Life

Jacob Bernhard Struve was the first child of pharmacist Frans Ulrik Struve, who was of German descent, and Anna Elisabeth, née Hassenbalk.

Struve arrived at Uppsala University as a preparatory student in 1779, becoming matriculated in 1781. He graduated pro exercitio in 1785 and pro gradu in 1788, both times with botanical dissertations. Struve continued his natural science researches at Kiel University, Germany, from 1791, originally hoping to become a doctor of medicine but switching on the advice of his professor to doctor historiae naturalis, a degree that did not exist in Sweden at the time.

In the early 1790s, Struve studied harmony, composition and counterpoint, first for Adalbert Gyrowetz in Vienna, and then, according to contemporary sources, for a number of unidentified teachers in Paris and England. After 1795, it seems as if he put aside his scientific endeavours to work on some major compositional commissions, one of which was the instrumental interludes to the coronation music for King Gustaf IV Adolf in 1800, for which Johann Christian Friedrich Haeffner wrote the vocal and choral movements.

In 1797 Struve was voted unanimously into the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of Music), and in 1805 was appointed first the supervisor, then director of its singing school. There is, however, no evidence for the claim made repeatedly in the modern literature that he served as the president of the academy from 1805 to 1811. His service in the singing school and his occasional appearance as deputy piano teacher overlapped with the sometimes extensive private tuition he gave in several musical disciplines. A memoir in the twice-weekly Stockholm journal Kometen from 1826 claims that he was approached privately by a great many pupils, and often put ten hours’ work a day into these commitments alongside his own compositional efforts and performing. In 1818 Struve applied for the post of permanent teacher in the piano and organ class, which, however, went by ballot to Thomas Byström. When a combination of political factors led to a nadir in the activity of the academy in 1810, Struve moved to Norrköping to take up the position of organist in its German Church. He returned to Stockholm in 1817, where he remained until his death in 1826 as an active part of the city’s music scene, most notably as a member of the Harmoniska sällskapet (the Harmonic Society), which was formed in 1820. He died on 27 July and was buried at Maria Magdalena Church on 9 August.  

To the Harmoniska sällskapet, Struve left his piano, his music library and a cash sum of a thousand riksdaler. The society subsequently made over these bequests in 1865 to the Kungliga Musikaliska akademien, by which time the sum had accrued a significant amount of interest.

On several occasions, Struve strove to emulate the ways of earlier generations and either paid, or declined a salary, to gain a position, from which it may be inferred that he had both a pre-Gustavian understanding of the concept of office and a relatively solid financial position. In the instance of his application to the post of piano teacher at the academy in 1818, voices of protest were raised against his offer to cede part of his salary to the former incumbent’s widow, while he more successfully gained the position of organist in Norrköping with a personal contribution of a thousand riksdaler and his own salaried assistant, against the promise of 6 per cent annual interest on the same sum.

Works

On the whole, Struve’s comic operas, many of which are  compilations of new compositions and recycled passages from the existing repertoire and popular melodies, display a breadth of compositional and stylistic types, often put to original use. Some arias and ensembles achieved a degree of popularity through chamber music concerts and in the salon culture of and after his day. By and large they share many of the characteristics of contemporary German Singspiel, in contrast to the otherwise French operetta that dominated the Stockholm scenes during Edouard Du Puy’s second term as hovkapellmästare (chief conductor of the Royal Court Orchestra).

Notable amongst his comic operas is Den ondsinta hustrun, which is based on a play by Charles-Guillaume Étiennes and which was staged on more than ninety occasions at the Kungliga Operan (the Royal Opera) in Stockholm, even after the composer’s death. In the final scene, the discord between husband and wife is described with lecture-like thoroughness in terms of tempo and sound, with instructions that go far beyond the notation (for example, ‘Carolina sings and sets a moderate pace’), which also provides illuminating insight into performance practice and characterisation in the idiosyncratic comic opera genre. Struve was considered by his contemporaries to be ‘nigh on the only native Swede to compose for the theatre’.

