‘Clear, Happy, and Naïve’: Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Music for As You Like It

Abstract

This article explores early twentieth-century Swedish attitudes towards modernism. It uses as its focus Wilhelm Stenhammar’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s As You Like It, composed in 1920 for a production directed by Per Lindberg. It argues that by 1920, ‘modernism’ in Sweden was associated with particular styles that differed between disciplines. The term ‘modern’, however, had the same meaning across disciplines, and referred to cultural forms that aimed to reach a mass audience. As a collaborative form, theatre is particularly useful for exploring conflicting ideas about modernism as practitioners involved frequently held opposing views. This was the case here—Stenhammar and Lindberg had differing attitudes towards ‘modernism’, but were united by a common goal of creating ‘modern’ art. Through an investigation of the 1920 production, I argue that Stenhammar’s music was central to the play’s success, and was received as ‘modern’ in part because of its diatonic language.

Swedish composers are largely absent from musicological studies of the early twentieth century. Without a single figurehead like Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius, Sweden’s musical climate in this period has remained relatively underexplored. Key personalities such as Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871–1927) have yet to receive the scholarly attention recently enjoyed by their Nordic colleagues.¹ Consequently little is known about Swedish musical modernism, despite the extensive exchange of ideas between Sweden and the rest of Europe.

This article puts Stenhammar on the cultural map of the early twentieth century, situating his 1920 incidental music for Shakespeare’s As You Like It within contemporaneous discourse on modernism and modernity. It argues that Stenhammar rejected musical ‘modernism’—which by the 1920s was synonymous with atonality—to create instead what was termed ‘modern’ music. In Sweden, whether an art form was ‘modern’ or not was determined by its political, not stylistic, affiliation. ‘Modern’ culture was aimed at a mass audience, designed to be appropriate for Sweden’s new political status as a social democracy.²

‘Modern’ had the same meaning across disciplines, but ‘modernism’ did not. ‘Modernism’ was used to refer to particular styles, so it did not mean the same thing to a musician as to a theatre director. As a multidisciplinary collaborative art form, theatre is uniquely placed to illuminate competing attitudes towards the concepts ‘modern’ and ‘modernism’, and indeed the different associations and definitions that modernism had throughout the early 1900s. Stenhammar and the collaborators he worked with for As You Like It had different attitudes to modernism within their disciplines, but were nonetheless united by the common goal of creating popular, ‘modern’ theatre.

Stenhammar is one of the most prominent figures of Swedish music history, and crucial when considering Swedish debates about modernism. As the principal conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra from 1907 to 1922, his programming choices were reflective of the composers more broadly considered progressive within Sweden. He performed music by central European composers such as Richard Strauss, Max Reger, and Claude Debussy, but particularly championed Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, and Ture Rangström, regularly scheduling their work and inviting them to guest-conduct the orchestra.³

As a composer, Stenhammar collaborated with some of the most pioneering practitioners of his time. Not least among these was the director Per Lindberg (1890–1944), with whom Stenhammar worked for As You Like It.⁴ Lindberg’s significance for twentieth-century Swedish theatre is difficult to overstate. He studied with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, bringing the ideas and techniques he had learned in the German capital back to Sweden. He experimented at the Lorensberg Theatre in Gothenburg, where he was the artistic director from 1919 to 1923, and where the premiere of As You Like It took place. Lindberg’s productions provided a fruitful creative meeting space for practitioners from Sweden and abroad. Frederick J. and Lise-Lone Marker claim that Lindberg produced ‘the most influential new Swedish theatre of the period’, and that his creative teams were ‘the leading revolutionary force in Scandinavian theatre’.⁵ Alongside his directing he was also a theorist and author, disseminating his ideas through both talks and publications. His output in this area was so extensive that Stenhammar’s biographer, Bo Wallner, posits that Lindberg might be Sweden’s most important theatre theorist to date.⁶

Coming from different disciplines with different points of reference, modernism had different figureheads and geographical centres for Stenhammar and Lindberg. Accordingly, the term accrued subtly different connotations for each. Within theatrical circles, ‘modernism’ was defined negatively; a production was termed ‘modernist’ if it was ‘not realist’. Realism was defined by Lindberg as using ‘a historically accurate environment’ for the play’s aesthetic.⁷ Lindberg objected to realism, as embodied by the Meiningen players and later by Konstantin Stanislavsky, terming it an ‘ethnographic accuracy [which] is the rich man’s amiable weakness’.⁸ As a result, he actively embraced many aspects of theatrical modernism in order to move away from realism. But for musicians, ‘modernism’ became associated primarily with atonality throughout the 1910s, particularly the music of Arnold Schoenberg. For the most part, this was greeted with ambivalence by Swedish composers.⁹ Stenhammar viewed musical modernism as unnecessarily complex and convoluted, and identified instead with figures like Nielsen and Sibelius, who also had equivocal relationships with atonality. Stenhammar sought a musical idiom that was modern but not modernist—a music that he characterized in 1911 as ‘clear, happy, and naïve’, as discussed in detail below.¹⁰

The 1910s and 1920s saw a cultural and political shift within Sweden, during which the term ‘modern’ began to be attached to culture—of any discipline—that aimed to be popular, accessible, and politically minded. Before the First World War, there was no especial emphasis on the creation of popular art. This is particularly demonstrated by the proliferation of small theatres that targeted a bourgeois audience. The most influential of these was the Intimate Theatre, established by August Strindberg in 1907.¹¹ Based on models such as André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris and Max Reinhardt’s Kammerspiele in Germany, the Intimate Theatre staged chamber productions of Strindberg’s smaller dramas such as Spöksonaten (‘The Ghost Sonata’, 1907) and Svanehvit (‘Swanwhite’, 1901). After 1918, however, the cultural atmosphere changed. Lindberg’s appraisal of the years immediately following the end of the war indicates a far less forgiving attitude to socially exclusive cultural practices across Europe and Sweden:

When the armies returned from the fronts, when the major revolutions and economic crises reshaped societies, when the proletariat became an increasingly dominant power in society … then began a new era, with a new society and a new mentality. Shouldn’t this newness also remodel the theatre? … A vindictive criticism of the mentality that produced world war sparked a general distrust of the concepts of culture, aesthetics and morals. Art … the unfortunate art had to pay for bourgeois culture’s sins.¹²

In his concern about responding to ‘reshaped societies’, Lindberg was in accord with the preoccupations of many Swedish critics and practitioners in the 1920s. Anti-bourgeois rhetoric permeated writing on modern theatre, including Lindberg’s own, no doubt fuelled by the ongoing financial crisis. Sweden was heading into a depression caused by a post-war speculation boom—from the start of the decade the prices of global goods fell, destabilizing Sweden’s export income, which had been so buoyant during the war, leading to an increase in domestic inflation.¹³ In 1917 bread riots broke out across Sweden in cities including Gothenburg, instigated by rioters influenced by the Russian Revolution, and from 1919 accelerating inflation was widely discussed in the newspapers.¹⁴

