Allan Pettersson

Gustav Allan Pettersson, to give him his full complement of names, was born in Västra Ryd (south-west of Stockholm) in Sweden in 1911; he died in Stockholm in 1980. The 'Gustav' name is bracketed in New Groves, indicating its optionality: it is therefore dropped when cataloguing his works by most. He is regarded as one of the most significant of Sweden's composers.

He was brought up in poverty by his atheist, alcoholic and sometimes-violent father and deeply religious mother, who sang Salvation Army hymns to her children. Aged 10, he started reading up on matters of philosophy, religion and music. When he was 20, he began to compose for the first time, as he began his studies at the Stockholm Conservatory. His principal subjects there were violin and viola, but he also joined the counterpoint class. Between 1939 and 1951, he was a violist in the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; he was forced to abandon that career in the 1960s when arthritis took hold. His health generally took a turn for the worse in the 1960s and it was only at this point that he turned to composition full-time. He lived most of the 1970s confined to his apartment, racked with pain from rheumatoid arthritis. A jolly existence it was not!

The first of his works to be given in a concert was the Concerto for violin and string quartet, in 1949. It was not well received. Its poor reception was partly responsible for his decision to go to Paris and gain a more thorough technical grounding: there he studied with Honegger at the Conservatory and took 12-tone lessons privately with Leibowitz. His career as composer really took off after that: in 1968, a performance of his Symphony No. 7 was conducted by Antal Dorati to great acclaim. Dorati promoted his music heavily after that and his reputation developed well as a result.

In various forums, I've seen it said that you have to have a bit of a death-wish to listen to Pettersson: that his music is unrelentingly grim and bleak, for example. In [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvuICzVQnAw this video], entitled “Pettersson Symphony No. 8 (Not for the Depressed)”, for example, critic David Hurwitz says, Swedish composer Allan Pettersson's symphonies are dark, brooding works shot through with oases of tender lyricism and the occasional glimmer of hope. And I do mean “occasional”. He goes on to describe the symphony as being 'emotionally draining' and requiring the listener to be in the 'right frame of mind'.

The New Groves takes a slightly different tack: his musical preferences were for Bach, Beethoven and Schubert; the psychological root of his work is a sympathy with the oppressed and the outcast. They go on to describe his musical characteristics as dissonant crescendos leading to violent, often complex, explosions, and relaxed passages of an almost folk-like simplicity; momentum is never in doubt in this passionately temperamental art, though the symphonies often end in extended, resigned diminuendos. Its most individual features are the frequently chromatic, triadic harmony and the complicated percussion passions“. I personally haven't felt an unrelenting grimness about his music, though it is all challenging to listen to.

There are 17 numbered symphonies (the last of them merely fragmentary). There are also songs and the aforementioned violin concertos. His output is not extensive, but it is all deeply felt.

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