Sæverud, Harald

All

Sæverud, Harald

Sonatine for viola and piano (first print / score and part)

24,00 

Harald Sæverud Sonatine for bratsj og klaver (1989)

(17. April 1897 – 27. March 1992)
(Sonatina for viola and piano)

First performance: 20. September 1989, Oslo Universitetets Aula
Are Sandbakken, viola; Helge Kjekshus, piano

Harald Sæverud was born in Bergen, the son of a respected and modestly wealthy business man and a devout mother. When Sæverud was 12 years old, disaster hit the household: his father, with his business partners, was found guilty of tax evasion and became bankrupt. He was sent to jail for three months. It was at this time that young Harald began to write music, perhaps as an inner escape from grim reality. His first formal studies took place at the Bergen conservatoire where his main teacher was the pianist and composer Borghild Holmsen (1865-1938). By the time he was 17 Sæverud was working on his first symphony, often skipping school in order to do so.
Between 1920 and 1922 Sæverud studied at the Berlin Hochschule. While there a wealthy friend hired the Berlin Philharmonic for the first performance of  Overtura Apassionata.
Later in life Sæverud would claim that he learned nothing in Berlin, and that his only teachers were Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. However, letters from the period show that he did in fact learn a lot in Berlin, where he studied with Friederich Koch (1862 – 1927).
Upon returning to Norway in 1922 he slowly built a reputation as one of the country’s most promising young composers, making ends meet as a music critic and by giving piano lessons. He received unexpected encouragement from Carl Nielsen (1865 –1931), who wrote Sæverud a letter expressing his great enthusiasm for his Five Capricci for piano, op. 1.
Harmonien (today known as Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra) would eventually become Sæverud’s main expressive outlet. The ensemble went on to premiere many of his orchestral works.
In 1934 Sæverud married Marie Hvoslef (1900 – 1982), an American of Norwegian ancestry, daughter of a very wealthy ship magnate who had died in 1926. Marrying Marie Hvoslef enabled Sæverud to devote himself to composition full-time. It also facilitated the building of Siljustøl, the impressive mansion in the outskirts of Bergen which would become their home. Siljustøl, with its wild nature, would, from 1939 until Sæverud’s death, serve as his main source of inspiration, together with his family.
The completion of Siljustøl was timely. The Nazi occupation of Norway during WW2 started in April 1940. Sæverud was one of the few Norwegian artists with an unequivocal anti-Nazi stance throughout the war. WW2 turned out to be an especially fertile period for Sæverud. The anger caused by the Nazi invasion brought out a strong rush of creativity in him. This difficult time induced him to compose three symphonies (Nrs. 5, 6 and 7), as well as several other orchestral works and piano pieces. The Ballad of Revolt (Kjempevise-slåtten), by far his most famous work, was written out of rage against the occupation.
By the end of WW2 Sæverud had become an established composer. The Ballad of Revolt made him into a kind of national hero in a country that had just begun to recover from five years of foreign invasion.
Shortly after the war, the radical actor and theatre director Hans Jacob Nilsen (1897 –1957) asked Sæverud to write new music for a stage production of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Sæverud hesitated at fist but, on rereading the play, he decided he had indeed something to contribute. His Peer Gynt score stands among his most powerful creations.
In the 1950s the Koussevitzky foundation commissioned Violin Concerto, op 37. The State of Minnesota commissioned a symphony (his eighth, the Minnesota Symphony, op. 40) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the state in 1958.

 

Read full preface / German version not available > HERE

Score No.

Special Edition

Genre

Size

Specifics

Printing

Pages

Go to Top