From Stenhammar’s perspective, musical modernism only appealed to a limited audience and was therefore antithetical to the social goals of modern music. But for Lindberg, theatrical modernism was perfectly compatible with the social goals of modern theatre. He associated realism with the older, more established theatres that aimed at a bourgeois audience, and he argued that realist theatre could not be popular or accessible because of its cost. He claimed that most theatres could not afford the level of detail that realistic stagings required, which made it difficult for small theatres to put on productions. Covering the cost of the intricate sets and costumes also kept ticket prices high, meaning that only the wealthy could afford to attend. Additionally, realism did away with spectacle and resulted in an elitist theatre by extracting theatricality and making productions less interesting to watch.¹⁵ Lindberg’s solution to this problem was twofold: first, to stage contemporary repertory, which he felt better allowed the theatre to be ‘a mirror of contemporary life’;¹⁶ and second, to adopt whichever style guaranteed visual spectacle and attracted an audience. These styles were very often modernist. Thanks to Lindberg, therefore, ‘modern’ theatre largely became synonymous with theatrical ‘modernism’ in Sweden. Whether theatres should maintain realist stagings or not was widely discussed in 1920s Sweden and was colloquially termed ‘the modern theatre problem’. Newspapers in both Stockholm and Gothenburg referred to this issue and divided Swedish theatres into the old (realist) and new (anti-realist) accordingly. While Stockholm’s theatres, particularly the Royal Theatre, were seen as bastions of the old style, Lindberg and his team at the Gothenburg Lorensberg were depicted as the trailblazers among the new, staunchly rejecting any pretence to realism in their productions.¹⁷

To demonstrate how Stenhammar and Lindberg’s competing attitudes towards modernism were subsumed by a larger goal of creating modern theatre in As You Like It, I first discuss Stenhammar’s approach to creating a ‘new way’ for music. I place this in the context of similar endeavours by his friend and colleague Carl Nielsen and discussions about the naïve within Sweden. The category of the naïve was frequently invoked to describe artistic enterprises that aimed to be anti-elitist and anti-academic, which was the explicit goal for As You Like It. I then lay out Lindberg’s ideas about the importance of popular theatre and how it should be achieved, before turning to Stenhammar and his views on the topic. I focus on Stenhammar’s most extensive statement about the theatre, written in 1909 as a response to a questionnaire about Gothenburg’s lack of a theatre by the newspaper Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning.¹⁸ The paper published twenty-three responses to three questions, asking participants whether they felt that Gothenburg’s theatrical resources were sufficient for the town’s size and cultural ambitions, and if not what should be done about it. As the conductor and artistic director of the city’s Symphony Orchestra, Stenhammar was invited to comment. His response demonstrates that, beyond being an avid audience member, he had thought extensively both about the purpose of theatre, and how his ideal theatre might be constructed. He presented a vision of a theatre for the whole of Gothenburg, calling for a large institution that could keep its ticket prices low enough to attract a broad audience. In addition, he argued that incidental music should only be included where it had been written specifically for the play in question, a comment that is especially illuminating regarding his own approach to theatrical composition. With this in mind, I turn to Stenhammar’s music for As You Like It and the roles that it played in the production as a whole. I argue that the primary purpose of Stenhammar’s music was to create spectacle and to cultivate a style that would have mass appeal. The merits of Stenhammar’s score in the context of modern theatre were, therefore, its diatonic language, repetitive structure, extensive integration with the play’s text, and visual flamboyancy, as the musicians were often placed on the stage and included as part of the visual spectacle of the production.

stenhammar’s new way

Discussing his relationship to Schoenberg, Stenhammar wrote in revealing terms to his colleague Bror Beckman in 1911. Regarding his own musical style, Stenhammar claimed that he was seeking

a whole new way, a way for which I may have to search for a long time before I find it. It is therefore not a whim or a temporary fancy of mine, not a desperate attempt to deaden the pain and seek oblivion, when I sit in the evenings and study counterpoint. It is simply returning to the starting point and an attempt to find a new and better line from which to try again. It is … not resignation, it is a secret, trembling hope. … In this time of Arnold Schoenberg I dream of an art far beyond Arnold Schoenberg: clear, happy, and naïve.¹⁹

Stenhammar’s letter is illuminating for a number of reasons. First, it indicates an antagonistic attitude towards Schoenberg; second, that he believed that the study of counterpoint (which, according to the dates in his notebooks, he embarked upon in 1909 and continued until at least 1918)²⁰ was the most profitable way of constructing a route past Schoenberg; and third, that this new way could be described as ‘clear, happy, and naïve’.

Within Sweden, Schoenberg’s music was greeted apathetically by many composers who were in contact with Stenhammar. Their comments suggest that they chose to eschew atonality not through ignorance nor lack of interest, but due to a fundamentally different conception of what music’s ‘new way’ should be. Compare, for example, Sibelius’s 1912 comment where he stated that ‘ Arnold Schoenberg’s theories interest me. But I find him one-sided!’²¹ Nonetheless, Sibelius’s and Stenhammar’s responses were quite different—Schoenberg prompted in Stenhammar none of Sibelius’s later anxiety regarding his music’s place in, as James Hepokoski calls it, the ‘institution of art music’.²² Instead, Stenhammar envisaged his contrapuntal study as a way to disentangle himself from Schoenberg and the attendant furore surrounding him. He positioned himself less in dialogue with Austrian developments than Sibelius would and turned to his Scandinavian colleagues for inspiration, particularly Carl Nielsen and the Swedish composer Ture Rangström. Stenhammar was in regular correspondence with both, and their attitudes towards Schoenberg and musical modernism remained largely negative, even if they varied in degree. Rangström’s critical writing about Schoenberg bordered on the vituperative, calling his first Chamber Symphony ‘a monstrosity of sterile and pitiable musical fantasy’ in 1929.²³ Nielsen, meanwhile, wrote that Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and Verklärte Nacht were merely ‘melodies of the old kind that are so banal and sentimental they appeal to a half-educated public’, later declaring in 1927 that Schoenberg’s later music was ‘on the way to being out-moded’.²⁴

In the same letter castigating Schoenberg’s early pieces for being ‘banal and sentimental’, Nielsen justified his critique by stating that the music lacked a ‘firm ground’—namely, a contrapuntal basis.²⁵ Stenhammar was not alone in his turn to counterpoint during these years. As Daniel Grimley notes: ‘In its polemically charged diversity, counterpoint became the primary tool with which to promote or resist the advance (or, indeed, the retreat) of musical modernism.’²⁶ Nielsen saw polyphony as a rejuvenating source and as a way of rejecting musical modernism, returning instead to music’s ‘basic principles’ to avoid the ‘sultry sentimentality or empty, storming passion’ that he felt beleaguered the music of many of his contemporaries.²⁷ This sentiment is reflected in Stenhammar’s desire to find ‘a new and better line from which to try again’. Throughout their years of correspondence, Nielsen actively encouraged Stenhammar in his counterpoint studies. In 1911, he asked whether Stenhammar had ‘noticed how many young composers have approached music from the wrong end … they begin by expressing moods, feelings, colours and sensations, instead of voice-leading counterpoint’.²⁸ Later in 1921, while Stenhammar was writing his cantata Sången (‘The Song’), Nielsen wrote to him that he should begin composing ‘with long half-notes, like dry cantus firmi, like wooden beams that are laid out to give the basic form of a house. … You are after all a master in counterpoint, so use that.’²⁹

