Don's Weekly Listen: Wirén's String Serenade

The term “machine age” in music often calls to mind 1920s and ‘30s Germany, as seen through the eyes of composers like Hindemith and Weill. These composers captured the harsh zeitgeist of their time by combining Stravinskian neoclassical techniques with a penchant for brash, forward-driving rhythmic patterns and crunching dissonances. While both offer plenty of warmhearted moments (witness, for instance, the second movement of Hindemith’s viola concerto Der Schwanandreher), those moments almost always feel brittle and ephemeral.

For my part, I admit that Hindemith’s music often makes me feel that I am on a conveyor belt to an unknown but surely dreadful destination, hemmed in on all sides by a metallic apparatus emitting portentous mechanical whirrings and clangings.

Bearing in mind the devastation of the Great War, the dislocation of the ensuing Weimar period, and the rise of Nazism, it is no great mystery why so much Austro-German music from the 1920s and ‘30s is so unforgiving, and its moments of tenderness so fleeting. But Hindemith and Weill do not constitute the entire story of the machine age.

From the start there were dissenters, mostly from outside Germany or Austria, who decoupled the propulsiveness of the machine from all suggestions of unfeeling factory lines or brutal militarism. The hotbed of this alternative style was Paris. One early example is Poulenc’s 1918 Trois Mouvements Perpétuels (Three Perpetual Motions) for piano, which manage somehow to integrate a motor into the signature Parisian languor of their composer’s early works.

But there might be no more enjoyable exploration of the machine age’s softer side than the 1937 Serenade for Strings written by Swedish composer Dag Wirén (1905-1986). A gorgeous piece of pre-WWII escapism, Wirén’s composition is simultaneously disciplined and warm, a perfect listen for a late spring or early summer’s day.

As the piece begins, we hear a whirring motor of repeated quick notes in the middle voices, and we wonder where the conveyor belt might be leading us. But then a long held note sounds in the violins, falling artfully and harmlessly down a perfect fifth. It reassures us that these are mostly untroubled waters. Throughout the movement, we are introduced to a parade of melodic and rhythmic characters. Some are spunky and accented, others smooth. Some are light and airy, others hint at impending darkness. But when any melodic element begins to darken the sky too much, Wirén’s motorized conveyor belt promptly ushers it out (he does this to almost comic effect at 1:40).

Wirén’s optimism carries on unrelentingly through the remaining movements: a sweet pizzicato-accompanied slow movement, a scherzo whose main motive evokes the guffaw of a delighted child, and a peppy march. Granted, Wirén’s use of the march genre may be an oblique reference to the impending horror to Sweden’s south, and its shifty, bluesy middle melody (starting at 12:00) is likely a reference to the operas of Weill. But before long, the motor kicks up again to show Weill the door, and the unflappable optimism of the opening movement wins out.

This serenade hails from a land without risks and without consequences. Call it compartmentalization, call it a coping mechanism, but it sure makes beautiful music. More from Wirén (one of the 20th century’s most underrated neoclassicists) to follow soon!