Gustaf Allan Pettersson (19 September 1911 – 20 June 1980)[1] was a Swedish composer and violist. Today he is considered one of the most important Swedish composers of the 20th century.[2] His symphonies developed a international following, starting in the final decade of his life, particularly in Germany and Sweden.[3] Pettersson's song cycle Barefoot Songs influenced a lot of his compositions. He was awarded the Litteris et Artibus, a Swedish royal medal established in 1853.
Pettersson, the youngest of four children[4] of a violent, alcoholic blacksmith,[5] Karl Viktor Pettersson (1875–1952)[6][7] und his wife Ida Paulina (neé Svenson) (1876–1960)[6][7] was born at the manor of Granhammar in Västra Ryd parish in the province of Uppland. He grew up in poor circumstances[8] in the Södermalm district of Stockholm,[9] where he resided during his whole life. He once said of himself:
"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."[10]
At 10, Pettersson bought a cheap violin with money earned from selling Christmas cards.[8]
In 1930, he began study of violin and later viola, as well as counterpoint and harmony, at the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (Royal College of Music, Stockholm).[1] He started composing songs and smaller chamber works in the 1930s. At the beginning of World War II he was studying the viola with the French viola player Maurice Vieux in Paris.[a][12] During the 1940s he worked as a violist in the Stockholm Concert Society (later the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra),[1] but also studied composition privately with the composer and conductor Karl-Birger Blomdahl, the conductor Tor Mann, and organist and composer Otto Olsson.[6] He married in 1943 the physiotherapist Gudrun Tyra Charlotta Gustafsson.[6]
In September 1951, he went to Paris to study composition, having been a student of René Leibowitz, Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud.[6][13][14] Pettersson returned to Sweden at the end of 1952. In the early 1950s he was given the diagnosis rheumatoid arthritis.[15][16] He gave up the instrument, and began devoting his life to composition.[8] In 1954, Pettersson received one of the annual state composition grants for the first time.[17]
By the time of his fifth symphony, completed in 1962, his mobility and health were considerably compromised.[18][19] In 1964, the government granted him a lifelong guaranteed income.[20] His greatest success came a few years later with his seventh symphony (1966–1967),[5] which was premiered on 13 October 1968 in Stockholm Concert Hall with Antal Doráti conducting the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.[21] The release of a recording of his seventh symphony with same conductor and orchestra in 1969 was a breakthrough, establishing his international reputation (Grammis 1970). The conductors Antal Doráti and Sergiu Comissiona premiered and made first recordings of several of Pettersson's symphonies and contributed to his rise to fame during the 1970s.[22][23]
Pettersson was hospitalized for nine months in 1970, soon after the composition of his ninth and longest symphony, beginning to write the condensed tenth (1972) from his sickbed.[b][25][26] He recovered, but rheumatoid arthritis confined him most of the time to his apartment.[27][28] He composed two related works about social protest and compassion, the twelfth symphony for mixed chorus and orchestra (1973–1974) to poems by Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda with contemporary relevance and the cantata Vox Humana (1974) on texts by Latin American poets. In 1975, after a disagreement arising from a change in a concert program for a U.S. tour, the Stockholm Philharmonic is denied the privilege of performing works by Pettersson "for all time". The following year the ban was lifted.[29][30] In Autumn 1978,[c] he moved to a state living quarters.[31][28] During the prolific last decade of his life he also wrote a concerto for violin and orchestra (1977–1978, revised version 1980) written for the violinist Ida Haendel,[32] a sixteenth symphony (1979) which features a bravura solo part for alto saxophone commissioned by saxophonist Frederick L. Hemke,[33] and an incomplete, posthumously discovered concerto for viola and orchestra (1979–1980).[34] He also started to write a seventeenth symphony, but he died in Maria Magdalena parish, Stockholm, aged 68, before finishing it.[35] Pettersson was buried in Högalid Church columbarium.[36]
Pettersson's music is related to Mahler's symphonic manner, in the grandiosity of design and in the passionate, exclamatory dynamism of utterance.[37] The symphonic eccentric Pettersson is not an avant-gardist.[38] His kinetic[39] and organic development of musical matter[40] uses traditional means of expression.[41] Basic motifs are constantly being changed and developed.[38] Pettersson's writing is very strenuous and often has many simultaneous polyphonic lines.[42][43] His symphonies end on common chords—major or minor chords[44]—but tonality, which depends on some sense, however attenuated, of tonal progression, is found mostly in slower sections: e.g., the openings and endings of his 6th and 7th symphonies, and the end of his 9th. Overwhelmingly serious in tone, often dissonant, his music rises to ferocious climaxes, relieved, especially in his later works, by lyrical oases ("lyrische Inseln").[45][46][47]
Pettersson's music has a very distinctive sound and can hardly be confused with that of any other 20th-century composer.[48] His symphonies, which range in length from 22 to 70 minutes,[49] are typically one-movement works.[50][51] The music of Pettersson is demanding on performers and listeners.[52]
His production from the 1940s include the song cycle twenty-four Barefoot Songs (1943–1945) based on own poems and a dissonant[53] concerto for violin and string quartet (1949). The latter work is influenced by Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith.[54][55] In 1951, Pettersson created the experimental Seven Sonatas for two Violins. At the same time he also composed the first of his seventeen symphonies, which he left unfinished. This work has been recorded in a performing version prepared by trombonist and conductor Christian Lindberg in 2011.[56]
Pettersson about the symphonic output of the 1950s:
"No one in the 1950s noticed, that I am always breaking up the structures, that I was creating a whole new symphonic form."[57][58]
It took four years to write the conceptual and style-defining sixth symphony (1963–1966).[59] The seventh and the eighth symphony (1968–1969) have received more recordings than his other works and are probably his best-known works.
Pettersson quoted songs from his own 24 Barefoot Songs in several of his compositions.[60][61]
Ivanka Stoïanova designed a theory of musical space about Pettersson's music.[62]
Most of his music has now been recorded at least once and much of it is now available in published score.[d]
In 1968–1969, conductor and composer Antal Doráti arranged eight of Pettersson's Barefoot Songs as full-scale orchestral songs.[63]
Choreographer Birgit Cullberg produced three ballets based on Pettersson's music. Rapport (1976, Symphony No. 7), Vid Urskogens rand (1977, Concerto No. 1 for String Orchestra), Krigsdanser (War Dance) (1979, Symphony No. 9).[64]
The four orchestral sketches "... das Gesegnete, das Verfluchte" (1991) by Peter Ruzicka are a tribute to the life and work of Pettersson.[e][65]
The finale in Symphony No. 7 was used in Roy Andersson's short film World of Glory (Härlig är jorden).[66]
After Pettersson's death, in Germany an Allan Pettersson Gesellschaft issued six yearbooks, CPO began recording his complete works, and a series of concerts (in 1994–1995) programmed almost all of them.[67][68][69]
The selected discography includes the original format of the recording and releasing label. Some of the LP releases have been reissued on CD. A 12-CD pack of the Complete Symphonies of Allan Pettersson has been produced by CPO (Classic Produktion Osnabrück) based on recordings of 1984, 1988, 1991–1995, 2004. A cycle of all Pettersson symphonies produced by BIS is ongoing.[70]
