Life

Early years and studies in Germany

Ture Rangström was born on 30 November 1884 as the eldest child of leather merchant John Rangström and his wife Charlotta (née Andersson). He grew up in a petit bourgeois family with a passion for the Euterpean muse: there was often singing in the household and the father was a keen member of the Par Bricole order choir. The family’s three children took piano lessons, and on one occasion the future composer is said to have bitten one of the piano legs in protest (according to his memoirs). But the music captivated him, despite his aversion to lessons, and his first love – salon piano music and pieces of national romantic bent – were soon the object of his rebellion.

As a student of Norra Latin gymnasium, Rangström had as his music teacher Erik Åkerberg, a composer well-orientated in contemporary French music. It is likely that Åkerberg set him on the road to composition and made sure that he got to perform as both a conductor and a composer at the school’s various ceremonies. But amongst his friends it was literature that everything pivoted around. The family home had a collection of Strindberg’s works (the most provocative locked away in a bookcase) while Rangström kept himself abreast with more up to date literary trends through various magazines. This was one of the main reasons why poetry would become such a point of reference in his composition. Rangström had a voracious appetite for new poetry, which was to take him on a life-long voyage of discovery stretching from the canonical writers of the 90s such as Gustaf Fröding, Erik Axel Karlfeldt and Verner von Heidenstam to Karin Boye, Gunnar Ekelöf and Harry Martinson in his later songs.

Rangström’s lack of formal training prevented him from applying to the conservatory. ‘It was,’ he comments in a note, ‘naturally an impairment from which I have suffered all my life but never regretted.’ Yet this did not stop him choosing the career of composer in spite of his parents’ protests, although he did briefly but intensively study counterpoint with Johan Lindegren (Axel Helmer, Rangström’s meticulous biographer, finds concrete traces of these exercises in many of his major works).

With the assistance of his friend Henning Mankell, Rangström was able to travel to Germany in 1905 to study in Berlin and Munich. His initial intention was to study singing for the Wagnerian teacher Julius Hey, but Rangström also made contact with the much sought-after Hans Pfitzner (the extent of his teaching is unclear but it only lasted a short time). That said, his association with Hey was highly influential, forming his view of song as rooted in the diction or melody of language while enabling him to start earning a desperately needed income as a singing teacher. When Rangström’s father fell into financial difficulties, his own finances began to dry up and in 1907 he returned home − where the job of music critic at Svenska Dagbladet awaited. His years of study were over.

Back in Stockholm: the meeting with Strindberg

In October 1908, shortly after his return to Stockholm, Ture Rangström married the upper-middle class Lisa Hollender (1882−1968) on the grounds of a premarital settlement that put her in position of providing the financial stability. The marriage was not a happy one.

Professional successes there were, however, not least for Rangström the critic, even if he had to leave SvD in 1909, only to start a little later at Stockholms Dagblad (1910−14). He was a proponent of the new era and stood in opposition to national romanticism, and in particular Wilhelm Peterson-Berger − both as a composer and a critic. A ‘Young Swedish’ front (a term coined by Rangström himself) was formed, which meant that the young generation was just as nationally minded as the previous one except that the ties to the 1800s were loosened, if not severed altogether. It was also the Young Swedes (which, besides Rangström, counted amongst its number Kurt Atterberg, Natanael Berg and Oskar Lindberg) who took the initiative to form a Swedish society of composers, which would eventually become Föreningen Svenska tonsättare (FST – the Swedish Society of Composers) in 1918.

Rangström’s close affiliation with the new wave is manifest in his relationship with the doyen of radicalism, August Strindberg. The ageing author had long been searching for ‘his’ composer, and when Rangström sent him musical settings of some poems from his (Strindberg’s) Ordalek och småkonst he was overjoyed to say the least. The pair met in Blå tornet on Drottninggatan in November 1909, marking the start of a collaboration on an opera based on a drama titled Kronbruden. Rangström, surprisingly, was allowed to scrap the last two acts on condition that he left the rest of the text intact. Following the author’s death, Rangström composed incidental music to some of Strindberg’s plays and orchestral music inspired by the author himself (his first symphony and Vårhymn).

It would be a few years before Kronbruden received its debut staging after the completion of the score in 1916. Rangström presented the work, through his friend Kurt Atterberg, to the head of the Stuttgart opera Max von Schillings and it was premiered there in 1919; its Stockholm premiere would come three years later.

