This is our first recording together. It is a major step—especially for the father, I think. When you take your child to school or swimming class, the prospect of appearing one day on stage together to perform great music somehow does not enter your mind.

Leif started piano lessons when he was eight. We would prepare his lesson with half an hour of piano practice immediately after school. I never had to focus on tone or touch. It was clear from the very first note Leif played that he had an in-built concept of beauty—which is wonderful, isn’t it, a child wishing to express beauty? I recall Leif’s first teacher, Graeme Humphrey, for thirty years professor at the Royal Academy of Music, telling him after a passage on the piano: ‘Remember, an audience always responds to warmth.’ The gift of playing beautifully is what signifies Leif’s musicianship. It affects not only the listener, but also those who make music with him. I can hear it in my own cello tone because of how Leif makes me listen.

When we started playing together, the big question was whether a father and a son on stage would come across as somewhat unexciting, a little too much of a family business up there. And would our decades-old domestic roles prove an obstacle during rehearsals? Would I expect my son always to follow my lead and to be given no room for discussion, like ‘son, I want a diminuendo in bar 5 and staccato in bar 6; and you need to take out the garbage in the break’? Would it prevent us from unleashing our individual talents and finding a mutual platform for passionate and romantic playing? Well, we quickly learned that none of that applied. The only time I am reminded of the fact I share the stage with my son is when we walk on and off. I can look at him as we take the applause, and somewhat overwhelmed I confirm that it is in fact Leif standing there next to me. Music is powerful. It engages—and takes over, and in that lies a privilege: we are there to serve the music, to unspin our powers and commit. So, no time, really, to ponder over family ties.

This compilation of Swans celebrates the great composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It was meant to mark the centenary of the composer’s death (1921), but the sudden COVID pandemic pushed plans like that into an uncertain future. Most of the pieces presented here are my arrangements of songs and piano pieces especially made for this album. When dealing with songs, it requires a different approach from that of transcribing instrumental pieces. A song is often made up of many verses, and of words which require a bunch of repeated notes, a narrative which is not only a musical one, but one supported by a text. Without words, that support is gone, and so, as an arranger, one elaborates, expands on the narrative and makes additions to the vocal line in order to convince the listener that the piece was originally written for cello all along.

‘Le cygne’, composed by Saint-Saëns in 1886 and appearing as the thirteenth item in Le carnaval des animaux, is an iconic cello piece—and an iconic piece for cellists. Discreetly the swan glides in parallel with all that happens in a cellist’s life. Ever present, this three-minute piece forms a cornerstone of the repertoire, enjoying a status on its own.

However, Saint-Saëns did not have exclusive rights to draw inspiration from swans. There were pieces using the same bird written before and after the one appearing in Saint-Saëns’s Carnaval. After some research, Leif and I landed at the Vatican, in New Orleans, Warsaw, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, in Renaissance England and other places too. We discovered Swans were written all over the world and how each composer had his or her own ideas for how it ought to appear, fly or dive. Some swans fish for empty reflections, some are black, and others made of silver. The composers represented here are from different eras, so the way they see the world is different from one another, which, in the end, makes listening to them all a rather moving journey.

PS: A compilation consisting of twenty-two male composers and two female makes the otherwise happy ship tilt alarmingly. I have done my best to find a balance. On the mighty internet site IMSLP there are hundreds of female composers listed. It took me two weeks to go through all the names, pieces and work lists. The result of that research is two Swans by Fanny Mendelssohn and the Swedish composer Hélène Tham, both active during the nineteenth century.

Gabriel Fauré described his oldest and dearest friend Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) as ‘the most complete musician we ever had, paralleled with the great masters of former days. His unlimited knowledge, his marvellous technique, his clear and exquisite sensitivity, his integrity, the variety and astonishing number of works—do not all these justify his claim to recognition of all time?’

Born on 9 October in the Rue du Jardinet in Paris, Saint-Saëns’s gift was that of Mozart’s. A Galop for piano was written when he was four; his first song, Le soir, when he was five; his first symphony at the age of seventeen. With an output including five symphonies, five piano concertos (one being the fascinating F major ‘Egyptian’ concerto, with its technical experiments with new colours), three concertos for violin and two for cello, thirteen operas, a ballet, church music and a multitude of chamber music and songs, he was the leading composer of France. He may also have been the first French film composer: in 1908 he wrote the music to H Lavedan’s L’Assassinat du duc de Guise.

