Hugo Alfvén

Biography

In 1954, when Alfvén was already past eighty, he conducted a recording of his own orchestral works in stereo. These were the first classical stereo recordings made in Sweden; they were issued on LP in the United States by Westminster Records.

He was born on 1 May 1872 in Stockholm, the son of a tailor, Anders Alfvén. From 1887 to 1891 he studied the violin at the Stockholm conservatory (the Royal College of Music). At the same time he took private composition lessons from Johan Lindegren, an expert in counterpoint, and from 1890 to 1892 he played the violin in the orchestra of the Royal Opera. He also studied painting, with Otto Hesselbom and Oskar Törnå, and painted watercolours; by some accounts he once thought of devoting himself to them entirely. From 1897 he spent about ten years travelling in Europe. In Brussels he studied violin technique with César Thomson, and in Dresden in 1901–1902 he learned conducting from Hermann Ludwig Kutzschbach. In these same years his first major works appeared: the First Symphony (1897) and the Second (1898–1899), which can be regarded as his graduation piece in composition. In 1900 he received the Jenny Lind scholarship, and he held the state scholarship for composers in 1896–1899 and again in 1906–1910. In 1903 he was chosen as a teacher of counterpoint and composition at the Stockholm conservatory, but he never took up the post.

In that same year, 1903, “Swedish Rhapsody No. 1”, also known as “Midsommarvaka” (“Midsummer Vigil”), appeared. It was later joined by the “Uppsala Rhapsody” (1907) and the “Dala Rhapsody” (1931). The Third Symphony (1905) was inspired by a trip to Italy. The Fourth, “From the Outermost Skerries” (1918–1919), is written in a single movement of about forty-five minutes and uses wordless voices; to my mind it is the most individual of his symphonic works. The ballet-pantomime “The Mountain King”, to a libretto by John Bauer, was completed in 1923. He began the Fifth Symphony in 1942 and finished it only in the 1950s; its first movement is performed more often than the whole.

From 1910 to 1939 Alfvén was director musices (music director) of Uppsala University and led the Royal Academic Orchestra. In 1910 he also took over the student male choir Orphei Drängar, which he led until 1947. In Dalarna he founded the Siljan Choir and conducted it until 1957. He conducted at festivals in Uppsala, Dortmund, Stuttgart, Gothenburg and Copenhagen and toured Europe throughout his life, most often with his own works. He wrote a great deal of choral music: pieces for male choir and cantatas for university and state anniversaries. He also wrote film music, for example for “Synnöve Solbakken” (1934).

He could not manage money and depended all his life on commissions. In his memoirs he claimed that he would rather have written symphonies. These memoirs, in four volumes (1946–1952), are regarded as one of the best accounts of Swedish musical life of the time.

In 1908 he was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, and in 1917 Uppsala University awarded him an honorary doctorate. After retiring in 1939 he settled in Leksand parish in Dalarna, where he had a farm at Tibble. Alfvén's drawings are held in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. He was married three times: from 1912 to 1936 to the Danish painter Marie Triepcke (Krøyer), then to Carin Wessberg, and in 1959 to Anna Lund. His daughter Margita became a silent-film actress. His nephew Hannes Alfvén received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970.

Hugo Alfvén died on 8 May 1960 in Falun, a week after his eighty-eighth birthday. He was buried in the cemetery at Leksand. His musical archive was given to Uppsala University.