Franz Berwald: Symphony No.1, ‘Sinfonie Sérieuse’, in G minor, Neeme Järvi (conductor)

Franz Berwald – Symphony No.1, ‘Sinfonie Sérieuse’, in G minor, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi (conductor).
Completed sometime from January to March 14, 1842 (perhaps begun earlier), revised ca. 1843–44
1. Allegro con energia – 00:00
2. Adagio Maestoso – 10:30
3. Stretto – 16:48 -------
4. ------ Finale: Adagio - Allegro Molto – 22:14
Franz Adolf Berwald (23 July 1796 – 3 April 1868) was a Swedish Romantic composer. He made his living as an orthopedist and later as the manager of a saw mill and glass factory, and became more appreciated as a composer after his death than he had been in his lifetime.
Franz Berwald was born into a family that had been musical for generations. His father, who had been a violinist in Frederick the Great’s orchestra in Berlin, emigrated across the Baltic Sea to Stockholm, which is the town where Franz Berwald was born. Franz grew up during tumultuous historical times.
Berwald found employment as a violinist (and later a violist) in the court orchestra, through which he became acquainted with operas by Mozart, Weber, and Rossini.
By 1818 his music had earned a review in the Leipzig-based Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, though not a very good one.
When he could line up the time and finances, he toured as a solo violinist in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. He persevered with his compositions, and by 1821 he was able to unveil his first symphony (of which only a fragment survives) in an all-Berwald concert that also included a violin concerto and a quartet for piano and winds. Again, the reviews were discouraging.
In 1829 he left for Berlin, intent on getting operas produced. In this he did not succeed; nor did he ingratiate himself with the city’s leading musical citizen, the usually genteel Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote to a Swedish friend, “Right now there is a compatriot of yours here in town whom I do not like,” before complaining of Berwald’s “boasting and arrogance” and dismissing his music as “a piecemeal of borrowed ideas which he tries to make new with all kinds of oddities.” In any case, Berwald did not make much of an impression in Berlin’s musical community, but he did develop a parallel talent there—in orthopedics! He invented various mechanisms to correct orthopedic defects, and founded an orthopedic institute.
He put composition on the back burner until he moved to Vienna for a stay in 1841–42. He returned to composing more actively, completing two symphonies, the Sinfonie sérieuse and Sinfonie capricieuse. Two others, the Sinfonie singulière and Sinfonie naïve, followed in 1845. Of the bunch, the Sérieuse was the only one Berwald ever heard performed, and that only at its single performance during his lifetime. Later in life he returned to Vienna and also spent time in Paris; but most of his time from 1842 on he spent in Sweden, where for quite a few years this master of the non-linear career ran a glass-making factory while slowly earning the grudging respect of the musical community.
The serious championing of his works waited until the twentieth century.
On aesthetic grounds, it is hard to comprehend why Berwald’s pieces met such resistance; probably his difficult personality had more to do with it than the music itself. The surface language of the Sinfonie sérieuse mostly falls somewhere in the neighborhood occupied by Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, yet it does possess a distinct flavor.
Berwald’s orchestration is fascinating; ears raised on Classicism would not have been prepared for the original sound of trombones and bassoons doubling the strings at the outset of the Adagio maestoso, which is by turns placid and dramatic—proto-Brucknerian, on might even say. Similarly intriguing is the sound of the third movement, which Berwald labels Stretto (rather than Scherzo, as anyone else would have called it). The movement doesn’t quite end; it arrests on what should be its penultimate note and then continues without a break into the finale, which, curiously, begins with a reminiscence of the slow movement. The music turns quick but maintains the feeling of an introduction until nearly two minutes into the movement, when it breaks into a march, with a Berliozian cast, which carries the piece through various episodes before reaching the symphony’s formidable conclusion. (excerpts from Biographical Note by James M. Keller)