Capital city of Sweden. It was founded in 1255 as a small island fortress between Lake Mälar and the Baltic, and soon grew into an important trading centre, with a large German population. Polyphonic singing seems to have been introduced in the 1580s and 90s, after the establishment of the Lutheran service, primarily through the Tyska Kyrka (German Church) and its Kantor, Wolfgang Burchardt (d 1599), also rector of the German school. Burchardt's acquisitions of German, Dutch and Italian vocal music are still an important part of the German Church Collection now in the Statens Musikbibliotek.
There were lute players, singers and other musicians at the royal court in the 16th century, and trumpeters and drummers in the guards regiments. The Hovkapell was not fully organized, however, until 1620, when 20 German musicians arrived with the composer Andreas Düben, who had studied with Sweelinck in Amsterdam. He and his descendants dominated Stockholm musical life in the 17th century, holding positions at court and as organists. The Latin school, mainly for training priests and officials, taught singing and instrumental playing, and the curriculum included plays with music, in Latin, Swedish or German. The pupils also sang at funerals and other ceremonies, providing the schools with considerable income.
During the adult reign of Queen Christina (1644–54) music and ballet were encouraged at court. A ballet-master, violinists and singers, all from France, introduced the manners of the continental courts, and several ballets with songs were created. In 1652 a group of Italian musicians arrived, among them some well-known castratos, under the direction of Vincenzo Albrici. They performed cantatas and scenes from operas, but left Sweden, like several of the French musicians, on Christina's abdication in 1654. (20 Italian cantatas from the Albrici repertory ended up in the library of Christ Church, Oxford, probably through the English ambassador to the Swedish court, Bulstrode Whitelocke.) The kings succeeding Christina were less interested in music than in warfare, and eventually all countries around the Baltic fell under the Swedish crown. Nevertheless, the capital attracted foreign theatre troups including the Dutch Fornenbergh company, which performed ballets in the 1660s, as well as the German composers of church music Christian Geist (1670–79) and Christian Ritter (1681–3, 1688–99). The Düben family collected more than 2000 compositions in print and manuscript, mainly by German and Italian composers of the period, now held in the Uppsala University library. There are records of town musicians during the 17th century, but they never constituted a guild.
Music at court began to prosper again with the arrival of a French theatre and opera company under Claude de Rosidor (?1660–1718), which remained in Stockholm from 1699 to 1706. The military victories of Charles XII turned to defeats after 1709, and the Swedish empire shrank considerably with the peace treaties of 1719–20. Eventually the Hovkapell was reorganized and enlarged, and the standard of playing was improved under Johan Helmich Roman, who returned to Stockholm in 1721 after five years of study in England. He organized public concerts at Easter from 1731 in the Riddarhus (Palace of the Nobility) with works by Handel and Italian composers. Amateur orchestras were active from 1738, culminating in the literary and musical society Utile Dulci (1766–86), in which professionals played together with aristocratic amateur instrumentalists and singers.
In 1743 the crown prince Adolf Fredrik arrived from Germany with 14 musicians. The public concerts of the Hovkapell became more numerous, especially after 1758, when F.A.B. Uttini became Hovkapellmästare. Their repertory included music by Handel, Pergolesi, Hasse and Graun in addition to Uttini's own arias and symphonies. Uttini had arrived in 1755 with five Italian singers from the Mingotti company; they performed operas and cantatas in the newly built royal theatre at Drottningholm, 10 km from the centre of Stockholm. This theatre burnt down in 1762 but was replaced in 1766 by a building that survives largely intact and is now used for revivals of operas from its heyday (see fig.1).
