Oil painting by Carl Larsson, 1905. (Kungl. Musikaliska akademien).

Life

Early years and studies

Emil Sjögren’s childhood was a mixture of insecurity and security. He was born out of wedlock in Stockholm in the summer of 1853 and placed in a foster home. Five years later his father opened his own linen goods merchants in Stockholm’s old town, giving him the stability he needed to marry Emil’s mother and unite the family. Five years later, his father was involved in a fatal accident, leaving his wife Christina to support herself, Emil and his half-brother Gösta on the income she earned running a little boarding house in Stockholm. It remained her home until she died in 1895, and was Emil Sjögren’s residence for just as long.

Emil was a sickly child but was said to have been inventive and ‘quite mischievous’. He did not excel at school but was a voracious reader at home, particularly of a weighty tome titled Illustrerad världshistoria (An illustrated world history) by Friedrich Wilhelm Held and Otto von Corvin, who took a politically radical stance on the topic. The family had no particular musical tradition, but musical director and businessman Ludvig Ohlson discovered Emil’s gifts, possibly via Abraham Mankell, Emil’s music teacher in Nya elementarskolan (the New Elementary School) and Ohlson’s organist colleague in Klara Church. Emil left school at the age of 16 and enrolled at the conservatory. A year later, he took a job in Ludvig Ohlson’s and Isidor Dannström’s piano shop tuning pianos and the like. He continued as a ‘semi-businessman’ for several years, but the commercial world was to prove not for him.

Of Emil Sjögren’s teachers at the conservatory, organist Gustaf Mankell and pianist Hilda Thegerström, were particularly important and they both regarded him fondly. Mankell noted in his final grade that his talented pupil had ‘a very delightful gift’ for improvising preludes. Outside the classroom, there were two prominent composers that served as mentors for Sjögren: Ludvig Norman and August Söderman. He looked up to Norman, who had taken an interest in his artistic development, and assisted Söderman, who during his final years gave Sjögren advice on compositional matters.

It was while he was studying that Sjögren took his first independent steps as a composer. His first songs (1871−73) he entered into a little black notebook − now kept at Musik- och teaterbiblioteket (the Music and Theatre Library of Sweden) − as he slowly but surely honed his own individual style.

Emil Sjögren in his youth. (Musikverket).

Two fellow conservatory students of Emil Sjögren’s became his close friends: singer Johannes Elmblad and pianist Richard Andersson, both of whom were extremely talented and on the threshold of remarkable careers, Elmblad as an opera singer and director, Andersson as a pianist and music teacher in Stockholm. Sjögren was also a ‘regular guest’ at the parties arranged by the students of Konstakademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts) and acted as their musician, both playing and composing. He became acquainted with many of the young Swedish artists of the time, one of whom was Carl Larsson, who painted his portrait and eventually included him in his memoires.

Compositional debut

1876 saw the publication of Sjögren’s op. 1, Fyra dikter (Four poems), which set to music poems by Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. While these two Norwegian writers were very much in vogue in Sweden, his choice might also have been influenced by August Söderman, who knew Ibsen and had published two collections of Bjørnson compositions. These works gave Sjögren a certain reputation as a song composer. Soon, however, he would move on to a language that would mean much more for him: Danish. In 1879 he won Konstmusikaliska föreningen’s (the Swedish Art Music Society’s) annual composers’ competition with his op. 3, seven songs to poems from Holger Drachmann’s Tannhäuser romance. A large collection of other songs set to Danish lyrics then ensued, including poems by Ernst von der Recke, J.P. Jacobsen and, much later, the Swedish-Danish author Helena Nyblom, who had been a friend of Sjögren’s since back in the 1870s.

Sjögren was on good terms with Stockholm’s culturally interested families, who admired the fresh, inspired aspects of his music. But there were some who also felt that his great compositional talents were not matched by his technical acumen. With the financial backing of his employers in the piano shop, Ludvig Ohlson and Isidor Dannström, he travelled to Berlin in 1879 to spend an academic year there studying for composer Friedrich Kiel and organist Karl August Haupt. With the former he was trained in using counterpoint as a mode of expression in contemporary music, while his time with the latter turned him into a proficient organist.

The Tannhäuser songs op. 3 put him in touch with the Danish music publisher Henrik Hennings, who invited him to stay with him in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1883 at the same time as he took part in a Nordic composers’ competition for piano works. Sjögren won the competition with his Erotikon suite. In Copenhagen, he fell in with a group of young Danish authors and musicians, amongst them Holger Drachmann and composer Peter Erasmus Lange-Müller, who would remain one of Sjögren’s closest friends for many years.

