I skogen (1885)

Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte Op.4 No.1 (1893)

Månsken Op.20 No.4 (1904)

Adagio Op.20 No.5 (1903)

Although Wilhelm Stenhammar is one of the more familiar names among those of the Nordic composers who flourished round the turn of the 19th century, his music is rarely performed here. We hear his Excelsior Overture and his Serenade in F from time to time but scarcely ever his two symphonies and two piano concertos, his chamber music and his piano pieces. Even his songs, which offer the most direct approach to the essence of his art, elude our concert programmes – not least because, apart from two settings of Walther von der Vogelweide and three of Heine, they are all in Swedish (which, happily, as with other Scandinavian languages, is becoming less of a problem these days).

One of the earliest of Stenhammar’s 65 songs – it was written when he was still having the “terribly boring” theory lessons that were just about all the training he received as a composer – I skogen is an engagingly spontaneous response to Gellerstedt’s little poem. A rhythmically regular but harmonically varied accompaniment, a lyrical melodic line, conventional but effective modulations as the poet turns his attention from orchid to thrush and back again: anything more ambitious would have overloaded the potential of the text.

By 1893, when he wrote his two Runeberg settings Op.4, Stenhammar was a much more sophisticated composer. It is clear from the sadly inflected folk-like melody that introduces each of the first three stanzas of Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte that things will not turn out well for the girl, in spite of the outbursts of rapture in voice and piano at the end of the first two. The change of mood as she gives her chilling response at the equivalent point in the third stanza is resourcefully sustained as she reveals the truth of the situation. The opening melody returns in a piano postlude to confirm its sad message. Sibelius’s setting of the same poem, written eight years later, by no means renders Stenhammar’s redundant.

Månsken and Adagio, two of the five Bo Bergman settings of Op.20, are masterly examples of the economy Stenhammar developed in his maturity as a song composer. In both cases the interest is focused on the voice and the natural union between the melodic line and the inflections of the verse that shaped it. In Månsken the piano has little more to do than offer occasional echoes of the vocal line, a fragment of bird song and a hint of the dancing rhythm suggested by “Det går en dans.” Adagio is accompanied throughout by a rocking figure, a response perhaps to the faint music the poet hears in the second stanza, and a regularly placed chords to mark the measured progress suggested by the title of the song.