Geirr Tveitt
Rediscovering a Norwegian Master
Last month I witnessed an unusual spectacle at the Bergen Music Festival in Norway. After three or four curtain calls, clapping in unison began and, as if by prearranged signal, everyone stood at once in enthusiastic acknowledgement. The orchestra that did the playing was the visiting Stavanger Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ole Kristian Ruud. The music that did the arousing was a new “reconstruction” of the Julekvelden (Yule Eve) Symphony No. 1 by Geirr Tveitt.
Who?
Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981, rhymes with “fire fight”) is virtually unknown in this country, but the hundredth anniversary of his birth was being celebrated by the concert I attended, and other concerts elsewhere, for good reason. His music, in its stark power, speaks to the overwhelming influence of nature on those living among the deep fjords. His technique, superbly developed at the Leipzig Conservatory and subsequent studies in Paris and Vienna, was second to none of his generation of Norwegian composers. The range of expression found in his Hundred Hardanger Folk Tunes suites, and the instantly recognizable originality of his sound, makes him an artist of international significance.
Why haven’t we heard of him? There are many reasons, not the least of which is that his homeland is on the European cultural periphery. A more significant reason is that he chose to embrace a Romantic ethos and musical nationalism in the face of the rising tide of Modernism.
Remember that Norway only became an independent country in 1905, resulting in a decades-long celebration among artists of all things Norwegian. As a student in Leipzig, Tveitt declared that he would write “orchestral works that refuse to go down on their knees for intellectual fads, throwing themselves freely and playfully like the Norwegian mountain brook from tall cliffs.” His reputation in the 1930s was strong enough for him to receive performances in Paris, and one Norwegian critic described Tveitt in 1935 as “singing like the fresh taps of a summer rainstorm on the canvas roof of an old sailing boat.” But in the postwar period through the 1960s his music had little opportunity for success abroad, where the politics of style favored avant-garde and serialist composition, which dominated the European scene.
Thirty-five years ago, if you had asked certain members of the Norwegian musical establishment about Tveitt’s recognition by posterity, they would have told you the odds of a Tveitt’s centennial being celebrated in such a manner as I experienced were as low as driving coast to coast through this mountainous and rocky country without going through a tunnel (I drove through 58 of them from Oslo to Bergen).
Olav Anton Thommessen, professor of Composition at the Norwegian Academy of Music, recalled Tveitt’s former reputation:
He was really not somebody we knew much about, because he was discredited when I was a student. And although his Hardanger pieces were known, they were seen as just pieces of late Romanticism — we didn’t see how original they were at that time. When I was studying, Modernism was the goal. As a result, we didn’t get into his music at all. There had been a split between internationalists and nationalists, and of course we, the younger people, were internationalists. That faction more or less won the day, and therefore Tveitt was no longer part of the agenda at all. It is only now that we can look back.
And why are so many looking back now? Fashions have changed, fortunately, so that Tveitt’s skills in melodic treatment and orchestral color are no longer viewed as useless buggy whips from an outmoded era. But the main reason for Tveitt’s renaissance is the tireless dedication of his advocates — and a story of loss and destruction that has intrigued many of them into becoming musicological detectives.
Disasters and Festivals
Tveitt had built a dream home and studio on a roadless knoll high above the family farm near Norheimsund, on the Hardanger Fjord, hauling two grand pianos and the unheard-of luxury of plate-glass picture windows by horse. There he practiced (he was a concert pianist), pursued his analyses and reimaginings of many hundreds of folk tunes he had laboriously collected up and down the long fjord, and composed. But in 1960, heavy snow crushed the house, destroying the piano and glass. A greater disaster struck 10 years later, in 1970, when a fire burned the lower farmhouse along with all of Tveitt’s folk-tune notes, and worst of all, a majority of his musical manuscripts, many of which had not been published.
