Life

Studies and early career

Edmond Passy was born in Stockholm on 3 September 1789 of French parents who had a background in acting. He studied composition under Joachim Nicolas Eggert as well as piano with Luigi Piccinni, who was the son of Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni.

His first compositions made accessible to the public consisted of three piano pieces, which were published in Musikaliskt tidsfördrif in 1811, 1812 and 1813. At that time Passy lived in Gothenburg where one of his most important works, the piano concerto op. 1, was premiered on Easter Sunday in 1814. Thereafter he studied with Irish pianist and composer John Field in St Petersburg until 1817. It was here that Passy honed his mastery of the piano.

Passy’s stay in the then Russian capital was also a productive period for his composing: two songs were printed by a St Petersburg publisher and he composed the second piano concerto op. 2, together with a fantasy for piano six hands and orchestra. Passy, together with Field and Eugenie Gabrielle Tardif, performed the latter. Passy married Eugenie Tardif in 1817.

Composer and pianist in Stockholm and abroad

At the end of 1817 Passy returned to Stockholm and on 6 December he performed with the Hovkapellet (the Royal Court Orchestra) under the leadership of Edouard Du Puy. On the programme were two of Passy’s own compositions – an orchestral overture and a piano concerto − as well as a concerto for two pianos by Jan Ladislav Dussek, with Edmond and Eugenie Gabrielle Passy as soloists. For two decades Passy came to occupy an important position as a pianist in the music life of the city. He appeared several times as a soloist with the Hovkapellet playing works of Beethoven, Dussek, Field, Hummel, Mendelssohn, Aloys Schmidt and Daniel Steibelt, and during four seasons (1820, 1826, 1827 and 1835) he took part in the organisation of musical soirée series in Stockholm.

In 1819 Passy received a permanent job as pianist for the Kungliga Stora Teatern (the Royal Opera), a position that involved soloist duties, accompanying rehearsals and giving song lessons three hours every week. However, he only stayed there for 18 months. Instead, in the autumn of 1820 he went on a more than two-year long trip through Europe. In Berlin, Dresden, Paris and probably Cologne, he played his fantasy on Swedish folk songs − a piece that was evidently a favourite part of his repertoire and that could be heard in Stockholm both before and after the trip.

Contemporaries of Passy described him as an outstanding representative of the Fieldian piano tradition. After a concert in Berlin, it was written in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 21/2 1821: ‘He played with remarkable precision and ease, especially his elastic touch is very pleasurable. The elegant performance style was completely that of Field, his teacher’. And from 1841, in Gustav Schilling’s Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, Passy is described as being ‘known in Germany as Field’s most brilliant student and a truly excellent piano virtuoso’.

Teacher and church musician

Like many musicians, Passy devoted a part of his life to teaching. His most well known disciples include Otto Daniel Winge and Ivar Hallström, who were his piano students, as well as Wilhelm Bauck, who was a composition student of his. The latter states that he took music theory lessons from Passy after 1830 and in his autobiography characterises him a thoroughly educated man.

It may come as a surprise that Passy was never employed as a piano teacher at the educational institution of the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music), given the special status he had as a pianist in the early 19^th-century Sweden. He was 18 years older than Jan van Boom, the great pianist in the following generation, and he stood alone for a number of years as a pianist of the highest grade in Stockholm. However, there are reasons leading one to believe that his relationship to the Musikaliska akademien was not entirely free of friction. In connection to Passy being elected into the membership of the Musikaliska akademien in 1840, the academy’s meeting minutes from 14 December 1839 indicate that he was the object of re-voting more than ten times, which suggests that within the academy there were both stubborn adherents as well as opponents of Passy.

From the middle of the 1830s less and less was heard of Passy. A contributing factor to this decline in musical activity may be a prolonged depression at the beginning of the decade when, according to the Vikarbynteckningen (a collection of biographical facts on Passy’s life by an unknown instigator), he was overtaken by ‘such disgust for music, that he didn’t open his piano for several years’. It is said that Passy’s despondency was related to his inability to get his stage music performed and that he was dismissed as piano teacher to the crown prince and princess.

