Allan Pettersson

Gustaf Allan Pettersson (19September 191120June 1980) was a Swedish composer and violist. He is considered one of the 20th century's most important Swedish composers. In his life's final decade, his symphonies (typically one-movement works) developed an international following, particularly in Germany and Sweden. Of these, his best known work is Symphony No. 7. Pettersson's music also found success in the United States. The conductors Antal Doráti and Sergiu Comissiona premiered and recorded several of his symphonies. Pettersson's song cycle "Barefoot Songs" influenced a lot of his compositions.
Pettersson studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music's conservatory. For more than a decade, he was violist in the Stockholm Concert Society; afterwards, he devoted himself exclusively to composition. He suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Pettersson was awarded the Litteris et Artibus, a Swedish royal medal established in 1853.
Biography.
Early life.
Gustaf Allan Pettersson was the youngest of four children. His father, Karl Viktor Pettersson (1875–1952), was a violent, alcoholic blacksmith, and his mother, Ida Paulina (neé Svenson) (1876–1960), was a dressmaker. Allan was born at Granhammar manor in Västra Ryd parish in Uppland province. He grew up in poor circumstances in Stockholm's Södermalm district, where he lived during his whole life. He once said: "I wasn't born under a piano, I didn't spend my childhood with my father, the composer... no, I learnt how to work white-hot iron with the smith's hammer. My father was a smith who may have said no to God, but not to alcohol. My mother was a pious woman who sang and played with her four children."
With his parents and siblings, Pettersson lived in a damp one-room basement apartment with bars on the window. When he was 10, Pettersson bought a cheap violin with money earned from selling Christmas cards and taught himself to play it. Even the beating he received from his father and the threads of reform school could not diminish his interest in music. Through strict self-discipline and with the help of music, Pettersson freed himself from the social misery and difficult family circumstances surrounding him. Aged 14, he finished elementary school and took up full-time practice on the violin. Later he made two unsuccessful attempts to enter conservatory.
In 1930, he began studying violin and later the viola, as well as counterpoint and harmony, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music's conservatory (Royal College of Music, Stockholm). At the beginning of World War II he was in Paris, studying the viola with the French violist Maurice Vieux.
Later life.
During the 1940s he worked as a violist in the Stockholm Concert Society (later the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra), but also studied composition with the composer and conductor Karl-Birger Blomdahl, orchestration with the conductor Tor Mann, and counterpoint with organist and composer Otto Olsson. In 1943 he married the physiotherapist Gudrun Tyra Charlotta Gustafsson (1921–2017). The marriage was childless.
In September 1951, he went to Paris to study composition, having been a student of René Leibowitz, Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud. Pettersson returned to Sweden at the end of 1952. In the early 1950s he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. He gave up the viola and began devoting his life to composition. In 1954, Pettersson received one of the annual state composition grants for the first time.
By the time of his Symphony No. 5, completed in 1962, his mobility and health were considerably compromised. In 1964, the government granted him a lifelong guaranteed income. His greatest success came a few years later with his (19661967), which was premiered on 13October 1968 in Stockholm Concert Hall with Antal Doráti conducting the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. A recording of his seventh symphony, with same conductor and orchestra, was released in 1969. It was a breakthrough, establishing his international reputation and receiving two Swedish Grammis in 1970. The conductors Antal Doráti and Sergiu Comissiona premiered and made first recordings of several of Pettersson's symphonies and contributed to his rise to fame during the 1970s.
Pettersson was hospitalized for nine months in 1970, soon after the composition of his Symphony No. 9 and longest symphony. He began to write the condensed Symphony No. 10 (1972) from his sickbed. He recovered, but rheumatoid arthritis confined him most of the time to his fourth-floor apartment in a building with no elevator. In 1975, after a disagreement arising from a change in a concert program for a U.S. tour, the Stockholm Philharmonic was denied the privilege of performing works by Pettersson "for all time". The ban was lifted in 1976. In autumn 1978, he moved to a state living quarters. He started to write a seventeenth symphony, but before finishing it he died in Stockholm's Maria Magdalena parish, aged 68. Pettersson was buried in Högalid Church columbarium.
