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Edvard Hagerup Bull - Symphony no. 2 op. 21 (1958)
(b. Bergen 10. June 1922. d. Oslo 15. March 2012)
First Performance: Oslo, 8. March 1963
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edouard Lindenberg
Original score available from the Norwegian National Library:
https://www.nb.no/noter/produkt/symfonier-nr-2-op-21-2/
Edvard Hagerup Bull was born in Bergen in 1922. He obtained an organist diploma in Oslo in 1947 after studies with Arild Sandvold. He also studied piano with Erling Westher and Reimar Riefling and composition with Bjarne Brustad and Ludvig Irgens Jensen. His father, Sverre Hagerup Bull, was a respected music critic as well as the editor and one of the main authors of the Norwegian music encyclopaedia “Musikkens Verden”. Edvard Hagerup Bull had an impeccable ancestry for a Norwegian composer: his paternal grandfather was a cousin of Edvard Grieg, while Ole Bull was the grandfather’s uncle. The same grandfather was several times finance and justice minister for the Christian Mikkelsen government, the first Norwegian government after Norway became independent from Sweden in 1905. Between 1948 and 1953 Edvard Hagerup Bull studied composition at the Paris Conservatoire with Darius Milhaud and Jean Rivier and musical analysis with Olivier Messiaen. Later on he spent two years in Berlin (1959 – 1961), where he studied composition with Boris Blacher and analysis with Josef Rufer. Back in Norway he was ready to establish himself as a working composer. This was not to be, however. He encountered a great deal of indifference, even downright hostility towards his music in his own country. The latter was epitomised by the overwhelming flood of negative reviews his Second Symphony received after its premiere in Oslo in 1963. After a long crisis, and with a young family to take care of, he decided to move to France, but not before his beloved master Milhaud had reassured him that he was indeed on the right track and that the Second Symphony was an outstanding work that did not deserve the bad reviews it had received. Indeed Milhaud considered Hagerup Bull to be one of his most brilliant pupils and described him as “a musician with a solid technique and a very winning, commanding and highly imaginative personality." Milhaud's original words were:
“Je […] certifie que le compositeur norvegien Edvard Hagerup Bull […] est un musicien d’une technique solide et d’une personnalité vraiment très attachante, vigoreuse et pleine de fantaisie” (17 oct. 1963)
While he lived in Paris, Hagerup Bull received commissions from Radio France (Sinfonia Humana op. 37, Air Solennel op. 42 and Posthumes op 47) and from several outstanding French ensembles, such as Quatour Instrumentale de Paris, Ensemble Moderne de Paris and Trio Ravel. He was also the first Norwegian composer to receive commissions from the French Cultural Ministry. The resulting works were his 5th Symphony (Sinfonia in Memoriam op. 41), and the Concerto pour flûte et orchestre de chambre op 33.
Hagerup Bull returned to Norway in 1987. His 80th year (2002) was, in Norway, marked by the world première performance of his Sinfonia Espressiva (Symphony nr. 3 – written in 1964!) by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under David Porcelijn, as well as by a concert of his chamber music given under the auspices of the Bergen Chamber Music Society.
On August 13th 2006, to mark the 45th anniversary of the Berlin Wall, Hagerup Bull's Épilogue op. 26 for string orchestra (the only known piece of music written in protest against the Berlin wall) was performed at Checkpoint Charlie by the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin conducted by Jon Bara Johansen with the composer in attendance. He presented the original score of the work to the Mauermuseum. This was to be his last public appearance.
Due to blindness Hagerup Bull was unable to compose during the last eleven years of his life. After a period of illness he died in Oslo in March 2012, three months short of his 90th birthday.
Edvard Hagerup Bull is one of the great Scandinavian composers from the 20th Century, with an instantly recognizable and original voice. More than half of his production is still unpublished and only a fraction of his music has been recorded professionally. Performances of his music are, likewise, infrequent.
As the previous lines point out, Hagerup Bull's Second Symphony op. 21 became a decisive composition in his career, although through no design of his. The symphony came right after Hagerup Bull's most popular work, the masterful Ad Usum Amicorum op. 20 and before the delightful Cassation op. 22 (mph 4098). It shares with these works a general similarity of style and approach, although each of them has its very own unique characteristics.
