Songs

Rediscovering a Forgotten Voice

By Thomas Husted Kirkegaard

Tekla Griebel Wandall never imagined she would become a composer. Although she received early instruction in singing, piano, and music theory from her German father, Theodor Griebel, she had seen how gruelling and poorly paid a life in music could be. Theodor had come to Copenhagen to work as a second violinist in H.C. Lumbye’s renowned Tivoli Orchestra, but his tenure was short-lived. During Tekla’s childhood, he made a living teaching music from morning till night – and in the evenings, he played at dances in the city’s taverns.

Tekla had grown up believing she would become a draughtswoman or a painter. She inherited a remarkable talent for drawing from her mother, Camilla Andresen, and at fifteen she was admitted to the Women’s School of Drawing in Copenhagen, but she became a composer after all. While a student, she attended a performance of Arrigo Boito’s opera Mefistofele (1868) at the Royal Danish Theatre. As she recalled in her memoirs, the experience changed everything: as if by magic, she knew she was destined to write opera – indeed, that she already was a composer at heart. She immediately began writing an opera, enrolled at the Copenhagen Conservatory, and during the 1890s made her debut as a composer of vocal, ballet, and operatic works.

Her later obscurity tells a tragic story: one of likely severe postpartum depression, a failed marriage and a life of poverty in which she, like her father, struggled to make ends meet by teaching music, leaving little time for composition. This makes her determination all the more remarkable: she composed throughout her life, even as performances of her works after 1900 became increasingly rare. She had a particular fondness for songs, which form the core of her oeuvre. Perhaps this was because songs, being smaller in scale than opera and more likely to be performed, allowed her to realise her true passion: music that was narrative, expressive and closely tied to action and text. She wrote no symphonies and very little instrumental chamber music, highlighting that her gift lay in the interplay between the expressive worlds of music and language.

Music as Storytelling
Griebel Wandall’s lifelong passion for opera, theatre and dramatic music is evident throughout this album. It opens with Five Songs, one of the five collections published at her public debut as a composer in 1893. Among these diverse songs, her setting of J.P. Jacobsen’s poem ‘Det bødes der for’ (‘A reckoning is due’) stands out; it is a poem that several Danish composers had also set.

The poem conveys a sombre moral: that every smile or moment of happiness is fleeting, and sorrow, the true undercurrent of life, holds no dreams and always returns stronger. In Griebel Wandall’s setting, the otherwise static poem acquires a vivid narrative dimension. The song begins in G minor, yet in the first verse attempts are made to modulate to various major keys. Phrases end with hopeful gestures that almost carry us from minor to major – but, naturally, there is a reckoning, and we are drawn relentlessly back into the minor.

As the song unfolds, the verses become harmonically and metrically varied, while attempts to break the minor mode gradually diminish. By the final verse, all evasions have vanished, and the expression is resigned. The musical progression can be understood through the recurring refrain, ‘Der rinder harm, rinder sorg af roser røde’ (‘From red roses flows both bitterness and sorrow’). This is initially sung to a melody reflecting the opening piano motif, where each note is accented, as if charged with special significance, perhaps symbolising the sorrow explored in the poem. In the first three refrains, this motif is only briefly followed before the singer leaps into a dissonant interval in a painful attempt to escape sorrow.

By the final refrain, after the resigned verse, the melody follows the full opening motif. The narrator, who initially denied sorrow by constantly seeking to escape the minor key and the piano motif, has now reconciled herself with it. In this way, Griebel Wandall creates a narrative of transition from denial to reconciliation. It is characteristic of her songs that immediate, expressive power is combined with subtle, carefully considered layers that reveal themselves only on repeated listening.

In other songs, her narrative interest is more direct. Some draw their texts from larger epic works: for instance, the text for ‘Rinda, min brud’ (‘Rinda, my bride’) comes from a scene in Adam Oehlenschläger’s novel Hroars saga (1817), where the Swedish prisoner King Skalk sings a lonely song in a prison tower the day before the Danes plan to sacrifice him to the gods. This scene, and much else from Hroars saga, Griebel Wandall would later expand in her ambitious but never staged opera Kong Hroars skjalde (The Bards of King Hroar) (1892–1925). In Drei Lieder für eine tiefere Stimme (Three Songs for a Lower Voice), the song ‘Mater Dolorosa’ is drawn from a scene in Goethe’s Faust, where the unhappy Gretchen sings to the Virgin Mary, saying that only she can feel and understand the depths of Gretchen’s pain.

Dramatic Poetry
The album also features the collection Five Songs from Oscar Madsen’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ . Here, Griebel Wandall has set music to some of the songs appearing in The Flying Dutchman by the Danish author Oscar Madsen. The work is described as ‘dramatic poetry’ and is a play in verse, with a number of interpolated songs to which Griebel Wandall has here given melody and form.

