(b Bergen, 5 Feb 1810; d Lysøen, nr Bergen, 17 Aug 1880). Norwegian violinist and composer. He was one of the greatest 19th-century violinists and a central figure in Norwegian music.
JOHN BERGSAGEL
His father was an apothecary from a cultivated Bergen family of clergymen and military officers. At the age of five he was given a violin and made rapid progress; by the age of eight he could play in the weekly string quartet meetings at his home. The statutes of the Bergen Harmonic Society were altered to admit so young a musician to membership in the orchestra, and in 1819 he made his début as a soloist. He was first taught by the town musician Niels Eriksen, and then by leaders of the Harmonic Society orchestra, J.H. Poulsen (until 1820) and Mathias Lundholm (1820–27), pupils of Viotti and Baillot respectively, who provided a sound technical foundation on which he later superimposed a very personal manner. He also learnt much from the peasant fiddlers around Valestrand on Osterøy, north of Bergen. It was not however intended that he should follow a musical career. He went to Christiania in 1828 to read theology at the university, but failed the entrance examination. As his reputation as a violinist had already secured him a leading position in the city’s musical life, he was invited to take over the conductorship of the Musical Lyceum and of the theatre orchestra during the illness of Waldemar Thrane; when Thrane died a few months later Bull was appointed to succeed him as conductor.
Bull now devoted himself to theory and composition. In a letter he mentioned work on a symphony; two settings in 1829 of poems by Henrik Wergeland, Hymne til Friheden (‘Hymn to liberty’) and Tordenen (‘In the thunder’), significantly reveal what was to be a guiding principle of his career: to use his gifts in the service of his country and national independence. In Wergeland he encountered a dynamic spirit who had given expression to ideas with which Bull could identify. His exalted place in Norwegian history is due to the success with which, as the first really internationally famous Norwegian, he propagandized on his country’s behalf.
In May 1829 Bull made his first trip abroad, to Copenhagen and Kassel. He wrote to his father that he intended to visit Spohr, then his favourite composer. It has often been said that Spohr was critical and discouraging, but it is unlikely that they met at that time (Spohr’s description of Bull’s playing in his autobiography dates from January 1839). Returning to Christiania in September, Bull resumed his musical activities and studies, making a short concert tour in Norway in summer 1830. In summer 1831 he met Torgeir Augundson, the most famous Norwegian peasant fiddler, known as ‘Myllarguten’, from whom he learnt a number of slåtter (folkdances) which he used later in his own compositions and as the basis for the improvisations that were a characteristic part of his concerts. When he left for Paris in August, he took with him a Hardanger fiddle, the Norwegian peasant violin with extra (sympathetic) strings.
In Paris Bull met and shared rooms with the brilliant young Austrian violinist H.W. Ernst, who introduced him to Paganini’s style of playing. Unsuccessful in finding employment, he suffered serious privation and was nursed through a long illness by a kindly landlady, Mme Villeminot, whose granddaughter Félicie he married in 1836. In April 1833 he heard Paganini play and gave a concert at which he played his Souvenirs de Norvège, which used Norwegian slåtter and folksongs arranged for the Hardanger fiddle (then unknown in Paris), with the accompaniment of string quartet, double bass and flute. His performance got a good review, but in June he left Paris having attracted little significant attention.
