Eight of the Saddest Piano Concerto Slow Movements

by Emily E. Hogstad 

If you’re a classical music fan drawn to sad, slow movements in piano concertos, this is the list you’ve been looking for.

Whether it’s Chopin’s gentle melancholy, Ravel’s elegant wistfulness, or Rachmaninoff’s romantic despair, each of these slow movements paints a picture of a particular kind of sadness.

© chopinacademy.com

Although every ranking having to do with classical music is subjective, we numbered our picks anyway, from least sad to saddest. Find out which concerto we’ve dubbed the saddest at the end.

8. Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, Mov. 2  

Chopin wrote this concerto in 1830 when he was just twenty years old.

The inspiration behind this piece is unclear…but we know there was one.

Frédéric Chopin in 1849

In a letter, Chopin wrote a cryptic observation to his best friend (and potential crush or even lover) Tytus Woyciechowski:

“Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.”

It’s a mysterious confession. Some believe he’s referring to his other crush, singer Konstancja Gładkowska. Others wonder if he’s referring to Woyciechowski, with whom he exchanged a number of romantic letters as a young man.

Chopin wrote to Woyciechowski about the slow movement in particular:

“It is not meant to create a powerful effect; it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.”

The specific sadness of this music is a gentle, possibly flirtatious melancholy.

7. Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 3   

Brahms’s second piano concerto covers similar emotional territory to the Chopin Romance. Save for a brief stormy interlude in the centre of the movement, this is not overtly tragic music: it’s more brooding, repressed melancholy.

Johannes Brahms, ca 1875

The movement begins with a soulful cello solo (an idea that Brahms may have lifted from his dear friend Clara Wieck Schumann, who had included similar instrumentation in the piano concerto she’d written as a teenager decades earlier).

The final portion of the movement, where the cello returns again and moves with the piano through a number of keys together, is the absolute epitome of bittersweet regret.

6. Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3, Mov. 2   

Béla Bartók composed his third piano concerto in 1945 when he was 64 years old. He was terminally ill with leukaemia at the time.

That October, his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, was set to celebrate her 42nd birthday. He began working on a third piano concerto for her as a birthday present. He was hopeful that after his death, whenever it occurred, she could tour with it and make money.

Béla Bartók in the 1920s

Tragically, he died in late September, a month before her birthday. Fortunately, the piano concerto, save for the final seventeen measures, was completed.

The slow movement of this concerto feels like a hushed, tender, intimate goodbye. Regret and wistfulness are mixed in with profound gratitude.

5. Ravel: Piano Concerto, Mov. 2   

Ravel wrote of his piano concerto:

“My only wish…was to write a genuine concerto, that is, a brilliant work, clearly highlighting the soloist’s virtuosity, without seeking to show profundity. As a model, I took two musicians who, in my opinion, best illustrated this type of composition: Mozart and Saint-Saëns…”

Maurice Ravel

In particular, he looked to Mozart’s clarinet quintet for inspiration. That melody is an unusual twenty measures long. In his concerto, Ravel’s melody is an astonishing thirty-four.

“That flowing phrase!” he wrote later. “How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

This long melody calls to mind a long, wistful train of thought from the middle of the night, when nothing in the darkness interrupts the thought.

This music is sad in a restrained way. A listener can feel a great depth of sorrow hiding just beneath the surface.

4. Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Shostakovich wrote his second piano concerto for his pianist son Maxim’s nineteenth birthday in 1957. Maxim premiered it at his graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory that May.

Over the past few years, father and son had suffered a great deal together. In 1954, Maxim’s physicist mother, Nina, had died suddenly. Maxim was just sixteen. Shostakovich was forced to become a single father overnight: a role he was completely unprepared to play.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The slow movement of this concerto evokes emotions that a father and son might feel upon seeing a son graduate after the death of a beloved wife and mother: pride, yearning, and a sadness that is simultaneously quiet and deeply intimate.

3. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Mov. 2   

Mozart wrote his 23rd piano concerto in early 1786, two months before the premiere of one of his best-loved operas, The Marriage of Figaro.