Besides music, his genius also produced poetry, plays (including Le roi Apépi from 1903), as well as books and essays on astronomy, Roman theatre scenery, antique lyres and zithers, and plants and animals. In 1874 he announced that a new and fertile era was opening for music following the break-up of the major–minor tonal system. (1874 was the year Schoenberg was born!) His book Problèmes et mystères from 1894 concerns his personal philosophy and thoughts on religion, and whether man possesses the spiritual qualities religion claims for him: ‘In an age when humanity finds it increasingly impossible to have faith, the only alternative is to seek in nature the basis for morality and society.’ Faith must have been a daily occupation for Saint-Saëns, who in 1878 tragically lost his two little boys within six months. It led to the collapse of his marriage. He never remarried.

Saint-Saëns was considered one of the greatest pianists of his day, equal to his great admirer Franz Liszt who dedicated the Second Mephisto Waltz to him. When Anton Rubinstein, another piano giant, was scheduled to perform in Paris, Saint-Saëns anticipated the visit by composing—in seventeen days, no less—his now-famous Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor. The French composer also recognized Wagner’s genius, and gave his support for a Paris production of Tannhäuser. They remained friends until Wagner’s witless farce Une capitulation, in which he mocks the French for having lost the 1870/71 Franco-Prussian War. Saint-Saëns served as a private in the Fourth Battalion of the Garde nationale de la Seine, but during the violent Paris Commune he sought refuge in London. He played twice to Queen Victoria, and appeared as a regular guest pianist and conductor at various venues, not only in London. He played once to Queen Alexandra, and wrote the Coronation March (Marche du couronnement, Op 117) for her husband Edward VII. The famous ‘Organ’ Symphony No 3 was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society. In 1893 he received a doctorate in music from Cambridge University along with his friend Tchaikovsky. A further doctorate was conferred by Oxford in 1913. His lifespan covered the premieres of Bellini’s Norma and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. He saw the painting of Delacroix and Corot develop to that of Picasso and Kandinsky.

His immortal ‘Le cygne’ is the thirteenth of fourteen movements from Le carnaval des animaux, a ‘Grande fantaisie zoologique’ written in 1886. It is dedicated to his cellist friend Charles Joseph Lebouc, with whom he often appeared in chamber-music concerts together with violinists Charles Lamoureux and Édouard Colonne, not yet conductors. Worried what the Carnaval would do to his reputation, Saint-Saëns permitted only ‘Le cygne’ to be published. In 1900 Anna Pavlova collaborated with Fokine to create a dance based on Tennyson’s poem The Dying Swan. It was to become her greatest triumph, and she performed it some 4,000 times around the world. ‘Le cygne’ proved a money-spinner too: besides being published in dozens of versions, including those for oboe, mandolin, organ and French horn, it was made into a song called ‘Mother Cabrini, the twentieth-century saint’, as well as appearing in a Hollywood musical accompanied by eighteen harps.

Mats Lidström (b1959). As a young teenager, Leif was learning the cello part of Saint-Saëns’s ‘Le cygne’. During our piano practice I started thinking: ‘Why not?! Why not compose my own Swan?!’ The idea is not a new one, as we can see from this album, but in those days I wasn’t aware of the bevy of swans that have been written by other composers. For my own undertaking, I wanted the material to associate with Saint-Saëns, to be recognizable. The rest is for Leif, with all my heart.

Karol Maciej Szymanowski (1882-1937), the great Polish composer and pianist, was part of Young Poland, a movement of modernist artists. He also founded a publishing company with the aim of publishing new works by fellow Poles. In the late 1920s he was the director of his former place of study, the State Conservatory in Warsaw.

Szymanowski’s music was described by Aleksander Laskowski as showing ‘an incredible development from the Straussian and Wagnerian, through an interesting and very romantic Oriental period, and finishing with a national period influenced by his time in the Tatra Mountains’. Here he encountered Goral music of the Tatra Highlanders where he made his home, now the famous museum in Zakopane. There are four symphonies (I count a performance by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra of the second symphony as one of my most memorable listening experiences; I remember being struck by its beauty from bar 1—a proper ’ello, ’ello??-moment!), the fourth symphony with piano bearing a dedication to Artur Rubinstein, and two stunning violin concertos dedicated, as in the case of most of his music for violin, to Paweł Kochanski. There are operas, a ballet, an oratorio, string quartets, songs and piano music. And yet, he was lost to tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Lausanne at the age of fifty-four. Łabedz (‘The swan’), Op 7, is a single song written in 1904. It was dedicated to Szymanowski’s mother Anna (née Taube), and premiered by his sister Stanisława in Warsaw on 12 March 1909. The text, a sonnet written by the Young Poland writer Wacław Berent, is featured in the author’s novel Próchno. The swan here is the guide to the underworld, to unsatisfiable desire, hopelessness and inability. In the manuscript it is stated that the music should be played rhythmically, ‘like the wings of a flying bird’. I have added bridges of notes in some passages to make the transition of sensuality work when leaving the vocal line for that of the cello. The relentlessness of the very opening has always had a hypnotic effect on Leif and me.

Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) is considered one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, hugely admired by such talents as Sergei Rachmaninov and Josef Hofmann. At his Berlin Philharmonic debut in 1909, he played Brahms’s D minor concerto in the first half and Tchaikovsky’s B flat minor concerto in the second.

Godowsky was brought up in America by Polish parents. At the age of sixteen he decided to study with the greatest living pianist, Franz Liszt, in Weimar. Upon his arrival in Europe, Godowsky learned of Liszt’s death. Only one pianist was considered Liszt’s equal: Camille Saint-Saëns. Godowsky’s beautiful and tasteful version of his future teacher’s piece was originally written for piano in August 1927, and later arranged for violin and piano for his friend Isidor Achron. Here I play the violin part one octave down, thus not an exact transcription. Leif loves this piece. I think it’s his favourite.

Leif Kaner-Lidström (b1995). Leif has that rare gift: the ability to write beautiful music. His Swan is tender and sensitive—which makes it a contender for the sweetest swan personality of the album. Leif says:

I wanted to pay homage to Saint-Saëns in a similar way that my dad did with his piece, but instead of taking inspiration from the rhythm and texture, I replicated and inverted the main melody with an aim to do this the whole way through. However, within the first two bars the music had become a variation of itself. I found myself wanting to stay in that world, like someone having a dream about something completely different, with Saint-Saëns’s piece playing far away in the background.

After having a Swan written for me by my dad when I was a teenager, I had always planned to write one in return and dedicate it to him, and after starting it during my time at the Royal Northern, I finally finished this small piece shortly before we recorded it in 2022.

Something my dad always spoke to us about when growing up, and still does to this day, is the beauty of intervallic leaps in melody, particularly in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. There is something about it which is indescribable, inherently expressive, particularly on a stringed instrument when performed masterfully. Knowing I had a true master of the cello performing this piece, I could compose the melody as expressively as I was capable of.

‘He has adorable children and his oldest daughter could give you something of Sebastian Bach. This child is really something special.’ That is how the father of Fanny Mendelssohn and of her younger brother Felix was introduced to Goethe in a letter by their composition teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter. At the age of fourteen Fanny played the first book of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier from memory to honour her father on his birthday. He, on the other hand, could be called tolerant but not supportive of her devotion to and passion for music, writing to her in 1820: ‘Music will perhaps become Felix’s profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament.’ Fanny Mendelssohn (Hensel after her marriage in 1829) was the composer of four cantatas, an orchestral overture, chamber music, 250 songs and some 125 works for piano.

Fanny and Felix were very close. He would sometimes call her ‘Minerva’ after the goddess of wisdom. Their letters to one another express love in its most profound and beautiful form. Maybe one ought to put some of them to music? Fanny died of a stroke on 14 May 1847. Felix followed her on 4 November that same year.

Jacques Arcadelt (?1505-1568) was born in Namur in the Netherlands, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. An important composer of both sacred and secular music, he made the form of the madrigal known outside Italy. His influence on other composers was enormous. (In Caravaggio’s The Lute Player the music in front of him is by Arcadelt!) As a young man he moved to Florence, continuing to Rome in 1538. Only a year later he became a member of the Sistine Chapel. There he met Michelangelo, who was working on several projects commissioned by the Pope. Arcadelt set two of Michelangelo’s sonnets to music, but was met with indifference, with the latter telling Arcadelt that music did not mean much to him and that he was unmusical, anyway. Still, Michelangelo presented him with a piece of satin, suitable for making a snug-fitting jacket (doublet). In 1551 Arcadelt moved to Paris where he became maître de chapelle under the Cardinal of Lorraine. As a member of the royal chapel, he also served the king. Arcadelt’s music was immensely popular in both Italy and France for more than 100 years. Il bianco e dolce cigno (‘The white and gentle swan’) is one of his most famous works. A four-voice madrigal, the subject matter is apparently erotic. Eroticism—as found in the text written by the Ischian-born sixth Marquis of Pescara, Alfonso d’Avalos, who uses terms like ‘a thousand deaths a day’ or ‘a death that fulfils me with happiness and longing’—completely escaped me during work on my transcription. I must have been terribly focused on how the piece would be played had it been written for the viola da gamba—hence the attempts to show passages of swiftness.

Helena or Hélène Tham (1843–1925): when I first came across Tham’s name, I wondered why it sounded so familiar. Then I remembered that one of the streets in central Göteborg (Gothenburg) is called Vollrath Tham, the name of Helena’s future husband!