The big trip, 1883−85

Private benefactors and public scholarships made it possible for Sjögren to take a two-year European tour with Lange-Müller, with long sojourns in Vienna, Merano, Munich and Paris. In Vienna, he studied instrumentation, probably to broaden his skills and become a qualified orchestral composer, something that Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music), which had granted him the scholarship, probably expected of him. In all other respects, the trip was about gaining inspiration and working. It seems his most productive time was spent in the Alpine idyll of Merano, where his songs and piano pieces were conceived.

Emil Sjögren and Tor Aulin. Together they debuted Sjögren's violin sonata no. 2 in Copenhagen 1888. (Musikverket).

Throughout the trip, he worked on his first violin sonata, and as a result of the connections he had made with music publishers during a brief stay in Leipzig in the winter of 1885, it was published by Peters on completion. In the autumn of 1885, Sjögren travelled on an extended stipend back to Berlin, where he made the acquaintance of the young violinist Tor Aulin, who gave him technique advice for his sonata. In the following spring, Sjögren fell seriously ill and returned home, but not before his violin sonata was premiered in Stockholm by the French violinist Emile Sauret, Aulin’s tutor, and the German pianist Felix Dreyschock in February. The piece was lauded by the press, especially the slow movement. 

Stockholm 1886−1900

Emil Sjögren became the organist at the French Reformed Church in 1881, which gave him a modest income as a musician. He resigned from his job at the piano shop two years later, although he continued to tune pianos for the firm. When Richard Andersson’s piano school opened in 1886, he added teaching to his livelihood. He taught composition, music theory and organ there for two years, but by all contemporary accounts he did not excel at the post. One of his students was the then 17-year old Wilhelm Stenhammar, who went on to succeed Sjögren on the organ stool of the French Reformed Church. In 1891, Sjögren finally received an important musical appointment as organist of the newly built St John’s Church in Stockholm. He had written a cantata to mark its opening in 1890, which was warmly received and which can still be regarded as one of the best of the genre. He would remain in the service of the St John's Church for the rest of his life, and his improvisations on the organ during services and devotions became so celebrated that they would attract large crowds of the musically interested. Fifty years later, the organist-trained critic Karl Berggren recalled how he had heard one of Sjögren’s improvisations in the early 1900s, a ten-minute or so long postlude: ‘Never since have I had such a powerful […] experience of the significance of sacred music during the celebration of the mass’.

St John's Church in Stockholm where Sjögren was hired as an organist in 1891; a position he would keep for the rest of his life. (Photo: Åsa Chew Nilsson).

Sjögren continued to write songs and piano pieces in the late 1880s, producing what would be his most famous work: the violin sonata no. 2 in E minor. Again, Tor Aulin helped him with his expert knowledge of the instrument, and performed the sonata in the summer of 1888 at its premiere at the first Nordic music festival in Copenhagen with the composer at the piano. Amongst the many admirers of the work was one Edvard Grieg, who, having already been interested in his music for some time, now became acquainted with Sjögren.

Sjögren had not made a success of orchestral composing, despite his attempts in the genre with his two works for male choir and orchestra from the 1880s, Bacchanal and Islandsfärd, and the shorter orchestral piece Festspel from 1892. None of these three works is central to his oeuvre. Notwithstanding this lack of orchestral music, the 1890s was a time in which Sjögren became established as a leading figure in Swedish music composition. He was often dubbed a ‘genius’ by the papers and not uncommonly ‘our leading tone poet’. The new opera house, which was inaugurated in 1897, contains a mural depicting muses holding a music book of Sjögren’s songs − the only reference in the building’s main artworks to a contemporary composer. He was approached by authors such as August Strindberg and Verner von Heidenstam with an invitation to collaborate, and was considered by their colleague Hjalmar Söderberg as a maestro.

Despite this prestigious place in public life, the 1890s was a troubled time for Sjögren. The severe psoriasis that had tormented him since his youth required costly treatment and was possibly one of the root causes of his other disease: alcoholism. To make matters worse, his mother died in an accident in 1895, suddenly depriving him of the rock that she and their home had been for him. He had had several complicated relationships with married women, and now met Berta Dahlman, whom he married in December 1897. She helped him recover and arranged his life for him, so that he gradually regained enough courage and health to resume his work composing, which he had neglected for some years. Besides being a wife, Berta became Sjögren’s de facto manager.

Paris and Sweden, 1901−18

Berta Sjögren, who was a Francophile, arranged a trip to Paris in 1901, where a concert of her husband’s works was arranged in Salle Pleyel, one of the city’s larger, more famous concert halls. There, Sjögren’s new, third violin sonata was played by one of the 20^th century’s leading violinists, Jacques Thibaud. This was the start of the greatest promotional drive that had ever been made of a Swedish composer abroad and that was supported by numerous musicians who, like Thibaud, performed for free. Up until the outbreak of war in 1914, the Sjögrens visited Paris almost every year, and the concerts devoted exclusively to his works were many − usually modestly staged, on the odd occasion they were extravagant affairs, like the one in Salle Gaveau in 1908, at which Alexandre Guilmant premiered his Prelude and fugue op. 48. Sjögren’s collaboration with another luminary, violinist George Enescu, is particularly noteworthy. The years around 1910 were the busiest for Sjögren as he endeavoured, successfully, to make an impact with his piano works and violin sonatas on French musicians. His music was also positively received in Germany and England.

