Gustaf Allan Pettersson (19 September 1911 â 20 June 1980) was a Swedish composer and violist. He is considered one of the 20th century's most important Swedish composers and was described as one of the last great symphonists, often compared to Gustav Mahler. Pettersson's music has a very distinctive sound and can hardly be confused with that of any other 20th-century composer. In the final decade of his life, his symphonies (typically one-movement works) developed an international following, particularly in Germany and Sweden. Of these, his best known work is Symphony No. 7. His music later found success in the United States. The conductors Antal Doráti and Sergiu Comissiona premiered and recorded several of his symphonies. Pettersson's song cycle Barefoot Songs influenced many of his compositions. Doráti arranged eight of the Barefoot Songs. Birgit Cullberg produced three ballets based on Pettersson's music.
Pettersson studied at the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. For more than a decade, he was a violist in the Stockholm Concert Society; after retiring he devoted himself exclusively to composition. Later in his life, he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Pettersson was awarded the Swedish royal medal Litteris et Artibus.
Born on 19 September 1911, Gustaf Allan Pettersson was the youngest of four children. His father, Karl Viktor Pettersson (1875âÂÂ1952), was a violent, alcoholic blacksmith, and his mother, Ida Paulina (née Svenson) (1876âÂÂ1960), was a dressmaker. Pettersson was born at Granhammar manor in in the Uppland province of Sweden. He grew up poor in Stockholm's Södermalm district, where he lived throughout his life. He once said: With his parents and siblings, Pettersson lived in a damp, one-room basement apartment with bars on the window. When he was 10, he bought a cheap violin with money he earned from selling Christmas cards and taught himself to play it. Even the beatings he received from his father and the threat of reform school could not diminish his interest in music. Through strict self-discipline and with the help of music, Pettersson freed himself from his social misery and difficult family circumstances. Aged 14, he finished elementary school and took up full-time practice on the violin. He later made two unsuccessful attempts to enter the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
In 1930, Pettersson began studying violin and later the viola, as well as counterpoint and harmony, at the conservatory of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music (Royal College of Music, Stockholm). At the beginning of World War II, he was in Paris, studying the viola with the French violist Maurice Vieux. Pettersson won the Jenny Lind scholarship prize in 1938, using it to study abroad.
During the 1940s, Pettersson worked as a violist in the Stockholm Concert Society (later the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra). He also studied composition with the composer and conductor Karl-Birger Blomdahl, orchestration with the conductor Tor Mann, and counterpoint with organist and composer Otto Olsson. In 1943, he married a physiotherapist, Gudrun Tyra Charlotta Gustafsson (1921âÂÂ2017).
In September 1951, Pettersson went to Paris to study composition and was a student of composers René Leibowitz, Arthur Honegger, Olivier Messiaen, and Darius Milhaud. He returned to Sweden at the end of 1952. In the early 1950s, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. He gave up playing the viola and began devoting his life to composition. In 1954, he received his first annual state composition grant.
By the time of his Symphony No. 5, completed in 1962, his mobility and health were considerably compromised. In 1964, the government granted him a lifelong guaranteed income. His greatest success came a few years later with his (1966), which premiered on 13 October 1968 in Stockholm Concert Hall with Antal Doráti conducting the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. A recording of his seventh symphony, with the same conductor and orchestra, was released in 1969. It was a breakthrough, establishing his international reputation, and he received two Swedish Grammis in 1970. The symphony was listed in 2025 in the Swedish Culture Canon. The conductors Antal Doráti and Sergiu Comissiona premiered and made first recordings of several of Pettersson's symphonies and contributed to his rise to fame during the 1970s.
Pettersson was hospitalized for nine months in 1970, soon after the composition of his Symphony No. 9, his longest symphony. He began writing the condensed Symphony No. 10 (1972) from his sickbed. Pettersson was admitted to Karolinska Hospital due to a life-threatening kidney ailment. He recovered, but rheumatoid arthritis largely confined him to his fourth-floor apartment in a building with no elevator. In 1975, after a dispute about a change in a concert program for an American tour, the Stockholm Philharmonic was forbidden to perform works by Pettersson "for all time". The ban was lifted in 1976. Pettersson was awarded the Litteris et Artibus, a Swedish royal medal established in 1853, in 1977. In autumn 1978, he moved to state-provided housing. He began writing his seventeenth symphony, but died of cancer on 20 June 1980, at age 68, in Stockholm's Maria Magdalena parish before finishing it. He is buried in the Högalid Church columbarium.