A listener can immediately hear the influence of opera here. It’s especially dramatic because the piano is alone when it enters with its atmospheric, aria-like, minor-key melody.

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Starting the movement with a solo part creates a kind of sudden, intense intimacy between the soloist, composer, and audience.

2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Mov. 2   

The orchestral introduction to this slow movement is loud and brutally unforgiving. The piano answers with a sense of quiet despair.

That conflict and dialogue create the narrative that drives the entire movement.

Beethoven in 1803

Three movements into their unnerving conversation, the piano takes over for a solo turn. We discover that the piano still has fight in it, with a series of loud ringing trills, before sinking back down into a whisper again.

When the orchestra returns, it is also quiet, witnessing the piano’s unraveling.

1. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Here it is: the saddest slow movement of a piano concerto: the Adagio sostenuto from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto.

This movement begins with slow, hushed chords in the strings, followed by a mournful chain of arpeggios in the piano.

The winds contribute hushed fragments of a heartbreaking theme to the steady accompaniment of the piano.

When the soloist and the orchestra players begin interacting with one another, it feels like a confessional conversation. The music conveys all kinds of sadness: grief, regret, yearning, and more, appearing in all different types of musical colours and textures.

Kubey-Rembrandt Studios: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1921

Rachmaninoff wrote his second piano concerto while coming out of a severe period of depression. For a while, he was seeing a therapist daily. It seems that writing this concerto helped him to process what he needed to.

His composing career continued for decades afterwards, and this work became one of the most beloved piano concertos ever written. It’s sad music…but it had a happy ending.

Ten Greatest Women Violinists of All Time

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

For generations after the invention of the instruments, the violin was widely considered to be a masculine instrument.

Despite this, from the eighteenth century on, women have flocked to this instrument and succeeded at the highest levels.

Today, we’re looking at the life and work of ten women from the history of violin playing, all of whom have made huge impacts on the art.

Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (1745–1818)

Portrait of Maddalena Laura Sirman (artist unknown)

Maddalena Laura Lombardini was born in 1745 in Venice.

As a girl, she studied at the music school at the San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti. While there, she showed special musical promise and went to Padua, Italy, to study with Giuseppe Tartini (composer of the famous Devil’s Trill sonata).

She graduated in 1767 and married violinist Ludovico Sirmen that same year. The two performed together and co-wrote music, including a double violin concerto that sadly has not survived.

In the late 1760s, when she was in her early twenties, she published her six violin concertos. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, praised the first, calling it “beautifully written.” 

She became one of the first composers to write string quartets, publishing a collection in 1769, shortly after Haydn’s early efforts in the genre.

In the 1770s, she began appearing as a singer, but her singing was not as successful as her violin playing had been.

As tastes changed, her violin-playing eventually came to be seen as too “old-fashioned.” She died in 1818, having lost much of her net worth after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy.

Teresa Milanollo (1827–1904)   

Teresa Milanollo was born in 1827 in Savigliano, Italy, to a violin maker and his wife. When she was four, she heard a violinist play at church and demanded to be taught.

Initially, she took lessons locally, then moved to Turin for further studies when she was eight. By nine, she was studying in Paris in between extensive concert tours.

In 1838, she began teaching her younger six-year-old sister Maria how to play the violin. The two would become frequent performance partners.

Teresa Milanollo

Before the Milanollo sisters began touring Europe, the violin was widely seen as an instrument unsuitable for women. The charming sisters changed that.

Audiences weren’t the only people impressed; so were critics and composers. Berlioz wrote a glowing review of Teresa in 1841. A few weeks later, she performed for Chopin. The following year, they played with Liszt before royalty.

The Milanollos continued their triumphant tours until the summer of 1848, when sixteen-year-old Maria became sick with tuberculosis. She died that October.

After the death of her sister, a devastated Teresa began playing only for the benefit of charity. She would hold one concert for a paying audience, then hold an identical one for impoverished schoolchildren and their families, and distribute the money she’d just earned.