While the French Sjögren concerts were being performed, the composer held a great many similar concerts on tours of the towns and villages of Sweden.

In 1910, the couple bought a house by a lake in Knivsta, a few miles south of Uppsala, after having lived in rented accommodation to the south-west of Stockholm in Tumba and near Södertälje. This tranquil abode became their base, where they received visiting musicians and friends, and where Sjögren composed his final works, including the fifth violin sonata, the cello sonata and the Chinese songs.

Emil Sjögren had always been of fragile health, and in 1918 he died of a heart and lung-related disease. In memory of the composer, his good friend Hugo Alfvén wrote his Elegie (Vid Emil Sjögrens bår), the introduction of which is a deft orchestration of Sjögren’s song ‘Saa stansed og dér den Blodets Strøm’.

Emil and Berta Sjögren 1910 in Paris. The couple married in 1898. Berta outlived her husband by nearly fifty years and died in 1967. (Musikverket).

Works

Songs

The solo song is the genre with which Sjögren was most associated during his lifetime. He represented something new here; the musical structure was given much greater freedom relative to the recitation of the text, the piano line was made more tonally rich, and the treatment of dissonance was arguably bolder than in any previous Swedish music. While such traits can be found in many of his works, other songs are simpler in style.

Even in his early collections Sjögren had accomplished important and independent songs, such as the Norwegian songs in op. 1, the music he set to poems from Danish author Holger Drachmann’s novel Tannhäuser op. 3, the seven Spanish songs op. 6 and the songs in op. 12 to poem’s from Julius Wolff’s German verse version of Tannhäuser − today his most sung works. Also of note amongst his early songs is ‘Bergmanden’ to a text by Henrik Ibsen in op. 2, written for his friend Johannes Elmblad.

A significant source of inspiration for Sjögren was Danish poetry, as attested by his compositions to Danish texts, including poems by Ernst von der Recke in op. 11 and 13, and by J.P. Jacobsen − a bardic favourite of Sjögren’s − in op. 22, in which the composer exercises the greatest freedoms with respect to letting tone, harmony and musical gestures express the substance of the text. Of particular note in this regard is ‘Saa standsed og dér den Blodets Strøm’ and ‘Lad Vaaren komme, mens den vil’.

His songs contain many examples of Sjögren’s penchant for the exotic:  ‘I seraljens lustgård’ in op. 22, ‘Molnet’ to lyrics by Verner von Heidenstams, much admired in its day, and later, the three songs to Hans Bethge’s translations of Li-Tai-Po: ‘Wenn nur ein Traum das Dasein ist’, ‘Die geheimnisvolle Flöte’ and ‘Die Treppe im Mondlicht’. With these later works, we are into Sjögren’s 20^th century production, which also includes two collections: Kärlekssånger op. 50 to words by Jane Gernandt-Claine and five poems by Helena Nyblom op. 63.

Sjögren’s rich catalogue of vocal music contains songs that, while unmentioned here and unavailable as recordings, are well worth singers re-acquainting themselves with.

Chamber music

The five violin sonatas, which were written during a period of thirty years, belong, like the songs, to Sjögren’s most important works. Here, too, he breathed fresh life into Swedish music creation, partly because the genre was almost non-existent in Sweden when he first ventured into it, but also because the sonata form allowed him to inject the same personal tonal idiom, with its emotional and lyrical dialect, as he used in his songs. He had a pattern to follow in Grieg’s violin sonatas, which along with Sjögren’s two first, were described by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger as ‘bunches of melodious songs without words’ that could be considered as much suites as sonatas. Sjögren’s sonatas have since been criticised for their lack of thematic development − and not without justification, as their strength generally lies less in their thematic development than in their melodic and harmonic flow and expressiveness.

The first two sonatas are clearly related to each other and to the Nordic tradition, and earned him a solid reputation from the outset, especially the second E minor sonata, which in many situations became ‘E-moll Sjögren’s’ flagship piece (moll being Swedish for minor). There is more coherency here than in its forerunner, both in the form of a framing motif that ends the first and last movements, and in its inherent motivic kinship.

The third sonata came after an interval of over ten years, the most critical period of Sjögren’s life. It was less like Nordic music than the earlier two, with an introduction that calls to mind both Brahms and contemporary French music. The fact that it is somewhat less uniform than sonata no. 2 was noted by the critics even at its premiere.

