Erik Gustaf Geijer: The Hopeful Romantic

Margareta Jonth, Carl Rune Larsson, Nils-Erik Sparf, James Horton, Lars Frykholm, Lucia Negro, John Forsell, Wilhelm Stenhammar, Akademiska kören, Tor Mann, Allmänna sången, Henry Weman, Orphei Drängar, Eric Ericson

The musical legacy of writer, poet, philosopher, historian and – most relevant for this context – composer Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847) is represented here with an exclusively digital compilation of all of Caprice Music’s recordings of his masterful, but tragically almost forgotten music. Here is a wide musical selection of both his more frequently performed melodies such as “Kväll och frid” and “Svanvits sång”, and more unknown works such as his dramatic Piano Quartet in E minor and heartfelt songs for voice and piano.

This extensive compilation album is available to stream and download on most digital outlets, such as Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music.

E.G. Geijer, oil painting by J.G. Sandberg, 1828.

Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847)

In German cultural circles the expression the Goethe era is an accepted term; few would question the justification of using those words to describe the period 1749-1832, which was the master’s lifetime – or at least 1770-1832, which was his active time. We take it for granted that the “Olympian of Weimar” dominated an age which nevertheless was by no means lacking in geniuses.

If one particular Swede apart from the sovereigns – with similar arguments could claim to be elevated to the key figure of an epoch, the choice would probably fall on Erik Gustaf Geijer. In several spheres which, at any rate, those in prominent positions regarded as essential, he embodied Sweden’s approach to romanticism, the religious self-control and conservative self-examination of the early 19th century. He also embodied the transition to “modernity” – to liberalism and individualism.
On this journey, which was often arduous, he took with him from the peaceful country-house life in Värmland, where he spent his childhood and youth, provisions which were indispensable and which gave his long intellectual, religious, and moral life decisive traits of great humanity: love of the forests and mountains, songs and music, the lyrical gift. Without these provisions, which he generously shared with others, the thinker and historian Geijer would probably have had to walk alone on the usual professor’s path.

Now he became, as far as an individual can be, an inspirational leader. After his death, his memory, at least in the small academic town of Uppsala, proved a heavy weight to bear. The Geijer cult – discreetly upheld by his daughter Agnes, Countess Hamilton and mistress of Uppsala Castle, by her husband the governor, and by a generation or more of historians and philosophers up to the storms of the 1880’s – became part of the dreamy Late Romantic echo’s self-defence against everything new. The cult became a burden. But that was not Geijer’s fault.

Geijer was born at the manor house of the iron foundry at Ransäter in the province of Värmland, on
12 January 1783. His father’s side came from a German bourgeoise family who had gone in for mining; his father, a capable mining engineer, was ironmaster at Ransäter. On his mother’s side too – where intellectual talents and inclinations were more prominent – Geijer came of a middle-class family of German origins.

In Geijer’s Minnen (“Memories”, 1834), life at Ransäter is described with a loving freshness, witnessing both to the ability of one’s childhood surroundings to live on in the rose-tinted light of memory, and to the ageing Geijer’s unbroken creative power and emotional intensity. At a distance of almost 250 years, the home at Ransäter, with the stern father and the silent, subdued mother, may seem narrow and harsh. It was a manor house in which the 20-year-old had to purloin the candle-stumps he needed in his room at night to write, in secret, the work that was to bring him youthful fame – the memorial to Sten Sture the Elder (1803), which was awarded the Grand Prize of the Swedish Academy. The house still has a palpable atmosphere of Sweden in the rustic 18th century days of poverty, with a lingering Carolinian austerity.
But there was dancing and music-making; there were books, and nature had been discovered as a source of strength and joy. In Geijer’s “Memories”, Ransäter is a paradise, without overbearing sentimentality:

The sap of the spring greenery, the coolness of the forest shade, the invigorating freshness of the billows – the scent of spruce and flowers – country air, morning air – all this lives and is present in this memory; and town life, indoor life, books galore, all the dust on the path of learning have not been able to wipe it out.

One of the fundamental experiences outside the path of learning strewn with book dust which became Geijer’s career, was a journey (1810) to the England of the Napoleonic wars and early industrialism. There he had the opportunity of studying the world at large, and the strength and weaknesses of a free, wealthy, and open society. Otherwise, Geijer was not much of a traveller.
From 1799, when the 16-year-old set out for Uppsala, until 1846, when as professor emeritus he left it to spend the last year of his life in Stockholm, he remained in the university town with only a few short breaks. To an even greater extent than now, an academic career in those days meant long, financially lean times of waiting – accompanied by lengthy engagements and much letter-writing – and Geijer’s career was no exception: unpaid lecturer in 1811, acting professor of history in 1815 (the first paid post) and finally, in 1817, permanent professorship. In the summer of 1816, after a betrothal of seven years, he married Anna Lisa Lilljebjörn, a girl from the neighbouring estate in Värmland.

Geijer reflects his century. He follows many tracks. From 1803, we have the memorial to Sten Sture, an 18th century eulogy in the French academic style, but also learned dissertations in the University Latin of the age. From 1810 until the middle of the 1820s, Geijer wrote Gothic* poetry – Odalbonden (“The Yeoman”), Manhem, Vikingen (“The Viking”) – hymns, but also aesthetic and political theses in the spirit of new romanticism and conservatism. Geijer became the theorist of the Swedish, and above all the Uppsala reaction, but he was not “reactionary” in the real sense.
The journey to England, the Värmlandian liberalism with echoes from the Swedish Age of Liberty’s tradition (1718-72), and his own independent reflections on history and society, saved him from narrowminded attitudes. In religious matters he remained so openly liberal that he incurred a press lawsuit; his subsequent acquittal strengthened his faith in a free social order.

From the 1820s, the research and writing of history predominated. At the same time, Geijer’s famous “defection” was being prepared: his change from fundamental conservatism to a moderate liberalism. Besides historical works and extensive writings with a philosophic, social, and political outlook, the last ten years of his life produced a small collection of very personal lyrical poems. Geijer’s “Memories” belongs to this final phase of his development. And all his life, he performed and composed music. In a concise but masterly way, he has characterised his relationship to music in the poem Tonerna (“The Tones”):

“Thought, whose struggles only the night sees,
Tones, with you it begs for rest!
Heart, which suffers from the day’s tumult,
Tones, to you, to you it wants to flee.”

The final point in Geijer’s intellectual development was what he himself called the philosophy of personality: a conception of the world and of life in which, on the basis of what he had learnt in his full life, of his observations and reflections, he succeeded in combining warm personal piety, respect for the individual – even the most insignificant person’s ego as a building stone in the universe, as well as faith in human and social fellowship as an essential condition of life. In this philosophy, which had great influence on generations of Swedish teachers, clergymen and civil servants, the strongest element is faith in a personal contact with God. The poem Natthimmelen (“The Night Sky”) may serve to sum up the mature, ageing Geijer’s outlook on life:

“Alone I advance along my course,
farther and farther extends the way;
alas, my goal is hidden in the distance.
Dusk is falling. The sky turns to night.
Soon the eternal stars are all that I see.

But I do not lament the fleeing day,
the coming night does not appal me;
for of the love that goes through the world
a ray also shone into my soul.”

Stig Strömholm, 1982
Vice principal, Uppsala University

*A cultural movement inspired by Nordic pre-historic times, especially located to Uppsala.