Friday 2nd of October 2026 5 pm
A Swede in Beethoven’s Shadow
Program
Hermann Berens the Elder (1826–1880)
Chromatic Fugue, Op. 84
Two Organ Pieces
I. Andante con moto
II. Allegro moderato
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
Adagio in F major, WoO 33/1
Hermann Berens the Elder (1826–1880)
Fantasy in C minor, Op. 25
Programme Notes
A Swede in Beethoven’s Shadow portrays Hermann Berens the Elder (1826–1880), the Hamburg-born pianist and composer who came to Sweden at the age of 21 and soon became a driving force in the country’s musical life. After serving as music director of the Life Regiment Hussars in Örebro, he worked in Stockholm as music director at Mindre teatern and the Royal Opera, and as professor of composition and instrumentation at the Conservatory of Music. Despite his central position as a musician and teacher, his artistic home remained the German Romantic tradition: Beethoven was a lifelong ideal, both in the chamber music Berens performed and in the music he composed.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of Hermann Berens’s birth. He became one of the more important figures in Swedish musical life in the mid-nineteenth century, yet has been more or less forgotten, at least until recently. In this article I would like to give a brief account of his life and a closer look at his church music. The designation “the Elder” is sometimes added to his name because his son bore the same name and was also a composer.
Throughout its history, Sweden’s musical life has benefited immeasurably from immigration, not least from the German-speaking world. During the seventeenth century, a number of organ builders came to Sweden to furnish its churches with instruments of high quality. Musicians from across Europe arrived to help develop the country’s musical life, particularly through their work in the Royal Court Orchestra. In the late eighteenth century we encounter Georg Joseph Vogler, an enormously influential figure in many fields, who lived in Stockholm for several years. In 1815 the organ virtuoso Georg Günther moved to Gothenburg and pursued an impressive concert career throughout the country. Examples abound; those mentioned here relate chiefly to church music.
On 8 December 1847, a newly formed piano quintet from Hamburg performed at August and Wilhelm Davidson’s music café in the park of Trädgårdsföreningen on Drottninggatan in Stockholm. The ensemble gave eight concerts in all, with Beethoven’s Archduke Trio among the works on the programme. Its pianist was Hermann Berens. He was born in Hamburg on 7 April 1826, the son of the military musician and composer Carl Berens. Most of the family were involved in music, and the children probably received lessons from their father. Hermann trained as both a pianist and a violinist, and also studied conducting and composition with the renowned Carl Gottlieb Reissiger in Dresden. His outstanding gift was for the piano, and in 1845, at the age of 19, he was given the important task of accompanying the widely celebrated Italian singer Marietta Alboni on an extensive European tour that took them to London, Berlin, Prague, Leipzig and Dresden, among other cities. We do not know how the quintet came to Stockholm, but we do know that all its members remained in Sweden. The string players were engaged by the Royal Court Orchestra, while Hermann Berens was eventually appointed music director of the Life Regiment Hussars in Örebro in 1849. Before that, he had briefly worked as a tutor at Falkenå manor for Lieutenant Johan Robert Ulrik Brauner. One of Brauner’s daughters was named Mathilda. She and Hermann became a couple and married in 1853. Accounts describe Hermann as lively and engaging, with an ease in making new friends. He also quickly acquired an excellent command of Swedish. Together with the organist Karl Johan Lewerth, he revived Örebro’s flagging musical life, not least through his regular evening gatherings, Afton-Gillen, at the Societetssalongen. These gave Berens opportunities to shine both as a pianist and as a composer.
In 1860 the family settled in Stockholm, where Hermann had obtained a position as music director at Mindre teatern, composing and arranging music for its productions. He was also appointed acting teacher of counterpoint, composition and instrumentation at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. In 1868 he was made professor of composition and instrumentation. Berens’s best-known work would become his 40 piano études, Neueste Schule der Geläufigkeit, Op. 61, alongside numerous other substantial piano works. He was himself a virtuoso on the instrument, as he demonstrated on many occasions. In addition to his extensive output for piano, he composed orchestral works, several operas, incidental music, songs and a great deal of chamber music. His four distinctive Gesellschafts-Quartette deserve particular mention. Their unusual scoring gives the piano part to two players at one instrument: in effect, each is a piano trio with four-hand piano. His three exquisite string trios, Op. 85, also deserve mention. Taken as a whole, his catalogue of works is extensive.