If Rangström had kept folk music at arm’s length until his meeting with Strindberg, Kronbruden represented a plunge into nationalism. During the 1910s he developed a harmonically austere and thematically sharp song style, although the song cycles Havets sommar and Notturno (both to his own lyrics) are suffused with moods of nature and he even approached folk music itself (to lyrics by Runeberg and Fröding). At the same time, he also started to compose music to the poems of Bo Bergman, with their spirit of melancholy and precise diction. Bergman was the poet to whom Rangström turned most for his compositions, but even though they lived in the same city and corresponded with each other, they never met.

Crises and lost laurels: the Gothenburg debacle

Despite the clash between Rangström’s expressively direct compositional style and Wilhelm Stenhammar’s craftsmanship, Stenhammar accepted Rangström and made a success of his first symphony at the Nordic Music Days festival in Copenhagen in 1919. That same year, as music director of Göteborgs orkesterförening (the Gothenburg Orchestra Society) Stenhammar invited Rangström to become guest conductor, an offer for which Rangström showed his gratitude by dedicating his second symphony (‘Mitt land’) to Stenhammar and his orchestra. Rangström was also the one to replace Stenhammar when he left his post. Rangström went on to stay in Gothenburg from the 1922/23 season to the end of the 1924/25 season, praised for his radical programme policy but increasingly faulted for his lack of conducting technique.

The time leading up to the crisis year of 1925 was also very fertile in terms of songs. Many of Rangström’s most frequently heard songs were composed in the first half of the 1920s, such as the Bergman song ‘Pan’ and the Levertin song ‘En båt med blommor’. However, when he was denied an extension to his contract with the orchestra society he entered a deep crisis, and in 1926 his marriage to Lisa, which had already started to show cracks, finally collapsed. By this time he was having an affair with Omon Håkanson (1894−1984), the wife of his friend and fellow-composer Knut Håkanson. Thus began a new, nine-year marriage in 1927, into which he never really settled. In this sense, his private life was labouring under a Tristan-esque conflict, a theme that had earlier emerged in Rangström’s works, but which would go on to make an indelible impression on his production up until his last magnum opus, the never completed opera Gilgamesj.

Song now made a serious incursion into his symphonic form, more specifically in the third symphony (‘Sång under stjärnorna’, 1929), which is based on Bo Bergman’s song ‘Bön till natten’. The symphony is, in Rangström’s own words, ‘a song without words set to large orchestra’.

The last two decades: for and against modernity

In the 1930s and 1940s, Rangström occasionally had to struggle to feed himself. In 1930, he was dismissed as a critic on Stockholms Dagblad after three years, but worked for a time between 1931 and 1936 as press commissioner at the Kungliga Teatern (Royal Opera), handling media relations and translating (including Dmitri Shostakovich’s Katerina Ismailova and Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa). Nevertheless, he described this time as a ‘humiliation’, and went on to spend a few years as a critic on Nya Dagligt Allehanda.

Two important works − the fourth symphony ‘Invocatio’ (1933–36) and the mystical opera Gilgamesj − mark the last two decades of Rangström’s life and represent two opposing tendencies in his compositional style, so that while intensely expressive, he also gravitated towards masque and pastiche. The New Objectivity and Neoclassicism of the 1920s were movements that brought to the fore the stylistic interrogation that had engaged Rangström ever since his early compositions. This is particularly evident in the fourth symphony, with its passacaglia in the prelude (the base line recurs in later movements) and its conversation between baroque and modernity in the principal movement Recitativo ed arioso.

Other responses to the arrival of modernity can be found in Rangström’s ideological opinions. After the debacle in Gothenburg he had retreated to the critic’s desk, from where he vented his antipathy towards the latest musical trends, railing against the gramophone industry (‘corned beef’), modernism (‘ultra violet’) and jazz (‘stupid’). He also became involved in the ‘gymnic’ movement (‘health, character and beauty’), which had as its central organ the magazine Gymn, with its mix of articles on outdoor living and eugenics. Rangström described Young Swedish music as ‘gymnic’. But his engagement was short-lived: by the time the magazine adopted the cause of national socialism, Rangström had already pulled out.

Rangström’s appearance as a guest conductor of his own music in Dresden 1940 must not be seen as a political act, even if his cultural orientation was German (like the majority of the Swedish intelligentsia). Rangström had a nationalist streak, but was anti-totalitarian. No work shows this more clearly than Gilgamesj, a large-scale opera with a libretto by Rangström himself and poet Ebbe Linde based on the latter’s radio play of the same title. The emergence of totalitarian states in Europe in the 1930s is mirrored by the oppression of the opera’s mystical Assyria, in a libretto that also repeatedly expresses socially critical, if not anti-modernistic sentiments. It is a work that gathers up the threads from several Rangströmian styles, from irony to late-romantic flow. The work remained, however, truncated: the composer only managed to orchestrate two thirds of the first act before he finally fell victim to the throat cancer that had been stalking him throughout the 1940s.

