Leif Ove Andsnes on Geirr Tveitt

Always a passionate advocate for music by his compatriots, the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes has championed the work of Bergen-born Geirr Tveitt (1908-81) since the beginning of his career, though only a small proportion of his vast output is in circulation - in 1970, a fire at Tveitt's isolated farmhouse destroyed vast quantities of the composer's unpublished manuscripts, prompting decades of reconstructive work on the part of musicologists.

Fresh from a visit to the site of the Tveitt farmhouse this spring, Leif Ove spoke to me about his gradual discovery of the man and the remarkable music on his new album, including Tveitt's sole surviving piano sonata and a selection of the folk-tunes and songs which he gathered through field-work in his native Hardanger.

You’ve been programming Tveitt’s music since the early 1990s - when did he come into your life?

I had my big Tveitt awakening when I was 24, but it started much earlier than that! Some of the small pieces like the folk tune arrangements are quite well known in Norway, and a couple of the easier ones are often given to children by their piano-teachers. I learned one or two when I was about twelve, although at that stage I didn’t know much about the composer.

When I was studying at the Bergen Conservatoire there was a pianist in my class who was from the same town as Tveitt, and he played a lot of his music including the’ Sonata etere’. When I heard it in concert it made a massive (if confusing!) impression on me, and I started exploring more of his folk tunes. A bit later I got involved with my first chamber music festival, at Risør in southern Norway, and in 1994 we did a programme profiling him as part of a long-term project to spotlight that generation of Norwegian composers - we started with Tveitt and ended with Fartein Valen in 2000.

Tveitt was an especially interesting case, because his farmhouse burnt down in 1970 and so much was still unclear in terms of how much music had survived the fire…We unearthed unpublished pieces in manuscript, then we found some recordings of pieces which had gone up in flames. One of them was Tveitt’s own recording of the ‘Sonata etere’, which was released on Simax.

When did you start performing the sonata yourself?

I was encouraged to study it when I was young but it’s such a big, overwhelming piece: he deals with just two themes over the course of half an hour and I wasn’t sure how I could keep the tension going…

But it was always there in the back of my mind, and like a lot of musicians during the COVID pandemic I suddenly had the time to pick up scores I’d left on the shelf for years; after playing through it a few times I realised it was a unique milestone in Norwegian music, and I couldn’t avoid it any longer. 

I tried out the first movement in a few concerts during that weird phase of semi-lockdown where you could only have about fifty people in the audience, but that was enough to convince me to learn the whole thing. I’ve performed it a lot since then, and it’s been great to tour with - it really speaks to the audience, and people always come up to chat about it afterwards. When I played it in the US, someone asked me if Tveitt was ‘like a Norwegian Charles Ives’, and I definitely got where he was coming from!

Do you hear similarities with any other twentieth-century composers?

Tveitt was obsessed with modality for most of his life. When he was only nineteen, he published a set of fifteen two-part inventions dealing with each mode in turn; they’re not his greatest pieces, but they are interesting because they’re so strict. In some of his later pieces that hyperfixation gives the music a certain French accent, which makes me think of Debussy and the modal chords of Messiaen in particular…Some of the cluster chords in the second movement of the ‘Sonata etere’ definitely sound very Messiaen-esque, but we can’t say he copied him - this was in the 1940s, so Messiaen hadn’t written much by then! And those French colours are also rooted in his handling of the instrument to create a very rich, sensuous canvas. 

At the same time there’s something very energetic and full of tension, plus a sense of epic storytelling that puts me in mind of Russian music – the rhythmically driven part in the last movement of the sonata feels more akin to Prokofiev or Bartók. So there’s a mixture of styles, but I also think that he’s a unique voice – there’s a certain anarchy at work in the way he shifts from one character to another in the blink of an eye. On the page it’s hard to see how it can all belong together, but somehow it adds up. 

So many people have come up to me after concerts and said that they heard sounds that they didn’t think belonged to the piano…There’s one passage where I’m silently holding down the keys in the bass with my left arm and then playing short notes in the right hand, which creates a resonance that sounds almost electronic. Tveitt writes in the score that for radio or studio recordings there should be crescendos and diminuendos added electronically in certain places, and that’s very obvious in his own recording from the 1950s because they didn’t have the digital technology to make it subtle. 

I liked the effect of that, but I don’t do it when I perform the ‘Sonata etere’ live: adding an amplifier to the stage for those relatively short passages draws too much attention to the machine and it feels a bit dated now. Furthermore, in a good acoustic there is actually no need for it! It sounds like after playing it, the chord expands on its own for a bit before it decays anyway – it’s a fascinating effect, and audiences find it very captivating. 

Was the sonata published or in manuscript?

It’s published: Tveitt was approached by Norsk Musikkforlag in the 1950s about submitting a piece and he offered this sonata. He was very proud of the piece and played it a lot - including at his only concert in Britain, which took place at Wigmore Hall in 1947. I played it there two years ago and it was fun to tell the audience that story!