His works for organ are relatively few, but of exceptionally high quality. Foremost among them is his large-scale Fantasy in C minor, Op. 25, from 1854. It became particularly well known after the great organ virtuoso Georg Wilhelm Heintze played it at the inauguration of the new Åkerman organ in Uppsala Cathedral on 1 October 1871. The work has three sections in a relatively simple ABA form. Its turbulent, virtuosic outer sections frame a tender Andante in A-flat major. This section, however, develops in a dramatic direction and becomes far more complex than an ordinary middle section of the period. Its deliberate construction reveals a composer who understood how to write for the organ.
Another of Berens’s known organ works, Two Organ Pieces, was composed in 1870 and dedicated to his friend Gustaf Mankell, professor of organ playing at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and organist of St James’s Church. The first piece, Andante con moto, has an elegant, flowing texture reminiscent of writing for strings, with which Berens was thoroughly familiar. Its indications for manuals, registration and articulation are detailed and consistently applied, testifying to Berens’s familiarity with the organ and with composing for it. The second piece, Allegro moderato, is lively and built as a canon between two powerfully registered voices. Here, too, the writing is carefully conceived and clearly influenced by string writing.
Chromatische Fuge für die Orgel, Op. 84, was dedicated to Hermann Jimmerthal, the renowned organist of St Mary’s Church in Lübeck, and, judging by its opus number, was probably composed in 1871. Jimmerthal was an early performer of transcriptions of music by composers such as Wagner and was thus a progressive figure, even if most of his repertoire was drawn from the classics: Mozart, Beethoven and Spohr. Berens’s music, too, inhabits this space between the older Classical tradition and a newer, more daring chromaticism. After a calm, homophonic introduction, the fugue begins with meticulously specified articulation, almost as in a string quartet. Once the dynamics have built to full organ, the fugue fades away in a diminuendo—another more orchestral idea. We know that Berens travelled to his native Germany even after moving to Sweden. There is no evidence that he and Jimmerthal met in person, but it is hardly unlikely, given Lübeck’s proximity to Berens’s home city of Hamburg. As we have seen, Hermann Berens’s output for organ is small but of high quality.
A melody that seems to call out to be played by human hands was, in fact, written for a machine. In Beethoven’s Adagio in F major, WoO 33/1, long melodic lines unfold like those of a slow movement in a string quartet. At the same time, the music is so richly ornamented that its origins become apparent: it was intended for a mechanical instrument, not human hands.
In 1799 Ludwig van Beethoven became acquainted with the Countess of Brunswick and her daughters. As teacher to the two young countesses, he soon became a welcome guest at the family’s country estate. One of the daughters, Josephine, married Count Joseph Deym at her mother’s instigation. Deym owned a waxworks museum with a collection of musical automata. Mozart had previously written three pieces for a mechanical organ in the collection. Beethoven, who was himself interested in musical automata, went on to write three pieces for Deym’s instruments.
At the same time, Beethoven was working intensively on his six string quartets, Op. 18. Perhaps that is why the expressive world of the quartet feels so close in this Adagio: behind the ingenious mechanical playing lies a melody with an almost human voice.
The organ also had a place in Beethoven’s own musical background. As a young man in Bonn he worked as an organist, although he left behind few works for the instrument. They include the early Fugue in D major, WoO 31, and two preludes through all the major keys, Op. 39, for piano or organ. The Adagio belongs, strictly speaking, to another tradition—music for an automatic pipe organ—but when performed on a conventional organ, music originally designed to play itself once again encounters a performer’s phrasing and sensitivity.
Many years after Hermann Berens’s death, his daughter was interviewed in Nerikes Allehanda. She portrayed a sombre and taciturn man. “He never spoke to us children. Illness had marked him early; he was filled with a restless urge to create, and had no strength left for those closest to him.” Berens, so full of life in his youth, had developed diabetes and died on 9 May 1880, “after prolonged suffering”, according to his death notice. Posterity regarded him as a skilled but hardly original composer, and Julius Rabe’s assessment in the Dictionary of Swedish Biography in 1922 did little to improve that image: “B. was no great artist or personality, but he was a diligent and conscientious musician and won considerable recognition through his teaching.” Berens’s ideals were firmly rooted in the Classical repertoire, represented by composers such as Beethoven, Schumann and Spohr. Yet today we must reconsider Rabe’s grudging verdict and recognise Berens’s considerable artistry, not least in his brilliant chamber music, with the four Gesellschafts-Quartette foremost among it. His music is more than mere imitation: it displays great melodic and compositional imagination. Today his music is receiving renewed attention, revealing an inspired body of work. His organ compositions in particular deserve to be performed more often.
— Programme notes by Jan H Börjesson and Johan Hammarström