Franz Berwald

2 Pages 506 Words

Franz Adolf Berwald


Franz Adolf Berwald was born in Stockholm on July 23, 1796. He was the son of a German violinist in the royal orchestra, named Christian Friedrich Georg Berwald. For the most part, Franz taught himself, but he did study music with his father and composition with J.B.E Dupuy. At the age of sixteen, Berwald was employed in the court orchestra as a violinist. During his break from the court orchestra, Franz was inspired to publish his own Musikalsk journal. The journal contained easy piano pieces and songs for the amateur market.
The lack of enthusiasm in his home country for his highly original and bold style provoked Berwald to leave Sweden to try and make a career abroad. Following a tour of Norway, he spent time studying in Berlin, where his opera Estrella di Soria was performed. They were even less receptive to the radicalism of Berwald’s music than Stockholm. He almost gave up on composition in order to run a successful orthopedic institute.
Franz then lived for a period in Vienna, where he began seriously composing again. He married in 1841 to Mathilde Scherer. His works were staged to increasingly supportive audiences. In 1842, he wrote a symphony, Sinfonie sérieuse. This was the only one of his symphonies that he saw performed in his lifetime. On his return to Sweden in 1845, the Royal Opera's did a production of his operetta Modehandlerskan. It was a failure. Nonetheless, Berwald persevered and produced three more symphonies, including Sinfonie capricieuse and Sinfonie singuliére. The latter in particular, which has only three movements instead of the usual four, reveals his skill as an orchestrator, and is perhaps his finest work.
Berwald spent a further three years traveling in Europe, where he met with varying degrees of success. In Paris neither the Conservatoire nor the Opéra-Comique showed interest, but in Vienna he did see a performance of his opera Ein Landliches Verlo...