany, where Aulin’s third violin concerto had a permanent place on the playlist, all in the interests of promulgating Swedish music.

Aulin, who was prone to the occasional bout of the doldrums, put his all into Gothenburg, and shared with Stenhammar the vast number of concerts performed there. As they both started to buckle under the workload, the one who broke first was Aulin. Musicologist Bo Wallner has noted that Aulin was dogged by depression even before the move, but then came kidney problems and in 1913 a stroke that left him partially paralysed. A memorial written by his friend Emil Hansen tells of how Aulin had to be carried in to the rehearsals of his newly composed Svenska danser, but had to be carried out again on being overcome with emotion. As he departed, he waved one last farewell to his musicians.

Tor Aulin died in Saltsjöbaden on 1 March 1914, and both the Göteborgs orkesterförening and the Stockholms konsertförening orchestra performed at his funeral service in Stockholm’s Klara Church.

Aulin the musician and conductor

Opinions of Tor Aulin as a violinist vary depending on whether it is the young or the middle-aged Aulin that is under discussion. Both his technical brilliance and demonic passion are lauded in the early reviews of a repertoire that contained virtuosic numbers as well as the grand solo works. As the years passed, his repertoire narrowed and critics commented on his penchant for Mozart’s violin concertos (to which he had written a couple of cadenzas). He is said to have claimed once that he ‘wasn’t born holding a violin’, but he was at home at the piano, the very instrument on which he had made such an impression on his friend Edvard Grieg. His qualities as concert master and first violin in the Aulinska kvartetten are, however, undisputed.

Although there are no extant descriptions of Aulin’s conducting technique, Bo Wallner’s attempt to juxtapose Aulin’s more spontaneous and temperamental manner with Stenhammar’s structural interpretations is warranted. This said, Aulin never got in the way of what he was conducting, but let the music be served by the spur of the moment and the musicians’ own initiatives.

Aulin the composer

The same traits can be seen his own compositional method: rather than drawing attention to himself, he wanted to be an instrument for the music of others, as can be clearly understood from a retrospective article by his wife Anna Aulin: 

To Tor’s mind, composition had to come last. He saw himself as an autodidact and therefore never played his own works in public other than the odd performance out in the provinces, but his melodic prodigality was forever flowing. His main aim was to prepare the way for his ‘more worthy’ countrymen. (Röster i Radio, no. 9 1939).

Solo concertos and orchestral music

Be that as it may, it is none other than Aulin who is responsible for one of only a handful of Swedish solo concertos that still feature on the repertoire: his third violin concerto in C minor, first performed in 1896. There are often said to be parallels with Bruch’s G minor concerto, but they go no deeper than the external structure’s slow introduction to the principal movement. On the other hand, the concerto is certainly closer to the German tradition than the rest of Aulin’s solo works; the orchestra has a more muted palette, the movements are more elaborate in structure, and the absence of virtuosic passages echoes the attitude of a Brahms.

Aulin had begun his compositions for solo violin and orchestra with a Concert Piece in G minor op. 7, which was probably premiered in 1889. Since it is a relatively major composition, lasting 15 minutes and with an andantino episode inserted as a contrast to the main allegro, Aulin was to number it as his first violin concerto, apparently having come to regard it as such. The piece reconciles the French-Belgian tradition in which Sauret tutored him with a more Nordic melodic language. The Concert Piece was followed by Violin Concerto no. 2 in A minor, a three-movement work that also inclined towards the French school with lyrical themes interspersed with virtuosic passasgework.

If these three works have little to do with Swedish folk music, the same can definitely not be said of the two dance suites Gotländska danser op. 28 and Svenska danser op. 32. Two aspects of these suites deserve particular note: a greater affinity than was customary with the folk musician style, and the distinct undercurrent of melancholy in the slower movements.

Music for violin and piano

The young Aulin did not lack ambition as a composer. An early example of this is his serenade for string quartet, in which the first violin part of the first movement has something of the concertante about it. Much more thoroughly conceived is the violin sonata in D minor op. 12, premiered in 1892, in which Aulin, with his dual proficiency on both violin and piano, renders the violin sonata form mastered by Emil Sjögren more virtuosic and passionate. After this, the large-scale works disappear from Aulin’s chamber production.

The Swedish folk melody often surfaces in his many character pieces for violin and piano, such as in the still oft-performed Fyra akvareller and, of course, the original version of Svenska danser (op. 30), in which the violin part is much more virtuosic than in the melody-bearing parts of the orchestral version. Two suites/collections are of note, including Fyra stycken i form av en svit (1904) and Liten svit for violin and piano (1905). Otherwise it is Lyrisches Gedicht op. 21 that, by virtue of its close to 10-minute playing time and its lofty ambitions, breaks the bounds of salon music.

Songs

Just as his wife Anna Aulin wrote, melodies poured out of Tor Aulin. It is not surprising, then, that he also composed songs, which although relatively few in number – there are about twenty-five of them − constitute some of his most important works.

One collection, Fyra serbiska sånger (Four Serbian Songs) makes a deeply personal contribution to the Swedish art song, imbued with a pessimism that anticipates Ture Rangström. Without alluding to any Slavic style, he economically captures a sense of profound tragedy in the introduction to ‘Till en ros’. Like Emil Sjögren, he also set poems from Julius Wolff’s Tannhäuser, composing three considerably more life-affirming numbers.

Dramatic music

As principal conductor at the Dramatiska teatern Aulin also composed music for the stage. Already in 1892 he had written music for En stormig dag, following it up in 1903 with music for Tor Hedberg’s Giorgione; the most important score, however, he composed for August Strindberg’s prose version of Mäster Olof in 1909. Aulin composed preludes for all five acts and a melodrama for Act 4. While the music is partly tableau in character, the first prelude bears some similarity to Wagner’s prelude to Die Meistersinger (as pointed out by Peterson-Berger in his review), an exquisite melancholy unfolds in the prelude of Act 3, and Act 4 begins with funeral music that cites the Dies iræ and goes way beyond simple mood-setting. Aulin’s last collaboration with Strindberg was the drama Siste Riddaren (1909), to which he composed a song and some funeral music.

Aulin’s legacy

Wilhelm Peterson-Berger stated in his obituary of Tor Aulin (DN 3 March 1914) that it was only the third violin concerto and his Mäster Olof music that was permanently anchored in the public mind. But then he added this: ‘It is not unlikely that now that he has passed, much of his production, which has thus far been overlooked, will surface, gain approval and bear his memory to posterity as beautifully as it deserves.’ Admittedly, this prediction didn’t exactly hit the mark, but in recent years there are indications that the violin concerto is no longer as alone as it once was. Violinist Tobias Ringborg has recorded the two earlier concertante pieces and some of the songs (including the Serbian ones) have returned, as has the violin sonata.

Bearing in mind the quality of Tor Aulin’s most important works, a lighter workload as a musician and conductor would probably have resulted in more compositions of significant calibre. But he was also hamstrung by his modest attitude to his own creativity. Yet it was thanks to his energy as a conductor, musician and organiser that Swedish music really started to flourish after the turn of the last century.

Erik Wallrup © 2016
trans. Neil Betteridge