Composers › Gösta Nystroem › Programme note
Själ och landskap (1950)
Gerald Larner wrote 2 versions of differing length — choose one below.
Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966)
Själ och landskap (1950)
Vitt land
Önskan
Bara hos den vars aro
As a painter as well as a musician - and gallery director and music critic - Nystroem did not devote himself to full-time composition until he was in his fifties. His two major creative interests were not, however, mutually exclusive. The artist’s long contemplation of seascape, 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.
Ebba Lindqvist - a poet represented in the central movement of Nystroem’s Sinfonia del mare of 1948 and in Sänger vid havet (Songs by the sea) of 1943 - clearly shares with Nystroem his love of the sea. She expresses it moreover in such musical terms that all the composer has to do is release the potential of the verse, which he does with rare sensitivity. The vocal line and harmonies of Vitt land react spontaneously to the words, imposing no musical pattern on them apart from an intermittent ostinato figure subtly and momentarily transformed into a hint of a funeral rhythm at the end. If the modest but fragrantly lyrical piano part of Önskan seems to betray a French influence - Nystroem spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s in Paris - Bara hos den vars aro confirms it, above all when the undulating water imagery and the evocation of “the sea singing its song” are extended into the piano postlude.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “Själ och landskap/w262”
Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966)
Själ och landskap (1950)
Vitt land
Önskan
Bara hos den vars aro
På reveln (1949)
På reveln
Otrolig dag
Havet sjunger
As a painter as well as a musician – and gallery director and music critic – Nystroem did not devote himself to full-time composition until he was in his fifties. His two major creative interests were not, however, mutually exclusive. The artist’s long contemplation of seascape, 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.
Ebba Lindqvist – a poet represented in the central movement of Nystroem’s Sinfonia del mare of 1948 and in Sänger vid havet (Songs by the sea) of 1943 – clearly shares with Nystroem his love of the sea. She expresses it moreover in such musical terms that all the composer has to do is release the potential of the verse, which he does with rare sensitivity. The vocal line and harmonies of Vitt land react spontaneously to the words, imposing no musical pattern on them apart from an intermittent ostinato figure subtly and momentarily transformed into a hint of a funeral rhythm at the end. If the modest but fragrantly lyrical piano part of Önskan seems to betray a French influence – Nystroem spent much of the 1920s and early 1930s in Paris – Bara hos den vars aro confirms it, above all when the undulating water imagery and the evocation of “the sea singing its song” are extended into the piano postlude.
While På reveln is no less committed to the sea than Själ och landskap, it is even more economically scored. The texture of the introduction to the first of the three songs, a simple ostinato in the right hand fluttering over a wide-ranging but unadorned line in the left, is sustained throughout the first stanza and is recalled in the postlude. In the meantime, where the poet turns his attention from the immediate impression of butterflies on the reef to the eternity of natural beauty, well-chosen chords and fragments of melody reflecting the vocal line create a timely and meaningful contrast. The short Ostrolig dag is as unpretentious, and as charmingly tuneful, as a nursery song. Perhaps the most beautiful of the set, Havet sjunger is another Ebba Lindqvist inspiration. The challenge represented by her invocation of “the song of the sea” Nystroem meets this time by developing and modestly enlarging on the folk-like melody introduced by the piano and taken up by the voice in the opening bars.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “På reveln”