31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN (DAY 19)
For Geirr Tveitt’s birthday, a literal and figurative nightmare:
Tveitt was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1908. His family originally came from the Hardanger region. Each summer, they returned to Kvam to do farm work.
Tveitt would take up permanent residence in Hardanger in 1940. In the meantime, he studied music in Leipzig and Paris (with Honegger, Villa-Lobos, and Boulanger) and gained renown throughout Europe as a concert pianist, but it was his connection to the Norwegian countryside that would color most of his mature compositional output.
In 1970, a great tragedy stuck, when fire swept through Tveitt’s home, a farmhouse in Nordheimsund, destroying most of his unpublished manuscripts – 300 pieces, stored in wooden chests – fully 4/5ths of his compositional output. By extension, and not surprisingly, it also destroyed his ability to compose. He succumbed to alcoholism and died a broken man, with little hope of being remembered, in 1981.
Sadly, Tveitt did not live to see his reputation revived. In the intervening decades, musicologists have been able to piece together a number of these “lost” works, using as reference scattered orchestral parts and live concert recordings. Performances of these reconstructions have been widely distributed on the Naxos and BIS labels. The exceptional quality of what’s now available, and speculation over what’s been lost, is cause for a listener to share Tveitt’s heartbreak.
Tveitt’s symphonic poem “Nykken,” from 1956, is about a literal “night mare,” a white horse that lurks in a nocturnal wood near a silent pond. The beauty of the horse charms a hapless wanderer into attempting a ride. But the horse plunges into the depths of the pond, dragging its victim to a watery grave.
Here’s the music:
Happy birthday, Geirr Tveitt.