Sinfonie Nr.9 Allan Pettersson

für Orchester

Studienpartitur

Pettersson's Symphony No.9 was composed in 1970, as a commission for the celebration of the 350th anniversary of the founding of the city of Göteborg. It was premiered on February 18 of 1971, performed by the Göteborg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergiu Comissiona. A work formed by a single movement that lasts over an hour, being the most extensive of its production.

Like many of Pettersson's symphonies, his ninth can be described as an extended struggle in which harmony is the ultimate winner. Interviewed in connection with the first performance of his Symphony No.2, he maintained: "If one fights one's way through a symphony, one needs to achieve consonance and harmony even if it takes twenty hours to do it. That is why the new symphony turned out to be rather long. It had to achieve harmony in spite of the nervous content, and the extreme tension." He made this comment in the context of a much earlier symphony, but it applies equally well to Symphony No.9. Thus, the work can be regarded as a quest for ultimate resolution.

It begins with a chromatic phrase interpreted by the bassoons, violas and cellos that ends in a dissonance. As an indication that many dissonant passages will be heard during the symphony. This motif will be developed through a dynamic of blocks, during which certain chromatic structures will be repeated. After this deeply atonal introduction, the music becomes more aggressive, relaxing a bit in a part full of frantic repetitions, which increase their rhythm until their partial resolution in the form of a polyphonic passage. The music continues its atonal character, producing a state of dramatic tension that seems to stop, becoming more meditative but following the same atonal principles. Several descending scales appear, re-creating an obsessive climate through frequent repetitions of chromatic phrases accompanied by percussion. This leads us to a terrifying climax, like a black nightmare, through the repetition of brief motives. The intervention of the brass in strong phrases seems to want to stop this nightmare.

In the middle of the work, the initial structures are repeated and then enter a less aggressive process. The beginnings of tonal melodic phrases appear. The tension grows again until reaching a new climax, marked by percussion over repeated phrases with insistence. This leads to a kind of rupture. Choppy phrases take us, through a new climax, to a section apparently calmer, but that also contains a great tension that develops obsessively. Later a kind of hymn of great poetic force appears, presented partly by the brass. This hymn is developed by the strings, finding one of Pettersson's typical lyrical islands. The wood repeats it in tonal phrases. The treble of the flute leads us to a much more atonal part, returning the previous tension, but is finally stopped by a new hymn in a titanic struggle.

After this, the tense initial motives are presented to us again, continuing in a more relaxed way. The percussion leads us to a section in which the hymn resounds, with the tension gradually disappearing. The strings intervene, the treble ones begin a fight with the grave ones. Percussion continues with its funeral rhythms with a feeling of despair. The next section seems to want to offer some comfort, with its aerial figures, but ends up being dragged by the powerful funeral march, which, accompanied by a percussion in a very expressive way, totally dominates the scene. A sad hymn, played in unison by the first violins and cellos, will lead us to the end. The music has totally lost its aggressive character, reducing itself to an intense expressive song of great sadness and pain. This song will lead us to the coda, which ends the intense work with almost religious measures.

With this work ends the central part of Pettersson's symphonic work that has begun with the Sixth Symphony. It is the part most appreciated by the public and in which it reaches maximum expressiveness. This symphony, as in its time was the sixth, announces a new change in the style of its author, becoming more atonal. The ninth symphony is the end of a stage, in which we have the strong contrast between aggressive atonal motives, which create the great tension accumulated in the first half of the work, showing all their pain and fierce rage against life and human misery, to finish in a way that we can not say bright, but with a kind of song, perhaps hope as it seems to indicate in the coda.