Bull went first to Switzerland, where he visited his countryman, the pianist Hans Skramstad, in Lausanne, and then to Italy, where he intended to spend a year taking composition lessons and studying in the music library in Milan. He developed a new manner of holding the violin and experimented with modifications to his violin and bow, making the bridge flatter, after the fashion of the Hardanger fiddle, and the bow longer and heavier, like Myllarguten’s. After concerts in Milan, Venice and Trieste, he appeared in Bologna, creating a sensation and receiving honorary membership in the Accademia Filarmonica. There he met the violinist Bériot and the singer Malibran (later Bériot’s wife). From the account of their meeting it appears that Bull could now play only on his own instrument, the tone of which Malibran preferred to Bériot’s. In Bologna Bull performed his first large composition with full orchestra, his Concerto in A, which Bériot said had so many difficulties of a type previously unknown that he doubted whether any other violinist could play it – even if he were in possession of Bull’s violin and bow. In autumn 1834 in Naples he played his Quartet for solo violin, composed to outdo Paganini’s famous Duo. Bull’s remarkable ability to play polyphonically, made possible by the low bridge on his violin and his specially shaped bow, became a legendary feature of his technique (Albert Schweitzer credited it to the survival of Baroque practices in the conservative north and cited Bull on behalf of his efforts to encourage a round violin bow for the performance of Bach’s music). In February 1835 he went to Rome, where he completed and performed his Recitativo, adagio amorosa con polacca guerriera for violin and orchestra (inspired, he said, by the sight of the smoking Vesuvius), which became his most frequently performed composition.
Returning to Paris, Bull gave a concert at the Opéra on 17 June, the only violinist other than Paganini ever to do so, describing himself on the programme simply as ‘artiste norvégien’. It was a bold patriotic gesture that succeeded in putting Norway on the cultural map of Europe (a leading Paris critic, Jules Janin, took the point and began his enthusiastic and widely circulated review with a description of Norway itself). After further concerts in Paris and the provinces, Bull went to London (May 1836), where he had an overwhelming success at the Philharmonic Society and established himself as the greatest violin virtuoso of his time. He returned to Paris in July to be married, then embarked on a tour of the British Isles that included 274 concerts in 14 months. After two months’ rest in Paris he toured with triumphant success through Germany and Russia, then back to Stockholm and Norway, where he was welcomed in July 1838 as a national hero.
In 1839 Bull gave nearly 200 concerts in Germany and Austria (see illustration); in 1840 he was again in London, where he played Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with Liszt at a Philharmonic Society concert. In November he played in Leipzig, where Schumann, who had heard him the year before in Vienna, heard him again. He then learnt that a wealthy Viennese collector had bequeathed him a valuable Gasparo da Salò violin, the scroll of which was reputedly carved by Benvenuto Cellini; a chamber music concert, in which Bull was assisted by Mendelssohn and David, was held on 20 January 1841 to present the instrument to the public. The following month in Prague he composed his E minor Violin Concerto, then continued to Poland and Russia. In 1842 he was in Germany and the Netherlands, in 1843 in Sweden and Denmark, and in November 1843 he gave his first concert in the USA. Before sailing for America he arranged for the publication by Schuberth in Hamburg of some of his compositions, including the Bellini Variations approved by Liszt.
As a democrat and Romantic adventurer, Bull admired and enjoyed the USA, which in turn responded to him in a quite exceptional manner. ‘My relationship to the Americans is that of an adopted son’, he wrote. He was back in Paris for Christmas 1845 and for three months contented himself with private music-making with Liszt and T.D.A. Tellefsen, a Norwegian pupil of Chopin, before setting out again for southern France, Algeria, Spain and Portugal. He had reached Nantes on the return journey when he learnt of the February 1848 Revolution in Paris, where, on his return, he led a deputation to greet Lamartine on behalf of the Norwegian people, a characteristically flamboyant and presumptuous gesture that caused offence in official circles in Norway. At the end of the year he was back in Norway giving concerts and speaking on behalf of an independent Norwegian republic. After a particularly enthusiastic reception arranged by the Society of Students on 10 December Bull promised a composition to commemorate the occasion. The resulting fantasia, originally called Den 10. December, is a programmatic piece describing a summer visit to mountain pastures; under the title Et saeterbesøg (‘A visit to the mountain pasture’) it became Bull’s most enduring composition. It contains one of the most beloved of all Norwegian melodies known as ‘Saeterjentens Søndag’, later sung to the words by J. Moe, ‘Paa solen jeg ser’ (‘I gaze upon the sun’).
