Erik Bergman; the Grand Old Man of Finnish music
Hyfler/Rosner
Martin Anderson
09 May 2006
Erik Valdemar Bergman, composer, conductor, critic and
teacher: born Uusikaarlepyy, Finland 24 November 1911;
married first 1942 Sylvelin Långholm (marriage dissolved
1955), second 1956 Aulikki Rautawaara (marriage dissolved
1958), third 1961 Solveig von Schoultz (died 1996), fourth
Christina Indrenius-Zalewski; died Helsinki 24 April 2006.
For as long as anyone can remember, Erik Bergman was the
Grand Old Man of Finnish music, a figure admired and
respected the world around. But if the label suggests some
stuffy conservative defending "traditional" values, Bergman
doesn't fit the bill at all: he was one of the pioneers of
Finnish modernism, with a spirit as open as the high seas to
new developments in music and to the discoveries of other
cultures. He was no seat-of-the-pants adventurer, though,
always insisting on the importance of a thorough training.
"Technique is vital," he said.
There's no getting away from it, no compromising, because
without it you get lost in daydreaming. But every composer
must use his technique to express his innermost being, his
very own message.
Bergman was born in Uusikaarlepyy (the Swedish name is
Nykarleby), on the coast of north-western Finland, in
Ostrobothnia. At Helsinki University in 1931-33, he studied
musicology with the composer and ethnomusicologist Ilmari
Krohn - the founder of the discipline in Finland - and
literature with the critic and folklorist Yrjö Hirn;
concurrently (1931-38) he was a student at the Helsinki
Conservatory - composition with the composer-pianist Erik
Furuhjelm and with Bengt Carlson, who had studied under
Vincent d'Indy in Paris, and piano with Ilmari Hannikainen,
one of the major Finnish pianists. Two extended periods in
Berlin (1937-39 and 1942-43) allowed him to learn from the
composer Heinz Tiessen at the Hochschule für Musik.
Bergman's first compositions, in the 1930s and early 1940s,
were Romantic in style - Sibelius's shadow was difficult to
avoid in those days - and he soon rejected most of them. But
he had come into contact with Schoenbergian dodecaphony in
Berlin - for all that the Nazis had driven Schoenberg
himself from the city - and it began to exert its discipline
on his musical language.
A brief period of neo-Classicism generated works such as the
Bartókian Burla for orchestra in 1948. But his language was
growing increasingly chromatic, and within a year he had
written the atonal piano piece Intervalles. Bergman produced
his first 12-tone piece - indeed, the first 12-tone piece by
any Finnish composer - in Espressivo, for piano, in 1952.
Not entirely happy with it (he described it as "an attempt
at dodecaphony"), two years later he wrote Three Fantasias
for clarinet and piano, already his op. 42, which is
generally deemed to signal the birth of modernism in Finnish
music. Later in 1954 he travelled to Ascona in Switzerland
to sharpen his 12-tone technique in lessons from Wladimir
Vogel.
In 1953, between the two landmarks of Espressivo and the
Three Fantasias, Bergman wrote Rubaiyat for baritone, chorus
and orchestra. Although not itself dodecaphonic, Rubaiyat
signalled much else: Bergman's fascination with the Orient,
his taste for choral textures, a liking for extended
percussion writing, a keen ear for orchestral colour.
The next obvious step on Bergman's stylistic journey was
serialism, extending the control of the fixed tone-row (or
"series") over melody to the other elements of music. And
so, in 1957, he attended the summer school in Darmstadt, the
hotbed of international musical modernism, to attend
lectures by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono. The fruits
of his reflection emerged in the orchestral Aubade in 1958,
which applied serial techniques to rhythm as well. Not that
you need to know that when you listen to the piece: Aubade
is a powerful piece of nature-painting, atmospherically
evoking the emergence of daytime energy from the Stygian
still of night. Bergman explained that the idea had come to
him in Istanbul, "where the morning fog lay over the
Bosporus and the foghorns were calling here and there".
Although Bergman found serialism a useful tool, by the early
1960s he felt he had squeezed as much juice out of it as he
could: other considerations were becoming more important,
not least tone-colour and a clearer sense of structure. The
logical outcome was another orchestral piece, the
kaleidoscopic Colori ed improvvisazioni (1973), whose title
points to its principal preoccupations. The central of its
three movements is a hypnotically inventive "study of
raindrops", textures of gossamer delicacy and testament to
an extraordinary imagination.