For around 30 years during the latter part of his life, Passy was, despite his Catholic origins, employed as the organist at the royal chapel (from 1832 or 1833). Neither sacred music nor the organ seems to have interested him particularly deeply. Church music is completely missing in his list of works and he apparently composed only two organ works, fugues op. 11.

Passy died on 16 August 1870 at his country home Canton no. 3 at Drottningholm outside of Stockholm. His first wife, the pianist Eugenie Gabrielle, died in 1818 and seven years later he married Carolina Christina Estenberg. Both marriages were childless.

Works

Edmond Passy’s musical output includes compositions for large as well as small instrumentations: piano pieces, songs, chamber music, orchestral works and stage music. The majority of his music is based on the piano or is some form of vocal music. Numerous songs and some piano works were published during the 19^th century, however, none of his larger compositions saw the printed page.

Passy wrote both of his most ambitious works for piano early in his career: piano concerto no. 1 in 1812 and no. 2 no later than 1817. Manifestations of the composer’s finest qualities were evident even at this early stage. His well-developed harmonic imagination often finds expressive shadings by using the notes of the minor key scale in major scale passages. One also sees Passy’s interest in slightly asymmetrical phrase constructions − for example in compound 5+4 bars − that avoid an overly predictable balance.

Every so often one can hear influences of Field in Passy’s composing. This applies even to the first concerto, despite the fact that it was written before he studied with Field in St Petersburg. Passy’s compositions moved early on in the direction of romanticism.

Composer Johan Peter Cronhamn acknowledges the composer’s ability to build rich harmonies during a commemorative speech in 1871 upon Passy’s death, and he also points out ‘a thorough, often polyphonic style’ as being characteristic of his music. The inclination that Passy had for harmonic development is seen in the first piano trio in which the C major allegro unexpectedly ends in C minor. Shifts between major and minor in a smaller scale can be heard in one Schubert-like second subject, and in the second movement one hears a mystical mediant chordal passage in bars 28−29 (prepared in bars 5−6) that anticipates Liszt’s harmonic workings. Those contrapuntal elements that Cronhamn spoke of emerge with particular clarity in the string quartet in D major with the self-ironic title ‘Monotono’. Here one finds a tightly connected weave of voices that include passages in a double canon, with the answer in the fifth in an invertible counterpoint. A richly elaborated movement is to be found also in the Piano Trio no. 2. The solo piano works are of a slightly different nature and can be described partly like virtuoso compositions in the Hummerl-Kalkbrenner tradition, and partly like simpler pieces for amateurs. A nocturne in B-flat major is related to Field’s music.

Passy’s better vocal compositions are characterised, according to Cronhamn, as ‘being strongly characteristic music containing a lively musical painting’. Among the 30 or so songs, Cronhamn maintains that ‘Kolarflickan i skogen’, from Musikalisk målning (musical painting), was ‘a masterpiece’. Here the piano part actively contributes to the music’s expressive value.

Two major works for the stage have been preserved. One, Den nordiska qvinnan (The Nordic woman), is Passy’s music to ‘Forn-Historiskt skådespel […] af P. A. Granberg’ (An ancient historical play by Per Adolf Granberg). The work includes an orchestral overture, vocal numbers, dance, melodrama, pantomime, and a Swedish polska (couple dance in ¾ metre) with an embedded rhythmic section in the score called ‘weapon crash’. In addition there is an early example of the artistic concept of having instruments and singers heard play and sing from backstage − in this case, two hunting horns, a bass trombone and a ‘choir of fighters’ − the latter – possibly modelled after the Overture no. 2 and 3 to Beethoven’s Leonore, in which a hidden trumpet creates an effect of distance. A preserved score has notes about a rehearsal ‘at the Theatre’ on 29 May 1836, but the work was probably never performed. The same is likely also true of Passy’s second major work for the stage, the one-act comic opera Inbillning och verklighet (Imagination and reality).

A symphonic movement in C minor containing fugato parts may be part of an unfinished symphony. It is orchestrated for strings, winds and percussion. The score, however, notes that the string parts should be arranged for wind instruments – probably in order to have the work performed in some specific context.

Martin Edin © 2015
Trans. Jill Ann Johnson