Norheimsund (Tveitt farm in foreground)
Tveitt preferred to keep his music ”close to the vest” at home after performances. As was the case for many composers at the time, his orchestral scores were seldom published formally. After his death, Tveitt’s son Haoko and daughter Gyri encouraged musicians to reexamine scores for performance and recording. In 1990, Haoko himself found the remarkable early score Prillar inside an old paper bag, in a dusty suitcase, in a barn that had escaped the fire. (The title refers to a folk instrument constructed from a goat’s horn and juniper reed.) Tveitt had torn up the score in a fit of despondency over his inability to get it performed under conditions to his liking in 1931. He had discarded it and forgotten where he put it. Much later, in despair, he reported it lost forever to his family and others.
Resurrection I
Those providentially rediscovered fragments of Prillar helped fuel interest in a yearly festival honoring Tveitt’s music in Norheimsund that had been founded about the same time by Haoko and friends. Pasted back together by Nina Hesselberg-Wang, working with Øyvind Norheim, Research Librarian for Music at the National Library of Norway, with the few missing elements recomposed, Prillar at last received its premiere in 1992. The national publicity in turn attracted Norwegian conductors such as Ruud and Bjarte Engeset, among others, who began to champion Tveitt’s music.
Gyri Tveitt and Øyvind Norheim with Prillar
Resurrection II
One of the most remarkable feats of reconstruction began in 1999 when the composer Kaare Dyvik Husby was completing his studies in orchestration under Thommessen. As Husby related to me at a remarkably good dim sum restaurant in Oslo:
I had to write a final for Instrumentation. The normal way of doing that would be of course to have a piano piece, and orchestrate it. But I in my hubris told Professor Thommessen I had no intention whatsoever of doing another instrumentation of Shostakovich’s Three Fantastic Dances; I wanted to do something useful. And he said “Very well,” and the week afterward he gave me the three orchestral pieces [derived from Tveitt’s] Baldur’s Dreams, and he explained to me, “The score is missing, but this old recording is all that’s left, so write the score from your ears and I will accept it.”
Kaare Dyvik Husby
Baldur’s Dreams was Tveitt’s magnum opus from the 1930s, originally planned as a three-hour “Symbolic Play” for 100 dancers and a large orchestra. It portrayed the cycle of the seasons as personified in the life and death of the sun god Baldur, fairest of the gods. Minus the dancers, it was performed in 1938 in Oslo and 1939 in Paris. Then it was sent to London for a proposed staging at Covent Garden, but the war intervened and as far as Tveitt was ever to know, the music was lost in the London Blitz.
Undaunted, Tveitt rewrote the piece in 1951 from memory, with possible reference to piano reductions and orchestral sketches as “Three Pieces from Baldur’s Dreams,” which was premiered in 1958 and recorded by Norwegian Radio. This was the score that burned up in the 1970 fire and tested Husby’s ears. Needless to say, Husby passed his course of study with flying colors and had the honor of seeing his reconstruction recorded, along with Prillar, in 1999 on the BIS label with Ruud and the Stavanger Symphony.
Resurrection III
Meanwhile, the persistence of conductor Bjarte Engeset brought great dividends. Engeset wanted to bring the music to a worldwide public and correct the impression among Norwegians that Tveitt was only a composer of popular tunes. Before I drove him to the Oslo airport, he described to me his efforts to help record the four published orchestral suites containing 60 of the “Hundred Hardanger tunes.”
The people of Norway knew some of his popular tunes, about the summer night (“Sumarnatta”), and so on, but they didn’t know he was an orchestrator on a international, high, and interesting level. Especially back then, before the [Ruud and other] CDs.
It was a long process for me: I had to convince Naxos. All the credit to Klaus Heymann [founder and chairman of HNH, parent company of Naxos and Marco Polo Records] that in the end, he believed in it. It was very important for me to have this on Naxos and not on Marco Polo [for the wider distribution, lower shelf price, and increased marketing], and also I wanted to have a great orchestra playing, especially in the wind section. You couldn’t have any weak sections anywhere in the orchestra because everybody has such demanding stuff to play. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a great brass — and you need brave people, not hiding! You need great woodwind soloists as well. It took many years because I said no [to initial proposals]. I knew it would be of no use in a bad setting.