Hagerup Bull's first symphony, Trois Mouvements Symphoniques, had been premiered with reasonable success in Bergen in October 1961, shortly after his return from Berlin. As this second essay in the genre was in a style close in character to his first, the composer expected it to receive a similar stamp of approval when it was premiered in Oslo on March 8th 1963. However, on the days following the premiere six reviews appeared on Norwegian newspapers, all of them negative and some of them downright demeaning and mean-spirited. Two of the reviews came from composer colleagues whom he had helped during his time in Paris. Another one came from a former teacher of his. This was a shock to the very sensitive composer. To make matters worse, people in the Oslo musical environment began to shun his company and turned their back on him, as if afraid his failure might rub off on them. Hagerup Bull found himself, willy-nilly, in a Kafkian situation where he was suddenly being charged and sentenced for a crime he was not aware of having committed. By this time he was married and had a five year old daughter. With any prospects of making a decent career as a composer in his own country seemingly evaporated, he took a trip to Paris in October of 1963 to visit Milhaud, who wrote the short letter of recommendation that included the text cited above. Milhaud's support opened doors for Hagerup Bull in France, where he moved with his young family and remained for 24 years.
It is worth remembering that the Second Symphony had been the work that so had impressed Boris Blacher that he arranged for a two-year stipend for Hagerup Bull to study with him in Berlin. Milhaud was of the same opinion about the symphony.
The Second Symphony is cast in four movements, a formal procedure Hagerup Bull would also adopt for his following three symphonies.
It seems appropriate to remark that the music in this symphony is, for the most part, urban in nature. There is a lot of bustle and excited activity throughout, with brief moments of joyful introspection. The slow third movement is the one with the most extended moments of lyricism but here also the music becomes gradually agitated before returning to a relative calm. It is the indoor calm of a city dweller.
Although the music sounds distinctively like Edvard Hagerup Bull, there is an apparent similarity of approach to that of Les Six. This is felt in the generally light and cheerful character of the music and also in its relentless rhythmical thrust. The latter aspect annoyed some of the reviewers after the premiere performance. They complained that that the music had a sense of "marching on the spot". One can see where they are coming from but, in all fairness, the performance of March 1963 - the only one so far - was rather poor, hardly revealing very much at all of the possibilities inherent to he score. Said performance is in the archives of the Norwegian National Library and can be listened to by going there in person. It is a performance lacking in nuances. From a technical aspect it is often slapdash. From a musical point of view it has no cohesion whatsoever. The lyrical sections are marred by imprecise and often sloppy playing and the rhythmical ones do, indeed, sound like futile marching, rather than like the excited surges of energy they are meant to be.
Unusually for Hagerup Bull, the symphony begins in a very serious mood, sustained for well over one minute, before the music becomes more light-hearted in the typical Hagerup Bull manner. It is full of colourful details of orchestration and contrasts of density. Although they are fleeting and not ostentatious, there are plenty of solo spots for many of the instruments.
The second movement - the symphony's scherzo - begins almost vulnerably, in the manner of a musical box, before it too gains momentum and develops a musical dialectic that belongs to its composer alone. There are moments of decidedly jazz-like character. Only in the last brief moments does the music return to the lightness of texture of the beginning. This movement suggests a character who enters a boisterous dancehall, stays there for a while and then eventually abandons it.
The third movement is a prime example of Hagerup Bull's liking of continuous melody. The singing line wanders from instrument to instrument and moves in ways that are most unusual for anyone but Hagerup Bull. As is always the case in Hagerup Bull's slow music, this movement contains moments of aching beauty. His way of dealing with harmony in conjunction with an ever present melodic line is utterly original and deeply affecting.
The last movement is the longest. It is also the most generally relentless. It reaches two distinct moments of filmic grandeur and also embraces mock-pompousness on occasion. On the whole it is a very playful movement. The very end returns to an introspective atmosphere found only occasionally in the symphony.
Although there is no definite key centre to any of the movements, they all end in a clear tonality. The first ends in G major. The second begins and ends in C major. The third ends in B minor. The last one ends in C sharp Major.