John Fernström was commissioned to complete the first two acts, while only a fragment remains of the third. The posthumous premiere in 1952 contained such a large number of deletions that the tedium cited by many critics could well have been the result of its consequent loss of structural balance. Besides, modernism had already become established. Rangström, who had been nationally lionised on his 50^th and 60^th birthdays, was now a symbol of the past.

Works

With his close to 250 songs, Ture Rangström, known by his contemporaries as ‘the Swedish Schubert’, was the leading proponent of the Swedish art song in the first half of the 1900s. This said, he was active in all music genres, from chamber to symphony and opera, even if the judgement of his own and later times diverge, particularly as regards his instrumental music.

Already as a young man, Rangström rejected a technically adroit compositional style in favour of the expressive, which has been blamed for the formal shortcomings of his larger compositions. But as Lennart Hedwall rightly points out in Den svenska symfonin his ‘al fresco’ technique and alternative formal solutions were not attributable to ‘any lack of prowess but to his strong fidelity to the musical material and its inherent character’. In fitting in between national romanticism and 1930s modernism, Rangström can be described as a Swedish representative of what in Germany was called ‘the modern’ (die Moderne), a movement that was still musically progressive in the 1910s but an antithesis of modernism.

The songs

Rangström’s songs are not only the dominant genre in his oeuvre and the works of his that occupy a permanent place on the modern concert programme, they are also where his compositional style comes into its own. Even if he studied for Pfitzner only briefly, they are both characterised by the same manifest openness to the flash of inspiration, the whim, which in Rangström’s case came to him most starkly in his intimate relation with poetry.

Rangström’s songs can be grouped along at times intersecting lines of orientation. The first group contains songs run through with a single motif and an accompanying movement, preferably with a culminating arch (as in ‘Floderna’ from 1907 or the oft-heard ‘Vingar i natten’ from 1917). Even though the dramatic declamation was his steadfast point of departure, it could show through directly in the second group, as in the early ‘Stjärnöga’ (1904) to lyrics by Bo Bergman, or in the extremely reduced Ekelund composition ‘Ro’ (c. 1910). The third group of songs is informed instead by folk music and its strophic forms, such as in a number of Fröding compositions and some Runeberg songs. Fröding’s poems were also set in Ur Kung Eriks visor (1918, then in the commonly performed orchestral version), but here there is a pronounced element of role creation in which Rangström gives voice to the pessimistic and ironic. Such role creation appears as early as in Drei Gedichte (Otto Julius Birnbaum, 1904). The final line of orientation is the pathetic opera-derived scene that includes ‘Tristans död’ (Bergman, 1935), the most explicit and ambitious example, and ‘Sköldmön’ from the Karin Boye collection Sköld och svärd (1941).

Another way of arranging his songs is by poet. The general wisdom is that weak poetry makes way for the music, but Rangström shows that high-calibre poetry can also be a source of inspiration. His settings of Heidenstam in Tre dikter (1924) find three very specific moods, all bound by the same noble bearing. Levertin was transformed by Rangström into an opulent style of great harmonic abundance and formal complexity, where ‘En båt med blommor’ is the equal of Hugo Wolf’s most exuberant songs. Later on in his production he also turned his attention to the young poet Gunnar Ekelöf – significantly, the natural romantic and song-like Ekelöf.

Yet it is Bo Bergman, composed on over thirty occasions, who resonates most clearly with Rangström: a sensitivity that applies to both the melancholic side that leans towards French symbolism and the pessimism that despite its austerity the composer manages to saturate in sentiment. ‘Pan’ (1924) has the Greek god sitting with his back against the trunk of a spruce tree, out of which Rangström conjures up a hymn to nature. With the important collections of his own songs, Hafvets sommar (1913, 1915) and Nuttorno (1917), he captures atmospheres uniting landscapes exterior and interior.

Orchestral music

Another central genre is orchestral music, most prominently the symphony. Here too there is a connection with song, namely Symphony no. 3 in D-flat major ‘Sång under stjärnorna’ (1929). The Bergman song ‘Bön till natten’ (1924) is embedded in a symphonic context, enlarged and transformed. At the same time, Rangström takes up one of the most advanced forms of the sonata model, that combination of one single movement with four intimated (such as found in the music of Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schönberg). There is also another formal layer, a chiastic form in which beginning and end are each other’s reflection.