The two CDs [released in 2001 and 2002] got the “Critics Choice” in The Gramophone magazine. It helped of course, the focus, and the good reviews. They sold quite well — they still do.
It was these CDs that first introduced me to Tveitt, and led me to two trips to Norway to get closer to the source of those amazing sounds. I have to agree with what his biographer, Reidar Storraas, wrote me, that “Tveitt’s talent is based on genuine melodies and his special gift to form his thoughts in a fantastic, glittering, first class orchestral setting — putting him in the first line of Nordic composers of the 20th century.” Prillar in fact has a champion horn/trumpet call, an earworm that has resided in or near my consciousness for the six years since I first heard it.
The Hundred Hardanger Folk Tunes, Op. 151, consist now of Suites 1, 2, 4, and 5, each of 15 tunes. (Suites 3 and 6, or sketches for them, were lost in the fire.) Almost all the tunes are based on pithy narrative texts and are exquisitely orchestrated, ranging in length from 30 seconds to 6 1/2 minutes. They address the lives, loves, and risky natural setting of the people, animals, and spirits along the length of the Hardanger Fjord, the west shoulder of which props up the Tveitt farm, 30 miles east of Bergen. The music is extremely wide-ranging in mood, including topics such as the joyous anticipation of a fresh keg of beer that “crashes in the trousers like gunshot”; the secret directions a glacier gives to lost hikers; the resignation one feels, late in life, gazing at hills one will never climb again; the ineffable beauty of a bride being rowed across the mirror-smooth fjord; barnyard noises; a beard catching on fire; the roar of a waterfall; even, in a sarcastic nod to the fashion that doomed Tveitt’s early reputation, a drunken hymn to atonality.
Soon Ruud and Engeset were releasing almost all of the available orchestral music: four concerted piano works, symphonic poems, the orchestral song The Turtle on words from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and two concertos for the Hardanger fiddle (a violin with additional, but unplayable, strings that vibrate in sympathy below those stroked with the bow). But more was yet to come.
A Discovery from the Flames
The spate of festivals, recordings, and favorable Norwegian publicity helped secure funds to examine, replicate, and conserve Tveitt’s burned scores. Hesselberg-Wang described to me the methodology that conservation students used in a task that took six months to complete.
There were bunches of sheets. They were damaged, especially around the edges, and sometimes all over the sheet. They were stuck together, but not glued. They were so brittle that if we tried to lift off one sheet then we would destroy it. But luckily, the main part of the music was written with carbon pencil. And I recognized that if we looked at it with the light at an angle, then the carbon would shine, so we could read the music. So the thought was if we could photograph the sheet in the side-angled light, then we could [copy] all the music, and risk ruining the sheet when we lifted it off. We put what was left in polyester pockets so we could handle them. The process took six months, maybe. All the pages were digitized so the music could be reconstructed.
Burned manuscript
As the process unfolded, it became apparent to Norheim that about 50 percent of the material belonged to Baldur’s Dreams, music that was supposed to exist only in recording. Husby was again enlisted to do a detailed review. He discovered that most of it seemed to belong to a copy of the 1938 version, and that this version was very different from the 1958 version that Husby had put together by ear and that Tveitt had recomposed from memory and sketches. Also, technology had improved such that a 1938 rcording of the premiere could be exploited, so the Russian composer Alexey Rybnikov was given Husby’s earlier task of ear-reconstruction. Meanwhile, Husby proceeded with a paper reconstruction based on the conservationists’ photos.
Plasticized page from Baldur’s Dreams
The result, remarkably, was a close correspondence between the Russian composer’s and the Norwegian’s reconstructions, a performance at the 2002 Bergen festival, and a 2003 recording by Ruud on BIS.