On 16 April 1857, she gave her farewell performance. Hours later, she married a military engineer named Theodore Parmentier. She followed societal custom and retired from the stage after her wedding, although she continued to play privately and occasionally performed for charity or at home.

She died in 1904.

Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda (1839–1911)

Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda

Wilhelmina Neruda was born in Brno, Moravia, to the organist at Brno Cathedral and his wife, who had several children who went on to become child prodigies. Wilhelmina would become the most famous of all of them.

Her father initially wanted her to play piano, but when she was a child, he caught her playing her brother’s violin. She was so naturally talented that he permitted her to continue.

The family moved to Vienna, and she began studying with Leopold Jansa. Wilhelmina gave her first public performance at seven. She and her talented siblings later began touring Europe to acclaim.

In 1864, when she was thirty-three, she married composer Ludvig Norman. She had two sons with him before the marriage deteriorated, and they separated.

Norman died in 1885, and three years later, Wilhelmina married renowned conductor and pianist Charles Hallé. When he was knighted, she became known as Lady Hallé.

Wilhelmina became famous across Europe, but especially in her adopted homeland of Great Britain. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously had Sherlock Holmes attend one of her concerts in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet.

She especially enjoyed performing chamber music and gave many incredible performances. These were striking at the time because she was one of the first women players to publicly perform chamber music with men in integrated ensembles. This would eventually help pave the way for women to play in orchestras with men.

She was widowed for a second time in 1895, and in 1898, her son was killed in a mountaineering accident. She retired from the concert stage the following year and moved to Berlin to focus on teaching.

She died in 1911.

Camilla Urso (1840–1902)

Camilla Urso

Camilla Urso was born in Nantes, France, in 1840, to an Italian flute player and his French singer wife.

Like Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda, she first heard the violin in church when she was a little girl and begged her father for lessons. She began playing the violin when she was six years old, and began playing for hours a day.

She enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire in 1849, the month she turned nine. (Rossini was on her audition panel.) She became the first woman violinist allowed to study there and graduated in 1852.

Later that year, she and her family sailed to New York, where she began touring America. During this decade, while Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda was inspiring European girls to take up the violin, Camilla Urso was doing the same in America.

In the mid-1860s, she returned to Europe to tour. Over the following decades, she would appear on four continents: North America, Europe, Australia, and Africa.

After fifty years of concertizing, she retired from the stage and began focusing on teaching. She died in 1902.

Maud Powell (1867–1920)

Maud Powell

Maud Powell was born in 1867 in Peru, Illinois, a small town a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. She began taking violin and piano lessons when she was seven years old. Her talent quickly became obvious.

When she was thirteen, her parents sold their house to fund studies in Europe. While there, she studied with Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin.

She made her Berlin Philharmonic debut in 1885, at the age of eighteen. It was the beginning of a major career.

Powell became the first great American violinist, male or female.   Her legacy lives on in three important ways.

First, she used her fame to spotlight contemporary composers. She gave the American premieres of the Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák violin concertos, all of which have since entered the permanent repertoire. She was also a strong advocate for the work of American women and Black composers.

Second, she was also on the cutting edge of recording technology, making dozens of recordings between 1904 and 1919, the year before her death.

Third, during her American tours, she made a point to stop in dozens of tiny towns in between her big city appearances, sparking interest and curiosity about classical music across America.

Her intense workload was presumably one of the triggers of a fatal 1920 heart attack, which happened immediately after playing her transcription of the Black spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” She collapsed onstage and died.

Marie Hall (1884–1956)

Marie Hall

Marie Hall was born in 1884 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Her father, a harpist with a touring opera company, was her first teacher.

The family had very little money, and despite her extraordinary natural talent, her training was intermittent. She studied violin with composer Edward Elgar in 1894, August Wilhelmj in 1896, and Johann Kruse in 1900.

In 1901, at the age of seventeen, she finally found funding to pay for studies with Otakar Ševčík in Prague, one of the best-known teachers of the era.

She made her London debut in 1901 with a staggeringly difficult program: Paganini’s first concerto, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, and Wieniawski’s Fantasy on Themes from Faust.

