A Radiant Century with the Swedish Radio Choir

The Council of Trent was held from 1545 to 1563 to cleanse the Catholic Church of abuses and laxity. Music was also addressed. Complaints were made about masses based on secular melodies, loud instruments, and that the music had become so complicated that it was difficult to hear the text. The result was general guidelines: gently flowing melodies, regular rhythm, and simplified counterpoint. The greatest proponent of these ideals was in Rome: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. In 1562, he composed the Missa Papæ Marcelli dedicated to Pope Marcellus II.

Although the national romanticist August Söderman was inspired by the great composers of the continent, not least the giant Richard Wagner, he wrote music with his own language in a newly created Swedish folk musical spirit. In his rich catalog of works, there is a wealth of vocal music, including a smaller sacred production where the most famous is the collection Spiritual Songs for choir and organ. In a well-known manner, he borrowed from himself; much of the music in Spiritual Songs was taken from another significant part of Söderman’s creation, his music for the stage.

Alice Tegnér is considered our foremost creator of children’s songs during the early 1900s, but art music was her foundation and inspiration. It inspired both chamber and choral music. During her time as an organist in Djursholm Chapel, Tegnér had the opportunity to write choral music for performance in worship services. One of her sacred works is this Ave Maria for women’s choir.

In the wake of the political unrest in Poland in 1956, avant-garde composing was encouraged, and Krzysztof Penderecki quickly became a leader in the new movement. However, his Polish Requiem, written in the early 1980s, marks a turning point. Here, almost classical values appear in his music. This is also a time when a new nationalist wave is sweeping across Poland. Agnus Dei was composed in 1981 and dedicated to the charismatic friend Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, who was murdered in his struggle for Poland.
Alma Mahler’s songs Die stille Stadt and Laue Sommernacht give us a glimpse of the music she wrote before she met Gustav, who did not want a wife who was also a composer. Unlike Gustav, Alma appreciated and set contemporary poetry to music. Her musical style is forward-looking and shows kinship with both Arnold Schönberg and her composition teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky. The songs have been arranged by the German composer and conductor Clytus Gottwald, who is known for his up to 16-part transcriptions for choir of late Romantic songs originally written for soloist and piano or orchestra.

The mid-1930s in Germany was a difficult period for Richard Strauss. The Nazi regime curtailed his world, and he was forced to navigate the cultural-political twilight. He was particularly worried about his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. At this time, he came across Friedrich Rückert’s poem and set it to music for male choir: Traumlicht – the light in the dream that hopefully can also dispel the darkness of reality.

It was close that posterity never got to experience Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir. He said: “it is a matter between me and God.” Perhaps Martin was hesitant to spread a strictly liturgical mass that expressed his deep religious feeling as he was unsure of the sacred music’s place in the social and cultural climate of the 1920s. It took 40 years before the mass was published; by then, Martin was an established composer, and the music world was enriched with a masterful choral work.

Arne Mellnäs’s early compositions are characterized by a very experimental style, while later in life he created significant works in a more traditional spirit. In his Laude – il cantico di frate sole from 1994, we meet Francis of Assisi, one of Catholicism’s most remarkable figures and reformers. A wealthy merchant’s son who, after a spiritual and physical crisis, becomes “God’s little poor man.” Towards the end of his life, Francis writes his most important text: The Canticle of the Sun, a declaration of love to the sun, moon, fire, water, animals, plants, and all earthly life, which also includes brother death.

György Ligeti’s Hölderlin Fantasies were commissioned in 1982 by Swedish Radio. The music is impulsive and expressionistic, with sound-imitating elements. Ligeti had been a guest professor in composition in Stockholm, knew the Radio Choir, and knew that it was possible to push the boundaries. In the work, Ligeti combines three independent poems in which Friedrich Hölderlin deals with the painful distance between ideals and reality, between a favorable past and a bleak present. A hope that beyond the sufferings, one can find peace and tranquility, formulated by a poet who drifted further into mental illness and isolation.

Like the pointillism of the Impressionists, where small dots of color build up an image, Hans Gefors also builds the piece Whales Weep Not! with short notes that from a distance create an image – or, in this context, a sound. What evoked the sound in Gefors was D. H. Lawrence’s poem about the whales, the warm-blooded animals that dive under the icebergs and have the entire earth’s oceans as their home. Whales Weep Not! was commissioned by Swedish Radio for Eric Ericson’s Chamber Choir’s 40th anniversary in 1985.
Francis Poulenc received Paul Éluard’s texts in the summer of 1943. He immediately set aside all other work to secretly write a work for the day when the long-awaited liberation from the occupying power would be a fact. In a time so filled with crisis, Poulenc wrote one of his greatest and most sincere works: Figure humaine. In Liberté, the final movement, the message of survival is hammered in with the help of a persistent, poetic litany.