<\/p>\n
On a summer night in 1970, high above a fjord in western Norway, the farmstead of the composer Geirr Tveitt caught fire. As flames tore through the wooden buildings, family members rushed into a shed crammed with his unpublished scores. Using fruit crates, they hauled burning manuscripts into the open. By the time the fire was under control, roughly 80 percent of Tveitt\u2019s compositions had been destroyed.<\/p>\n
The loss hastened the eclipse of one of the most prominent and original voices in Norwegian music since Edvard Grieg.<\/p>\n
Now a new album by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is helping bring Tveitt (1908-1981) to the attention of a wider international audience. \u201cHe was a sort of wild talent,\u201d Andsnes said in an interview. \u201cHis music sometimes has a neurotic energy, mixed with a very local feeling and at the same time enormous knowledge of what was going on internationally. It\u2019s a world unto itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Born in Bergen and trained in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, Tveitt (pronounced TVAYT) wrote prolifically across genres including chamber works, popular songs, orchestrations of folk tunes, concertos \u2014 including for Norway\u2019s national folk instrument, the Hardanger fiddle<\/a> \u2014 and a ballet on a subject from Norse mythology. For a time, Tveitt was a central figure in the country\u2019s musical life. He anchored a radio program and toured internationally as a pianist. But his final decades were spent largely isolated, his reputation tarnished by his nationalist beliefs and his wartime service in the puppet government of Nazi-occupied Norway. Even before the fire, his music was fading from view.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The centerpiece of the new recording, \u201cGeirr Tveitt,\u201d<\/a> is the composer\u2019s only surviving piano sonata, No. 29, titled \u201cetere,\u201d Italian for ethereal. (Andsnes performed it at Carnegie Hall last year.) Its conception is boldly austere with just two themes elaborated over the course of three movements. The first skittish, roving theme<\/a> evokes Nordic folk idioms; the second, questioning and mystical, seems to open onto a vast, frigid space. The third movement reworks the first theme as a brilliant and angular dance.<\/p>\n A transfixing moment<\/a> occurs at the opening of the second, \u201cethereal\u201d movement, when Tveitt has the pianist silently depress a row of low keys with the left forearm while hammering out crisp notes above, so that a halo of overtones appears to rise from the released strings.<\/p>\n Andsnes, who grew up in the same part of rural Norway where Tveitt had his farm, said he recognized the acoustics of the landscape in that passage. \u201cSomething in that music is connected to how things resonate there,\u201d Andsnes said, \u201cthe echoes, how things sound when you walk in nature, close to stone mountains.\u201d<\/p>\n Just as striking as that echo is a marking that accompanies it in the score: during a held pause, when only the fading resonance of the chord hangs in the air, Tveitt asks for the sound to swell and taper, as if trying to animate the aftersound itself. But a piano can\u2019t do that: Once a note is struck, it begins to decay. In a footnote, Tveitt suggests that during radio performances, an engineer might raise and lower the volume manually during this moment. Andsnes said that even in performance, without amplification, something of Tveitt\u2019s intention comes through. Just having the marking, Andsnes said, \u201cdraws attention to the resonance; it\u2019s very mysterious.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Tveitt\u2019s sound world was the product of a wide-ranging musical education. After attending conservatory in Leipzig, he took lessons in Paris with Arthur Honegger, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Nadia Boulanger; and in Vienna with Egon Wellesz, a former pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. The French influence often comes in his Impressionist, refined sound palette.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund described the sound like \u201cthe most rural countryside in Norway meets the most elevated parts of Paris.\u201d At a recent concert with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg, Berglund programmed the opening movement of the first suite of Tveitt\u2019s \u201c100 Folk Tunes From Hardanger\u201d \u2014 his most popular orchestral work, celebrating the nature and myths of southwestern Norway. Airy and tender, it unfurls a simple melody across different instruments.<\/p>\n \u201cThe use of color is extraordinary,\u201d Berglund said in an interview before the concert. \u201cIt has this light in it. I can almost hear the waves on the Hardanger fjord\u201d near Tveitt\u2019s farmstead. At one point in the piece, Tveitt has an oboe and a piccolo trade undulating lines. The oscillating semitones create an effect of animated brightness. \u201cIf any other composer had done that, it would have sounded like an alarm,\u201d Berglund said, \u201cbut here it just blends beautifully and creates this wavering, shimmering light.\u201d<\/p>\n This naturalistic observation of landscape distinguishes Tveitt from Grieg: Tveitt\u2019s depictions of landscape and atmospheric conditions feel more depersonalized and forensic than those of his Romantic predecessor. \u201cHow silently they row upon the glittering fjord,\u201d also from the \u201c100 Folk Tunes,\u201d proceeds in a gleaming haze of flutes and string harmonics. Tonality is hinted at, unmoored, oblique.<\/p>\n Elsewhere in the \u201c100 Folk Tunes,\u201d Tveitt applies his experimental zest to less pastoral subjects. In \u201cFylle-snakk<\/a>\u201d (\u201cDrunken Talk), he calls for a percussionist to smash glasses onstage. \u201cIt\u2019s quite dangerous,\u201d said Berglund, who conducted a performance of that work with the Swedish Radio Orchestra. To guard against flying shards, they installed a tall bucket and equipped the percussionist with protective eyewear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cTveitt didn\u2019t care about limitations,\u201d she said. \u201cHe was sort of larger than life.\u201d<\/p>\n But for Tveitt, this engagement with Norwegian traditions was more than aesthetic. (It also went beyond music: He collected ancient weapons he found on his property, refusing to hand them over to a museum as required by law.) <\/strong>His interest in Nordic folk music, with its modal melodies and archaic tunings, was part of a nationalistic outlook that aligned him with some of the most vociferously right-wing ideologies of the 1930s. His most overtly ideological composition is the ballet \u201cBaldur\u2019s Dream,\u201d first staged in 1938, which is bathed in Norse pathos.<\/p>\n Tveitt never joined the Norwegian pro-Nazi party and opposed the German occupation, but he did serve in the culture ministry of Vidkun Quisling<\/a>\u2019s pro-Nazi government. (Tveitt\u2019s political beliefs continue to be the subject of debate.)<\/p>\n Tveitt\u2019s theoretical writings make clear that for him, music was part of a wider push for reviving pre-Christian local traditions to shore up a racially defined Norse identity. In place of the major and minor scales that had come to dominate Western music, he proposed four modes, which he named Rir, Sum, Fum and Tyr after Norse gods. In a 1938 article, he decried the hegemony of \u201ccivilized\u201d music propagated by what he referred to in a thinly veiled way as \u201cthe international parasite race,\u201d shadowy cosmopolitan forces that he felt had destroyed more \u201cnatural\u201d Norwegian forms of expression.<\/p>\n