Edvard Hagerup Bull's Second Symphony is as uncompromising as any work of his. It refuses to bend to any kind of convention and stubbornly holds its ground and proposes its views on what a symphony can be. The reviewers who denigrated then work in 1963 were expecting a symphony built upon Classical and Romantic principles and were, therefore, disappointed. Although it contains music that can be related to both Classicism and Romanticism, it ultimately obeys to a logic of its own, making any comparisons to established repertoire perfunctory and meaningless.
It is our hope that this first edition of the symphony will awaken an interest in the work, which, after 59 years - at the time of this writing - is still awaiting a sorely needed second performance that will do it justice.
We present this edition in celebration of Edvard Hagerup Bull's centenary year.
About the edition
As was the general norm in Hagerup Bull's earlier compositions, the manuscript of his Second Symphony is far from inviting for a prospective conductor. Probably in order to save paper, the notes are often crammed together. Instrumental staves disappear and reappear frequently, making the conductor's job very arduous. A particular staff can suddenly change instrument halfway through. In addition, there are many nearly microscopic additions, mostly in the percussion parts, that are all but impossible to read. Although the work is elegantly orchestrated, after Hagerup Bull's personal principles, there are passages of very high density, which prove challenging for an engraver in search of visual "air" and tidiness in the score.
There are several errors in the manuscript, as is always the case with complex orchestral scores that have not been proofread. This edition has endeavoured to correct as many of these as possible.
NB: in the wind and brass instruments, when a pair of instruments has the same rhythm, it is understood that the articulation above the staff applies to both instruments. This has been done in order to save visual space. Naturally the articulations appear in the individual parts.
1st Movement
Measure 6, cello: added pizz. to 4th beat
m 10, bassoons: added bass clef
m 15, flutes & piccolo: added 8th-note rest at the end of measure. Piccolo: last note changed
to 8th-note (erroneously notated as quarter note in manuscript)
m. 17, contrabassoon: added 8th-note at the end of measure, tied to previous dotted half-note
m. 29, strings: added arco to all parts
m. 31, 2nd violin: added sharp to third beat
m. 39, piano, Left Hand: changed to treble clef
m. 53, piccolo: second note changed to G, to correspond with 1st flute, 1st oboe and 1st clarinet
horns: rest in second beat changed to dotted 8th
m. 54, viola: cautionary natural added
m. 60, 2nd violin: pizz. added to second beat; arco to third beat
m. 63, flutes and piccolo: changed to F (written erroneously as G in manuscript)
m. 64, tamburo militare: ff added
m. 68, viola: pizz. added to second note (and further)
m. 72, piano: f added
m. 75, horns: first two beats changed to second horn (given as first horn in manuscript)
m. 83, viola: arco added
mm. 84-86, piano: octaves changed to more idiomatic hand disposition
m. 95, harp: 8va added to right hand
m. 106, 2nd horn: cuivrez added
m. 117, bass: f added
horns: ouvert added
m. 121, piano: f added
m. 122, flutes: first beat changed to F (1st) and D (2nd) to correspond with m. 151
m. 126, flutes & piccolo: natural added to second beat
m. 127, bass: pizz. added
m. 128, 1st bassoon: bass clef added
bass: arco added, to correspond with the other strings
m. 131, horns: sfp and crescendo hairpin added, to correspond with rest of the brass
m. 138, celesta: grace note on third beat changed to G# (Ab in manuscript)
m. 146, viola: Bb-C 8th-notes added to last beat. Missing without apparent reason on
manuscript.
m. 149, violins: cautionary sharp added to end of third beat
m. 155, harp: left hand changed to bass clef-
m. 157, violins: articulation in first and second beat changed to correspond with woodwinds
m. 170, 1st & 2nd horn: natural added (erroneously missing from manuscript)
m. 180, cello: pizz. taken way
m. 185, cor anglais: note changed to notated D (erroneously notated in concert pitch in
manuscript)
2nd Movement
m. 19, clarinets: p added
m. 20, cor anglais: p added
m. 21, glockenspiel: p added
m. 25, piano: changed to treble clef in L.H.
clarinets: last note changed to notated C# (concert pitch: B) to correspond with
glockenspiel, piano and violins. Notated as A (concert pitch G) on manuscript for no
apparent reason
m. 27, bass: f added
m. 28, piano: fourth 16th note (lower) changed to Eb to correspond with 2nd violin.