Music.
Pettersson's music is related to Mahler's symphonic manner, in the grandiosity of design and in the passionate, exclamatory dynamism of utterance. The symphonic eccentric Pettersson is not an avant-gardist. His kinetic and organic development of musical matter uses traditional means of expression. Basic motifs are constantly being changed and developed. Pettersson's writing is very strenuous and often has many simultaneous polyphonic lines. His symphonies "end" on common chords—major or minor chords—but tonality, which depends on some sense, however attenuated, of tonal progression, is found mostly in slower sections: e.g., the openings and endings of his 6th and 7th symphonies, and the end of his 9th. Overwhelmingly serious in tone, often dissonant, his music rises to ferocious climaxes, relieved, especially in his later works, by lyrical oases ("").
Pettersson's music has a very distinctive sound and can hardly be confused with that of any other 20th-century composer. His symphonies, which range in length from 22 to 70 minutes, are typically one-movement works. The music of Pettersson is demanding on performers and listeners.
Pettersson quoted songs from his own 24 "Barefoot Songs" in several of his compositions.
Ivanka Stoïanova designed a theory of musical space about Pettersson's music.
Most of his music has now been recorded at least once and much of it is now available in published score.
Works.
Pettersson started composing songs and smaller chamber works in the 1930s.
His production from the 1940s include the song cycle twenty-four "Barefoot Songs" (19431945) based on own poems and a dissonant concerto for violin and string quartet (1949). The latter work is influenced by Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. Pettersson soon found his own compositional style.
In 1951, Pettersson created the experimental "Seven Sonatas for two Violins". At the same time he also composed the first of his seventeen symphonies, which he left unfinished. This work has been recorded in a performing version prepared by trombonist and conductor Christian Lindberg in 2011. 
Pettersson about the symphonic output of the 1950s: "No one in the 1950s noticed, that I am always breaking up the structures, that I was creating a whole new symphonic form."
It took four years to write the conceptual and style-defining Symphony No. 6 (19631966). The Symphony No. 7 and the Symphony No. 8 (19681969) have received more recordings than his other works and are probably his best-known works. He composed in the 1970s two related works about social protest and compassion, the Symphony No. 12 for mixed chorus and orchestra (19731974) to poems by Literature Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda with contemporary relevance and the cantata "Vox Humana" (1974) on texts by Latin American poets. During the prolific last decade of his life he also wrote a concerto for violin and orchestra (19771978, revised version 1980) written for the violinist Ida Haendel, a Symphony No. 16 (1979) which features a bravura solo part for alto saxophone commissioned by American saxophonist Frederick L. Hemke, and an incomplete, posthumously discovered concerto for viola and orchestra (19791980).
Legacy.
In 19681969, conductor and composer Antal Doráti arranged eight of Pettersson's "Barefoot Songs" as full-scale orchestral songs.
Choreographer Birgit Cullberg produced three ballets based on Pettersson's music. (1976, Symphony No. 7), (1977, Concerto No. 1 for String Orchestra), ("War Dance") (1979, Symphony No. 9).
The four orchestral sketches "" (1991) by Peter Ruzicka are a tribute to the life and work of Pettersson.
The finale in Symphony No. 7 was used in Roy Andersson's short film "World of Glory" ().
After Pettersson's death, in Germany an Allan Pettersson Gesellschaft issued six yearbooks, CPO began recording his complete works, and a series of concerts (in 1994–1995) programmed almost all of them.
Discography.
The selected discography includes the original format of the recording and releasing label. Some of the LP releases have been reissued on CD. A 12-CD pack of the Complete Symphonies of Allan Pettersson has been produced by CPO (Classic Produktion Osnabrück) based on recordings of 1984, 1988, 19911995, 2004. A cycle of all Pettersson symphonies produced by BIS Records is ongoing.