from the Classical Archives:
Like his contemporary Berlioz, Berwald was a visionary. He preferred to use established forms to contain a unique mode of thought. His four symphonies (1842-1845) are especially significant as they are precursors of Sibelius and Nielsen in their streamlined contours and unexpected harmonic and melodic devices. As such, he was one of the most important of the early Romantics.
from the New Grove 2010:
Posthumous reputation, works.
After Berwald's death, Ludvig Norman continued to be the most active promoter of his music: a performance of the Sinfonie sérieuse on 18 November 1871 led to further performances in Stockholm and Helsinki in 1876, as well as the première of the E symphony in 1878. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, however, that Berwald's music emerged as an important point of reference for a younger generation of Swedish composers including Wilhelm Stenhammar and Hugo Alfvén. After Tor Aulin's performance of the Sinfonie singulière in 1905, Wilhelm Peterson-Berger hailed Berwald in Dagens nyheter (11 January) as ‘our most original and modern composer’. Despite the revival of Estrella de Soria in Stockholm for the 150th celebrations of his birth in 1946, Berwald's music has yet to occupy a secure place in the repertory, and since Hillman's pioneering biography (1920), only two full-length biographical studies of the composer have been published (Layton, 1956, and Andersson, 1970–71). Similarly, the music has yet to receive systematic analytical attention, although the completion of the critical edition, and several recordings of the symphonies, points towards a more positive reception of Berwald's work in the future.
In a motto dated 17 August 1838 Berwald declared: ‘Art may be coupled only with a cheerful frame of mind. The weak-willed should have nothing to do with it. Even if interesting for a moment, in the end every sighing artist will bore listeners to death. Therefore: liveliness and energy – feeling and reason’ (DSL, 186). Berwald himself seems to have been uninterested in forging a Swedish national identity in his music but this does not necessarily mean that his music is not ‘national’. His works could also be heard in a broader Scandinavian context: his music reflects formal and expressive preoccupations similar to those found in the works of other Northern composers.
The most ‘Northern’ characteristics of Berwald's work are an obsessive concern with large-scale structure and a heightened sensitivity to the timbral characteristics of the sound object so that the music is often conceived in terms of specific sonorities rather than more dynamic process-orientated forms. A prominent feature of Berwald's music is the use of extended pedal points to create moments of virtual harmonic inaction. In the A major Trio of the Sinfonie sérieuse (1842), for instance, the transparent scoring for strings and woodwind anticipates the C major interlude in the first movement of Nielsen's Fourth Symphony (1914–16) (ex.1). Similarly, at the close of the development of the first movement of the Symphony in E (bars 224–44) the second theme is slowly dissolved over a subdominant pedal to prepare for the abrupt reprise of the opening (ex.2).
The formalist aspect of Berwald's music is more apparent in his use of palindromic multi-movement designs. The symmetrical arch-like tonal scheme of the early Septet (?1828) is prefigured by the circle of 5ths motion of the main theme of its opening Allegro molto. In the Sinfonie sérieuse a fragment of the slow movement Adagio maestoso returns after the scherzo as both a reprise and a slow introduction to the finale. Berwald's use of symmetry reaches its most obsessive in the String Quartet in E of 1849, in which the scherzo Allegro assai is enclosed within the slow movement Adagio quasi andante which is in turn enclosed by a reprise of the first movement Allegro di molto.
The Sinfonie singulière (1845) is characteristic in many ways of Berwald's works. The scherzo is embedded within the slow movement, and the sense of formal circularity this creates is emphasized by the coda of the finale, which explicitly recalls the 1–5 oscillations with which the symphony opens. The first movement begins with a rising sequence opening harmonically from I to V7, a gradual ‘in-filling’ of the cello's initial 1–5 motion (ex.3). Berwald plays with the structural and rhetorical status of this opening, the insistence on 1–5 suggesting a cadential function which is fulfilled only by the reappearance of the passage at the close of the first movement. The repercussions of the unfolded V7 that is suddenly left unresolved at rehearsal figure 1 resonate throughout the movement. Disruption becomes one of the ‘structural topics’ of the symphony as a whole, in spite of the apparently seamless continuity of the opening bars. The central musical argument of the work is therefore predicated not so much on tonal opposition or thematic development, as on the juxtaposition of different types of musical discourse: static against linear harmonic motion, predominantly melodic against predominantly harmonic progression, tutti against solo or duet instrumental textures. The opening of the second movement consists of a chain of first inversion chords that suggests an introduction to a conventionally harmonized lyric melody which never actually arrives. The interjection of the Scherzo in place of a more emotionally involved development completes the denial of Romantic pathos that characterized the opening of the slow movement. The formal design of the movement, and consequently of the symphony as a whole, signifies the renunciation of a certain type of sentimental discourse particularly associated with such German Romantic symphonists as Mendelssohn and Schumann, in favour of a more abstract, formalist aesthetic. It is this isolationist attitude which is Berwald's most thoroughly Northern characteristic, and which led Carl Nielsen to write admiringly to Stenhammar: ‘neither the media, money nor power can damage or benefit good Art. It will always find some simple, decent artists who forge ahead and produce and stand up for their works. In Sweden you have the finest example of this: Berwald’ (letter dated 27 January 1911, quoted in Carl Nielsens breve, ed. I.E. Møller and T. Meyer, Copenhagen, 1954, p.112).
