Underrated Classical Musicians 2/28/20

Finland had Sibelius, Denmark had Nielsen, Norway had Grieg, Sweden had.... Stenhammer? Berwald? Alfven? 

Finland's great cultural product is music, but Sweden is the land of Bergman and Strindberg, its great cultural products seem to be some hybrid of theater, cinema, and marital dysfunction. It would seem that Sweden's national composer is yet to reveal herself. Some would pull quite vociferously for the name of Allen Pettersson, but I've never quite understood Pettersson's appeal, his music is almost a perfect manifestation of every stereotype casual listeners hold about Mahler - morbid, bombastic, self-absorbed, and rambling.... Perhaps one day I'll better understand the appeal...

But if I, in my not particularly expert opinion, had to propound one musical figure as Sweden's great composer, my immediate thought would be of Kurt Atterberg. He writes so beautifully, with such a diversity of expression, with so much color from instruments and such interesting harmonies, that it can only be from lack of awareness that people don't consider him a front-rank composer. And he produced an enormous output while simultaneously holding a career as an electrical engineer and being secretary of the Swedish Composer's Union. 

Atterberg was yet another composer who wrote nine symphonies, but the one which has always captured my fancy is the sixth, entitled the 'Dollar Symphony" because in 1928, it won an international $10,000 prize from Columbia Records. The prize was handed out to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Schubert's death, the winner was for the score which best re-captured the spirit of Schubert's music. 

An online inflation calculator tells me that $10,000 in 1928 is the rough equivalent to $150,000 in today's currency, so many composers were understandably bitter about Atterberg's good fortune, and Atterberg was accused of writing a symphony in a panderingly conservative style to make his music more palatable to a commercial audience and conservative jury. Later, Atterberg would admit that he wrote the last movement not in the style of Schubert but as a 'parody' of Schubert, but parody, in its way, is often a labor of love. 

Atterberg is the most compelling Swedish composer I've so far discovered. To me, his music exists in some twilight region between Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, Bartok, Respighi, Sibelius and Richard Strauss. He was younger than all six, truly part of the generation of Prokofiev and Hindemith, and his musical language was certainly not as progressive, and while Prokofiev and Hindemith took their cue from Stravinsky and pared down the orchestra to neoclassicism, this is probably the closest Atterberg gets to neoclassical. Atterberg's gods was not Stravinsky and Bartok, his gods were Sibelius and Nielsen. Even his pared down simplicity is lush and full of romantic sehnsucht. But what a beautiful piece of music this is, of a lush type that seemed quite passe by the time he wrote it. But it's now nearly 100 years later, and even if there's something backward-looking about Atterberg's music, the nostalgia he conjures is so vivid as to be experienced through the other senses.