Helena Tham was a pioneer amongst female Swedish composers. She took part in musical salons which provided a forum where her works would be played to a knowledgeable audience. Her godmother was the legendary singer Jenny Lind, and a friend of the family was the composer Adolf Fredrik Lindblad. This indicates that the Thams belonged to Stockholm’s main musical circles. She composed from a young age and regularly before her marriage in 1864. Nine children may have made it difficult for her to find time for composition, but she continued nonetheless to publish works well into her forties and fifties. There is no mention of her music being performed in public concerts. The majority of her works seem to have been intended for private use. Tham’s music consists mostly of songs and piano pieces. She was active as a piano teacher, and one of her students, Victor Wiklund, the older brother of composer Adolf, later became a piano professor at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Her Svanen wants to try its young wings; it has had enough of the lake and longs for higher ‘spheres’. The song is the second of nine published in Stockholm in 1894 and dedicated to the composer’s sisters. The text was written by her father. For my transcription I have added a bit here and there, as well as a small cadenza at the end, again to convince the listener the piece was always written for the cello.

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625) was born in Oxford, but took his Bachelor of Music degree in Cambridge. He was the youngest contributor to the first printed collection of English keyboard music, Parthenia (c1612). In 1603 he became a musician of the Chapel Royal and in 1605 a Gentleman there as its junior chapel organist. By 1610 Gibbons was considered the most important musician and composer at court, maintaining good relations with King James I and the future, not to mention beheaded-bound, King Charles I. More importantly, he must have known William Shakespeare, as they moved in the same circles; Gibbons must—surely, for the sake of entertainment—have attended performances at The Rose and The Globe. In 1617 he became a chamber player for Prince Charles and gained the same position for the king in 1619. The most important move of his career came in 1623 when he was appointed organist at Westminster Abbey. Here he officiated at the burial of King James. In May 1625, on his way to Canterbury to receive the Queen of Charles I, Gibbons suddenly died. The haste of his burial at Canterbury and his body not being returned to London generated suspicion. Rumour had it he was poisoned or died of plague. His wife died a year later, leaving Gibbons’s brother Edward to care for the nine orphaned children. Orlando’s son Christopher followed in his father’s footsteps, eventually becoming the teacher of Henry Purcell. The silver swan is one the most famous pieces from the Renaissance period. It is a five-part madrigal and was published in 1612. My arrangement is straightforward. The cello plays the leading voice, while the other four are absorbed into the piano part. The original text is by an unknown author, and tells of the legend that swans are unmusical and therefore silent in life, singing beautifully just before death:

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sang her first and last and sung no more:
Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes,
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) studied composition privately with Saint-Saëns while enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire as a student of Gounod and Théodore Dubois. (He was also in the same piano class as Alfred Cortot and Maurice Ravel.) He would accompany Saint-Saëns to concerts and to the opera. It is therefore hurtful that, after Saint-Saëns’s death in 1921, he dismissed his mentor in a newspaper interview: ‘I would gladly exchange the entire output of Saint-Saëns for the first page of Bach’s B minor Mass.’ How does one approach Hahn’s music after such a statement? But Leif loves this Swan, so I love it too. And there’s always À Chloris.

Reynaldo ‘Nano’ Hahn de Echenagucia was born in Caracas, Venezuela, as the youngest of twelve children. His mother was of Spanish descent, while father Karl (Carlos), the eldest son of a Jewish family from Hamburg, emigrated to Venezuela aged twenty-two and eventually became financial advisor to the president. The family moved to Paris when Reynaldo was six. France would define Hahn’s musical identity in later life. As a teenager he wrote incidental music to Daudet’s play L’obstacle and set music to poetry by Paul Verlaine, who was found crying at the premiere from hearing his words accompanied by music. Hahn became a prominent member of the Parisian fin de siècle society, counting Sarah Bernhardt and Marcel Proust as close friends. Of Hahn, Proust said: ‘Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo.’ Hahn was also a conductor and appeared with the Vienna Philharmonic in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Salzburg Festival—a festival shared with Gustav Mahler, who conducted The Marriage of Figaro. In 1912 Hahn was commissioned by Diaghilev to write for the Russian Ballet. Le Dieu bleu was perhaps overshadowed by two other French works which appeared that same season: the ballet L’après-midi d’un faune (set to Debussy’s eponymous Prélude) and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.

Hahn had a successful life as a composer and conductor. He was commissioned to write for the Paris Opera—of which he became the director during his last two years. He wrote for various theatres in Paris, which did not stop him from composing two concertos and chamber music. There are about 100 songs with piano, one of which, called ‘Si mes vers avaient des ailes’ (‘If my verses had wings’), quickly became popular. It was composed by a fourteen-year-old.