Pettersson's music can be compared to Mahler's symphonic output, especially in the magnificent design and the passion and dynamism. Like Mahler, he also often includes music from his songs in his symphonies, as well as the second violin concerto. Pettersson, an eccentric symphonist, was not an avant-gardist. His kinetic and organic development of musical matter uses traditional means of expression. Basic motifs are constantly being changed and developed. Pettersson's writing is very demanding, often featuring many simultaneous polyphonic lines. His symphonies end on common major or minor chordsâÂÂtonality, though often attenuated, is found mostly in slower sections. This is evident in the openings and endings of his 6th and 7th symphonies, and the end of his 9th. Overwhelmingly serious in tone, often dissonant, his music rises to ferocious climaxes, relieved, especially in his later works, by lyrical oases ("").
Pettersson's music has a very distinctive sound and can hardly be confused with that of any other 20th-century composer. His symphonies, which range from 25 to 70 minutes long, are typically one-movement works, with the exceptions of No. 3 (in four movements) and No. 8 (in two). Pettersson's music is often demanding both on performers and listeners.
Pettersson quoted songs from his own 24 Barefoot Songs in several of his compositions.
Musicologist Ivanka Stoïanova designed a theory of musical space about Pettersson's music.
Most of his music has now been recorded at least once and much of it is now available in published scores.
Pettersson began composing songs and smaller chamber works in the 1930s.
His production from the 1940s includes the song cycle 24 Barefoot Songs (1943âÂÂ1945) based on his poems and a dissonant concerto for violin and string quartet (1949), which is influenced by Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith. Pettersson soon found his own compositional style. In 1951, he created the experimental Seven Sonatas for two violins. At the same time, he composed the first of his 17 symphonies, which he left unfinished. This work has been recorded in a performing version prepared by trombonist and conductor Christian Lindberg in 2011. Pettersson about the symphonic output of the 1950s: It took four years to write the conceptual and style-defining Symphony No. 6 (1963âÂÂ1966). His Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 8 (1968âÂÂ1969) have been recorded more than his other works and are probably his best-known. In the 1970s, he composed two related works about social protest and compassion, the Symphony No. 12 for mixed chorus and orchestra (1973âÂÂ1974) to poems by Nobel laureate in Literature Pablo Neruda with contemporary relevance and the cantata Vox Humana (1974) on texts by Latin American poets. During the prolific last decade of his life, he also wrote a concerto for violin and orchestra (1977âÂÂ1978, 1980) written for the violinist Ida Haendel, a Symphony No. 16 (1979) which features a bravura solo part for alto saxophone commissioned by American saxophonist Frederick L. Hemke, and an incomplete, posthumously discovered concerto for viola and orchestra (1979âÂÂ1980).
In 1968âÂÂ1969, conductor and composer Antal Doráti arranged eight of Pettersson's Barefoot Songs as full-scale orchestral songs.
Choreographer Birgit Cullberg produced three ballets based on Pettersson's music. (1976, Symphony No. 7), (1977, Concerto No. 1 for String Orchestra), (War Dance) (1979, Symphony No. 9).
The four orchestral sketches "'" (1991) by Peter Ruzicka are a tribute to Pettersson's life and work, quoting sketches of his unfinished Symphony No. 17.
Roy Andersson used the finale of Symphony No. 7 in his short film World of Glory ().
After Pettersson's death, the (International Allan Pettersson Society) issued six yearbooks, Classic Produktion Osnabrück (CPO) began recording his complete works, and a series of concerts (in 1994âÂÂ1995) programmed almost all of them.
In 2002, a Swedish Allan Pettersson Society () was founded.
The selected discography lists recordings in their original format and release label. Some of the LP releases have been reissued on CD. A 12-CD pack of the complete symphonies of Allan Pettersson has been produced by CPO (Classic Produktion Osnabrück) based on recordings of 1984, 1988, 19911995, 2004. In 2023, a cycle of all Pettersson symphonies produced by BIS Records was completed.