Bergman's interest in ancient and exotic cultures was bound
to find expression in his music - he relished the tension
between age-old texts and modern forms of musical
expression. As early as 1959, Aton, for baritone, speaker,
choir and orchestra, had used Akhenaten's Hymn to the Sun.
The Hathor Suite of 1971 sets German translations of ancient
Egyptian cultic texts for soprano, baritone, choir and an
ensemble consisting of flute, cor anglais, harp and
percussion. Noa (1976), for baritone, chorus and orchestra,
retells the biblical legend of the Flood. And Bardo Thödol
(1974) for speaker, mezzo- soprano, baritone, choir and
orchestra, is based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Bergman enjoyed travelling, his magpie mind absorbing
influences wherever he went. His trove took more concrete
forms, too, and he built up a considerable collection of
unusual instruments - and, of course, they were deployed in
his works: Bardo Thödol calls for a Tibetan shell trumpet,
rattle drum, hand-bells and ritual cymbals.
It is to the example of Bergman's ceaseless curiosity, the
composer Kalevi Aho feels, that much of Finland's current
musical prominence can be ascribed:
This kind of very open-minded mentality was totally new in
Finnish musical life and liberated it a lot and so greatly
influenced also the exceptional rise and international
success of contemporary Finnish music.
Bergman looked north as well as east and south, with the
choral Lapponia (1975) and orchestral Arctica (1979). Not
until 1984 did he visit the Kalevala, the Finnish national
epic, for Lemminkäinen, for speaker, mezzo- soprano,
baritone and choir.
In the meantime he had begun to explore two other genres:
the concerto, and chamber music. Dualis, a cello concerto,
appeared in 1978, Birds in the Morning for flute and
orchestra in 1979, and concertos for piano and violin in
1981 and 1982, respectively. After a long lull, another wave
of concertos broke in the mid-1990s, with The Maestro and
his Orchestra (1996) for violin and strings, Cadenza (1996)
for oboe and orchestra and a second cello concerto (1998).
His last work was a concertante piece for trumpet, the
Fantasia per tromba e orchestra, written in 2003.
Chamber music remained a more constant concern, beginning in
1977 with Solfatara for saxophone and percussion. Although
there are two string quartets, from 1982 and 1997, Bergman
generally used his smaller combinations to explore colour,
often also introducing the voice, as in Triumf att finnas
till ("Triumph of Being Here"; 1978) for soprano, flute and
percussion.
Bergman's long stylistic journey reached its final goal in
his only opera, Det sjungande trädet ("The Singing Tree"),
which took two years (1986-88) to write. The preoccupation
with instrumental colour now found room for a renewed
interested in melody, requiring a return to conventional
notation.
The ease with which he handled choral textures - Lapponia,
for example, is textless and uses extended choral
techniques, including microtones - was based on experience:
Bergman had conducted a number of different choirs until
midway through the 1960s. He was also a critic, writing for
three Helsinki papers - Nya pressen, Svenska pressen and
Hufvudstadsbladet - between 1945 and 1981. On top of that he
was a prominent teacher, as professor of composition at the
Sibelius Academy (1963-76).
Bergman was an important figurehead for his younger
colleagues, as Kalevi Aho recalled:
He has been an idol for many composers - especially because
he was mentally so vivid and curious and, as a personality,
so open and social. Erik wanted to know what happens in
music everywhere in the world.
Bergman's understanding of the obstacles facing younger
composers came from within himself:
Every time you have to start right from zero. You always
have to take yourself by the scruff of the neck and decide
what you really want to do, independently. You can
ultimately only rely on yourself. If I were 18 now, I would
study the use of a computer in music, and modern studio
techniques. It's too late for that now. Whatever you do, be
thorough. And I think my music still has something to say,
even by conventional means.
He retained his open-mindedness throughout his long life. In
an interview given to mark his 70th birthday, he remarked:
"Age is no objection! Being an Ostrobothnian, I've always
been ready to follow the popular cry of my youth: "Come out
and fight!" Figuratively speaking, of course - I mean that I
am always willing to undertake anything new and
interesting."