Les cygnes was started in Fontainebleau in 1893 and finished in Paris the following year, and the text by Armand Renaud begins: ‘Your soul is a lake of love / Whose swans are my desire.’ For my arrangement, I add a passage (based on Hahn’s harmony, naturally) in order to take the cello up to a higher register. Towards the end, I make some minor additions when the singer has run out of words, to give the piece a cellistic touch.

Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775-1838) was born in Finland and moved to Sweden as a seventeen-year-old. He worked as principal clarinettist in the Hovkapellet in Stockholm (the Royal Opera orchestra, where I worked as the principal cellist some 150 years later). He travelled around Europe and met many leading musicians and composers of the day. In Paris he befriended Rodolphe Kreutzer, the concertmaster of the opera orchestra (see Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ sonata), and Jean-Xavier Lefèvre, its principal clarinettist and the inventor of the clarinet’s sixth key. Crusell’s tone is said to have been exquisitely beautiful and as a colleague he was highly respected: his ‘delicate refinement and judgement of character anticipated every misunderstanding’, wrote the Swedish playwright Bernhard von Beskow.

Crusell wrote a comic opera, The Slave Girl, based on a tale from Arabian Nights, as well as concertos and chamber music for various wind instruments, and many songs. His Svanen, marked ‘Un poco allegretto’, uses the same Runeberg poem as Ehrström’s setting. Because of the brevity of this lovely song, I have added a cadenza which incorporates material from Crusell’s three clarinet concertos. The song in its original form appears as No 87 in a volume called The Singing Sweden—100 well-known and popular songs—published in the year of his death.

It should be noted that Crusell translated ten operas into Swedish for his employer, The Royal Opera. He was fluent in French and German, and fairly fluent in Italian. His compositions for clarinet are a vital part of the clarinettist’s repertoire, with the concertos often mentioned in the same breath as those by Mozart, Weber, Nielsen and Copland.

Maurice Ravel’s mother was a free-thinking Basque who filled the house with folk songs from her own childhood, and his father was an inventor-manufacturer who designed an internal combustion engine as well as the ‘Whirlwind of Death’, a loop-the-loop circus machine which was a major attraction until a fatal accident at a Barnum and Bailey’s Circus performance in 1903. Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) and his brother Édouard had a happy childhood. As a young man Maurice dressed as a dandy, meticulous about his appearance and demeanour. He was short in stature with a large head which seemed suitably matched to his formidable intellect. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ravel’s father introduced him to Erik Satie, who was making his living as a café pianist. Ravel saw Satie’s constant experiments in musical form not only as an inspiration but ‘of inestimable value’. Another long-lasting influence was the music of Rimsky-Korsakov. Ravel’s mastery of orchestration, his creation of a colour, and then another after that, make for sensuality and clarity. The opening of the second orchestral suite from Daphnis et Chloé, for instance: what world are we swept into then?

Ravel’s Swan escaped me until Leif found it two weeks before our scheduled recording. ‘Le cygne’ is the third number in the song cycle Histoires naturelles, composed in 1906 and premiered on 12 January 1907. Jules Renard’s poem tells of a swan looking like a white sledge on a pond, fishing for empty reflections while fearing death. The cello remains in the register of the original writing, but I have made changes at those instances when the poem requires the singer to repeat the same note. Unsurprisingly, Ravel’s Swan is a very special item on our programme.

Fredrik August Ehrström (1801-1850) is sometimes called ‘the first Finnish composer’. His mother tongue was Swedish, like Jean Sibelius, but his passion was to promote Finnish folklore and songs to a nation whose repertoire was dominated by music from Sweden and Germany.

Ehrström studied seamanship and law before turning to music. He was a singing teacher in the Swedish-speaking church of St Catherine in St Petersburg, and thereafter moved to Helsinki. There he led the choir of the Music Society, and from 1840 he was the organist of the Old Church. Ehrström died aged forty-nine, but his wife survived him by fifty-five years.

The great Finnish poet J L Runeberg was a childhood friend. Ehrström put music to several of his texts, including Svanen; this Swan rests on the river bank and sings one night in June about the beauty of the North. For the second verse, I have composed a variation on the original theme, inspired by Weber’s treatment of the cello.

The Farjeon family is interesting. Harry Farjeon’s sister Eleanor wrote children’s books and poetry; his brother Herbert was a playwright, librettist and a major figure in British theatre; and his other brother Joseph wrote crime and mystery novels. Harry often set music to his sister’s texts, as in the case of his opera Floretta and the symphonic poem Pannychis, and sometimes Herbert would join in, which resulted in pieces like the Christmas masque A room at the inn.