At this meeting with the students Bull spoke of the need to appreciate and preserve true Norwegian art and to establish a Norwegian national theatre. These projects occupied him during the next two years. He invited Myllarguten to Christiania for a concert with him on 15 January 1849, the first of several appearances designed to make Norwegians aware of their national heritage of folk music. On 23 July he announced the establishment of the Norwegian Theatre in Bergen to encourage Norwegian dramatists and actors and through them the Norwegian language, which had traditionally been subjugated to Danish as the language of educated culture. The theatre opened on 2 January 1850 but despite acknowledged artistic success and public support Bull’s application in 1851 for a state subsidy for the theatre was turned down and Bull was obliged to go on tour again. He installed the 23-year-old Henrik Ibsen at the theatre on a five-year contract with the stipulation that he write a play each year.
In January 1852 Bull was once again in the USA, where he became involved in the establishment of a colony, a New Norway centred round a town to be called Oleona. For this purpose he bought 11,144 acres in Potter County, Pennsylvania, and in September 1852 the first settlers moved in. Because of the condition of American citizenship required for the ownership of such a large tract of land, it has been assumed that Bull gave up his Norwegian citizenship, a supposition which aroused considerable resentment in Norway. However, he was given dispensation by the State of Pennsylvania, and did not take American citizenship. The widely held belief that Bull was sold land to which the sellers had no title is also incorrect. The undertaking had been entered into too hastily, and after a year it was evident that the land was better suited to timber and industry than to farming. In September 1853 Bull sold his holdings back to his partners for the same price he had paid, and the colonial scheme collapsed. His responsibilities to the immigrants cost him much money, and he was obliged to tour extensively, with Maurice Strakosch and his eight-year-old sister-in-law Adelina Patti, to meet his obligations. Back in New York at the beginning of 1855, he made an unsuccessful attempt to establish a permanent opera house at the Academy of Music in New York, which ended in an acrimonious dispute with Strakosch and his nephew Max Maretzek, the incident being reported in New York newspapers as ‘the great Opera House war’.
Bull’s return to Bergen in August 1857 was greeted by a newspaper article by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson that led to his being invited by Bull to take over the position at the Bergen Theatre that had been held by Ibsen, who had now moved to the new Norwegian Theatre in Christiania. Thus Bull helped to initiate the careers of Norway’s two great 19th-century dramatists. In 1858, after hearing Grieg play and seeing some of his compositions, he convinced the boy’s parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory, and in 1859 he encouraged the young Rikard Nordraak by inviting him to accompany him in some concerts, Nordraak’s first public appearances. Grieg’s first set of folksong arrangements (op.17, 1869) is dedicated to Bull, who had himself, in 1852, published a little collection of folk melodies in piano arrangements as an appendix to Tønsberg’s Norske folkedragter.
In 1859 Bull was one of the founders of the Norwegian Society for the Advancement of the National Element in Art and Literature. On his return to Norway in 1838 he had given a concert to start a fund to establish a conservatory. In 1862 he took up the idea again, but in spite of elaborate preparations and the promise of help from the king, his enemies in the government rejected his application for public support. This was the last scheme in which Bull tried to enlist government aid. But in 1872 he sponsored a fund for the purchase of a collection of Scandinavian literature for the University of Wisconsin, preliminary to the establishment of a professorship in Scandinavian languages and literature there, and during his last years he collected money for erecting a statue of Leif Erikson in Boston.
Bull made an extended tour of Germany, Poland and Russia in 1866–7, then again visited the USA. His first wife having died in 1862, in 1870 he married the 20-year-old daughter of a Wisconsin senator. During the last ten years of his life he spent the winters in the USA and the summers in Norway. He continued to perform with undiminished success until his death. The occasion of his 66th birthday, when he played his Et saeterbesøg from the top of Cheop’s pyramid in fulfilment of a promise to King Oscar of Sweden and Norway, is worth mentioning as an example of the sort of extravagant gesture that made him a legend and his life a fairy story to enthral every Norwegian child.