She would go on to perform in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.   

She also made a number of wonderful recordings, including, in 1916, the first recording of excerpts from the Elgar violin concerto, with the composer conducting from the podium. She performed in a cone with the orchestra behind her.

Ralph Vaughan Williams dedicated his famous showpiece, The Lark Ascending, to her. She played the premiere of the violin and piano version in 1920 and the violin and orchestra version in 1921.

In 1911, she married her manager and had one child, a daughter. She died in 1956.

Ginette Neveu (1919–1949)

Ginette Neveu

Ginette Neveu was born in Paris in 1919. She was the grand-niece of composer Charles-Marie Widor.

She was an astonishingly talented little girl who made her debut in Paris at the age of seven, playing the Bruch concerto.

She went to study at the Paris Conservatoire and studied with Nadia Boulanger, George Enescu, and Carl Flesch. She was so talented that Flesch gave her lessons free of charge.

In 1935, when she was fifteen, she won the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. (Legendary violinist David Oistrakh, twenty-seven, placed second.) The win catapulted her to the forefront of the classical music world.   

After World War II ended, she began making her major international debut. She and her accompanist brother embarked on a series of performances across Europe, North America, and South America.

Tragically, both Neveus died in a plane crash in 1949, flying between Paris and New York.

Her early death robbed the classical music world of one of its brightest stars. She had fewer opportunities to record than other violinists who lived longer, but the recordings she left behind are deeply beloved.

Kyung-Wha Chung (1948–)

Kyung-Wha Chung

Kyung Wha Chung was born in Seoul in 1948. She began playing piano at four and violin at seven. At nine, she made her debut in the Mendelssohn violin concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic.

Her six siblings all played musical instruments, and when she was thirteen, the family moved to the United States to further their educations. She began studying at Juilliard under Ivan Galamian. 

In 1967, when she was nineteen, she, along with Pinchas Zukerman, won the prestigious Leventritt Competition, which helped launch both of their respective careers.

Three years later, she stepped in as a replacement for Itzhak Perlman in London. The performance was so sensational that she was immediately hired to make a recording of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius violin concertos with the orchestra.

In 2008, she withdrew from the concert platform due to injury and poor health, but returned to the stage in 2014.

In 2016, she made her first recording in fifteen years: a recording of the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Bach, widely considered to be the Mount Everest of the repertoire.

Anne-Sophie Mutter (1963–)

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter was born in the town of Rheinfelden, Germany, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, in 1963. Her family was not musical, but loved classical music.

She began studying the piano when she was five, but soon switched over to the violin after hearing a recording of the Mendelssohn and Beethoven concertos. She gave her first public concert in 1972, when she was nine.  

When she was thirteen, Herbert von Karajan, legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, heard her playing and became her mentor. She made her first recording of two Mozart concertos when she was just fifteen.

She made her American debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1980, kicking off a decade of touring and recording.

Starting in the 1990s, she became increasingly interested in contemporary music. Over the ensuing decades, a number of composers have written concertos and other works for her.

She has earned a reputation as someone interested in ambitious projects. For instance, in 1998, she spent an entire year playing and touring the Beethoven violin sonatas. Later, to observe the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 2006, she toured performing all of the concertos.

In addition to her musical activities, she has also played benefit concerts to support charitable causes, from famine relief to Holocaust awareness, among many others. In 2021, she was elected President of German Cancer Aid.

Hilary Hahn (1979–)

Hilary Hahn

Hilary Hahn was born in 1979 in Virginia and grew up in Baltimore. She began playing the violin in a Suzuki program there when she was three years old.

When she was ten, she began studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Jascha Brodsky. At the time, Brodsky was eighty-three years old and a former student of Eugene Ysaye, who had himself been born in 1858. This training gave her unique direct insight into musical ideas from the early twentieth century.

She made her American orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1991 and her European debut in Hungary in 1994. Her debut recording was made when she was just sixteen: one of the finest recordings ever of three solo works by Bach.  She graduated from Curtis with her bachelor’s degree in 1999 at the age of twenty, but by that time her international career was already in full swing.