Wallner describes Stenhammar’s counterpoint study as being ‘a strict exercise in the elements of melody and harmony … the simplest means subordinated to the most inexorable rules: absolute diatonic melody, smallest possible use of leap, only consonant harmony, note against note’.³⁰ This could be used as a description for the music in As You Like It, which encapsulated the ‘clear, happy, and naïve’ music that Stenhammar described to Beckman, moving away from the ethereal chromatic sonorities of his earlier Ett drömspel (‘ A Dream Play’, 1916). In a musical culture that was increasingly being defined by atonality, Stenhammar’s almost entirely diatonic score for As You Like It was an ideological statement. Each movement has a clear key and relies on repetitive structures and uncomplicated rhythms. Reviewers applauded Stenhammar’s approach, saying that his music contained ‘forest life’s free gladness and nature’s jubilation’,³¹ and was ‘exquisitely simple and unpretentious’,³² ‘fresh and confident’,³³ and ‘strong and genuine’.³⁴ The overarching consensus was that the strength of Stenhammar’s music derived from its simplicity, the author for Hvar 8 Dag saying that the production marked a new ‘epoch in Swedish theatre history’.³⁵ ‘The whole was wrapped in an atmosphere of music’, another author (‘C. R. U-s’) enthused, ‘a musical reverie which lifted the events up a level to a peak of unreality, a reality more real than “reality”.’³⁶

For both Nielsen and Stenhammar, there was a political dimension to their counterpoint studies. The pursuit of music’s ‘basic principles’ formed an integral aspect of their attempts to make their music ‘popular’. For Nielsen in Denmark, this was manifested in the idea of folkelig, which in relation to culture means ‘popular’ or ‘accessible’, in way that is implied to be beneficial.³⁷ The composer Thomas Laub wrote to Nielsen in 1914 to request that they collaborate on a songbook, stating that the intention with these songs would be to address the ‘ordinary Danish people’, and that to do so they must be ‘set simply … to give people good words to sing to good folkelige melodies’.³⁸ Nielsen had been producing folkelige songs for several years already, so he embraced Laub's project enthusiastically, writing in 1918 that he believed that the folkelig was ‘where we should begin; otherwise the whole of our musical life is just floating in mid-air’.³⁹ This is not to say that Nielsen was interested in altering his musical style to gain popularity: he wrote to Edvin Kallstenius in 1917 that he hoped that ‘the music of the future’ would move ‘away from public effect, which … is trying to destroy or coarsen our taste and culture’. Instead, by maintaining ‘legitimate harmonic and polyphonic technique’, music would be inherently artistically edifying.⁴⁰ For Nielsen, then, ‘popular’ music had to be culturally beneficial for the public, and this was not achieved simply by being the cause of widespread discussion, like Schoenberg.

Stenhammar, similarly, saw it as a necessity to write music that appealed to as many people as possible. But he diverged subtly from Nielsen in that he adopted a specific attitude of anti-elitism, a position shared by Lindberg. A common goal of trying to create ‘popular’ music led Nielsen and Stenhammar in slightly separate directions, in the different contexts of Denmark and Sweden. Nielsen moved towards the idea of music as ‘a vitalist current’, as Grimley puts it, an art form that was both physically and intellectually stimulating, rooted in ‘vigour and physical health’.⁴¹ Stenhammar’s approach was slightly softer-edged; as highlighted by his letter to Beckman, a central facet of his ‘new way’ was to be the naïve. He continued to refer to the naïve as a state to which he aspired, writing in 1916 that he admired Kandinsky for being ‘a soul who is beautiful and deep and naïve’, and that Kandinsky’s work ‘dug into somewhere far down and deep in my soul, so that it vibrates as if with a young, great love’s grief and happiness.’⁴²

The category of the naïve became increasingly important for Swedish practitioners throughout the 1910s. It eventually developed an associated artistic movement, naïvism. Exhibitions by naïvist artists were widely covered in the press towards the end of the decade, to the extent that by 1919 the poet and art critic Gunnar Mascoll Silfverstolpe called naïvism ‘one of today’s slogans’.⁴³ It was widely considered to be one of the most stylistically adventurous of contemporary art movements, referred to as ‘modernist’ and associated with the political left.⁴⁴ The figureheads of the movement included Axel Nilsson, Hilding Linnqvist, and Nils von Dardel (who designed for the Ballets Suédois, exporting this style of art to Paris as distinctly ‘Swedish’). Naïvism found its precursors and models in symbolism and the art of Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau. When reviewing the naïvist works at a 1918 exhibition at Liljevachs Konsthall (Liljevach’s Art Hall) in Stockholm, Karl Asplund provided his readers with a short history of the movement, connecting it to Rousseau. He wrote that Swedish artists had adopted Rousseau’s characteristic traits including ‘a stylization which can be said to represent a primitive schematic rewriting of reality’.⁴⁵ Nonetheless, Swedish naïvism was distinct from the French school in that there was no implication in the Swedish term that the artist was entirely unschooled or lacking a formal art education. Instead, this was a genre that was naïve in appearance only. It was characterized by a tension between an adult’s awareness of the world and its presentation beneath a veneer of oblivious innocence. The technical language employed was deliberately infantile, using bold colours, asymmetric shapes, and eschewing realistic proportions. This was not due to technical incompetence but was rather a self-conscious stylistic choice, the heart of naïvism lying in the juxtaposition between its surface simplicity and the usually more sinister symbolism presented—often through dense intertextual reference—within a childlike frame.

‘Naïve’, then, was not a neutral term. Although naïvism as a movement with a particular stylistic language only concerned the visual arts, the term ‘naïve’ was used much more broadly to refer to practitioners who used deliberately simple languages that were designed to have mass appeal, and it is this use of the term with which Stenhammar identified. The characteristics and associations of the Swedish naïve were as follows, described by Cecilia Widenheim:

The naïve can be a disarming strategy against the view of art as technical finesse and brilliance. It can be the expression of vulnerability, playfulness, popular and everyday reality, or sheer artistic coquetry. But also a reaction against academicism, or the tendency to assert the intrinsic value of line, form and color.⁴⁶

The way in which Stenhammar invoked the concept of naïvety in his letter to Beckman implies that he also conceived of the naïve as an antidote to academicism. Additionally, naïve art forms were associated with the provincial, which correlates with Stenhammar’s—and Lindberg’s—desires to embrace ‘outsider’ identities within Sweden, building a regional theatre in Gothenburg in direct opposition to Stockholm’s institutions.