It is difficult to separate the impact of Bull’s playing from that of his personality, or the musical value of his compositions from the impression created by his performance of them. Bjørnson said his personality was so powerful that when he entered a room he obliterated all others. He was a figure of fascination for writers: George Sand used him as the model for Abel in her novel Malgrétout, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt owes not a little to him (Peer’s ‘Gyntiana’ is an obvious reference to Bull’s ‘Oleona’). Thackeray met him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1852 and 1855, and wrote ‘Last night … at Longfellow’s … there was a mad-cap fiddler, Ole Bull, who played most wonderfully … and charmed me still more by his oddities and character. Quite a figure for a book’. Indeed, he is easily recognized as the Musician in Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), who, interspersed with playing his violin, tells a story from the Norse sagas. In 1880 Mark Twain wrote ‘If Ole Bull had been born without arms, what a rank he would have taken among the poets – because it is in him, and if he couldn’t violin it out, he would talk it out, since of course it would have to come out’. He had a lively, quick intelligence with an unlimited range of interests. He was a connoisseur and collector of violins and an expert in their construction and repair, often working with Vuillaume when in Paris. He designed and built a violin whose tone was much admired, and in the USA he collaborated with the engineer John Ericsson in building an improved piano, which he introduced into Norway at a concert played by Agathe Backer.
Schumann regarded Bull as at least Paganini’s equal, and in technical feats, such as playing four parts at once, in a class by himself. He was struck by his unusually beautiful tone and by his playing of Mozart with German simplicity and intimacy; but he noticed too that he often played impulsively, in an almost improvisatory manner, dazzling and swaying his audience, which was not the German way. He regarded Bull’s own compositions at that time as unfinished, but revealing flashes of inexplicable genius. Similar opinions, which praise the melody and harmony, but tend to criticize the form and coherence of his compositions as well as his performance, are echoed by many critics, but on the whole Bull’s appearance, manner, presence and playing disarmed all popular criticism of his music. His genius for simple and touching melody is evident in two of his songs, Saeterjentens Søndag (from Et saeterbesøg) and I ensomme stunde (‘In moments of solitude’), which have become part of the Norwegian national song repertory.
Bull’s historical significance, however, derives from the fact that he was ‘more than a fiddler’; as Bjørnson said at this funeral, ‘Ole Bull was the first and the greatest celebration in the life of this people. He gave us self-confidence, the greatest gift that could be given us at that time’, sentiments echoed by Grieg. Few of Bull’s compositions were published, perhaps because of his predilection for improvisation or because of their virtuoso difficulties and personal idiosyncracies; they probably deserve more serious attention than they have received.
many lost
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Hymne til friheden [Hymn to Liberty], Tordenen [In the thunder] (H. Wergeland), 1829; Cantata, wind insts, for the funeral of Westye Egeberg, 1830; Song (Bjerregaard), 1830; Souvenirs de Norvège (? = Norges fjelde), Hardanger fiddle, 2 vn, va, vc, db, fl, 1832–3; Fantaisie et variations de bravoure sur un thème de Bellini, 1832–3, pubd vn, orch, op.3 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843); Aria appassionata with variations, June 1833; Vn Conc., A, 1834; Capriccio fantastico, solo vn, 1834; Capriccio; Qt, solo vn, 1834; Adagio religioso (A Mother’s Prayer), vn, orch, op.1, 1834 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843), arr. pf (Christiania, n.d.); Recitativo, adagio amorosa con polacca guerriera, 1835, Polacca guerriera, pubd vn, pf (Christiania, n.d.) |
