Swedish Sea

Most people picture Vikings raiding westward — England, Normandy. Swedish Vikings mostly went east instead, down Baltic rivers as far as Byzantium and Baghdad, trading and raiding along the way. Archaeologists have pulled tens of thousands of Arab silver coins out of the ground on Gotland, payment from a route that, at its far end, touched India and China. Birka , Sweden's first real town, existed because of that route. The sea was the road, not the wall.

It's also a strange sea. The Baltic is nearly landlocked, brackish — about a fifth the salinity of the open ocean — and barely tides. In a hard winter it freezes solid enough to walk across: Stockholm has a long-distance ice-skating culture dating to a club founded in 1901, skaters today checking satellite ice maps before heading out across miles of archipelago that's open water every summer. A sea that periodically stops being liquid isn't the one Debussy or Britten grew up next to.

It could also kill you fast. In August 1628 the warship Vasa sailed from Stockholm harbor, guns loaded for a ceremonial salute, and sank twenty minutes later — too top-heavy to survive a gust of wind, thirty dead within sight of the dock. The wreck sat on the harbor floor for 333 years until it was raised in 1961, and 95 percent of the wood came up intact, sailors' sea chests still packed with food and clothes — the same cold, brackish, low-oxygen water that makes the Baltic hostile to normal sea life also kept the rot away. The sea that sank the ship preserved it whole.

Underneath all of it was herring — Baltic fisheries going back to the Viking age, then the money behind the Hanseatic League from the 1200s on. The archipelago wasn't scenery; it was a shipping lane, a fishing ground, and a border you had to read correctly.

Composers inherited all of that layered history when they started writing the coastline directly. Hugo Alfvén's Symphony No. 4, Från havsbandet ("At the Outer Edge of the Skerries"), is the sharpest example: he spent several weeks alone in the archipelago in 1918 before writing a note, then built the piece around a doomed love affair from his own youth — a declaration, a woman waiting through moonlit calm, a brief happy dawn, then a storm that ends it, the weather doing the emotional work a libretto usually does. It premiered in 1920 and reached Paris, Vienna, and Berlin within the year. Stenhammar, Atterberg, Nystroem, Rangström, and Wirén all returned to the same water in smaller ways — Wirén literally summered on an island in Alfvén's own archipelago decades later — but Alfvén's is the one that trusted the sea to carry the whole plot.

Why water keeps doing this for composers, across cultures with nothing else in common: it has no fixed pitch or beat, so there's no "correct" way to notate it, which frees a composer to invent a vocabulary and call it accurate. Tremolo strings and rolling arpeggios sit naturally under the hand, so it's technically easy to write as well as symbolically loaded — a shape with no fixed shape, ready to carry whatever the composer actually wants to say without saying it directly. Alfvén didn't write a piece about a breakup. He wrote a piece about the sea, and let the audience do the rest.

full score on IMSLP