Home | Composers Index | Musical Epochs | Musical Forms | Contact Musical Instruments | Updates | Cairo Opera House | Links

Hugo Alfv�n (1872-1960)

Epoch: Modern
Country: Sweden

Introduction

Hugo Emil Alfv�n was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1872. He developed skills and a painter and a musician, entered the Stockholm Conservatory at age 15 while continuing his art studies, and supported himself playing violin in the Royal Opera Orchestra while continuing his composition studies with Johan Lindegren and still working on his painting. A government grant settled things: He got a scholarship to study violin in Brussels. He wrote two symphonies in 1897 and 1898, winning the prestigious Jenny Lind Prize with the second one. In 1904 he became director of the Siljan Choir in Dalecarlia (west-central Sweden), and led it for 53 years. In 1910 he became music director of Uppsala University and took on another chorus. He had an active and undramatic career as a conductor (mostly of choral music) and as a composer, highly regarded in Sweden up to his death on May 8, 1960, at the age of 88.

A large proportion of his work is for chorus, and is in Swedish, so that his fame is much higher in his native land than elsewhere. Many of his works are musical nature paintings. A striking example is his 1914 Fourth Symphony ("From the Seaward Skerries") which uses the storm-tossed islands in the Baltic outward from Stockholm as its literary subject, while the music also chronicles stormy passions in some of the most sweeping of late-Romantic symphonic love music. He wrote three orchestral rhapsodies, of which Midsummer Vigil is by far the most famous.