Life

Sven E. Svensson was born into circumstances that precluded formal study, and as a child in Uppsala earned his keep as a restaurant and cinema musician. In 1909 he took up private studies in the violin and harmony for Wilhelm Lundgren, acting director musices at the university. He continued his violin studies between 1917 and 1919 for Peder Møller in Copenhagen, where Svensson also worked as a theatre musical director. In the early 1920s he studied the history of music for Carl-Allan Moberg, who advised him to take self-studies in ‘speculative music theory’. He went on to study composition for Wilhelm Stenhammar in the mid-1920s and orchestral conducting for Ernst Kunwald in the 1930s – on two separate occasions (1932 in Berlin and 1937 in Wien).

Svensson precociously put his phenomenal capacity for work into composition and conducting on the one hand, and the theory and systematics of music on the other, this latter in a manner unprecedented in the Nordic countries at the time.

For many years he sat on the composer’s scholarship board of the Kungl. Musikaliska akademien (Royal Swedish Academy of Music) and was a music critic for Upsala Nya Tidning (1932−41). He was often engaged as an expert by, amongst other bodies, the Svenska musikerförbundet (the Swedish Musicians’ Union), the substantial Military Music Commission at the end of the 1950s and the Svenska ungdomsringen för bygdekultur (the Swedish Folklore Association) as a judge at the Zornmärkesuppspelningar folk music contest.

Svensson was made an honorary doctor at Uppsala University in 1945 and a Knight of the Order of Vasa in 1949. In 1951 he was elected as a member of the Kungl. Musikaliska akademien, which awarded him its Medal for the Promotion of Music in 1959. Svensson declined a position at an American University on grounds of health. He also struggled financially and only managed to clear his debts just before his death.

Svensson was something of a cultural celebrity in Uppsala by virtue of his eccentric manner, and was the model of the ‘Laban från Observatorieparken’ character in Gösta Knutsson’s Pelle Svanslös (Peter No-Tail) stories. Svensson died in 1960 and was buried in Uppsala old cemetery. Musicologist Nils L. Wallin declared that ‘[t]here was about him the same whiff of improbability as certain Thomas Mann archetypes.’

Svensson as conductor, teacher and researcher

As a docent of musicology at Uppsala University, Carl-Allan Moberg had opposed the appointment of director musices Hugo Alfvén as the head of music theory teaching in the subject, preferring the young Svensson, who at the time (1928) was involved in the founding of the Uppsala musikskola (Uppsala School of Music). When, following a bitter recruitment battle, Svensson succeeded Alfvén as director musices in June 1939, he continued his teaching in music theory.

Svensson had already been a vocal advocate back in the 1920s of voluntary music education at Uppsala elementary school (later established) and of the municipal music school, which was eventually founded in 1956. According to elementary school principal Karl Söderberg, Svensson was the single most influential instigator of these schools, his passion for open, advanced music education nationwide no doubt fuelled by his own constraints in this respect as a child.

Svensson was Sweden’s leading 20^th century music theoretician and published writings in both the analytical and systematics field, including acoustics and comparative musicology. His paper on the tonal structure of the Inuit music tradition (1956) was widely discussed by comparative musicologists around the world. The folk music movement engaged him as an expert on the chronicling and cataloguing of collected tunes, which led him into the field of organological research. He published a sizeable portion of editions of the historical Swedish repertoire, including works by Andreas Düben, Johan Helmich Roman and Ferdinand Zellbell the younger. These he performed on radio and at concerts, bringing to the attention of a broader audience the music with which his fellow-musicologists were working.

Both as a music theoretician and a composer, Svensson was heavily influenced by the theories of Hugo Riemann, and was one of only a handful of scholars – at least towards the end of his life – who adhered to the theory of harmonic dualism, in which the minor keys derive from a presumed undertone series that was taken, in mirror image of the sequence of sharp key signature fifths of the overtone series, to progress instead in flat key signatures through descending fifths. For Riemann, it remained a mere hypothesis, but according to an anecdote that thrived amongst his students and colleagues, Svensson claimed to have had an epiphany one night on the streets of Uppsala, in which the undertone series was visited upon him as a genuine sensory experience. This was not, however, the only discovery of Svensson’s to be concocted with a liberal dose of fantasy.

One peculiarity in Svensson’s music theory was the calculation of a so-called ‘fifth tension’ in melodies, phrases and harmonic progressions based on how far round the circle of fifths two tones resided. Here there were similarities with Jacques Handschin’s Der Toncharakter, which was published, however, long after Svensson’s earliest tract on this theory.

Svensson as a composer under his own name

In his youth, Svensson composed chamber music of a certain sophistication, of which the piano trio in F minor from 1925 is the most noteworthy; subsequently, after taking up the office of director musices in Uppsala, orchestral music came to dominate his output, although his two completed string quartets suggest that he never completely abandoned the genre.

Disregarding his music and cantatas for Uppsala University’s conferment ceremonies, there are solo concertos that deserve particular attention. Svensson’s single movement viola concerto is a mature and original work that manifests a keen awareness of (if, perhaps, not an ear for) contemporary aesthetic trends. The 1951 clarinet concerto also presents a completely different tonal idiom than that in the music for academic contexts.

Svensson’s admiration of Max Reger is evident in many of his works as a kind of inner tonal disintegration through tonally derivable principles − a compositional application of Riemann’s harmonic functions. This is also connected with the ‘fifth tension’ theories, in which melodic and harmonic progressions seen, in theory, as relatively independent can be proven to be closely related, lending certain works a modernist sound with a disciplined rigour that penetrates the post-romantic. However, Svensson never approaches the narrow yet dominant strain of Swedish ‘high modernism’ but claimed instead that he could physically-empirically prove the primacy of tonal music.

A neoclassical style can be discerned in some works, such as the Concerto grosso from 1940. His most history-aware compositions have, however, a unique and mysterious genesis.

Compositions as Gustaf Fredrici

Standing out amongst Svensson’s music historical research is the alleged discovery of a Viennese Classical composer of Swedish birth by the name of Gustaf Fredrici. Svensson published several works by Fredrici and analytical articles, and performed his works with various orchestras live and for broadcast on the radio. Fredrici remained a ‘mystery’ to musicologists after Svensson’s death in 1960, even though there is rich circumstantial evidence that Svensson himself had written the works he had ascribed to Fredrici. The reason given by Svensson for the lack of original testimony to his historical personage is that as an illegitimate descendent of the Swedish royal family Fredrici had been given a new identity – hence his absence in the Swedish parish rolls.

Whether Fredrici’s music was the product of an academic jape that went too far, a deliberate work of musicological fraud or simply the product of a delusional mind will never be known. Fredrici should be seen as more of an alter-ego than a pseudonym, one that gave Svensson an outlet for his gift for imitating historical styles. The singular circumstances of its genesis notwithstanding, the music is fascinating and deserves a place in the modern repertoire, if only as a curiosity.

Mattias Lundberg © 2016
trans. Neil Betteridge