Gustavus III (reigned 1771–92) was eager to create a national culture with the help of theatre and opera. He was himself a talented playwright and devised plots for a series of operas on national themes, using leading authors to work out the details. He founded the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademi (Swedish Royal Academy of Music) in 1771 and the Kungliga Teaterns Operascen (Swedish Royal Opera) in 1773, the year in which Uttini's Thetis och Pelée, the first serious opera in Swedish, had its première. In the following years a broad repertory of French and Italian works was presented in Swedish translations. Gluck's reform operas inspired the composers of the new, Gustavian Swedish works, notably J.G. Naumann's Gustaf Wasa (1786), G.J. Vogler's Gustav Adolf och Ebba Brahe (1788) and J.M. Kraus's Aeneas i Carthago (1799).
In 1782 the Kungliga Teater in central Stockholm opened with Naumann's Cora och Alonzo. The building was also used for concerts and masked balls (fig.2), one of the latter remembered because of the assassination of Gustavus III. A new feature was a series of concerts at which Vogler, active in Stockholm between 1786 and 1799, played the organ; his influence resulted in a general improvement of standards among the city's organists. He also started a music school and published music instruction books.
The main singer at the opera, Carl Stenborg, was given a royal privilege to run a smaller theatre on condition that he did not sing there himself. Known as the Eriksbergteater when it opened, it was renamed several times, becoming the Mindre Teater in 1799. Stenborg directed ballad operas and comic operas, mostly of French origin, but also plays with music by Swedish composers, for example Kopparslagaren (‘The Coppersmith’, 1781) by Johan David Zander and his own Gustaf Ericsson i Dalarne (1784). Some plays were vaudeville parodies of the grand operas, such as Petis och Telée (1779). Theatre life was controlled by royal licensing. Performances were given at the opera house, Stenborg's theatre and from 1787 at the Dramatiska Teater, where comedies with songs alternated with spoken drama. During the summers these theatres were closed, and comedies and vaudevilles were permitted in other theatres, especially in the popular Djurgården area. After 1825, when the Arsenalsteater burnt down, the restrictions were increasingly felt; finally Anders Lindeberg (1789–1849) daringly broke the royal monopoly by building the Nya Svenska Teater in 1842 and engaging Jacob Niclas Ahlström as conductor and composer. The theatre, with many comedies to music in its repertory, was a success, and during the 1850s four new theatres opened in Stockholm, all with orchestras. Meanwhile the Kungliga Teaterns Operascen performed European masterpieces, and some of its singers, such as Jenny Lind, Christine Nilsson and Sigrid Arnoldson-Fischhof (1861–1943), became known on the Continent and beyond.
From about 1870 more and more continental virtuosos found their way to Stockholm. Oratorios and bigger cantatas were given by choral societies with the opera orchestra; the main societies were the Harmoniska Sällskap (1820–47, under Johan Fredrik Berwald), the Nya Harmoniska Sällskap (1860–80; Ludvig Norman), the Musikförening (1880–1924; Norman and Franz Neruda) and the Filharmoniska Sällskap (1885–1912; first conducted by Andreas Hallén). They performed major works of Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms and Rubinstein, and also works by Swedish composers (I.C. Hallström, Vilhelm Svedbom, Norman, Hallén and others). Bach's oratorios were introduced from 1890, beginning with the St Matthew Passion.
The first purpose-built concert hall was the new building (1878) for the Musikaliska Akademi, used for solo recitals and chamber music. Another hall, giving cheap ‘folk concerts’, was established in the Arbetarinstitut (Workers' Institute) and much used from 1894 to about 1910. Fiddlers and folk singers performed at Skansen, an open-air ethnological museum opened in 1891 and still popular for choral and folk music performances. Concert life expanded considerably in the 1890s, and in the large-scale exhibition of industry and art in Stockholm (1897) music had a prominent place, especially in a Nordic music festival and the first national meeting of male choruses. Larger concerts still depended on the opera orchestra until 1914, when the Konsertförening was established (since 1992 called the Royal Stockholm PO). From 1926 it played in the main hall of the new Konserthus, the smaller hall being used for chamber music and solo recitals. Outstanding conductors have been Georg Schneévoigt (1915–23), Vacláv Talich (1926–36), Fritz Busch (1937–41), Antal Dorati (1966–73), Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1974–7) and Yury Ahronovich (1982–7). The Berwald Hall, opened in 1979, was designed for the musical activities of the Swedish RSO but is also used for public concerts.