The genesis of Struve’s symphonic oeuvre is generally less well-established than his works for the stage. The Symphony in E-flat major has been described by Stig Walin as a juvenile piece, the score and parts Walin based this upon having been probably destroyed by a fire in the offices of the Musikaliska sällskapet (the Music Society) in Norrköping town hall as late as 1943. An overture in C minor must qualify as one of Struve’s more original and interesting orchestral works and is in several respects more symphonically structured and arranged than the first movement of his E-flat major symphony. One question of particular interest is the early idiomatic use of trombones in the orchestral part. The overtures to some of his comic operas are also worthy of performance as freestanding orchestral pieces.

Struve also wrote a number of chamber works, presumably intending them for performance by the Harmoniska sällskapet. The piano quartet in F minor was once attributed to Joachim Nicolas Eggert, but there is no doubt that it was composed by Struve. The string quartets evince a wit and wherewithal that far transcend the merely competent aptitude so prevalent in the quartets of the time.

Struve’s piano pieces, as well as a couple of solo songs, reaped much success and were published by Müller’s in Stockholm and Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig. A piano arrangement of the song ‘Vila vid denna källa’ was previously attributed on rather shaky grounds to Joseph Martin Kraus, but it too, judging by the style and material evidence of the source , is also by Struve.

Struve’s works for choir and orchestra include the choral cantata ‘Jorden full af Herrans ära’ and the grand Missa pro defunctis, possibly the earliest verified setting of such a Habsburgian mass by a Lutheran. The work had been completed and scored by Struve himself by the time of his death, aside from the final movement, which was added later by A.J. Grundén, albeit after a finished concept by Struve. The claim that Grundén or Erik Drake completed the work after Struve’s death is wrong. The arrangement and structure of the monothematic opening movement share certain similarities with the similarly monothematic first movement of Antonín Rejcha’s requiem, with which Struve was probably familiar. However, the thematic treatment and the compositional technique are completely independent in relation to other conceivable exemplars. In the movements of the Dies irae sequence, Rex tremendae strikes the ear by virtue of its clearly separated harmonic and compositional layers; the quasi-chorale in F major of the solo vocalists stand in sharp relief against the stretto sections of an F minor theme in tutti, which can also be interpreted as a Lutheran statement in what is otherwise a highly unusual Protestant work.

The newspaper Stockholms-Posten’s review of Struve’s requiem calls the piece ‘effective without striving for effect’ and emphasises the uniqueness of such a composition for Sweden. Piano arrangements of selected passages compiled by Drake were published by Scheele in 1826, a remarkable specimen in the flora of piano reductions that was otherwise chiefly based on popular arias, duets and overtures. Selected parts of the Requiem were performed at Struve’s funeral at the expense and by the practical arrangement of the Harmoniska sällskapet, the members of which adulated Struve ‘for the sake of his pure harmonies’, which at this time in Sweden is a common reference to contrapuntal aptitude and refinement.

Struve’s legacy

Struve was one of few Swedish-born composers to have his music regularly performed the length and breadth of the country. His comic operas and chamber music were performed in dozens of Swedish cities and towns besides Stockholm, and interest in his music was uncommonly abiding, as the reprinting of certain piano pieces far into the 1900s testifies. Alongside his pedagogical activities, he also seems to have composed in all his phases of life, and could, according to Johan Olof Wallin’s funeral oration ‘follow, untroubled and temperately, the rapture of his emotions, which alone determined his call at the time, and this became his passion and his life’. This is not to say that Struve was wealthy or able to live off his work as a composer, only that unlike many successful composers of his time he was able to devote most of his time to music, in one form or other.

Struve’s disappearance from the music scene and from the academic radar during the 20^th century is hard to explain given the high esteem in which his music was held during much of the 19^th. One reason might be that for many years the sources of his works remained unclear. Important research in this respect was done by Wilhelm Bauck in the 1860s and by Susanne Haglund and Anna Lena Holm in the 1990s.

Mattias Lundberg © 2015
Trans. Neil Betteridge