Life

Education and career

After two years of study, Stockholmer August Lundh took his organist’s degree at the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music) in 1857, commencing soon thereafter on a long and significant career in music pedagogy on Södermalm in Stockholm. He taught music at Katarina lower secondary school from 1857 to 1906, and at the Stockholm elementary school teacher training college for women from 1865 to 1907; he was also engaged as a singing teacher at Maria elementary school from 1866. Between the years of 1869 and 1916 he served as organist at the German Church in Stockholm. The extant biographical material on Lundh reveals three marriages, the first of which with Emma Mathilda Nyqvist (b. 1829) produced three daughters.

The few surviving documents indicate an industrious, ambitious personality and an unremitting pursuer of respect for his work. He was appointed Director of Music in 1884, adding to his In sui memoriam medal, and subsequently awarded the Litteris et artibus badge of merit (1892) and made a knight of the Order of Vasa (1898). Even though the Musikaliska akademien seems to have demonstrated little interest in acknowledging the value of Lundh’s teaching material, he was voted in as an associate member in 1910 – recognition that was no doubt well served by the participation of such a luminary as Gustaf Mankell, the Academy’s professor of organ, in numerous performances of the composer’s liturgical music.

Writer of musical textbooks

August Lundh’s most important contribution to the music scene of his time is hardly to be sought in his individual compositions, but in an untiring production of musical teaching material for schools and the publication of several books of songs and chorales. No doubt his role as teacher at the training college for women contributed to the significant impact made by his books of sheet music and textbooks for the teaching of music.

The magnitude of his influence is, however, hard to judge. His work on harmony was the most talked about of his textbooks during his lifetime, and the fact that parts of it were reprinted as late as the 1940s testifies to its longevity. His song books and miscellaneous practical material for chorale performance were a natural point of convergence for his roles as publisher and composer. It is obvious that Lundh had a solid grounding in music theory, which he combined with a breadth of insight into the musical practices of school and church.

Works

Minor pieces and songs

As a composer, August Lundh is also often closely associated with different kinds of utility music or occasional works. In his songs as well as his short, elementary piano pieces he demonstrates a sure hand and a consistent ability to capture effectively, albeit through simple means, different characters and moods. In his chamber music with piano, like Legend for violin, he allows himself a more richly expressive palette, even if an inserted hymn shows how close he sailed to a religious style of composition. Nocturne for piano is one of his most interesting pieces, and even boasts certain virtuosic tendencies. The delicate song to the spring ‘Hör hur västanvinden susar’ is the only one of Lundh’s compositions to have a living place in music today, a century after his death. Not only is it popular amongst Swedish choirs, it has also been cited, controversially, as the unacknowledged inspiration for singer Ulf Lundell’s famous ‘Öppna landskap’ from 1982; whatever the truth of this, the tonal content of the introduction to both songs is indeed identical.

Cantatas

Much of August Lundh’s liturgical music and festive cantatas grew out of his work at the training college. He composed a number of short sacred cantatas to texts from the Swedish hymnal, with an era-typical church-musical reception of attributes of the baroque liturgical style. Retained contrapuntal practice and elements of recitative co-exist here with a restrictive attitude towards a more advanced, modern idiom. In contrast, Lundh demonstrates – for example in Kantat till Gustaf Adolfs-festen – programme music ambitions in his simple yet effective attempt to depict in sound the fluctuating moods of anxiety, dejection, hope and valour during the Thirty Years’ War. Lundh enjoyed particular widespread acclaim with his cantata Svea, composed to Esaias Tegnér’s of the same name and performed in 1897 at King Oscar II’s silver jubilee.

Requiem

Of all August Lundh’s surviving major compositions, his Requiem commands our especial interest for its scope and for being an example of how in a romantic era the forms of Catholic tradition gradually won acceptance, even within the setting of Swedish Lutheranism.  The work is a through-composed, ambitious setting of the traditional Latin text for four-part choir, with an orchestra comprising strings, woodwind, horns and trombones. The overall impression is one of a restrained solemnity that only occasionally gives way to greater expressive freedom of rhythm, melody and structure. A pervasive homophonic choral part without solo passages and thematic recycling between the movements help to enhance the impression of a concentrated, well-executed work, albeit without any real wealth of musical variation.

Jonas Lundblad © 2016
Trans. Neil Betteridge