Life

This man, deceased in 1851, was one of the capital city’s most educated friends of music, occupying himself even in old age, at eighty years, in part with his own attempts at composition, in part with the study of the works of the most renowned composers [...]. Silverstolpe loved and revered classical music, rather than the new.

So describes critic and composer Abraham Mankell his older colleague, Fredrik Samuel Silverstolpe, in his history of Swedish music from 1853. But even if Silverstolpe and Mankell shared interests in music criticism and composition, the differences between them are striking. Whereas Mankell was a typical national romantic, emphasising the importance of the common national spirit for the supremacy of simple song, Silverstolpe was a true man of the enlightenment with classicism and individualism as his aesthetic ideals.

Silverstolpe was born in Stockholm in 1769 and died in the same city in 1851. His life and achievements stretch from the Gustavian era to far into the romantic 1800s (it can be mentioned that Silverstolpe’s cousin David Gudmund was married to Magdalena ‘Malla’ Silfverstolpe, who held salon in Uppsala). Silverstolpe studied architecture in his youth but also cultivated an interest in music, which was nourished by his acquaintance with the thirteen-years-older hovkapellmästare (conductor of the Royal Court Orchestra) Joseph Martin Kraus. At age twenty-seven Silverstolpe was appointed to be the chargé d’affaires at the Swedish embassy in Vienna. There he met, among others, the French Republic’s envoy, Marshal Bernadotte, who would later be appointed as Sweden’s new king.

As Member of Parliament in the constitutional committee, Silverstolpe criticised a proposal for freedom of the press in the new form of government because it did not take into consideration all forms of censorship (the freedom of the press law adopted in 1810 has been misunderstood by later analysts for having included music copyright). During his time in Vienna, Silverstolpe maintained regular contact with Joseph Haydn, to whom he introduced Johan Wikmanson’s music. Haydn returned the favour by allowing Silverstolpe to take part in his not yet performed oratorio The Creation, which Silverstolpe translated into Swedish for the first performance in Stockholm in 1801, only two years after the Vienna premiere.

Critic, superintendent and biographer

By this time Silverstolpe was already a member of the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music) (to which he was elected in 1798, member of the second class in 1814, the first class in 1841), where he immediately worked to nominate Haydn as an honorary member. Silverstolpe studied music theory for a time with Pehr Frigel and in 1809 he published an impressive analysis of Kraus’ 6 hours long opera Aeneas i Carthago, encompassing nearly 120 pages (inspired by Kraus’ 1785 analysis of Niccolo Piccini’s Didon, but surpassing its model fivefold in size). Four years later Silverstolpe was appointed to be superintendent at the Royal Court, which meant he was also responsible for the Kongliga Museum, the forerunner of today’s National Museum.

Silverstolpe periodically wrote music reviews and articles in the newspapers (Stockholms Posten, Dagligt Allehanda and Svenska Biet), which he eventually published in a collected volume. In 1833 he published what is considered to be the first biography of a Swedish musician, his idol from youth, Joseph Martin Kraus, which included 50 of the composer’s letters. In 1837 Silverstolpe retired from work and publicity to Näs estate in Uppland, where in old age he finally had time to indulge in one of his main hobbies for the past decades: composing music.

Works

Music

Silverstolpe’s musical output includes over 130 songs, often with piano or string accompaniment. Unlike individuals such as historian and composer Erik Gustaf Geijer, Silverstolpe neither published nor made public his compositions, conforming to the aristocratic conventions of the time (as late as 1838 Silverstolpe refers to Kant’s moral imperative when insisting on the immorality of charging admission for public music performances). Not until nearly half a century after Silverstolpe’s death did Karl Valentin publish two of Silverstolpe’s songs for voice and piano in a collection of Swedish song. Characteristic of Silverstolpe’s music, in line with aesthetics as manifested in his writings, is its confinement within a classical framework. Rather than modelling after an ideal such as Kraus’ Sturm und Drang, it seems as if Silverstolpe found inspiration in Haydn’s songs. Thus, at least for smaller ensembles, Silverstolpe’s works make a remarkably anachronistic impression compared with the music of other contemporary Swedish composers such as Adolf Fredrik Lindblad or Geijer. Perhaps, as one historian writes, Silverstolpe’s songs can be most valued if listened to as ‘musical memoirs’.

Literary works

From a contemporary perspective, however, it is not his compositions that raise Silverstolpe to a place in music history, but his articles and writings. Above all, it is his analysis of Kraus’ mighty Aeneas i Carthago that deserves international recognition. Like a kind of opera semiotics avant la lettre, Silverstolpe’s analysis unites Gluck’s reformist thinking with a rational systematisation worthy of a man of letters.. This does not exclude recognition of the supernatural deities who in physical stature actively interact with the mortal protagonists of Kraus’ version of Vergil’s epic (the libretto was written by Johan Henric Kellgren), a dramatic move that according to Silverstolpe shows how the morally good can manifest itself as an ideal in the merely possible. It is also in light of this ethical-aesthetic tenet that we can understand Silverstolpe’s detailed account of how Kraus ‘with the finest of strokes describes the mixture of Dido’s affections with her present intentions and [how Kraus] has set the dialogue in a tone that immediately answers the natural of the former and the surmised of the latter’.

Ulrik Volgsten © 2015
Trans. Thalia Thunander