The two earlier symphonies can be seen as ‘Young Swedish’ variants of new German programmatic tendencies. Symphony no. 1 in C-sharp minor ‘August Strindberg in memoriam’ (1914) is not an attempt at a portrait of his muse but a characterful four movement vehicle for depicting traits he associated with Strindberg: ‘Jäsningstid’, ‘Legend’, ‘Trollruna’ and ‘Kamp’. Here is the tension between violent force and lyrical repose, between repeated sequences and protracted melodic lines so typical of Rangström’s large-scale works. Symphony no. 2 in D minor ‘Mitt land’ (1919) reinforces these tendencies when masculinity plays out against the moods of nature.

We have already mentioned the neoclassical features of Rangström’s Symphony no. 4 ‘Invocatio’, in which he departs from chord-based melodies to develop polyphonic features in an archaic atmosphere. So the introductory Preludio is in a Dorian church mode, the second movement’s wild Toccata juxtaposing sudden gestures with the first movement’s passacaglia-theme in extended note values. A moving Intermezzo is followed by a Recitativo ed arioso movement that is almost as long as the four other movements combined: polyphonic recitative in the organ part and wind section stand in contrast to the lyrical arioso of the strings. The finale reprises the passacaglia at varying tempos, sometimes in ways approaching Shostakovich.

Apart from the symphonies, Rangström also composed a number of single movement works, particularly during his youth, and several suites that sometimes drew their material from the wealth of incidental music he turned out. Ballad for piano and orchestra (1909) is Rangström’s only piece for solo instrument and symphony orchestra, although all we have is a revised version from 1937 with a character more in keeping with his more linear mindset. This was Dityramb (1909), a seething expression of his will which had once caught Strindberg’s interest. Havet sjunger (1914) is a powerful portrait of the element that was to have a profound influence on Rangström: the sea. Here he masters the art of the culmination.

On the other hand, the suites often display neoclassical tendencies. Already in the oft-performed Divertimento elegiaco (1918) there are subtle references to Handel amidst the otherwise mood music. More manifest are the pastiche-like elements of Partita in B minor for solo violin and strings (1933) and the more diversionary Vaux-hall (1937).

Operas

One of the greatest successes in Swedish opera is Kronbruden. Given the libretto’s mix of folk ballad and Maurice Maeterlinck’s crypticness, one might imagine a string of Rangström songs as the main ingredient. But since no more deletions were allowed after the radical excision of the last two acts, Rangström was faced with a dialogue far removed from the number opera and has his delicate feel for parlando put to the test.

This elicited a form analogous to Richard Strauss’ conversation operas but in a traditional rural setting. Kersti is a poor peasant woman who falls pregnant with the miller’s son; but they are not yet wed so the baby is passed to a ‘midwife’ for disposal. The infanticide is revealed when the baby’s spirit returns as a myling during the wedding party. Gloom rather than melancholy is the baseline mood, which the orchestra vouches for while the dialogue glides smoothly from line to line. Still, Rangström’s acumen for psychological portraiture shows through, as it does in the enterprising spirit that drives Kersti, as juxtaposed with the impotency of her Mats.

Two full-length operas are usually identified in Rangström’s oeuvre, but there is also the scenic ballad Medeltida, which he composed in 1917−18 from his own translation of Danish poet Holger Drachmann’s legendary play Middelalderlig. This is a stylised drama that draws its dramatic ingredients from Wagner (extramarital love followed by love-death as well as a song competition). Stylistically, the music swings between ballad and pastiche, and even if Rangström’s lyrical side is in evidence here, the work is more a retrospective on familiar patterns rather than anything individually distinctive.

Rangström’s final but incomplete contribution to the genre is something else entirely. Gilgamesj is at once a mythological drama based on the Assyrian epic and a social commentary. It tells of how King Gilgamesh loses his friend Engidu (which in the never-composed third act was to be followed by the king’s visit to the land of the dead) and depicts a country bowed by tyranny. To be sure, Ebbe Linde’s caustic criticism of the Soviet and fascist systems is somewhat tempered, but there are barbs thrown at modernity here that are still quite relevant.

Although Rangström spurned orientalistic tendencies, the long, repetitive sequences give the music an archaic, ritualistic feel, and it is quite obvious that he and Ebbe Linde discarded conventional opera dramaturgy: the first act places the scenes side by side rather than linking them together consecutively. The clash of musical styles is striking. On the other hand, the second act ends with an inverted love-death as Gilgamesh elegises his dead friend and bemoans the emptiness of power when life ebbs away. In the programme notes produced for the premiere, his friend and colleague William Seymer recalls a social gathering at Rangström’s home: ‘I will never forget that beautiful evening when he played and hummed his way through ‘Gilgamesj’ with such enthusiasm − we were deeply moved by the music, the mood and the creeping sense that our host would soon be part of our little circle no more.’

Erik Wallrup © 2016
trans. Neil Betteridge