Over the past two and a half decades, she has demonstrated a flawless technique and an intellectually probing musical curiosity. She has proven to be one of the greatest violinists alive, male or female.

Why Did the Great Composers Rewrite Beethoven?

 by Emily E. Hogstad 

Romantic Era composers had a unique relationship with Ludwig van Beethoven. The man and his music cast a massive shadow over the nineteenth century, especially when it came to orchestral music.

Joseph Willibrord Mähler: Ludwig van Beethoven, ca 1804–1805 (Vienna Museum)

The Beethoven works that loomed the largest were his nine symphonies, especially the Third (composed between 1802 and 1804) and the Ninth (composed between 1822 and 1824).

These works were so revolutionary that many composers found it difficult to write orchestral works after them.

Brahms, for instance, knew that any symphony he’d write would inevitably be compared to Beethoven’s. He struggled for over twenty years to write his first symphony. And even after all that effort, he still couldn’t escape Beethoven’s shadow: Brahms’s First quickly earned the nickname “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

Interestingly, one of the surprising ways that composers engaged with Beethoven’s towering legacy was by completely – and creatively – reimagining his works.

Today, we’re looking at three major composers who rewrote the Beethoven symphonies.

Franz Liszt Rewrites the Symphonies for Piano

Carbon print circa 1869 by photographer Franz Hanfstaengl

Franz Liszt was born in 1811 and apparently met Beethoven as a young prodigy shortly before Beethoven died in 1827.

At the beginning of his career as a daredevil virtuoso pianist, Liszt would transcribe the fifth, sixth, and seventh symphonies for piano. Decades later, he would finally complete the set.

These transcriptions have a frenetic brilliance to them that makes for gripping listening.

In the 1960s, Glenn Gould became the first pianist to record the transcripts of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. Gould described them before a radio broadcast:  

According to a rather touching paragraph in Grove’s Dictionary, these keyboard extravaganzas were intended for his own use in towns which could boast no municipal orchestra, and before audiences which were otherwise without access to the symphonic milestones of Beethoven.

We have no such access problem these days, but Liszt’s transcription is much more than a tremolo-laden silent movie style period piece.

It’s not just remarkable as an archival curio, nor even as a typically Lisztian object lesson in the deployment of pianistic sonority, for even while it maintains an almost puritanical fidelity to the original text, it captures, I think, Liszt’s view of Beethoven, and, by implication, the attitude of the Romantic Age toward the classicist who unleashed romanticism.   

In his pre-performance remarks, Gould verbalised a couple of reasons for Liszt to take on the project: to increase the symphonies’ accessibility in cities without orchestras, and to capture nineteenth-century ideas about the works for future generations.

Wagner Takes on Beethoven

Richard Wagner

Composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) was just a boy when Beethoven died.

He had recently fallen in love with music and was devastated by the loss. He later wrote about meeting Beethoven in his dreams, then awakening in tears.

In 1831, when he was still in his teens, Wagner made a transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for solo piano and voices. (Liszt had circumvented the difficulty of transcribing the choral part in the ninth by adding a second piano to his transcription.)   

Wagner wrote of his attraction to the symphony:

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the mystical goal of all my strange thoughts and desires about music… It was considered the ‘non plus ultra’ of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible, and this was quite enough to rouse in me a passionate desire to study this mysterious work.

However, unlike Liszt, Wagner didn’t stop at a piano transcription.

In 1846, when he was working as a music director in Dresden, he mounted a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. He prepared the local population for the performance by writing articles in the local newspaper.

He also altered the score. He believed that Beethoven wrote particular passages in certain ways because of his deafness or the limitations of earlier, more primitive instruments.

For instance, in bars 53-68 of the Scherzo, Wagner doubled a woodwind passage with brass.

Wagner also addressed the tempos of the symphony, encouraging musicians to discard the metronome markings that Beethoven had left behind, and taking the final two movements at almost half the speed of what Beethoven had indicated in the score.