replacing realism

In place of realism, Lindberg adopted a stylistic approach based on instinct, specific to each play in question. In his 1927 publication Regiproblem (‘Directing Problems’), he discussed how subjective a drama’s staging should be, stressing the importance of the individual in the interpretative process:

A drama is grown out of a person’s mind. There is something in the highest degree ‘unreal’, a personal spirituality. This mentality must be present above all on stage. The art work on the stage can never be what Zola felt an art work to be: a piece of nature, seen through a temperament. The art work on the stage must at least be: a piece of art (the poem), seen through a temperament.⁴⁷

According to Lindberg, all available theatrical apparatus should be called upon to bring a drama to the stage—light, sound, and movement were as important as the text in creating the unique tone of every production. He found his model in the theatre of his mentor, Reinhardt, describing how Reinhardt created the ‘unreal personal spirituality’ that Lindberg felt should underpin theatrical productions: ‘he melted together all the elements of the scenic mixture, actors, poetry, stage design, lighting and music, into one great unity of imagination and rhythm … he searched for a special way of playing each piece, he sought its distinctive rhythm and tone, its atmosphere, its music.’⁴⁸

Lindberg stressed the intangible nature of his practice, and how he behaved almost unconsciously—his was a theatre based on intuitions and impulses, not logic and rationality. Depicting himself in this way was part of the anti-establishment, anti-theory narrative which Lindberg built around himself during his lifetime, shaping his image of the modern theatre in opposition to the established theatre institutions in Sweden. He distanced himself and his colleagues from theoretical models by depicting these models as unnecessarily restrictive forms of categorization developed by academics and theoreticians, which were then imposed on practitioners who relied on their impulses and had no need or desire for such labels. Discussing Reinhardt’s style, Lindberg expressed disdain for attempts to contain his work within various ‘isms’ associated with mainland European scholarship: ‘If one reads any German account of Reinhardt’s development, one is hampered by a series of isms which he is said to have gone through. Presumably he found it easier to go through them than we did to read of them.’⁴⁹ This was reiterated in his comparison of Reinhardt and Gordon Craig, Lindberg writing that, while the latter had been a theoretical pioneer, Reinhardt avoided theorization. Instead he was surrounded by those who ‘translated his impulses into slogans’, a process by which Lindberg was clearly unimpressed.⁵⁰

There is contradiction within Lindberg’s conceptions: he repeatedly disavowed theory and ‘isms’ when applied to Reinhardt by other sources, but was content to label Reinhardt’s theatre ‘scenic impressionism’, and referred to the ‘modernists’ whose plays Reinhardt staged.⁵¹ And having a coherent aesthetic standpoint that rejects categorization and promotes personal impulse is, in itself, a form of theory. He chose to make a theoretical virtue of the unconscious and ineffable, but he associated himself with these attributes as way of allowing himself the creative freedom to move between styles, rather than being associated with any one particular aesthetic. Although Lindberg drew heavily on Italian Renaissance painting for the aesthetic of As You Like It, for his production of Till Damaskus (III) only six years later he hired the cubist John Jon-And as his set designer and adopted a style more associated with German Expressionism (Pl. 1). Lindberg’s only concern was that whatever style was adopted, the result should not be aimed solely at a bourgeois audience.

stenhammar on theatre

In his views on the purpose of theatre, Stenhammar revealed himself to be remarkably similar to Lindberg. In his 1909 response to the Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning survey, Stenhammar argued in favour of a financially and conceptually accessible theatre. He, too, wished for a theatre that would appeal to a broad audience, set in opposition to the capital’s institutions. Gothenburg had an established rivalry with Stockholm, which Stenhammar drew on throughout the article, to the point that his response sometimes reads as something of a propaganda piece. His choice of language displays an acute awareness of the newspaper’s audience, arguing that the existence of a theatre—and how it would be run—was of utmost importance for local identity.

This is best demonstrated by his description of the Royal Theatre in Stockholm, and in comparison how he envisaged Gothenburg’s theatre being built. Having produced a damning critique of Stockholm’s opera, he turned his attention to the Royal Theatre:

Shining white and gilded, expensively decorated and adorned, so that a poor wretch feels ashamed of his not-so-newly-pressed informal suit when he steps inside. The house cost nearly seven million, a million was certainly wasted on its adornment with art work. … Because the auditorium has a relatively limited number of seats, to keep the books balanced the prices have to be kept at a rate that can hardly be called popular … But we did not dream of our national theatre in this way. … Our theatre will be big, so that there are seats—and cheap seats—for many, the house will be erected simply and without obtrusive finery, so that even the lowly in society dare venture into it.⁵²

Stenhammar’s attitude towards Stockholm parallels what Lindberg was attempting to achieve. Both practitioners set themselves against more established institutions, portraying themselves—and their city—as the audacious outsiders who represented a more genuine, no-nonsense alternative to the profligate waste of the monied bourgeoisie. For the shipping city on the country’s west coast, pragmatism was an indispensable attribute of their local identity, opposed to the decadent capital. Stenhammar wrote that Gothenburg should sort its theatre question in a manner that was ‘dignified and simple, calm and earnest’⁵³ to set an example to the rest of the country, encapsulating the city’s identification with a sensible and unsentimental approach.

Related to this stance was Stenhammar’s argument that the theatre should be accessible to as many members in society as possible. As quoted above, Stenhammar wanted the ticket prices to be kept affordable. But audiences were not his only concern. Additionally, his was a vision of a community-run theatre. Regarding the theatre’s organization, he wrote that he did not have the expertise to judge whether the municipality should intervene, but in any case he preferred a less directed mode of theatrical management. Stenhammar’s plan for the Gothenburg theatre was that citizens should ‘each contribute according to his ability’,⁵⁴ favouring a collective method of organization over municipal leadership.

He did not, however, offer any practical solutions for how this organizational structure might work. Idealism and unshakeable belief in the power of artistic conviction characterizes both Stenhammar’s questionnaire response and his attitude towards theatre in general. He believed that the theatre should be a place of edification, ‘not a place of amusement, not an institution for temporary time-consuming distraction; but an art institution to pay attention to our language, for the refinement of emotion, for the awakening of thought, for elevation and for liberation from the monotony of everyday life’.⁵⁵ Consequently his choice of repertory was motivated by the wish for the theatre to house ‘all the ideal figures of high drama, which the human spirit created to refresh itself’,⁵⁶ naming Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière, and Holberg among acceptable playwrights, as well as ‘all good modern and, naturally, especially Swedish drama’.⁵⁷ Stenhammar emphasized that of all art forms, it was drama that was best able to provide ‘healthy community spirit and strengthening nutrition’.⁵⁸ This claim for an aesthetic hierarchy needs to be read with the caveat that it appears within an article trying to convince readers of the necessity for building a theatre in Gothenburg, even in a period of economic hardship. Nonetheless, that Stenhammar viewed drama as nourishment for the soul is corroborated elsewhere in his writings, as documented in a 1909 letter in which he said that he had received a taste of artistic nourishment during his trips to the Intimate Theatre.⁵⁹

Having extolled the virtues of building a theatre in Gothenburg, Stenhammar finally turned to how the orchestra might fruitfully be able to collaborate with any theatrical enterprise in the city. He was quite clear that he wanted a partnership between the two institutions. Throughout the article he presented the Orchestral Association as an important predecessor for any theatre in Gothenburg, particularly as it had gained Gothenburg its artistic reputation. Again, he used Gothenburg’s orchestra to berate Stockholm, saying that their recent tour to the capital had provided an ‘invaluable service’ for Stockholm’s musical life.⁶⁰ The new theatre, then, should (in a self-promotional vein) build on the foundations laid down by Stenhammar and the Orchestral Association. He argued that the two should work together for the greater good of the city and its people, as a means of public education and improvement.

