I listened again to the Symphony No. 6 by Allan Pettersson last night and again I am struck by the depth and seriousness of this music. I don't have the score so I can't embark on a real study of it, but here, from the liner notes, is a bit of the opening:
Sorry for the fuzziness: the original was really tiny. As I was listening, a comparison came to mind. This piece reminds me of a great Japanese film trilogy, The Human Condition, directed by Masaki Kobayashi. There is great human suffering, but, perhaps more in the symphony than the films, this suffering is balanced by great beauty. The beginning is ominous and gloomy:
And the tension grows and grows:
Sadly, the third part does not seem to be on YouTube and it has some of the most beautiful music. But here is the fourth and last part, which also has some beautiful sections:
What came to mind as the symphony ended was the thought: there is always suffering and there is always beauty.
Now that I have worked my way through the last of the Pettersson symphonies, I can make some further comments. These are challenging and troubling works. There were times, such as forty or fifty minutes into the Symphony No. 13, when I was ready to give up on a piece. And then a passage of warm humanity broke through the suffering and seemed to redeem it all.
Sometimes you want to say that there has never been a clearer case of OCD in music. There are certainly obsessive qualities in the music: the compulsive hammering on a single rhythm, the seeming inability to stop the music from constantly hastening to the next climax. The sudden quiet, followed by more compulsive ranting. At times one feels that one is experiencing a mental disorder.
The piece that I feel might be the real historical precedent for Pettersson's way of composing is Schoenberg's equally troubling Erwartung, composed in 1909:
A symphony by Pettersson is akin to a stream-of-consciousness novel by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. There are few traditional structural elements, which, paradoxically, makes the music perhaps more modernist than the music of some of the more well-known figures in modernism. I had always thought that Erwartung was an experiment in athematic stream-of-consciousness that had no heirs, not even in the music of Schoenberg himself. But I think that Pettersson, perhaps without realizing it, was proceeding on a similar path.
The phrases "stormy weather" and "lyrical islands" are used quite a number of times by the writer of the liner notes to the complete recordings, Andreas K. W. Meyer, and they seem appropriate. Pettersson, while exploring a wealth of atmospheric effects, often seems to create a dichotomy between a stormy mood and a lyrical one.
With one exception, I found all the symphonies both listenable and fascinating. The exception being the Symphony No. 12, "The Death of the Square", a choral symphony based on texts by Pablo Neruda. This is a frankly political work inspired by the events in Chile around the time of its composition. I don't believe Pettersson, on the evidence of this piece, to be a good composer for choir and I think it was a mistake to venture into the political field when all the rest of his work repudiates the whole notion of politics in music.
But the rest of the symphonies, while demanding and often grueling to listen to, do fascinate and have an uncompromising approach to music that is to be admired. The central group of works, nos. 5 through 9, written in the decade of the sixties, are probably the most accessible. The Symphony No. 9 will likely strain your powers of concentration with its single movement, seventy minute span. But in many ways it is the best of his symphonies with both powerful expression and the sense that it has a real coherence to it. The ending has a long, powerful unison passage for the strings ending with what I swear sounds like a plagal cadence!
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a clip of it on YouTube. But there is still a box of the symphonies available from Amazon:
We can find the Symphony No. 8, atypically in two movements, in one of the few commercial recordings of Pettersson's work, with Sergiu Comissiona conducting the Baltimore Symphony. Here is the first movement:
Last night I continued my odyssey through the symphonies of Pettersson with nos. 6, 7 and 8. This is very serious music indeed that makes you think long thoughts about the fragility of life. In the liner notes to the Symphony No. 8, there is discussion of the tendency in Pettersson of "not-wanting-to-stop". The observation is made that Thomas Mann said the same thing about his long novel The Magic Mountain. It grew from a short story because he was unable to stop. There is sometimes this feeling in Pettersson as the conductor Thomas Sanderling remarks. Perhaps we might make the comparison with the Symphony No. 9 of Schubert and its "heavenly length" as noted by Schumann (who also found it difficult to stop sometimes). There is a reluctance to come to an end because that means returning to the world of non-music, the real world.
Pettersson's music is in this way existential, not in the sense of implying that existence is meaningless, but in the sense that equates life with music in an absolute way (I am paraphrasing another remark of Thomas Sanderling). This music is a profound meditation on existence and as such, it is unlike other music.
Pettersson's life is exactly the same span as Shostakovich's, but five years later: 1911 to 1980 instead of 1906 to 1975. They were both plagued by ill health. They both suffered, but in different ways. Shostakovich lived on the edge of a precipice, never knowing from one day to the next if Stalin would give orders for him to disappear as happened to so many of his friends. But Pettersson had the equally great burden of growing up in poverty with an alcoholic, violent father.
Their music is radically different, remarkably so. Pettersson got a later start and studied with members of the avant-garde in Paris (Milhaud, Messiaen, Leibowitz), while Shostakovich had a more traditional education at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There is more of traditional form in Shostakovich. At this point, it is hard to say much about what is going on in Pettersson's music. It is perhaps too primeval to be called "tonal" but it certainly is not atonal. It is obsessive in its concentration on certain pitches and motifs. It is captivating in its emotional power. Perhaps this music even has a moral force; Pettersson certainly thought so.
