Stenhammar Symphony No. 2

The year is 1910. Imagine that you are a young composer, and the
music world is in flux all around you. Mahler is dying, and with
his death many agreed that the great Austro-German symphonic
tradition that stretched from the late 18th century with Haydn
all the way through Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn,
Schubert and more, was over and done with. Wagner’s music dramas
had inspired an entirely new style of music, and composers like
Strauss, Liszt, and Berlioz had blown open the possibilities of
what music could portray. But even their experiments had seemed
to have reached a breaking point. For many composers, there
seemed to be nowhere to go.  As the great Swedish conductor
Herbert Blomstedt said: “There was nothing to be done all the
great melodies had all been written - what could one do. There
was so much wonderful music but composers had to regroup and
develop their own language and that wasn’t easy in 1910.
Stravinsky found his own method inspired by Russian culture,
Bartok was similar, Hindemith went to Baroque and the
Renaissance. Schoenberg’s idea was: it’s all nonsense, we need to
start from the beginning. Every composer has to make a new
start.”  Over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about
composers who struggled with these questions, and the first one
on the list is the most important Swedish composer Wilhelm
Stenhammar, who started out his life as a disciple of Wagner, but
in the end rejected that influence and created a style all his
own, which is perhaps best exemplified in his second symphony,
which features the sounds of Swedish folk music, harmonies that
stretch back not into the classical era but into the Medieval
period, and a powerful resolve to not be like Wagner, but also to
not even approach the idea of sounding like Schoenberg either.
Stenhammar wrote to a friend as he began writing his G Minor
symphony: “In these times of Arnold Schoenberg, I dream of an art
far removed from him, clear, joyful and naïve.” We’re going to
discuss all of these roiling tensions this week, so please join
us for a look at this underrated symphony!