The role that Stenhammar envisaged the orchestra having in the theatre, however, was extremely specific. He cautioned that the city should ‘beware’ of setting up a standing opera, as it had too small a population to sustain it.⁶¹ He wanted to provide incidental music, but only of a particular type:

Personally I hope that we will do away with the obligatory, stylistically repulsive interval music in our theatre. But even without it the orchestra’s role is poisoned where incidental music is to a greater or lesser extent prescribed, particularly in the classical literature for which valuable music has been composed: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egmont, Antigone, Master Olof, etc.⁶²

This comment offers considerable insight into Stenhammar’s aesthetic preferences regarding incidental music. Besides intermission music, Stenhammar also rejected the practice of replacing or supplementing incidental scores with pre-existing pieces of music that were not part of the original incidental music. Beyond signalling Stenhammar’s appreciation of staples of the incidental repertory, this indicates that he believed that incidental music was most effective when composed specifically for the play in question. For Stenhammar, incidental music needed to be a part of the play, not separate and detachable from it, which shaped his own approach to incidental composition, as discussed in detail below.

In 1909, then, Stenhammar’s vision of an ideal theatre was remarkably similar to Lindberg’s. He hoped for a theatre that was run by and for the Gothenburg population, a symbol of local pride that could be used as a means of defining themselves against Stockholm. But this theatre was not just for Gothenburg’s benefit: Stenhammar hoped that putting Gothenburg on the theatrical map would act as an example to other cities to build their own theatres and concert houses. Diversifying Sweden’s cultural map would decentre Stockholm, in the hope that Sweden would eventually have multiple artistic cities. Music and drama would be intertwined in this ideal theatre—the Orchestra Association would work in tandem with the theatre and perform the incidental music that had been written for the productions in question.

as you like it as popular spectacle

Ahead of the first performance of As You Like It, Lindberg published an essay on the play in his theatre magazine Mellanakt (‘Intermission’).⁶³ He set up the small publication in 1919 to give context for and provide information about his performances. In this essay he laid out a clear manifesto for his Lorensberg Shakespeare: it should be playful, spectacular, and above all accessible. In his bid to create this kind of production, his first concern was the music, and he spent the entirety of the essay’s first paragraph discussing it. The production’s sound was foremost for Lindberg and he clearly expected it to be an attraction for the audience as well, presenting the play as an opportunity to hear a new score by the city’s celebrated composer and conductor, highlighting the ‘newly composed music by Stenhammar’ from the outset.⁶⁴ He continued that ‘it is not just small solo numbers, songs, choruses, string pieces, dances, hunting songs, it is also accompanying music. … A whole little pastoral, densely interwoven with the poem.’⁶⁵

Besides their shared principles on the theatre, choosing Stenhammar as the drama’s composer was a shrewd (and convenient) publicity move by Lindberg, given the former’s already considerable standing within Gothenburg in his role as conductor and artistic director of the Symphony Orchestra. Like Stenhammar, Lindberg was aware of how extensively the city’s identity was connected to its reputation as a musical city. The unusually high number of references to music in As You Like It was one of the reasons Lindberg chose the text, stating that he would have liked to stage an opera, but instead opted for ‘a musical piece with quite a bit of music’.⁶⁶ This was not lost on reviewers—Birger Bæckström observed: ‘The selection of As You Like It for the Gothenburg public is especially well calculated.’⁶⁷

The primary goal for the music was to contribute to the spectacle of the production. The flamboyancy that Lindberg stressed as being necessary for modern theatre is clearly evident in his staging of As You Like It, with enormous sets and highly stylized costume designs. The extravagance of the staging was mentioned in the essay, pointing out that the sets contained ‘city and sea and mountains and woods and barn and ferry’.⁶⁸ Stenhammar’s music played a central role in this image of spectacle, both sonically and visually. His score comprises twenty-four numbers and an Intrada. The music runs throughout the entire play, including songs, underscoring, and entr’actes (shown in Table 1). The entirety is scored for a combination of strings, woodwinds, horns, and trumpets, with the onstage actors providing the singers for numbers 7, 11, 18, and 22. This was by far his most extensive incidental offering to date, significantly surpassing the three numbers that he provided for his first collaboration with Lindberg, Lodolezzi sjunger (‘Lodolezzi sings’, 1919). Additionally, the musicians were incorporated into the visuals of the production. Lindberg highlighted in his publicity article that ‘The orchestra does not sit together in their usual places—they are spread around widely’, with the effect that ‘their music will sound as though from inside the forests and across the expanses’.⁶⁹ During the Intrada the trumpeters walked through the auditorium in costume,⁷⁰ exploiting the Lorensberg’s rich acoustic, which Stenhammar had previously commented on when composing Ett drömspel. He wrote in November 1916 that it was ‘a room where my music swims around, so I can only sit uncritical, happy, and bask in the wonderful sound’.⁷¹

This overt spatializing of the musical experience was part of Lindberg’s attempt to create the collective audience immersion that he deemed central to the experience of modern theatre. Describing the ideal audience experience in Kring Ridån, he spoke of Reinhardt’s circus theatres thus: ‘ An arena where the audience did not just consist of small art-political coteries but all of us in such a mass that we can really feel the connection with each other—there is something more than the ever-so-delicate pleasure of leisurely quiet enjoyment of the traditional theatre’s half-private world.’⁷²

Stenhammar’s music was designed to create a similar experience for Gothenburg’s audiences. The placement of the musicians was later picked up by the critics, who seemed to be in agreement that it was the music that created the sense of an expansive forest and enhanced (or perhaps generated) an atmosphere of jubilant theatrical extravagance. Ejnar Smith spoke of how ‘The party was blown in by the green-clad trumpeters from the side of the auditorium; they sang out their last fanfare into the air before the scenery’s red velvet draperies’.⁷³ Another rapturous reviewer wrote that the trumpet fanfares characterized the mood of the entire production, giving it ‘a triumphal atmosphere, a proud tone of victory and festival’.⁷⁴ Furthermore, this author recorded that the overall impression left by the production was sonic, concluding the review with the observation: ‘Even at the time of writing the hunting chorus and horn calls ring in my ears, mocking laughter and languorous sighs, the whole of Shakespearean drama’s peerless melody. I believe that they might continue for a long time yet.’⁷⁵ For both director and critics, the audience experience offered by Lindberg’s modern theatre was centred around music.