Let's end by putting two symphonies side by side. First, the Symphony No. 5 of Shostakovich, composed in 1937 when he was thirty-one years old:
That is certainly a very serious piece of music, even though it was written in an attempt to stave off criticism. Now let's listen to the Symphony No. 8 of Pettersson. There are two parts, the first about 20 minutes and the second about twenty six or seven minutes.
The symphony was written in 1969 when Pettersson was fifty-eight years old.
Can you guess the author of that quote? This was said by the composer Allan Pettersson, who, since his death in 1980, has been more and more recognized as perhaps the most important Swedish composer of the 20th century. Here is the Wikipedia article and here is the website of the Allan Pettersson Society, formed in 2002. June 20 will be the 34th anniversary of his death.
There is a box set of CDs available of all his symphonies issued by the German company CPO. I would hurry to place your order as Amazon says there is only one copy left! I wonder how many copies are sold a year, worldwide? Ten, twenty? In any case, I just received my copy yesterday and last night I listened to symphonies 2 through 5. The Symphony No. 1 is incomplete and the composer forbade performances during his lifetime. He completed symphonies 2 through 16.
I am certainly going to write more about the symphonies of Allan Pettersson, but I thought I would just share my first impressions. The only one I have heard previously is the Symphony No. 7, the one that first caught the public's attention after its premiere in October, 1968. I blogged about that here.
What stands out on first listening? Most importantly, these pieces make you want to listen and go back to listen again. They are certainly uncompromising music, but music that is not off-putting, but rather that draws you in. I am impressed by the freedom and originality. For example, the Symphony No. 2 begins quietly, with a repeated B in the low strings. Gradually a mordent figure is introduced, first on E, then on C. How do I know this? Well, I could certainly have figured it out, even though I don't have perfect pitch, but I didn't have to because, miracle of miracles, there are excellent liner notes in three languages that include not only a timeline of the life and works of Pettersson, but also, most exceptionally, musical examples!! Like this:
You don't see that much any more. Here is the first part of the Symphony No. 2 (it is not divided into conventional movements):
This is about a third of the symphony, which is some 45 minutes in length, one big movement in six sections. The liner note writer uses two metaphors to describe Pettersson's music: one is "stormy weather". I suppose this is akin to the description of some of Haydn's work as being "sturm und drang" ("storm and stress"). The reference is to somewhat agonized, passionate music. Another metaphor is "lyrical islands" that are passages of great tranquillity. One thing that makes the music so listenable is that he seems to strike the right balance between these two extremes: never too much stormy weather, nor too much lyrical island.
Another thing that struck me was the subtlety of his endings. As you might have noticed from my discussion of the Sibelius symphonies, endings fascinate me. How, in this post-tonal wilderness, do you end a piece? Pettersson has some interesting solutions including, a long diminuendo to nothingness, which is far rarer in symphonies than you would think.
That quote I used for my title? Here is the whole context:
"I wasn't born under a piano, I didn't spend my childhood with my father, the composer... no, I learnt how to work white-hot iron with the smith's hammer. My father was a smith who may have said no to God, but not to alcohol. My mother was a pious woman who sang and played with her four children."
Pettersson had a very hard life, first in the difficult circumstances in which he was born and second because of the precarious state of his health for the latter part of his life. He captured this in symphonies of strikingly powerful expression. Here is the first part of the Symphony No. 3 that begins with a bass drum roll and a jagged theme in the cellos:
UPDATE: I just ran across a more detailed biography on the website of the his publisher, Gehrmans Musikförlag.
This is a quote from the Swedish composer Alan Pettersson (1911 - 1980) which continues as follows:
"I am not a composer. I am a voice crying out, (something that should not be forgotten) that threatens to drown in the noise of the times."
I am amazed to have to say that I only recently stumbled across this composer. Despite having studied with some of the members of the post-WWII avant-garde in Paris such as Honegger, Milhaud and Leibowitz, in the early 1950s and achieving his first successes with commissions and state support in the 1960s culminating in the resounding success of the premier of his Symphony No. 7 in 1968, he has been little-known outside Scandinavia. One reason was that that very concert was the last he was able to attend due to very poor health. When he says "I am not a composer" we might understand that he simply does not participate in all those professional career-building things that composers 'have' to do if they are to be 'successful'. So much the worse for professionalism.
Pettersson had a hard life--his father beat him for buying a violin when he was twelve! But despite everything being against him and having no advantages, neither connections nor money, and further, despite making a late start, he became a composer in the real sense of the word: someone who writes music of power and depth as opposed to someone who is clever at getting commissions and premieres.
I don't have a great deal to say as I am just discovering him myself. But have a listen to his 7th Symphony and see what you think. I don't have much difficulty putting him beside Sibelius and Shostakovich as there certainly seems to be a great deal in this music: "a voice crying out" indeed.
