Tor Mann
Born, Stockholm, 25 February 1894
Died, Stockholm, 29 March 1974
Orchestral music had a marginal existence in 19th-century Sweden. Its only permanent orchestra, with roots centuries earlier, was Kungliga Hovkapellet, the “Royal Court Orchestra”, attached to the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Its 50 or 60 musicians gave occasional orchestral concerts, but the orchestra was busy most nights with opera, ballet, and incidental music for plays, so preparations were insufficient. This largely explains why Swedish composers, foremost among them Franz Berwald, wrote few symphonic works and why these few did not become more established. The small number of native conductors had to learn their craft by working in opera.
Only in the early 1900s did attempts to establish symphonic orchestras succeed, first in Gothenburg (1905) and then in Stockholm (permanent only from 1914). Their conductors were either foreign or recruited among instrumentalists and composers. The two leading Swedish symphonic conductors were Tor Aulin and Wilhelm Stenhammar, both composers, one a celebrated violinist, the other an even more successful pianist. Hugo Alfvén, another composer who was a capable conductor, did not aspire to a conducting career although he became director musices of Uppsala University in 1910 which included leading its orchestra. The most influential Swedish-speaking symphonic conductors apart from Aulin and Stenhammar were Alfvén and Georg Schnéevoigt, the latter a Finn who had studied conducting and held important positions abroad. He would continue to have a prominent role in Swedish music life into the 1940s.