Erroneously written as Db in manuscript. L.H. remains in treble clef (bass clef
erroneously added in manuscript)
m. 29, flutes & oboes: f added
m. 34, piano: treble clef added on L.H.
m. 38, cello: changed to bass clef
m. 43, cor anglais: mf added
m. 49, harp: mf added
m. 53, percussion 2: instrument name (tambour de basque) added to lower instrument
m. 66, clarinet & bassoons: mf added
m. 72, bass: staccato accent added to first beat
m. 79, celesta: f added
m. 91, cello: arco added
m. 96, cello: p added
m. 97, bass: p added
m. 119, cor anglais: third note articulation changed to staccato accent
m. 120, 2nd violin: pizz. taken away
m. 124, 1st flute: last note changed to G (erroneously notated as G# in manuscript)
3rd Movement
m. 28, piano: second note changed to 32nd-note, to correspond with cor anglais and bassoon
m. 34, cello: accent taken away, to correspond with viola and bass
m. 42, 2nd violin: arco added
m. 52, cor anglais & clarinets: rhythm in second beat changed to two 8th-notes, to correspond
with violins
m. 64, bassoon: staccato accent added
m. 65, piano: natural added to second beat of L.H.
mm. 80-81, harp: all notes changed to A harmonics, sounding an octave higher, thus
doubling the cello (erroneously written as C on manuscript)
m. 82, viola: first note changed to F (erroneously written as G on manuscript)
m. 88, 1st horn: long note tied to dotted 8th-note of same pitch (to correspond with cor anglais
and bassoon)
4th Movement
m. 4, 2nd violin: accent added to third beat, to correspond with upper woodwinds, horns,
trumpets, 1st and 2nd trombone, 1st violin and viola
m. 27 + upbeat, 1st trumpet: legato slur added over four notes, to correspond with cor anglais
m. 75, casse claire: f added
m. 82, 2nd violin: as in m. 4
m. 113, cello & bass: f added
m. 122, flutes, piccolo, oboes & trumpets: second beat changed to double-dotted rhythm, to
correspond with following measure. At the given tempo there is no point in making
the distinction between dotted and double-dotted, and the latter suggests more energy
m. 130, bass: f added
m. 180: the score has a handwritten indication of plus lent (quarter-note = 92-96). It is not in
the composer’s handwriting, so it must be assumed that it was written by the
conductor during rehearsals under the composer’s instructions. It is highly unlikely
that such a drastic change would have been made without the composer’s approval,
since Hagerup Bull was very keen on the strict adherence to a strict pulse, unless
otherwise specified. The tempo change has been observed in this edition
m. 239, viola: pizz. added
m. 242: oddly the cor anglais and 1st horn have the same note but with different lengths, as
opposed to m. 61, where both instruments have a whole-note. Although there seems
to be no reason for the difference, the notation of m. 242 has been kept as in the
manuscript
m. 257, viola: pizz. added
m. 263, 3rd trombone & tuba: rhythm of fourth beat changed to two 8th-notes, to correspond
with all other instruments with the same line (erroneously notated as a dotted rhythm
in the manuscript)
m. 275: rhythm in bassoons and brass changed to 8th -note rest – 8th-note. The manuscript
creates some confusion here. It seems the composer may have intended a dotted
rhythm, but he neglected to write one 8th-note rest on all mentioned instruments. In
the bassoons there is no rest whatsoever on the third beat. As the violas and cellos are
playing a complementary figure consisting of a triplet beginning with a rest, I
considered it more “tidy” to give the bassoons and brass an 8th-note upbeat to the
second beat
m. 280 contains a confusing tempo instruction. The composer writes “doppio più lento”
and, further down (above the trumpet staff) “8th-note = quarter-note de la mesure
précédente”. However, there is another indication with stronger hand, yet further
down (above the piano staves) of “quarter-note = 92-96”. This is way below the half
tempo that the upper instruction suggests. Did the composer make this decision during
the rehearsals? It is impossible to know. The recording of the premiere performance
has a drastic reduction of tempo at this spot, so it is plausible that the decision may
have come from Hagerup Bull. This edition has kept the “doppio più lento”
and “…de la mesure précédente” instructions and removed the final one. Eventual conductors can reach their conclusions based on the given information.
Ricardo Odriozola, 29. May 2022
No German preface available....
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