Harry Farjeon taught composition at the Royal Academy of Music for forty-five years, teaching for most of that time up to thirty students per week. He has a fine list of works which includes two cello sonatas, a pair of piano trios, three string quartets, various operettas and a symphony in D major. Ein Schwanengesang (‘A swan song’) was originally a piano piece, published in 1905. It comes with a romanticism one does well not to reject. It is in fact so lovely that I expanded on it by adding a couple of bars. The cello part also has a few amendments—cosmetic, really, because as an arranger you do not fiddle with the harmony.

Selim Gustaf Adolf Palmgren (1878-1951) was a Finnish composer, pianist and conductor. He studied in Berlin with Conrad Ansorge (a student of Liszt and composer of a cello sonata, among many other works) and Busoni (composer of an eighty-minute piano concerto and many lovely Bach transcriptions, including the D minor Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue for cello and piano). Palmgren taught composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, upstate New York, from 1921, the year of its inauguration, later returning to Finland. He was married to the soprano Maikki Järnefelt, herself sister-in-law to Aino Sibelius (wife of Jean Sibelius, composer of The Swan of Tuonela) by her first marriage to composer-conductor Armas Järnefelt. (Maikki had a stroke during a rehearsal of her husband’s cantata Turun Lilja and died a couple of days later.) Palmgren composed many songs, pieces for the violin, two pieces (‘Tårar’ and ‘Landskap’, both Op 80) for cello and piano, and five piano concertos. ‘Svanen’ is the fifth of 6 Lyric Pieces for piano, Op 28. Here, the leading voice has been extracted from the piano part and given to the cello. The swan sings supported by that beautiful and typical Finnish harmonic language. I have added a passage to fit with arpeggios at the very end of the piece.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) was a composer of over 2,000 works. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he enjoys legendary status in his homeland—the late ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague called him ‘the single most significant creative figure in twentieth-century Brazilian art music’. He was a conductor but also a cellist and a guitarist; there is a cello concerto dating from 1915, and his guitar works are highly regarded in the classical guitar repertory.

O canto do cisne negro (‘The song of the black swan’), subtitled ‘Poema – Ballo mímico’, forms the last part of the symphonic poem Naufrágio de Kleônicos, written in 1916. The concluding section of the original is scored for solo cello, harp and French horns. The following year, Villa-Lobos made a version for cello and piano, which has become one of his best-known works.

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845-1924) died on the same day as Mendelssohn, 4 November (albeit seventy-seven years later). We love Fauré for his warmth. There is truth in his music, and a distinctive tone-language. A beautiful entry by the French musicologist and journalist Adolphe Jullien in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians written three years after his death reads thus: ‘As a composer Fauré constantly progressed with a suppleness of style and an easy mastery of technique which often disguised the almost revolutionary boldness of his harmonies.’ Jullien also describes Fauré’s chamber music, including two cello sonatas and numerous short pieces for cello, as among the highest things of their class. Yet, acceptance by the general public came slowly, even in France. I remember talking to the head of the music department at the Bibliothèque nationale, Jean-Michel Nectoux, about his frustration over the French attitude to Fauré. After studies, Fauré’s first appointment was that of organist in the city of Rennes, a commute that involved four hours on trains every day. One may of course speculate how many songs or other pieces we missed because of those journeys. His close friendship with Saint-Saëns (in their correspondence, which is extensive, they use the ‘tu’ form, which I’m sure cannot have been a common occurrence with Saint-Saëns) brought him back to Paris, where he took up the role of organist at the magnificent Saint-Sulpice (his colleague being Charles-Marie Widor, who remained there for sixty-three years). In 1896 he became organist at the grand Parthenon-looking Madeleine, the same year he was appointed professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. In June 1905, the year of Lehár’s The Merry Widow, he succeeded Dubois as its director. Amongst his students were Ravel, Jean Roger-Ducasse and Nadia Boulanger. Old age meant sharing the fate of Beethoven and Smetana: loss of hearing. During the rehearsals of his cantata Prométhée at the Paris Opera, he purportedly turned to Roger-Ducasse and asked: ‘Is it good?’

‘Cygne sur l’eau’ is the first of four songs that form the cycle Mirages, Op 113, set to poetry by Renée de Brimont. It was composed during the summer of 1919, the same time he began work on his second piano quintet. Mirages was premiered in Paris on 27 December that year. Fauré accompanied on the piano, but his hearing impairment was now total and it was to be his last public performance. For this recording I have made slight alterations to the vocal line in some changes of rhythm and register.