As well as the distribution of the musicians, the manner in which Stenhammar composed the music around the text contributed to the impression of a seamless, coherent world in which the drama plays out. The defining aspect of Stenhammar’s score is how closely it is interwoven with the spoken text. As discussed above, Stenhammar had expressed vehement opposition to the practice of substituting incidental scores for other pieces not originally intended for the play in question. His own approach to composing incidental music explains the strength of his convictions on the topic. In an article published posthumously in 1954, Lindberg recalled Stenhammar’s compositional process for As You Like It. He wrote that Stenhammar was often present at the company’s rehearsals, and in the final week came ‘with watch in hand’.⁷⁶ Given how much of the music was either in dialogue with the actors or playing while they were speaking, Stenhammar timed the actors to ensure that the music would fit exactly with their speeches. Throughout his manuscript there are often annotations which indicate times, and in many movements he wrote music that could be repeated for an indefinite period of time to allow for variations in how the actors performed on the night. As a consequence the interaction between actors and musicians is so precise that Wallner argues that Stenhammar’s method made the music extremely difficult to transfer to other productions and would have been better suited to the exactitude required of music for radio dramas.⁷⁷

Numbers 2b and 2c (Ex. 1) are illustrative of this precise scoring. Number 2b constitutes a trumpet fanfare and string underscoring for Charles and Orlando’s fight, and 2c a string melody and accompaniment that underscores Duke Frederick and Orlando’s subsequent conversation. During the fight, Stenhammar repeats alternating bars of fortissimo tonic and minor dominant chords within D minor until the fight ends, using the punctuating chords to add energy to the onstage violence. As Charles is carried offstage, however, the mood immediately shifts through a series of small but significant changes to the texture, moving the emphasis from physical altercation to emotional tension. The first violin enters with a sequential melody that still alternates around tonic and minor dominant chords, but the melodic line concludes on the fifth scale degree. In part this is practical, as it allows the melody to be repeated until Orlando and the Duke finish their conversation, but emotively it also robs the music of a sense of conclusion, creating an increased emphasis on the strained relationship between the two characters. This is emphasized by the alteration of the minor dominant harmony—Stenhammar moves the third of the scale and replaces it with a dissonant fourth and seventh—and the inclusion of a tremolo in the second violin throughout.

The main motif from No. 2c is then used as the basis for No. 3a, which underscores Rosalind’s banishment from the court, creating a symmetry between Orlando and Rosalind’s emotional states. Again, this movement is constructed from short, enclosed sections designed to be repeated for as long as the actors are speaking. This type of melodic construction is only used for the court scenes, associating the court with a tense, almost nervous sound that is quite opposed to the more expansive material used for the scenes in Arden. This contrast is made explicit in Act III, Scenes i–ii, which constitute Duke Frederick instructing Oliver to find Orlando, underscored by No. 12, and Orlando pinning his love poetry to Arden’s trees, accompanied by No. 13. Material from No. 2c is reused for No. 12, but No. 13 is in a simple pastoral style, a single melody line over a series of sustained chords in G major in the strings. The sudden drop in both tempo and rate of harmonic change is drastic, Stenhammar using the immediate juxtaposition to create the sense that the court and Arden exist in two separate temporal and emotional spheres. Orlando’s love-poetry scene drew attention from reviewers, not all of it favourable. Edvard Alkman, for one, complained that the trees on which Orlando hangs his verses were ‘grotesque hawthorn trees’—‘Is this Arden’s romantic and protective forest, one asks oneself.’⁷⁸ For this critic, it was only the ‘horns and hunting calls’⁷⁹ that signalled that scene was indeed in a forest setting, the disjuncture between the musical and visual signifiers preventing Lindberg’s Arden from being bucolic.

as you like it as anti-academicism

Beyond the effects created within the performance itself, Lindberg’s publicity essay elaborated on As You Like It’s ability to appeal to contemporary audiences through the simplicity of its text. He foregrounded an image of Shakespeare as a layman’s poet, penning the lives of ordinary people. His summary of the play was that it ‘does not portray some big events. It is simply a theatre piece, in the pastoral style and written for a wedding party, to the young lovers’ delight!’⁸⁰ His actual appreciation of the text seems to have been much more multifaceted, hinting briefly that ‘of much more is told. Of culture diseases, of cunning, cruelty, betrayal. … Exultant joy and overarching melancholy go side by side.’⁸¹ But within this essay, Lindberg did not choose to rest on Shakespeare as philosophical extemporizer. Instead, he presented As You Like It as the comic result of Shakespeare’s ‘happiest time’, among the comedies which, ‘generation after generation, have been one of mankind’s best sources of joy’.⁸² Furthermore, he drew parallels between Shakespeare’s audiences and his own, writing that the former were ‘just like ourselves, only more cheerful, more defiantly happy, more full of life’s delightful adventure’.⁸³ The publicity image of Lindberg’s As You Like It was a truly restorative Shakespeare, presented as a cultural balm for the post-war years.

In keeping with this conception of Shakespeare as both timeless and spectacular, the design choices made for As You Like It were motivated by a rejection of historically informed, academic theatre. The set designer was Knut Ström, who had previously studied in Dresden and later went on to direct productions at the Lorensberg and elsewhere in Sweden. He was as enthusiastic about theatrical modernism as Lindberg. Consequently he drew on a variety of influences from different time periods, eschewing the sense of concrete periodization that defined the realist productions that Lindberg so despised. As Isaac Grünewald put it, ‘ All simple realism was excommunicated’⁸⁴—the visual aspects of the production referred to an eclectic mix of eras, often appearing on stage simultaneously. Many of the costumes (particularly those of the men of the court) are recognizably Elizabethan, but they appeared in the context of an enormous staircase and balustrade for the court scenes that is redolent of Italian Renaissance architecture (Pl. 2) and the grand neo-Baroque style adopted by Reinhardt for his production of Jedermann (‘Everyman’) at the Salzburg Festival, also in 1920. For the forest scenes, however, Ström constructed a small forest hut that is more reminiscent of rural Sweden than medieval or Elizabethan England (Pl. 3). The stage and set offered a potpourri image of Shakespeare’s England as seen through multiple sources.

