Elfrida Andrée: Andante cantabile from Fyra pianostycken (1881)

Elfrida Andrée (1841–1929) completed several firsts for a woman in her native Sweden.¹ She was the first woman in her country to become a cathedral organist, conduct a full orchestra, and focus on large-scale chamber and orchestral music as a composer. Though she would also become Sweden’s first female certified telegraph operator, she put this skill to little use. Instead, she enjoyed a long and successful career as a professional musician. In 1867 she began her tenure as organist at the Gustav Cathedral in Göteborg and would remain in that position for the remainder of her life. Her international successes included a critically acclaimed performance of her Second Symphony and the prelude to her opera Fritiofs Saga (1898), which she conducted in Dresden in 1904.²

Andrée’s achievements notwithstanding, she faced significant professional setbacks throughout her career. Fritiofs Saga, composed with future Nobel Prize–winning author Selma Lagerlöf as librettist, would not receive a full performance until the Göteborg Opera presented it in concert in March 2019. Her First Symphony, moreover, has seemingly remained unperformed since its shambolic 1869 premiere. The composer believed that members of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, annoyed to perform a symphony by a woman, sabotaged this performance: at one point the violins performed a measure off from the rest of the orchestra.³ Following this fiasco, Andrée’s father encouraged her to focus more on writing in smaller genres generally considered more appropriate for female composers, but she refused. She responded: “The popularity of all these little ladies with their piano fantasies or pretty songs is not what I want to do.”⁴ Her interest composing for orchestra and chamber ensembles was both artistic and related to her pursuit of gender equality. She often indicated her exasperation with the restrictions placed upon female musicians and, for instance, wrote: “How many times haven’t I been bitter when someone says that women cannot be mentioned in the context of serious art music?”⁵ Indeed, her motto, “the elevation of womankind,” developed in the 1870s, reflects this key element of her compositional philosophy.⁶

Andrée’s interest in larger forms notwithstanding, she left behind a significant body of shorter pieces, including songs and works for keyboard; these rarely align with the simple, pleasing aesthetic that she had associated with the “little ladies” whose music she had so derided. The extract presented here, the Andante cantabile from Fyra pianostycken (Four piano pieces), demonstrates this stylistic perspective well. It well demonstrates the overarching theme of the set, which she subtitled “Dikter för piano om Vemodet” (Poems for piano on melancholy). Andrée’s control over large-scale phrase and harmonic structures lends the melancholy of this Andante cantabile an air of restlessness. Though the bass pedal in measures 1–4 points toward the E-major tonic, Andrée avoids establishing it strongly until the downbeat of measure 16, the only full tonic cadence before the end of the movement. Moreover, the long, arching phrases and, in particular, the chromatic harmonies that postpone these cadences provide a Wagnerian flavor to this work.

Andrée produced at least four distinct versions of the Andante cantabile. These are listed as follows with their earliest date of composition:

Andante quasi recitativo for string orchestra (1878); revised for use as an interlude within her Swedish Mass No. 2 (1903)

Andante cantabile for piano, from Fyra pianostycken (1881)

Cantabile for organ, from Organ Symphony in B Minor (1891)

Andante cantabile for cello and organ (undated)⁷

Measure	Problem	Solution
7	Right hand ends measure with three eighths in pno2	Pno1 matches organ, match these two sources
9–11	Left hand pitches do not match between pno1 and pno2	Pno2 matches organ, match these two sources; also logical for flow of phrase and doublings within chord
10	Right hand includes dotted-quarternote E starting on the second half of beat 3 in pno2 but not in pno1	Include for consistency with m. 11
11	Right hand includes turn on the second half of beat...