(For a long time, conventional wisdom suggested that Beethoven’s deafness had made him incapable of judging the effects of the metronome markings, which many interpreters believed were too fast.)

Here’s a performance close to Beethoven’s stated metronome mark, as played by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan:   

And here’s a Wagnerian tempo, as typified by the Vienna Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler:  

The difference is stark.

Interestingly, Wagner also moved the chorus from in front of the orchestra to behind it: an arrangement that has been adopted in modern performances today.

Gustav Mahler Takes on Beethoven

Gustav Mahler, 1902

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) agreed with many of Wagner’s interpretive ideas. He was also in a position to put them into action after he became the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic in 1898.

Mahler decided he wanted to modernise Beethoven’s symphonies to sound better in larger modern concert halls. Accordingly, he set about tinkering with the scores of all of them, save the Fourth.

Conductor Michael Francis, who has conducted a 2024 recording of these versions, says:

Mahler was concerned that in the turn of the 20th century that Beethoven’s classical language had lost some of the power. You think about some of the pieces that Strauss is writing; think of the pieces that Mahler was writing. So these are huge, big pieces, and he wanted Beethoven’s strength to be heard.

In order to create a bigger sound, Mahler doubled the winds and horns and even added a timpani player and tuba player. 

In February 1900, Mahler debuted his new version of Beethoven’s Ninth.

Audiences were scandalised. Purists claimed they were upset because they valued Beethoven’s original score so highly, but the entire hullabaloo was also a convenient outlet for raging Viennese anti-Semitism.

The outcry became so loud that Mahler was forced to write an explanatory note in the press about his choices!

Judge for yourself; here’s the version of the Ninth Symphony that was so controversial.  

In 2024, we published an article looking at his changes to Beethoven’s Third Symphony.

In 2020, we did an interview with conductor Johannes Vogel about what it’s actually like to perform these Mahler adaptations.

And here’s critic Dave Hurwitz sharing his opinions about the Mahler reorchestrations:  

Conclusion

Every composer has to reckon with the shadow of Beethoven.

These three composers – Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler – did so in an especially intriguing way: by rearranging and rewriting his music, all for their own unique reasons.

Liszt wanted to be able to share Beethoven’s works with a wider audience. Wagner wanted to better understand his composer idol and translate Beethoven’s intentions for a new generation. Mahler continued that same mission where Wagner left off.

Whether you appreciate their work or not, it’s undeniable that each of these men made major contributions to Beethoven’s legacy. In the process, they proved the symphonies’ relevance and timelessness.

Elfrida Andrée: The Rebellious First Female Conductor in Sweden

by Emily E. Hogstad

Elfrida Andrée is one of the most remarkable women composers of the nineteenth century.

She campaigned to become the first professional woman organist in Sweden, paving the way for countless women after her.

Elfrida Andrée, 1891

But she didn’t stop there: she also became the country’s first woman conductor, as well as an accomplished composer who loved writing orchestral music.

Today, we’re looking at the life and times of Elfrida Andrée.

Elfrida Andrée’s Family

Elfrida Andrée was born on 19 February 1841. Her hometown was the Swedish city of Visby, on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Latvia.

Her father, Andreas Andrée, trained as a medical man and became a ship’s doctor, traveling to ports in Europe, Africa, and Asia. After he returned to Sweden and settled down, he began pursuing an interest in politics.

He became interested in various ideas that were gaining popularity at the time, such as the labour movement and the women’s movement.

The Musical Andrée Daughters

Elfrida Andrée

In 1836, he and his wife had a daughter named Fredrika. A second daughter, Elfrida, was born five years later.

He and his wife, Lovisa, determined they wanted to raise their daughters with liberal values and educate them. Andreas taught both of them how to play the piano and sing, as well as basic lessons in harmony.

Fredrika proved to be a talented vocalist. In 1851, when she was fifteen, she left the household and traveled to study at the prestigious Leipzig Conservatory.

As for Elfrida, she began to study with two local organists, despite that instrument’s masculine reputation. She also took up the harp, although we don’t know who she studied with.

She performed at the local Musical Society (headed by one of her teachers) and at salon performances given at the Andrée household.

