Kurt Magnus Atterberg (, 12 December 188715 February 1974) was a Swedish composer and engineer. He is best known for his symphonies, operas, and ballets.
Biography
Atterberg was born in Gothenburg. His father was Anders Johan Atterberg, engineer; his uncle was the chemist Albert Atterberg. His mother, Elvira Uddman, was the daughter of a famous male opera singer.
In 1902, Atterberg began learning the cello, having been inspired by a concert by the Brussels String Quartet, featuring a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 8. Six years later he became a performer in the Stockholm Concert Society, now known as the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as publishing his first completed work, the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 1. His String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 2, soon followed.
While already studying electrical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, Atterberg also enrolled at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm in 1910 with a score of his Rhapsody and an incomplete version of his Symphony No. 1. There he studied composition and orchestration under the composer Andreas Hallén. He earned his engineering diploma a year later, as well as being awarded a State Music Fellowship. He made his conducting debut at a concert in Gothenburg in 1912, premiering his first symphony and the Concert Overture in A minor, Op. 4.
Although continuing to compose and conduct, Atterberg enjoyed a fulfilling career in several different organisations. He accepted a post at the Swedish Patent and Registration Office in 1912, going on to become a head of department in 1936, and working there until his retirement in 1968.
Possibly Atterberg's greatest success was his triumph in the 1928 International Columbia Graphophone Competition, organized to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of Franz Schubert's death. Eventually, his sixth symphony was chosen out of 500 submissions as the winning work, over Franz Schmidt's 3rd symphony and Czeslaw Marek's Sinfonia brevis. It was performed all over the Western world in subsequent years, among others by Thomas Beecham and Arturo Toscanini.
Atterberg died on 15 February 1974 in Stockholm, aged 86, and was buried there in the Northern Cemetery.
Ties to Nazi Germany
Both before and during the Nazi era, Atterberg collaborated with German composers and music organizations with the aim of strengthening Swedish-German musical relations. He sometimes conducted his own works with famous orchestras in Germany and several famous conductors also performed Atterberg's symphonies. Atterberg never hesitated to pass on the German contacts he had made over the years to his Swedish colleagues or to work to have Swedish works performed in Germany. In this way, Albert Henneberg could collaborate with Fritz Tutenberg, whom Atterberg had known since a music festival in Kiel in 1926, and together with him write operas for the opera in Chemnitz. From 1935–1938, Atterberg was also general secretary of the Permanent Council for the International Co-operation of Composers (Ständiger Rat für die internationale Zusammenarbeit der Komponisten), founded by Richard Strauss.
There are anti-Semitic streaks in Atterberg's correspondence and use of language, particularly evident in disputes with the composer Moses Pergament, a music critic for the Svenska Dagbladet. In a letter to Pergament in 1923, Atterberg writes: "I could not have dreamed that you would launch yourself as a Swedish composer […] So far, you are a purely Jewish composer for the sake of principle - why not in name as well?" The contradiction between the composers was rooted in their diametrically different artistic orientations and the fact that Atterberg was a leading personality in Swedish musical life and an advocate of the romantic national identity. Pergament on the other hand, belonged to a more modernist phalanx, together with Gösta Nystroem and Hilding Rosenberg.
After the end of World War II, Atterberg was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. At his own request, an investigation was set up by the Royal Academy of Music. The investigation could neither confirm nor dismiss suspicions of Nazi sympathies. However, after the war, Atterberg seems to have been marginalized and ostracized by at least some of his fellow Swedish composers.