Charles Albert Stebbins (1874-1958) was a professional organist who held church positions in Ohio and Chicago. He studied with the German organist Wilhelm Middelschulte, who worked from 1896 to 1918 as organist for what would become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and who lived in America until the outbreak of World War II, when he returned to Nazi Germany. Stebbins’s other teacher was Gaston Dethier, a Belgian-born student of the great Alexandre Guilmant. Dethier emigrated to the US and taught at The Juilliard School from 1907 to 1945. He was a close friend of Stebbins, hence the dedication of this Swan. It was originally written for the organ. I have made some additions for full use of the cello register and to increase the element of drama in some places.

Homero de Sá Barreto (1884-1924) was a Brazilian pianist and composer who studied in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. He died too young. As a pianist he was famous for his interpretations of Chopin. His composition style was influenced by the French post-Romantic current, which for him became a transition to a more modern tone language. I am grateful to have come across Homero. I admit I had never heard the name. And yet there are pieces for cello to explore: a Berceuse from 1911, a Romance from 1918, a piano trio and a cello sonata. O cysne is a song set to the poetry of Júlio Salusse (1872-1948):

One day a swan will certainly die.
When that uncertain moment comes,
In the lake, where perhaps the water will swell,
May the living swan, full of longing,
Never sing again, nor swim alone,
Nor ever swim alongside another swan.

For my transcription I have used the usual techniques to make the vocal line sound like a cello part through minor changes to the rhythm and, since a cellist doesn’t need to pause to breathe, tying bars together with additional notes.

Didier-Gaston de l’Aubergine (1887-1938) was born in Rennes, son of the organist at the local church of Saint-Melaine. He eventually took over his father’s position at the church and remained there until retirement in 1936. Very little else is known about his life. Le cygne regarde son reflet dans l’eau was originally written for viola. It follows the standard ABA format. Besides seeking a reflection in the water, the composer employs almost desperate measures to display passion and virtuoso elements. L’Aubergine was self-taught.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) was the first American pianist to achieve international recognition and the first American composer to include Latin American and Creole folk themes and rhythms. He was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans. There is a plaque on the house in which he lived, which struck Leif and me as having been neglected. Both his maternal grandmother and Sally, the nanny, were Saint-Domingue Creoles. From an early age he therefore came in contact with a variety of musical traditions. Is that the reason why Gottschalk is not embraced more fully as a composer, so difficult to label is he? Considered a prodigy on the piano, he gave his debut aged thirteen at the St Charles Hotel in New Orleans, one of the first grand hotels in the US (its cupola second in size only to the dome of the Capitol in Washington, DC). The iconic, octagon-shaped bar room in the basement was also used for auctioning slaves. Despite being raised in the South, Gottschalk was politically outspoken on issues such as slavery and the Civil War. St Charles burned to the ground in 1851.

Gottschalk’s father took him to Paris to enroll him at the Conservatoire, but his application was rejected in the initial stages on grounds of his nationality. The reason given by the Head of Piano faculty was the following: ‘America is a country of steam engines.’ And yet, after a concert in Salle Pleyel it did not escape those present—including Chopin, Liszt and Alkan—that Gottschalk was a prodigy.

He gave his New York City debut in 1853, and travelled extensively in Central and South America, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Wherever he went he embraced the local music and included it in his compositions. He may have been the first Western composer to hint at jazz. Though many of his works are available today, such as a symphony and short pieces with beautiful and charming titles, much of Gottschalk’s music was destroyed or lost after his death—maybe because he travelled with unpublished manuscripts? He died from yellow fever in his hotel room in Rio de Janeiro at the age of forty.

I got to know Gottschalk’s music in my early teens through his exciting Grande tarantelle in D minor for piano and orchestra, Op 67. The dying swan is a ‘Romance poétique’ for solo piano dedicated to Miss Eva W Hedge from Chicago. It has a late opus number, Op 100, and was published in St Louis in 1870. The version I use for my transcription is without Gottschalk’s alternative ‘concert version’ introduction, but goes straight to meet the swan. The pianist is informed that ‘the proper and artistic use of the pedal in this composition is of the greatest importance’.

‘En svane’ by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) is the second of a cycle of six songs (Op 25) published in 1876 and set to poems by Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s Swan glides in circles with a ‘delightful song no trill betrayed’. Together with ‘Jeg elsker deg’ (‘I love you’, Op 5 No 3), ‘En svane’ is Grieg’s most popular song.

For my arrangement, the vocal line needed no rhythmic changes, but in the middle section a couple of passages which appear in the piano part seem to have been written for the cello! I fell for the temptation, extracted accordingly and gave them to the cello.

Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828) was born in a Viennese suburb to Franz Theodor and Maria Elisabeth as the twelfth of fourteen children. Nine died in infancy, a fact that must have affected the composer’s upbringing, as did losing his mother at the age of fifteen. In the beginning, his father taught him violin while his brother Ignaz taught him the piano. His talent was eventually noticed by one of the most important figures in Vienna: Antonio Salieri. Salieri taught him composition and music theory until 1817. From around 1808, Schubert came into contact with the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. One may wonder how many premieres of Beethoven’s works he attended, and how saddened he must have been to learn about the decline of Beethoven’s hearing. Schubert composed some 630 songs (‘I write all day, and when I have finished one piece I begin another’), seven completed symphonies, several operas (all rejected by the theatre directors) and the loveliest piano and chamber music.

Schubert died on 19 November 1828. He was thirty-one. The year before, he had been a pall-bearer at Beethoven’s funeral. (Schubert’s cause of death by syphilis was ‘determined’ in a 1907 biography by Otto Deutsch—a claim that went unexamined and unchallenged for years. However, there were no symptoms of either type of syphilis at the time of death. On the contrary, his friends didn’t dare to visit during the last days of Schubert’s life for fear he may be contagious. His symptoms point at salmonella or indeed the typhoid fever mentioned on his death certificate.) Schubert had sent Beethoven the score of his B minor symphony. But his great idol was at this point too ill to study it. Maybe Beethoven noticed the first page, the opening of the symphony, prompting a smile of approval. And maybe the young composer decided to throw into the same batch the string quintet and the G major string quartet! To get the perspective of Schubert’s untimely death and what could—what would—have followed, I think of the cellist F A Kummer, composer of studies and salon pieces. He too was born in 1797—but died in 1879. Fifty-one more years of Schubert would have given us one or two cello concertos; he would have been the person other composers came to visit. Tchaikovsky, Fauré: they would have loved him. He would have advised Brahms on the treatment of melody and given a young Debussy lessons in music theory.

Our Swan, given the catalogue number D744, is an earlier Schwanengesang than the famous song cycle of fourteen songs, D957. Composed in 1822 and published the following year, it is music set to a single poem by Johann Chrysostomos Senn. ‘How shall I sing of the feeling of new life / That redeems you with its breath, O spirit?’ reads one couplet. Nothing has been changed in the vocal line, save for one repeated note.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was the third child of seven. His father Ilya, one of the foremost metallurgists in Russia, graduated from the St Petersburg Mining College and played the flute sufficiently to participate in amateur concerts. Pyotr’s mother’s maiden name was d’Assier. He lost her to cholera when he was fourteen years old. Ilya wanted his son to become a civil servant, but when it was clear in which direction Pyotr was heading, Ilya gave both moral and financial support.

Tchaikovsky is the master of all nineteenth-century Russian composers. His works, beloved by audiences and musicians alike, comprise a long list of veritable ‘hits’: the last three symphonies, the first piano concerto, the violin concerto, The Nutcracker, the Romeo and Juliet overture—and, of course, Swan Lake. Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake in less than a year and was paid 800 roubles. It was premiered in Moscow in 1877, but did not receive another performance until 1895, in St Petersburg. In 1911 Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes brought it to London, where the role of Prince Siegfried was danced by none other than Vaslav Nijinsky.

My transcription is from the fourth number of the Swan Lake Orchestral Suite, Op 20a. It’s not clear who put it together from the original ballet score. If not Tchaikovsky, possibly Riccardo Drigo, the conductor at the Imperial Russian Ballet (now the Mariinsky Ballet). It was published in 1900 and, interestingly, its earliest known performance took place in 1901 in the Queen’s Hall in London, conducted by Henry Wood. The cello solo from this scene is preceded by a famous harp introduction, and is really a repeat of what has already been presented by the violin. Later in the score, the cello solo is in effect a duo, with the violin providing a supporting counter-line. I have therefore used the violin solo itself for my transcription.

There is a lovely story about Tchaikovsky as recounted by Scriabin. A get-together was scheduled for composer colleagues. The ‘Mighty Handful’ (Cui, Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev) were there, possibly Taneyev as well, all waiting in anticipation for the one they mutually admired: Tchaikovsky. The master finally arrived. It was like the sun itself entering the room, with Tchaikovsky wearing an immaculate white suit. Scriabin later recalled: ‘It was just perfect.’

Nine days after conducting the premiere of his ‘Pathétique’ symphony, Tchaikovsky died. He was fifty-three. Since the last movement is one of the finest of all symphonic movements, what beautiful achievements might have followed?

Mats Lidström © 2025