Hilding Rosenberg

His full name was Hilding Constantin Rosenberg, but the New Groves puts the middle name in brackets, so it's optional and therefore not used on this site. He was born in Bosjökloster, which is (even today!) a tiny village in the Skåne province of Sweden, right down at the southern most tip of the mainland of that country. He was born in 1892 and died in 1985, so he was a contemporary of Sibelius -and, of course, as a fellow Swedish composer, put in direct comparison with him.

He studied the organ as a boy before entering the Royal Academy of Music in 1915. There, he studied composition and conducting. He travelled to Germany, Austria and France in the 1920s, coming under the influence of the likes of Schöenberg, Hindemith and Stravinsky: he thereby acquired a taste for the distinctly modern, as opposed to the illustrious Sibelius's late Romanticism. This made him the distinctive voice of 20th Century Swedish classsical music, to the point of being considered an extreme radical by the musical establishment in his home country. Notoriously, for example, one reviewer wrote of his new first string quartet that it was “impotence, torture, insanity and dazed fantasy”! During the 1930s, he somewhat toned down his approach, simplifying his style and using more diatonic harmonies. Out with the brash modernism, in with something perhaps more palatable to the general classical musical audience.

His output includes 8 substantial symphonies, 12 string quartets, concertos for piano (1), violin (2) and cello (2), assorted works for organ, piano and solo violin, along with an opera (The Isle of Bliss, first performed in 1945 and thus written in the 'more accessible' style: it sounds to my ears like a cross between Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortileges and something Rimsky-Korsakov might have written!) and an opera-oratorio called Joseph and his brothers (beating Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice to that particular punch by around 35 years!) Perhaps his single most impressive work is the fourth symphony, called The Revelation of St. John, which is a huge composition in eight movements for baritone, chorus and orchestra, which the New Groves declares to be a mix of stylistic homages to the likes of Mahler, Palestrina, Schütz and Stenhammar!

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