The Perils of Rediscovery
Along with the increased interest in Tveitt’s music, however, has come renewed controversy. The youthful composer’s heady Teutonistic opinions expressed in a few private letters in the early 1930s were recently found and published. Earlier and false accusations of Tveitt’s actions before and during World War II resurfaced.
As his daughter Gyri explains it, Tveitt was partly blamed for receiving a government stipend, even though this grant was applied for on Tveitt’s behalf after the success of Baldur’s Dreams by 50 of the top personalities in Norway in 1938, under the prior government. He also had been questioned for serving on an artistic advisory committee for music only, very early in the war, from which he had angrily resigned. A Norwegian television documentary broadcast this spring has provided some perspective by including evidence of Tveitt’s exoneration by a postwar member and leader of the Supreme Court, Erik Solem, who wrote in 1946 with regard to the short time he served on the artistic committee:
there is little doubt that Tveitt was of help to the national front [the Resistance] in his work in an advisory capacity and one must credit him, at least partly, for causing many Nazi initiatives to be abandoned. Furthermore, there is agreement that Tveitt in everything apparent made use of all means as were available to maintain his [anti-Nazi] position and had led with a powerful and courageous pen at the risk of his own security.
Unfortunately, coming to grips with many of the complexities of Tveitt’s life requires familiarity with Norwegian, since no in-depth biography of the composer has been written in English. Thankfully, however, music itself is a universal language: Most of Tveitt’s surviving music has been recorded and can be appreciated in its own right.
A “New” Symphony
So what was the story behind the latest premiere I attended at the 2008 Bergen festival, Husby’s edition of the “Yule Eve” symphony? Had the score been eaten by moths, stolen by pirates, or buried in a secret cache at the bottom of a fjord? And what was it going to sound like?
The manuscript turned out to have a fairly normal history. It hadn’t been in the fire. It was written for, and held by, the Norwegian Radio; I saw the hand-copied manuscript myself in the Radio archives. It had been performed more than once. Patches had been pasted over sections; changes had been made not in Tveitt’s hand. Husby was sent to the rescue again to make a performing version.
What was really unusual about the symphony was its sound. The work, completed just before Yuletide in 1955 (the title is thought by Storraas to refer to that coincidence, and nothing more), suggests no program. Far from being Christmas-y, it exudes a primitivism worthy of Baldur’s Dreams. It starts off with a beautiful cello solo, but before long gets raucous and angry. The middle movement of three is quieter, featuring two repeated motives passed around the orchestra, and chamber effects. The finale is a tour de force of relentless orchestral thickening and nervous crescendo for eight minutes, with a rather abrupt end a minute later.
No other composer could have written this piece. The orchestration was singular, deep and growly, like the gray and pervasive gneiss outcrops lining the fjords. The energy was palpable, like air molecules above a summit ready to conduct a lightning bolt. While it lacked the grace of his folk-song transformations, and the melting beauty of his popular songs referred to by Engeset, let there be no doubt: Tveitt, fire-damaged, resurrected and all, will always be a true original.
Following Up
A great place to review the sound of Tveitt’s music is on this BIS/Naxos recordings site:
- Baldur’s Dreams: Baldur’s Dreams
- Prillar: Prillar
- Hardanger Suites 1 and 2: Hardanger Suites
Late-breaking news: More resurrection may be in the offing — word is out that the 1938 Baldur’s Dreams score sent to London has been found. Will it offer new revelations?
Jeff Dunn (jdunnpm@yahoo.com) is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.
©2008 By Jeff Dunn, all rights reserved.
Great article! I’ve been on a bit of a Scandanavian discovery process recently (Norgard and Aho, mainly) but I’m going to investigate the Naxos recordings when I get the money.
Posted by Henry Holland on July 28, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Jeff. This is a wonderful article, and a great service to music lovers. I hope it receives the widest possible currency. Have you considered submitting it to Symphony Magazine if you are allowed to do so?
jason
Posted by Jason Victor Serinus on July 29, 2008 at 9:43 am