Sånger vid havet (Songs by the Sea) (1942-3)

Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966)

Sånger vid havet (Songs by the Sea) (1942-3)

Ute I skären

Nocturne

Havets visa

Jag har ett him vid havet

Jag väntar månen

As a painter as well as a musician - and gallery director and music critic - Nystroem did not commit himself to full-time composition until he was in his fifties. His two major creative interests were not mutually exclusive however. The artist’s long contemplation of seascapes, his favourite subject, no doubt developed in the composer his spiritual relationship with the sea and his profound sense of affinity with it. Certainly, the sea was a major source of inspiration in the last twenty or so years of his life when he was living and working alongside it on Sarö on the west coast of Sweden. “My working place is out at sea,” he once said, “and I yearn for it in all weathers. Is there anything more grandly mysterious than the blue line of the sea? For me this, more than anything else, is the symbol of thought and flight of fancy.”

A modernist by Swedish standards in the 1940s, Nystroem did not express his love of the sea in romantic terms. There is a touch of impressionism - he spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s in Paris - in Ute I skären, a characteristically inward but intense settting of words by Ebba Lindquvist who was to be represented also in his Sinfonia del mare (Symphony of the Sea) in 1948 and Själ och landskap (Soul and Landscape) in 1950. Nocturne is similarly shaped, a haunted middle section followed by a recall of the atmospheric opening, in this case a kind of berceuse suggestive of the moon rocking on the waves. In timely contrast, Havets visa begins as a robustly modal march, a ”song of the sea” that inspires confidence when fears arise. “What could frighten me?”, the question posed towards the end of Havets visa is answered by an alarmingly dramatic intervention in the otherwise peaceful Jag har ett him vid havet. Returning to Hjalmar Gullberg, the poet of Havets visa, in Jag väntar månen Nystroem looks for consolation in the sea and his friend in need, the moon - although, strangely enough, the security he finds there is rather less convincingly expressed in the present version than in the orchestral version written at much the same time.