Ture Rangström: Sånger

Secondly, during the years 1905-07 Rangström studied in Berlin and Munich, composition with Hans Pfitzner and singing with Julius Hey. Most important were his studies with Hey, who during the 1880’s had been among those who had formulated the principles for a musical-dramatic singing practise in Richard Wagner‘s operas. One of Hey’s fundamental ideas about the art of song was that the song is a vocally and musically sounding fixation and magnification of the linguistic accents. Back in Sweden, Rangström would propagate closely to Hey’s ideas to promote a linguistically based singing practise.

These “unsingable” languages, how rich in opportunities for spiritual expression are they not – and to what degree do they not need this very psychological characterization… A Nordic poem must be spiritually inspired to sound – and even then, preferably, not like an empty bell. (1908)

The voice’s means of expression as concertante, theatrical instrument in Rangströmg’s music always aims in principle at “expressiveness of the soul” and “psychical characterization”, with a great range and wealth of contrast in the expression. For the singer – and the pianist – this unity is both challenging and rewarding to work with. It becomes a matter of seeking the truth, a striving to search into onself and others, and with poetry and music as media formulate knowledge of people and life.
The poem liberated for him fettered forces in tone and composer, and through this strange process, compounded of experience and fantasy, the new art work is born: the song.

That was how Rangström experienced it. His own description of his procedures as a reader of poetry, singer, and composer is instructive. His perspectives can hardly be explained more clearly.

A poem has very rarely enticed me by purely musical-associative elecments; on the other hand, the speech melody of a poem is extraordinarily decisive for a composer who endeavours to go further than the primitively pleasant charm of the cantilena. This speech melody should be followed in all parts, its, so to speak, inner and outer rhythm, its psychical and tonal balance, its rising and falling, and its precise rendering of the poem’s meaning. (1945)

This recording was made in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s great hall (now known as Musikaliska) in Stockholm on June 1, 3 & 5, 1981, April 13 & 15, 1982.
Producer and technician: Ulf Rosenberg
Cover photo: Bengt Wanselius
Graphics: Inga Beckeman, Pontus Reuterswärd