This decision was not prompted by ignorance on the part of the creative team. Lindberg gave a series of lectures on Shakespeare, his notes for which indicate his extensive knowledge of Shakespeare’s stage and the realities of theatre life in Jacobethan England.⁸⁵ The choice to mix styles was deliberate. Lindberg’s friend, Axel Romdahl, elaborated on how Lindberg decided on a stage style for each production, in an essay published in 1944:

First the director came to a decision about the essential content of the respective paragraphs, and marked the time and style in which it should be dressed. The selection is by no means obvious. Should Hamlet be set in the Middle Ages or Renaissance … As You Like It played in a Nordic court or in the South [?] … Per Lindberg worked intensively on this problem and sought different solutions until he came to one which seemed to him the best answer to the idea of the piece.⁸⁶

As part of his process of seeking different solutions, Lindberg would consult with friends to get their input. A meeting with friends is, according to Romdahl, how As You Like It acquired its visual aesthetic. Lindberg decided to base the scenery on paintings by Titian after a friend lent him a book on the artist’s work. Romdahl explained that the justification for this was the desire to evoke ‘the piece’s style … not copy the time’s style’, but added that ‘a learned specialist would probably have had cause to object to some of his costumes’.⁸⁷

Stenhammar adopted a similar approach to historical and geographical accuracy, the overall result of which is a score that is as stylized as the visuals. Multiple numbers that directly follow each other employ contrasting idioms, for example Nos. 8 and 9. The eighth (Ex. 2) evokes a Romantic, dream-like atmosphere, using a decorative flute melody over a G major pedal in the strings that is remarkably similar to the texture used by Grieg for ‘Morning Mood’ in his incidental music to Peer Gynt. This is the first music heard throughout the play that introduces the idea of the forest as a possible site of erotic encounter, and the opening of the flute melody is later developed in No. 13 in Orlando’s love-poetry scene. However, the succeeding movement (No. 9) uses a Baroque topic, scored for an oboe melody over a walking bass (Ex. 3). The walking bass is particularly evocative: No. 9 was used for Scenes iv and vi in Act II, accompanying the entry of Rosalind, Celia, Adam, and Orlando into the forest declaring that they are weary and in need of food, the bass line expressing their fatigue and melancholy. As with Ström’s visuals, Stenhammar’s score does not evoke a particular era, but instead adopts whichever style he felt was most appropriate to the scene in question.

Even where Stenhammar drew directly on historical sources, he did not aim for historical correctness. His manuscript contains sketches with transcriptions of horn calls and fanfares by Marquis Marc Antoine de Dampierre (1676–1756), Louis XV’s Master of the Hunt from 1727 (the first page of these is shown in Pl. 4).⁸⁸ These seem to have constituted Stenhammar’s research for the Intrada, which is comprised entirely of trumpet fanfares and horn calls. The French fanfares provided the very loose basis on which Stenhammar based the sections for brass instruments, but he transferred over only intervals and rhythms, rather than lifting the melodies directly (Ex. 4a). In the final event the Intrada is closer to a paraphrase of the ‘hunt’ scherzo from Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, a work that would definitely have been familiar to Stenhammar (Ex. 4b).⁸⁹ The Intrada was a twentieth-century Swedish imagining of Elizabethan England, as filtered through both German Romanticism and the French Baroque.

songs in as you like it

All the critics who reviewed Lindberg’s production agreed that As You Like It was a play of two humours, displaying the simultaneous presence of frivolity and lugubriousness. The reviewer for Göteborgs-Posten labelled it ‘a symphony … a Nordic symphony mostly in the minor mode, despite all the play’s gaiety … with much pain and anguish at the bottom. … It is the struggle between evil and good, between light and darkness.’⁹⁰ Shakespeare creates this doubleness partly through opposing merry and melancholy world-views, the latter represented primarily by Jaques. Of all the movements in Stenhammar’s score, the songs seem to have made a particular impression on the reviewers. Almost unanimously, they agreed that the songs most cogently expressed the dualism of a light-heartedness that knowingly conceals an underlying gloom, and that they were so successful because of the simplicity of Stenhammar’s musical language. One of the rare ambivalent reviews criticized Stenhammar’s score for not being extensive enough, but wished the whole work could have been of the same quality as the songs: ‘In the exquisitely simple and unpretentious fashion maintained by the songs … more inspired by Jaques’s melancholy than by the Arden forest’s coolness, one got an impression of how intimately Stenhammar had penetrated into the drama’s spiritual depths.’⁹¹

The first song in the play is Amiens’s ‘Under the greenwood tree’ (Act II, Scene v), where he sings of a blissful union between human and nature. In Shakespeare’s text, this is a distinctly jovial, communal moment, with the rest of the Lords joining Amiens for the refrain. Stenhammar’s setting, however, changes the mood entirely. The song is in E minor, introduced by a horn call that imparts a plaintive and melancholic tone, under which the strings descend to a root-position E minor (Ex. 5). Timbre and space are crucial here: the brass players were separated from the rest of the ensemble during the performance, which physically and figuratively pushed the solo horn into the background to give way to the foregrounded singer and strings. The manner in which the music was staged gives the retrospective sense that the opening horn call is a memory or reminder of a bygone age—the horn beckons from a different era to that playing out on the stage. This deceptively simple technique is used repeatedly throughout the score, physically demarcating the instrument groups to generate a sense of geographical and temporal distance. There is an implied distance from the chivalric Romantic ideal of the hunting forest—it is never quite abandoned, but exists in tension with the more critical perspective represented by Jaques, who constantly reminds the audience of humankind’s destructive effect on nature, rather than supporting the idea of synergy between the two.

The Swedish translation used for the second verse of ‘Under the greenwood’ supports this reading, as it differs slightly from Shakespeare’s. They read as follows:

Referring to ambition as ‘frivolity’s battle’ militarizes the sentiment of the text, imbuing the song with a far more combative tone. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on community coexistence that is absent in Shakespeare’s text. Carl Hagberg’s translation of this verse changes the conceptual position of the song’s subject, subtly altering the attitude, therefore, of the song’s imagined speaker. Shakespeare’s ‘come hither’ calls the subject to the forest—Hagberg’s ‘Welcome’ implies that the subject is already in the forest. The song is transformed from an invitation to all who love simple living to a conditional welcome to those who abide by the conditions laid out by the speaker. And these are explicitly tailored to a more communal goal—the peace of the countryside—than in Shakespeare. In Stenhammar’s setting, this is a moment where the instruments seem to narrate separately from the singer. Although Amiens is technically the speaker, with him and his group of Lords welcoming the subject to the linden, Stenhammar’s setting renders it ambivalent as to whether the group that surrounds Amiens (and, indeed, Amiens himself) submit to the song’s criteria. When the hunting horn interjects with an open fifth at the end of both verses, the accompaniment stops—the music falls into silence, and the conjoining of nature and man that Amiens sings of in the first verse is forestalled by the appearance of the hunting motif.⁹² The recurrence of the horn serves as a constant reminder that the Duke and his entourage have brought precisely the opposite of local peace to the forest. Additionally, the Swedish for sow, sår, holds a double connotation, also meaning ‘wound’, forming an association with the image of the sequestered deer mentioned at the opening of Act II, and anticipating the victim of the hunting group in Act IV. All of Stenhammar’s settings for Amiens’s songs suggest a disjuncture between man and nature, a relationship built on violence rather than coexistence. The utopian forest lifestyle never truly existed, and it is this realization that constitutes the ‘pain and anguish at the bottom’ of this production, the ‘spiritual inner depths’ of Shakespeare’s play.