Sadly, all the other sonatas went up in flames in that devastating fire of 1970 - we think that about 80% of his music was lost, which is an unimaginable tragedy for a composer. At least we have some of the pieces which he believed were his strongest and were published, but there were very few copies of the others. When we did that big push in the 1990s a few people emerged with odd pieces of sheet-music they’d unearthed at home, and the Norwegian Radio Archive found a few things including some orchestral parts without scores. There was a reconstruction of the Piano Concerto No. 3 on the back of that, and No. 4 was reconstructed solely from an archive recording - the sound quality wasn’t great, but it was better than nothing! For me, the ‘Sonata etere’ is his greatest achievement on a large scale, and I’m so grateful we have it.

The Folk Tunes from Hardanger showcase a very different side to Tveitt - was he out in the field collecting material à la Bartók?

Exactly. He had a kind of scholarship during World War Two where he travelled through the Hardanger area in Western Norway collecting folk tunes, and he did it with such thoroughness and respect. In the score of the folk tunes for piano, he writes the text under the melody, with footnotes saying things like ‘unfortunately the singer couldn’t remember the words here…’! He had such belief in the strength of this folk music, which is beautiful to see.

I really wanted to showcase his diversity with this recording, and the sonata and the folk song arrangements are like two different worlds. Some of the folk songs were based on things he’d just scribbled down: he transcribed the first one on the album in ten minutes! There’s just the vocal line and chords, so I’m improvising the piano part here; it’s often done with guitar, and it’s become a really popular song in Norway.

Have you had any contact with his family?

I’ve met his (now 80-year-old) daughter Gyri several times, and she’s heard me play the sonata in concert. She’s not a musician herself: she used to be a visual artist, but since her retirement she’s devoted her energies to taking care of her father’s legacy. I visited the farm for the first time a few months ago, and what struck me was the incredible view.

Things can be a bit claustrophobic in Western Norway when you’re surrounded by fjords and mountains, but the farm is quite high up and the horizon is extraordinary – you can see a bit of two different glaciers, and how the fjord just opens out…I think you feel that sense of space in his music, particularly the second movement of the sonata with those open resonances.

Tveitt was very into cosmology and stargazing, hence the nickname of that sonata is ‘Sonata etere’. Gyri thinks that’s all connected: she said that in one of the houses at the farm he had somebody paint the constellations on the ceiling, and as children they would all lie on the floor looking up while he explained it all to them! 

What was his wider social circle like?

He’s an interesting contradiction in that he was such a local man at the same time as being very internationally engaged: he was strongly bound to Hardanger but also studied in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, and travelled extensively. He was also into all kinds of world music and had an incredible record collection, full of interesting music from Africa, Asia and South America.

He had lots of friends at home and abroad before his final sad decade. For instance, the sonata is dedicated to Genevieve Joy, who was the wife of Henri Dutilleux and became a famous piano teacher in Paris; she’s billed as his ‘assistant’ on the poster for that Wigmore Hall concert in 1947, where they played a set of variations on a folk song for two pianos.

Once he retired as a pianist he didn’t travel so much. During his post-retirement years in Norway, he was very involved in the literary scene and knew all the authors and poets personally. He made a fantastic series of radio programmes with different poets – these were hour-long shows where he’d invite someone on to discuss their work in real detail, and he’d often write a few songs on their texts for the broadcast. He was very much a part of the wider artistic community in Hardanger and had many interests beyond classical music; he could frequently be found at poetry-readings and clubs where popular songs were performed.

The last ten years of his life after the fire were rather sad, as you can well imagine…he moved to Oslo and just gave up on trying to salvage any of his music, batting away any attempts at reconstruction. 

Your sister Solveig joins you for a selection of folk songs - is this the first time you’ve worked together?

When I discovered these songs at my festival back in the 1990s, they struck me as a fascinating mixture between classical Lieder, folk songs and more popular songs. Tveitt was playing with the genre a bit, and I remember thinking that if I ever did anything with them then a classically trained singer might not necessarily be the best option (although these days I’m sure Lise Davidsen would do a great job!).

When I was revisiting Tveitt's music during the lockdown I thought of Solveig, who’s an actress and singer working mainly in music theatre with a bit of jazz; our professional paths hadn’t really crossed before, but I invited her over to read through all these songs and see which might suit her. It worked so well that I decided to include some of our favourites on the album, and I love how much care she puts into delivering the texts. The music is quite simple and strophic most of the time so finding those different layers of meaning in the poetry is crucial.

Unfortunately we don’t have much in the way of official translations, but the Norwegian poems are really wonderful and I think Solveig gets the meaning across even to non-Norwegian speakers! It was lovely for us to finally work together on an album, and I hope it gives a nice picture of that side of Tveitt as a composer.