MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Sinding: Songs

. Otto Sinding became a painter and writer, while Stephan was a sculptor of some standing. Their father died when Christian was only four, and his mother decided it would be best to move to Kristiania (as the capital of Norway was known at the time), where she had family. It was there that Christian had his first music lessons, and we know that when he was accepted at the Conservatory in Leipzig, he indicated that he had been taught the violin by Gudbrand Bøhn, piano by Betzy Fischer and organ and harmony by Ludvig Mathias Lindemann. These were some of the most distinguished musicians in Kristiania at the time, so it is clear that, already at a young age, Sinding had set his sights on a career in music.

Christian Sinding's profound interest in music led him not to complete his school education, and after having worked for a while in the Brothers Hals's piano factory he studied between the years 1874-77 and 1878-79 at the conservatory in Leipzig, where, amongst others, he had Carl Reinecke as tutor in composition. Between 1882 and 1885 he continued his studies in Munich, where he completed what must be regarded as his break-through work, the Piano Quintet in E minor, Op. 5. In Munich he wrote also some of his earliest songs; it seems that the songs Opp. 1, 4, II and 15 all hail from this period. He also made his first foray into the world of opera then.

Between 1886 and 1889 he enjoyed a further period of study in Leipzig, when he established important contacts with, amongst others, Adolf Brodsky and Ferrnccio Busoni. The Brodsky Quartet and Busoni performed the Piano Quintet, Op. 5 during a concert in the Leipzig Gewandhaus in January 1889, which caused strong reactions in the press, both for and against Sinding. Especially brutal was Eduard Bernsdorff in Signale für die musikalische Welt with a negative review of the Quintet, whilst Adolf Ruthardt defended it strongly in Musikalisches Wochenblatt. The publicity that these opposing views brought proved invaluable in the furtherance of Sinding's career. After this the Quintet was played everywhere, clearing the way for several other works by Sinding, such as the Piano Concerto in D flat major, Op. 6, the Violin Sonata in C major, Op. 12 and the Symphony in D minor, Op. 21, which were all completed in 1892.

Throughout his life, Sinding tried to support himself solely through his work as a composer, without any extra income from teaching, playing the organ or music journalism, which many other Norwegian composers were forced to do. This resulted amongst other things in a series of compositions of very varying quality, compositions which he otherwise might not have written. It was especially the piano works which suffered during this intense period of composition. Many of them were written to order, partly under pressure from eager publishers. Sinding himself referred to this as a 'Piano work conveyor belt', yet it nevertheless secured him a decent income, together with various grants and, from 1910, a composer's salary, and later (1921), an honorary stipend from the Norwegian Government. In 1924 Norway offered him the house 'Grotten' as free quarters, which, incidentally, became his first permanent home. Until then he had, together with his wife, spent most of his life in hotels and guest-houses, an existence which he chose to best forward his artistic career.

It became clear early on that Sinding enjoyed a special relationship with text as a means of artistic expression, something which resulted in more than 250 songs, composed throughout his career. Alte Weisen, Op. 1 ('Old Songs'), six songs to texts from Gottfried Keller's (1819-90) collection with the same title, belong to the earliest of Sinding's extant songs. Also from this time are Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 11 with texts by Gottfried Keller, Robert Hamerling (1830-89) and Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), as well as Lieder from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, Op. 15, Sinding's very first attempts in the genre, compositions which he later destroyed, used texts which to a large extent stressed the exotic and the dramatic, such as Sulamiths sang ('Sulamith's Song') from the Song of Solomon and two songs with texts from Antar and Abla, and yet the earliest surviving songs use German folk-songs or German romantic verse. One of the songs from Op. 15, Maria Gnadenmutter ('Mary Mother of Mercy'), has, incidentally, been used in a heavily revised form in the Norwegian Church Hymn Book as the melody to O.T. Moe's Jesus, del eneste ('Jesus, the only one') and is one of the most expressive hymn-tunes in Norway today.