The new line Sjögren was taking became even more manifest in the fourth sonata, which is dominated by ‘figurations, arabesques and light, smooth movements’ as music historian Bo Wallner wrote. The fifth sonata, dedicated to George Enescu and performed by him and Sjögren at its premiere, is something of a synthesis of the early and late sonatas. In these two last sonatas, Sjögren left the ‘bunch of melodious songs without words’ model and approached a more integrated sonata form.

Besides the sonatas, Sjögren also wrote a number of freestanding pieces for violin and piano, many of which are of the same artistic substance as the sonatas. Of note amongst them is Poème, commissioned by Jacques Thibaud.

Sjögren wrote just one work for a solo instrument other than violin, namely the sonata for cello and piano op. 58, one of the most important Swedish works for this coupling, and composed in the same style as the late violin sonatas.

Piano music

Sjögren composed countless collections of character pieces for piano in the 1880s and 90s, the first of them, Erotikon op. 10, being one of his most important and most widely played. He also made something of an impression with his suite På vandring, inspired by the Alpine landscape around Merano.

New character pieces appeared in the 20^th century along with works in other genres: two piano sonatas op. 35 and 44, two sets of variations (op. 48 and 64) and the prelude and fugue op. 39. These genres, like the violin sonatas, were more or less untapped in pre-Sjögren Sweden.

Sjögren was an innovative force in piano music too. He used more of the keyboard than his piano-composer predecessors and contemporaries, and constructed specific sound effects. Musicologist Sven E. Svensson even goes as far as to write that ‘few of the great piano masters have managed to extract such fullness of consonance from the piano strings as Sjögren’.

Emil Sjögren at his piano. (SVT).

Organ music

His output here, although not very voluminous, is significant nonetheless. It contains three sets of prelude and fugue, the first, in G minor, having been composed during his studies for Friderich Kiel in Berlin (1879−80). The second, in A minor, was premiered by organ maestro Alexandre Guilmant in Paris in 1907 and the third, in C major, had an incomplete fugue that was completed by three different organists (see list of works below). While the G minor fugue is conventional in style, the later works take a rather liberal approach to the form. Sjögren also composed Legender, a much-played collection of 24 short, atmospheric organ pieces in all keys.

Larger format works

Even if Emil Sjögren never managed to realise large works such as the planned opera ‘Galjonsbilden’ or the piano concerto (which he started), there are works in his oeuvre that are, in one way or other, slightly grander in format. These include the relatively early works for male choir and orchestra, Bacchanal and Islandsfärd, and Kantat vid invigningen av S:t Johannes kyrka for soloists, choir and organ, from 1890. One orchestral piece, Festspel (1892), has also been preserved, albeit not in its original score. The work exists only as an arrangement for piano duet with instrumentational notes, and in a slightly revised orchestral arrangement by violinist Axel Bergström.

Reception

Opinions of Emil Sjögren’s over the years follow a trajectory that is perhaps more dramatic than it was for many other Swedish composers. In the early 1900s he was the most performed Swedish composer, and was often received enthusiastically and described superlatively. Peterson-Berger, for instance, wrote that ‘his lyricism is the most intense I can imagine…’ and the praises sung by Karl Berggren already quoted. The image of him as a ‘genius’ and as a leading figure in Swedish music applied not only in Sweden but abroad as well.

After Sjögren’s death, a great deal happened in Sweden that drew attention away from his works, and several factors conspired to make them gradually disappear from the public ear, despite Berta Sjögren’s tireless efforts to keep his music alive. The brutalities of the First World War had stifled interest in romantic dreams and moods, and even though to modern minds his music might not confine itself to this, it was regarded by many after the war as harking back to a bygone time. As already noted, he had written no purely orchestral works, which had been a critical point already during his life and was certainly seen as yet another shortcoming in the era of the newly formed Swedish symphony orchestras. The lack of the kind of thematic development in the Beethoven, Brahms and Sibelius tradition was another black mark against his music. What was perhaps his main genre, the lieder, had declined in importance, while the choral scene, which was blossoming in a new popular movement in Sweden, found none of the delightful a cappella pieces in Sjögren that it was able to in many of his younger colleagues. His organ music also fell into oblivion for similar reasons when the anti-romantic organ movement started to dominate sacred music.

All this meant that while Sjögren’s music was generally respected during the 1930s, 40s and 50s − especially his songs − it was given few occasions to resound in the concert halls. Things changed towards the end of the century, when romanticism shed its once low status, and thanks to the new generation of musicians the expressive power in music such as Sjögren’s could once again do itself justice. His violin sonatas, organ and piano pieces and some of his songs are now available as high-quality recordings, which has made Sjögren relevant again and well-received. This said, his music remains an under-exploited resource: in professional concert performances it could make more of an impact on the Swedish music scene. This applies not only to the well-known works but also to the forgotten ones, and perhaps above all ­­− to his songs.

Anders Edling © 2013
Trans. Neil Betteridge