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Concerto irlandais (Farewell to Ireland), 1837; Homage to Edinburgh (Fantasy on Scottish Folk Melodies), 1837; Preghiera dolente e rondo ridente (Cantabile dolorosa e rondo giocoso), perf. Berlin, 19 Feb 1839; Nordmannens heimlengt (Norwegers Traum und Heimweh), perf. Vienna, 1839; Vn Conc., e, Feb 1841, Adagio arr. pf, vn (Christiania, n.d.); Grüss aus der Ferne (En fjern hilsen), March 1841; Concerto romantico, begun 1834, perf. Christiania, 1841; Til hende [To Her], 1842; Villspel i Lio [Wild Playing in Lio], 1842; Nocturne, vn, orch/pf, op.2, 1842 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1843); Siciliano e Tarantella, vn, orch, perf. Bremen, 1843, arr. vn, pf (Oslo, 1949), full score N-Ou; El agiaco cubana, 1844; Recuerdos de Habana, 1844; Niagara, 1844; The Solitude of the Prairies, 1844; Davids Salme, 1844; Washingtons minde [In Memory of Washington], perf. New York, 1845, march, arr. pf (Christiania, n.d.); La verbena de San Juan, 1847; Guitarspilleren fra Sevilla, 1847; Et saeterbesøg [A Visit to the Mountain Pasture] (Den 10. December), vn, orch/pf, 1848 (Christiania, n.d.); music for prol for opening of Norwegian Theatre, Bergen, 2 Jan 1850; music for Wergeland’s play Fjeldstuen [The Mountain Cottage], Bergen, 1850 |
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I ensomme stunde [In Moments of Solitude] (M.J. Monrad), song, arr. male vv by J. Behrens, orig vn, pf (?=Ensomhed [Solitude], perf. Bergen, 16 June 1850); also arr. str orch by J. Halvorsen as La mélancolie (Copenhagen, 1914); Kunstens magt [The power of art] (H. Ibsen), male vv, orch, 1851, autograph score Ou; Lørdagskveld på saetren [Saturday Night in the Mountain Pasture], perf. Drammen, 1859; Kringen, perf. Drammen, 1859; ?Carnival in Venice (Paganini), variations; Kjaempeslåtten [Giant’s Folkdance], perf. Christiania, 10 Oct 1862; Hommage à Moscou, vn, vv, orch, April 1866; Nattergalen, fantasia on Russ. folksong, April 1867 |
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Lily Dale, fantasia on American folksong, 1872; Vision, 1872; Arioso, vn, orch, Ou (inc.) |
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Songs using melodies by Bull: Her, hvor i alt hvad jeg ser han er til [Here, where he exists in everything I see] (Sigrid’s Song, or Den forladte [The Abandoned One]) and Saa ganger nu ind [Go in Now] (Huldre Song) (H. Wergeland), from the music to Fjeldstuen, 1850; I ensomme stunde [In Moments of Solitude] and I granskoven [In the Spruce Forest] (M.J. Monrad); Paa solen jeg ser [I Gaze upon the Sun] (J. Moe), to Saeterjentens Søndag from Et Saeterbesøg |
NBL (O.M. Sandvik)
R. Schumann: Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig, 1854/R, rev. 5/1914/R by M. Kreisig; Eng. trans., 1877–80; new Eng. trans. [selection], 1947)
Ole Bull, et mindeblad [Ole Bull, a memorial] (Christiania, 1880)
A. Bull, ed.: Ole Bulls breve i uddrag, med en karakteristik og biografisk skitse af Jonas Lie (Copenhagen, 1881)
S.C. Bull: Ole Bull (Boston, 1882)
A. Grønvold: Norske musikere (Christiania, 1883), 123
H.L. Braekstad: Ole Bull: biografisk skitse (Bergen, 1885)
O.M. Sandvik and G. Schelderup, eds.: Norges musikhistorie (Christiania, 1921), i, 172
A. Schweitzer: ‘Der runde Violinbogen’, SMz, lxxiii (1933), 197–203
C. Aarvig: Den unge Ole Bull (Copenhagen, 1934)
A. Bjørndal: Ole Bull og norsk folkemusikk (Bergen, 1940)
M. Smith: The Life of Ole Bull (Princeton, NJ, 1943/R)
F. Bull: ‘Ole Bull og Norge’, Landet og litteraturen (Oslo, 1949), 119–54
O. Linge: Ole Bull (Oslo, 1953)
Ø. Gaukstad, ed.: Edvard Grieg: Artikler og taler (Oslo, 1957)
N. Grinde: Norsk musikkhistorie (Oslo, 1971, 3/1981; Eng. trans., 1991), 119–20
E. Haugen and C. Cai: Ole Bull (Oslo, 1992; Eng. trans., 1993)