Moving to Stockholm

After Fredrika returned from her studies in 1855, she was hired to sing at the opera in Stockholm. Elfrida joined her, while their parents remained in Visby. Fredrika was nineteen, and Elfrida was fourteen.

While in Stockholm, Elfrida took composition lessons with Niels Wilhelm Gade and Ludvig Norman (who would go on to marry Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda, one of the first great women violinists).

In October 1856, a family friend, organist and composer Gustaf Mankell, submitted a request to the Royal Musical Academy in Stockholm, asking to consider Elfrida for admittance. His request was denied, possibly because of her age.

She studied privately with Mankell until she was finally allowed to take the entrance examination in June 1857.   

Women Organists in Sweden

However, there was a controversy underlying her acceptance: the Swedish government did not allow women to be organists.

Elfrida could earn a degree, but it would be relatively useless without an accompanying job. To maintain an identity as an organ virtuoso necessitated regular access to an organ and a job to go alongside that access.

Unfortunately for Elfrida’s dreams, many countries banned women from playing the organ in church, citing St. Paul’s admonition that women remain quiet during worship.

So after her acceptance to the Conservatory, a sixteen-year-old Elfrida wrote to King Oscar I of Sweden and Norway, matter-of-factly laying the matter out and requesting that the policy be changed:

The fact that it has long been customary abroad, as in England and France, for women to hold the position of organist gives me the courage and hope to make this most humble request to His Royal Majesty.

She didn’t hear back for quite a while.  

Battling with the Government

Elfrida kept studying, and she graduated from the conservatory. But in the spring of 1859, bad news came: a government official had denied her proposal.

One magazine reported:

The government submitted the request to the archbishop, who refused to grant it, mainly because it would constitute a rejection of the order currently in force in the empire, which expressly stipulates that offices and positions should be filled by men who have reached the age of majority. As a result, the government has now also rejected the petitioner.

She continued studying while pondering her next moves. She also began giving piano and organ lessons to help support herself.

In 1859, her parents and younger brother moved to Stockholm. Reunited with Andreas, father and daughter teamed up to try submitting another petition. This one worked.

In March 1861, the Swedish parliament changed the law, opening the profession to unmarried women over the age of twenty-five. (It’s unclear why they granted an age exception to Elfrida, who had just turned 20.)

By May, Elfrida was a professional organist at the Finnish Church in Stockholm: the first in Swedish history.

Telegraph Operator

Elfrida Andrée

Amusingly, at the same time, Elfrida and her father also submitted another envelope-pushing application: for her to become a worker in a telegraph office.

At the time, telegraphy was cutting-edge technology, and women were not allowed to work in the field.

In 1863, her request was approved, but it’s not clear as to what purpose (publicity? activism? or did Elfrida actually seriously consider becoming a telegraphist?). There is no record of her ever working in the field.

Nevertheless, it was an important barrier to break.

Fittingly, around this time she adapted a personal motto: “det kvinnliga släkets höjande”, or “the elevation of womankind.”   

The Gothenburg Cathedral

In 1867, a vacancy for organist opened up at the Gothenburg Cathedral. Her father stepped in, writing to the provost that appointing a woman to the position would signal the city’s open mind and liberal spirit.

Elfrida went to audition on 14 April 1867, the weekend before Easter. Seven men auditioned for the position, too, but the committee unanimously elected her to the post. She became the first professional woman organist in Sweden, and one of the first in Europe.

Her remarkable tenure at the cathedral would last for over sixty years. Her duties in Gothenburg included programming and performing organ music at services, as well as maintaining the organ. In 1907, she also became the choir director.

Concertizing in Germany

Elfrida Andrée

Her fame spread. The Gothenburg Trade Newspaper reported on a November 1867 performance:

Miss Andrée’s performance of her solo part on the organ…justifies the decision that has made her organist at Sweden’s largest church.

However, attitudes were not quite so enlightened outside of Gothenburg.

In 1872, she was set to perform at Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, where Bach had been music director a few generations ago. But the performance ultimately had to be canceled.

