(Statens Musikverk)

Life

Harald Leonard Fryklöf was born in Uppsala on 14 September 1882. Hardly anything is known concerning his school career and basic music education. In the autumn of 1901 he gained entry to the organist class at Kungliga Musikkonservatoriet (the Royal Conservatory of Music), with August Lagergren as the teacher of his main subject, and he graduated in December 1903. Private composition and counterpoint studies under Johan Lindegren, starting in 1902, parallel to his conservatory studies and continuing until 1905, made an important difference to his development as a composer. In the autumn of 1905 Fryklöf spent a term in Berlin, studying instrumentation under the conservatory director and composer Philipp Scharwenka. Between 1904 and 1910 he took private piano lessons with Richard Andersson.

Fryklöf was sought after as a teacher, and music teaching occupied much of his time. Already in 1904 he began teaching harmony and piano in Richard Andersson’s school of music, remaining there for the rest of his life. In 1908 he became assistant teacher of harmony at Musikkonservatoriet, where in 1913 he deputised in the permanent post, which was finally awarded him in 1914. He became a member of Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music) in 1915, and as such held several appointments, serving for example on the conservatory board of governors between 1915 and 1918, and from 1916 onwards on the academy’s composer scholarship awards committee. Concurrently with various appointments and commissions, he also gave private lessons in composition and music theory subjects. Even established composers of his own generation, such as Sigurd von Koch, William Seymer and Ture Rangström, sought his advice. His pedagogical achievement also includes a textbook, Harmonisering av koraler i dur och moll jämte kyrkotonarterna (Harmonisation of hymn tunes in the major and minor keys, together with the church modes), first published in 1916, a new edition of which appeared as late as 1936.

Fryklöf had already begun composing before entering the conservatory. His first dated compositions (songs and choral music) are from 1900. For two years, in 1905−06, he received a state composer scholarship. His début as a composer came in 1908, with a performance of his Concert Overture op. 1 by the Stockholm Concert Society Orchestra under Tor Aulin. It was performed a second time that year, in Gothenburg. Also in 1908, Fryklöf became deputy organist of Storkyrkan (now Stockholm Cathedral), and was finally given permanent tenure in 1918. During the 1910s he devoted himself a great deal to vocal church music. He was, for example, one of the four editors of the choral music anthology Musica Sacra, which became an official repertoire collection for church choirs and to which he himself contributed several pieces. He was also actively involved in work on a new missal for the Church of Sweden, for which he also wrote music. His interest in church music and the liturgy was also manifested by his efforts at reconstructing church services from historical sources, resulting in a Christmas Mass (1917) and a Bridgettine Vesper (February 1918), both of which were performed in Storkyrkan.

Fryklöf was highly regarded and much relied on by his colleagues, thanks to his combination of artistic and pedagogic ability and calm, authoritative manner. He never married, but he was eminently sociable and had a large circle of friends. One of his closest friends was his superior, the conservatory director and composer Bror Beckman, who catalogued Fryklöf’s musical remains.

Fryklöf was always intent on improving his knowledge and skills and also on forging international contacts. His music was published, not only in Sweden but also in Denmark, Germany and France. In 1919 he was planning further studies with the German Catholic priest and composer Peter Griesbacher, who endeavoured in his church music to combine strictly archaic Cecilianism with modern late romanticism, a synthesis very much after Fryklöf’s own heart. He was also planning new secular compositions in a larger format − chamber music including the piano, and an orchestral piece. But at the beginning of March 1919 Fryklöf, who had hardly ever known a day’s illness in his life, was struck down by the Spanish flu raging in Europe at that time. Pneumonia supervened and he died on 11 March after only a few days of illness.

Works

Fryklöf’s output is far from copious. This can be attributed not only to his premature death but also to his time-consuming commitments in other fields, especially his teaching and church music activities combined with various commissions and assignments within the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien and the Church of Sweden. His music vocabulary stays within the bounds of late romanticism but, especially in his later compositions, has an unmistakeable personal touch. In it one finds both advanced harmony and archaic features which can be viewed in relation to his interest in the history of music, engendering a sometimes modally inspired idiom and a predilection for contrapuntal writing and polyphonic forms. Fryklöf’s capacity for integrating widely different influences can be gauged from his numbering both the Apollonian Carl Nielsen and the Dionysian Max Reger among his exemplars.

Instrumental works

Fryklöf’s first orchestral work (n.d.) is an Allegretto for strings, of which there is also a piano version. His début composition, Concert Overture op. 1, was in fact his only completed composition for symphony orchestra.

Sonata à la legenda for violin and piano (with the Italian title corrected in a later, 1947, edition to Sonata alla leggenda) was one of Fryklöf’s last works and today is widely regarded as the foremost of his instrumental compositions. Otherwise his chamber music output is confined to an early, unpublished sonata movement, also for violin and piano.

The grandest of Fryklöf’s piano compositions is the fugue in C-sharp minor, with which he won the Musikaliska Konstföreningen (the Swedish Art Music Society) competition in 1909 and which figured a year later in the society’s prestigious series of music publications. In the collection 8 mindre pianostycken (8 minor piano pieces) the composer displays both playfulness and originality. One of these miniatures, the recitative-like ‘Strömkarlen’, has neither bar lines nor cadences. In addition to another printed piece, an Impromptu in A major, there are ten or so shorter piano pieces in manuscript.

Fryklöf also wrote music for his main instrument, the organ. Aside from a number of short pieces, this music is distinguished by two compositions in one movement on a grander scale: the austere Passacaglia, which is to some degree Reger-inspired, and Symfoniskt stycke (Symphonic piece), which displays a fully developed personal idiom, with sharp contrasts between the ruggedly dramatic and the pastorally idyllic. Both these works were posthumously published by Musikaliska Konstföreningen (in 1929 and 1926 respectively).

Vocal compositions

Fryklöf’s solo songs were written mostly to poems by contemporary Swedish and Scandinavian poets, such as Erik Axel Karlfeldt, Vilhelm Ekelund and Sven Lidman, as well as Thor Lange and Vilhelm Krag. Two small collections were printed in the composer’s lifetime, namely To Digte af Thor Lange op. 2 and Songs for one voice and piano (six songs in two volumes), to which are added 17 unpublished songs, including two with orchestral accompaniment.

Fryklöf’s choral music is almost entirely religious and is often based on texts from the Church of Sweden hymnbook. Unlike his instrumental works, the choral songs are mainly homophonic, with a fluency of melody and with a harmony which, without any sacrifice of expressive power, lacks the austerity sometimes encountered in his instrumental works. In addition to the seven hymns he wrote for the Musica sacra collection, only two of his choral songs were printed in his own lifetime. He was also preparing to publish German versions of five choral hymns (mostly from Musica sacra), but that project was never realised. The great majority of songs are for mixed voices, but his best-loved choral hymn, ‘Han på korset, han allena’, is for descant choir and organ. This hymn became well known following its inclusion in the widely used De ungas hymnarium collection (1933). About ten songs went unpublished.

The vocal music can also be taken to include the liturgical melodies which Fryklöf composed for the 1918 edition of Missale för Svenska kyrkan.

Sverker Jullander © 2013
Trans. Roger Tanner