Rangström, Ture

Anders Johan Ture Rangström – Varhymn

(b. 30. November 1884, Stockholm – d. 11. May 1947, Stockholm)

Preface
Ture Rangström was one of the most prolific Swedish composers of the twentieth century. Born in Stockholm to an upper-middle-class family, Rangström never had formal conservatory training other than piano lessons as a child, taking pride in being musically self-taught. In the footsteps of other famous Swedish composers, however, he traveled to Berlin and Munich in the early 1900s to study with various teachers, including Johan Lindegren, Hans Pfitzner, and Julius Hey. Rangström also worked as a music critic, wrote for several Swedish newspapers, and worked as a conductor. When composing, he mainly focused on writing romanser, the Swedish equivalent of German lied. While lesser known compared to romanser, his orchestral works are critical to understanding who Rangström was as an artist. The little English-language research on the composer focuses on his songs as they give insight into Rangström’s love of literature and poetry; however, his orchestral works demonstrate a composer who idolized Romantic programmatic works. After he died in 1947 due to cancer, obituaries focused on his songs, and these works were the ones that represented him in concert. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, however, new recordings of his orchestral pieces by ensembles like Norrkoping Symphony have cultivated a new love for these works. …

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