Gunnar de Frumerie

Per Gunnar Fredrik de Frumerie (Nacka, 1908 – Mörby, 1987) was a Swedish composer, pianist and professor whose output ranges from opera to chamber music. He is of interest for combining an international training, shaped by periods in Vienna and Paris, with a personal idiom that remained faithful to clarity and sobriety.

His musical education began with his mother, who taught him the piano, and from the age of twelve continued with L. Lundberg. Between 1923 and 1928 he studied at the Stockholm Conservatory and then, from 1928 to 1931, spent time in Vienna and Paris, where he worked on piano with von Saurer and Cortot, and on theory with E. Stein and Sabaneyev. In 1945 he was appointed piano professor at the Musikhögskolan in Stockholm, a post he rose to the rank of full professor in 1962.

The works of the 1930s reveal a drive towards formal severity, often modelled on Baroque schemes, the fruit of his contact with Parisian neoclassicism. The opera Singoalla soon brought him recognition as the author of a musical drama of great power. Later works of note include the ballet Johannesnatten, inspired by religious paintings of a naive character, and the choral pieces Fader vår and Åtta psalmer ur Psaltaren. In the field of song, few Swedish composers matched him.

The clarity, purity and austerity that characterise his songs and chamber music reappear in his orchestral works of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in his concertos for wind instruments. As a pianist he was an outstanding and highly personal performer, and he wrote extensively for his instrument; his finest piano pages are the two piano quartets, the Piano Trio No. 2 and the First Sonata, built on a theme composed during his stay in Paris.

His legacy lies above all in song, chamber music and wind concertos, where his expressive pulse and technical rigour place him among the most important Swedish creators of the second half of the twentieth century.