She wrote to her father what the appalled pastor told her:

The board had the same feeling that it was not at all appropriate for a woman to play in a church! She would then be alone on the organ with the whole choir! That is not appropriate at all. We have never heard of a female organist in Germany, and that is not possible here in Germany; it is against German custom.   

Elfrida Andrée’s Compositions

She faced similar resistance when it came to presenting her compositions.

She was deeply attracted by the idea of composing not just chamber music, but large-scale symphonic works. As early as the 1870s, she wrote, “The orchestra, that is my goal!”

She wrote to her sister Fredrika, “If you could conceive of the ideal light in which the orchestra appears to my sight! It is an interpreter of the wondrous surgings of the soul.”

When legendary singer Jenny Lind expressed doubt to her that a woman could write well for orchestra, Elfrida went to the piano and played extracts of her second symphony for her.

Over the course of her career, she wrote an opera, two overtures, a symphonic poem, two organ symphonies, two masses, and two symphonies.

A Disastrous Premiere

In 1869, when she was twenty-eight, her first symphony was premiered by the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra.

A nightmare scenario played out. Elfrida wrote later:

The performance was terrible, and I think the musicians deliberately played wrong notes. Fredrika and I left when the Finale started, and the first violins were continually behind the rest of the orchestra one entire measure.

After the debacle, even her own supportive father expressed reservations about her obsession with writing for orchestra. She wrote to him, quite firmly:

The popularity of all these little ladies with their piano fantasies or pretty songs is not what I want to do.

She composed a second symphony in 1879, but had to wait years to have an opportunity to hear it performed.

The bad performance of her first symphony and the lag between composition and premiere of her second help to explain why even the most talented women composers in nineteenth-century Europe found it difficult to write symphonies and get them performed.

Triumph in Germany

Elfrida Andrée at 22

In 1887, she made another tour of Germany. This time, she was allowed to perform at the Marienkirche in Berlin, but she had to pay a hundred marks for the privilege (she did).

She conducted during this appearance, marking the first time that Dresden had ever seen a woman conducting her own works.

The press praised her: it was a “brilliant success for Miss Andrée, who was celebrated with stormy applause and a fanfare from the orchestra.”

Later Works   

Her second symphony – fourteen years old at this point – was finally premiered in 1893. Happily, this performance went off much better, and the audience demanded the finale be encored.

In 1899, she wrote an opera called the Fritiofs Saga with librettist Selma Lagerlöf, who would go on to become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Fritiofs Saga was inspired by Norse mythology. Tragically, despite Andrée’s high-ranking position in Swedish music, she was never able to see it fully staged. Ever persistent, she adapted the music into an orchestral suite.

Working as a Conductor

She continued exploring an interest in orchestral music: specifically, conducting it, as well as writing it. Although it was relatively common at the time for a woman to solo with professional orchestras, it was still rare for them to conduct an orchestra.

In 1897, when Elfrida was fifty-six, she became the head of the Gothenburg Workers’ Institute Concerts. Her responsibilities included conducting, which made her the first Swedish woman to conduct an orchestra in public.

But she also assisted by helping to organise the concerts, alongside her sister. The ticket prices were kept low, and audiences from all classes were encouraged to attend.

She presented around eight hundred of these concerts, making her an invaluable part of the cultural life of Sweden.   

Later Years and Legacy

In 1904, she returned to Germany for a final time, stopping in Dresden. She set up a performance for organ and orchestra. Again, she had to pay, but the concert was a “brilliant success”, according to the press. It had taken a few decades, but she had finally made her point.

In 1911, Elfrida gave the keynote speech at the International Suffragette Conference in Stockholm.

In her remarks, she declared that it was her aim to “give freedom to the bound…and courage to the frightened.”

She died in Gothenburg in January 1929, shortly before her eighty-eighth birthday.

One account claims that one night, toward the end of her career, she performed on the Gothenberg organ late into the night. After a virtuosic flourish, speaking of St. Paul and his admonition against women making noise in church, she remarked, “Paul, old lad – try that for size!”