The final song, ‘Pagernas visa’ (‘The pageboys’ song’, Act V, Scene iii, Ex. 6), is in a markedly different style from its predecessors. It is in F major with flattened-seventh inflections, adopting a highly repetitive verse structure that mainly fluctuates between chords I and vi, and employing a harp for the only time in the entire score. This setting was perhaps tongue-in-cheek—the close of the play appears to have been delivered with a sense of humour that was largely missed by the reviewers. Both Bæckström and Alkman took issue with the final scene, particularly with the cupids played by small children. They particularly objected to the children carrying torchlights, which they felt both detracted from the couples on stage and illuminated the puttees (‘puttis’) that the children were wearing, garments more associated with the military than cupids (puttees being hand-woven bandages wrapped around the legs that were worn by soldiers in India). Dressing the cupids in faux-army garb was presumably meant to be a humorous slant on the jollity of the final scene, a nod to the various tensions left unresolved when the curtain falls, such as Phoebe’s enforced marriage to a man she despises—a situation which is more likely to end in conflict than the matrimonial harmony suggested by the final scene. With this in mind, we need to dig deeper into Shakespeare’s text to contextualize Stenhammar’s setting of the Page’s song. Immediately after the pages have finished singing, the fool Touchstone criticizes them:

Touchstone: Truly, young gentlemen, though there was no great matter in the ditty, yet the note was very untunable.

1 Page: You are deceived, sir, we kept time, we lost not our time.

Touchstone: By my troth, yes. I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song.⁹³

This song is supposed to be a moment of musical comedy, but there is also a more serious point underpinning it. A running theme throughout As You Like It is the purpose of music itself. In his first scene, Jaques argues with Amiens, who refuses to sing because his ‘voice is ragged’. Jaques responds ‘I do not desire you to please me; I do desire you to sing’,⁹⁴ suggesting that he views music not as an entertainment but as an educational or edifying source. The purpose and status of music was prominently debated during Shakespeare’s lifetime: David Lindley writes that ‘despite the privileging of music as an image of cosmic harmony, in its practical manifestations it was embroiled in controversy’, and Shakespeare often referred to these debates in other plays besides As You Like It, including The Merchant of Venice.⁹⁵ Jaques openly defies the idea that the primary purpose of music is to be ‘pleasing to the ear’, instead using it as a tool for critique and satire. Besides setting up a comic moment for Touchstone, then, the page’s song contributes to the wider debate on the purpose of music by being deliberately juxtaposed with the more nuanced verses sung by Amiens. In this setting Stenhammar ultimately sides with Jaques, expressing the kind of idealism that characterized his Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning response: when music does not have a social purpose it is, as Touchstone laments, of little use at all.

the curtain falls

In As You Like It, Lindberg managed to sculpt a production that was both astonishingly simple in appearance and strikingly complex in its symbolic depth. Stenhammar’s music was vital to maintaining this dual perspective, being praised by reviewers as a ‘strange, sometimes radical musical work’.⁹⁶ This radicalism came from the diatonic language that Stenhammar employed, and from how the music interacted with the other aspects of the production. As You Like It set a precedent for Lindberg’s future reception, and firmly established the idea that modern theatre should be accessible and spectacular. This notion was so widely adopted that by the time he came to stage Romeo and Juliet in 1922, again with music by Stenhammar, modern theatre was associated with an aim of reaching younger audiences who would not otherwise attend (what is now termed theatrical outreach).⁹⁷

Accounting for incidental music can help us come to a more nuanced understanding of composers like Stenhammar. By writing incidental music, even when living within a musical culture that was beginning to be divided along modernist/not-modernist lines, theatrical collaboration helped Stenhammar find ways of thinking about composition and artistic progressiveness that were not focused on atonality, undermining the binaries against which he was reacting. In some respects, Stenhammar conceived of his music in direct opposition to modernism—it was one of the ‘powerfully performative’ categories described by Christopher Chowrimootoo ‘that shaped the way composers, critics, and audiences understood musical culture in their own time’.⁹⁸ But at the same time Stenhammar also identified positively with the definition of modern culture that was specific to the Nordic countries. Thus his rejection of musical modernism was not completely dualistic: it was also an adoption of the idea that modern, progressive culture needed to be explicitly political, and that composers had a political and social responsibility to cultivate music as a means of creating a more democratic and equal society. This has ramifications for interpreting Stenhammar’s output beyond the incidental scores, particularly his cantata Sången (‘The Song’, 1921), written shortly after As You Like It, and his earlier works such as the Second Symphony and the Fifth and Sixth String Quartets, all composed after he began to seek his ‘new way’. For example, Sången’s harmonic idiom can be read, not as lending ‘an old-fashioned flavor’, as Nick Strimple puts it, but as a means of creating a distinctive twentieth-century sound for Nordic music.⁹⁹ This is particularly pertinent when we consider that Sången was premiered in a concert that included Nielsen conducting his Helios Overture and Hymnus Amoris. In the context of Nordic debates about modern culture, all of these works can be understood as attempting to be both progressive and political in a way that is not solely reactionary.

This contextualization also offers a way of approaching the music of other Nordic composers who had an ambivalent relationship with modernism, such as Stenhammar’s colleague Ture Rangström. Rangström also worked with Lindberg in the 1920s, writing the score for the latter’s 1926 production of Strindberg’s Till Damaskus (III). As with Stenhammar, Rangström’s theatrical projects provide a way of situating him within the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Neither he nor any other Nordic composer worked in a musical vacuum, and the proliferation of Nordic incidental scores including Grieg’s Peer Gynt, Nielsen’s Aladdin, and Sibelius’s Tempest—all of which involved collaboration with some of Scandinavia’s leading cultural figures—indicate that approaching these composers from an interdisciplinary perspective could reveal much about their historical standing. These composers can be positioned not as conservatives writing regressive music against a progressive European mainstream, but as individuals who thought differently from their European counterparts about what ‘progressive’ meant in a musical context.

These productions also have an impact on the image of the Nordic countries as being peripheral to a European musical mainstream. Again, there is a balance needed between binary and more pluralistic conceptions of Nordic interactions with their neighbours. Stenhammar identified himself with part of a pan-Nordic bloc that was conceived of in opposition to and distinct from central European culture—he set up a Nordic music festival with Nielsen and actively promoted the music of Nordic composers through his programming for the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.¹⁰⁰ But simultaneously he and the practitioners he worked with were in constant contact with ideas from both the rest of Europe and Russia, and incorporated them into their work. As Daniel Grimley has similarly argued in relation to Sibelius, Swedish music of the early twentieth century should be located in a way that acknowledges the ‘dynamic nature’ of Nordic composers’ constructions of musical identity.¹⁰¹

As his first long-term musical collaborator, Stenhammar created the sound of Lindberg’s modern theatre—a sound that was ‘clear, happy and naïve’. In the context of the productions and the debates to which these stagings contributed, Stenhammar’s scores championed the idea that modern culture could be popular, enjoyable, and artistically edifying.

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [Grant Number 1473112]. I am immensely grateful to Sebastian Lindblom and Marianne Seid at the Teaterbibliotek for all their tireless assistance answering queries about manuscripts, and to Daniel Grimley for his input on early drafts of the article.

Footnotes