The Royal Opera moved into a new and larger building in 1898. The international repertory has included the world premières of Korngold's Die Kathrin (1939), Sutermeister's Der rote Stiefel (1951) and Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1978). Among successful productions of Swedish works were Andreas Hallén's Waldemarsskatten (1899), Wilhelm Peterson-Berger's Arnljot (1910), Ture Rangström's Kronbruden (1922), Hilding Rosenberg's Lycksalightetens ö (1945), K.-B. Blomdahl's Aniara (1959) and L.J. Werle's Tintomara (1973), commissioned for the 200th anniversary of the Royal Opera (one episode in Tintomara concerns the assassination of Gustavus III at the masked ball, also the subject of operas by Auber and Verdi). Among famous singers who made their débuts there were Jussi Björling, Set Svanholm, Birgit Nilsson, Nicolai Gedda and Elisabeth Söderström. Operetta and musical comedy were given in the Oscarsteater, which opened in 1906 with Offenbach's Les brigands, and gave Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera more than 500 times in the 1990s. After World War II several smaller opera companies appeared, the most successful being Folkopera (founded 1976).
Among smaller musical groups are the Par Bricole, founded as a singing and drinking society and active since 1779, and the Mazerska Kvartettsällskap, a chamber music society founded in 1847 by a merchant, Johan Mazer (1790–1847), who also bequeathed a large collection of 18th-century music to the Musikaliska Akademi. Fylkingen, founded in 1933, promotes contemporary music; in 1952 it became the Sveriges section of the ISCM and in the 1960s it was a forum for electro-acoustic music, cooperating with the electronic music studio built in 1964 by Sveriges Radio under the supervision of Knut Wiggen and later Lars-Gunnar Bodin.
Other institutions in Stockholm are the Musikhistoriska Museum, founded in 1899, which has large collections of instruments and of Swedish folk music, and presents historical and ethnological concerts; the Svenskt Visarkiv (Swedish Centre for Folk Song and Folk Music Research, founded 1952); the Svenskt Musikhistoriskt Arkiv (1965); and the Arkiv för Ljud och Bild (National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images, 1979). A private collection, open to visitors since 1973, is the Stiftelse Musikkulturens Främjande (Foundation for the Furtherance of Musical Culture), rich in instruments and French opera scores.
Higher musical education has always been one of the main objectives of the Musikaliska Akademi, but lack of means permitted only limited education, mainly of church musicians, until the 1850s, when classes in many subjects including composition were introduced. The academy's library has been open to the public since 1849. In 1971 the conservatory was separated from the academy and renamed the Kungliga Musikhögskola. Other important music schools have been the A.F. Lindblads Musikskola (1827–72), the Richard Anderssons Musikskola (1886–1982), the Borgarskola Musiklinje (the music class of the civic school, founded 1943), and the Stockholms Musikpedagogiska Institut (founded 1960).
GroveO (A. Johnson)
P. Vretblad: Konsertlivet i Stockholm under 1700-talet (Stockholm, 1918)
T. Norlind and E. Trobäck: Kungliga hovkapellets historia 1526–1926 (Stockholm, 1926)
T. Norlind: Från Tyska kyrkans glansdagar: bilder ur svenska musikens historia [From the heyday of the German church: pictures from Swedish musical history] (Stockholm, 1944–5)
M. Tegen: Musiklivet i Stockholm 1890–1910 (Stockholm, 1955)
B. Stribolt: Stockholms 1800-talsteatrar: en studie i den borgerliga teaterbyggnadens utveckling (Stockholm, 1982)
I. Mattsson, ed.: Gustavian Opera: an Interdisciplinary Reader in Swedish Opera, Dance and Theatre 1771–1809 (Stockholm, 1991)
L. Jonsson, ed.: Musiken i Sverige (Stockholm, 1992–4)
MARTIN TEGEN