In ‘I klitten gror ej roser’ (‘No roses grow in dunes’), the melancholy and lovesick Karen sings daydreamily while wandering the dunes of north-west Jutland, where the action is set. In the song ‘Den flyvende hollænder’ (‘The Flying Dutchman’), the fisherman Lars recounts the myth of the infamous ghost ship, with Griebel Wandall musically portraying the shift from calm weather to the raging waves that follow the ship. In ‘Jeg pynted’ mig så faur og fin’ (‘I dressed myself so fair and fine’), Karen returns, this time in her storming passion for the sailor Ole, who proves to be both absent and distant, at sea as well as at home.

In the fourth song, ‘Drages du ung fra det fædrene tag’ (‘Drawn young from father’s roof’), a possible explanation for Ole’s absence is given: a captain sings of the Flying Dutchman as a personification of the sea’s call, an irresistible wanderlust that every sailor must follow. The final song, ‘Arions sang’ (‘Arion’s Song’), is sung by Arion himself, court poet to the sea-king in a fantastical realm beneath the waves. Here, Arion tells how he abducted Agnete, Karen’s friend, as a sacrifice to the sea-king.

Humour and Irony
In Five Songs from Oscar Madsen’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’, humorous touches abound, as in the line ‘du kan tro, at du glemmer din skraver og letter dit sløje kadaver!’ (‘you can be sure you’ll forget your slumber and lift your feeble carcass!’), and in some songs Tekla Griebel Wandall cultivates the ironic in particular. This is heard, for example, in ‘Saphire sind die Augen dein’ (‘Sapphires are those eyes of yours’), set to a text by Heinrich Heine. Here, the narrator longs for his beloved, a woman with eyes like sapphires and lips like rubies, dreaming himself away: thrice happy is the man whom those eyes behold and whose lips they kiss! The deep and unattainable longing is underscored musically by a constant striving for a key that is never reached.

Eventually, it turns out that this happy man is a real person, and the narrator dreams himself away again: if only he were alone with this happy man in the forest! Birdlike trills in the piano hint that we are now almost at the longed-for key, but here the piano suddenly erupts in murderous stabs, a chilling tone painting that pulls the rug from under the song’s stereotypical romantic symbolism. The ending is a sigh of relief, a well-satisfied smile. What we thought was a romantic fantasy turns out to be a macabre murder fantasy. The irony is as shocking and grotesque as it is amusing and teasing. Heine’s poem exposes the less flattering sides of hopeless infatuation, while Griebel Wandall’s music goes all in on building an inner romantic longing that suddenly cracks.

The Wandall Family Texts – and Her Own Tekla Griebel Wandall drew her texts from both famous and lesser-known writers, from the now-forgotten Oscar Madsen to J.P. Jacobsen and Heinrich Heine. Also among the forgotten was her husband, Frederik Wandall, whom she married in 1902. She hoped his steady income as a catechist would give her time to compose, but once married, Frederik resigned from his job when he realised he was not a believer. Instead, he tried his hand as a poet under the pseudonym Erik Dall, without great success. This meant that it fell to Griebel Wandall to support the family, including their son Svend, born in 1904. The songs ‘Jeg ville gerne’ (‘I wish I could’) and ‘O glem det ej!’ (‘Oh, forget it not’) have texts by Frederik Wandall and give a glimpse into the collaboration and harmony between what Svend later called ‘two artistic souls’. Text by Frederik’s sister, Emilie Wandall, is found in ‘Der kom en liden sangfugl (‘Den vanvittige’)’ (‘A little songbird came – The madman’).

Tekla Griebel Wandall, a trained composer and draughtswoman, was also an author and used her own texts: in 1915 she published a feminist novel Rigmor Vording , and she wrote numerous unpublished stories and poems. ‘Flyveren’ (‘The Aviator’), which closes this album, is one of these. The poem reflects the spiritual nerve that underpins her always narrative and rich musical language. Deeply interested in the esoteric current of Theosophy, which enjoyed a great flowering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she wrote the treatise Tonernes mikrokosmos (Microcosm of Tones), in which she explained on a Theosophical basis how the world of tones corresponded with the spiritual order of the entire universe; how tones, colours, and affects were intrinsically connected, so that all music always expressed more than just sound.

In ‘The Aviator’, we hear how the harmony of the spheres permeates not only nature and the gentle summer breezes, but also the quiet hum of humanity’s most modern technology, the aeroplane. As the aviator moves across the landscape toward distant shores, the machine’s deep, quiet drone is heard in the piano’s bass, along with the meditative, fluctuating melodies and harmonies that together capture ‘the eternal song of death and life’.

This release presents a selection from Tekla Griebel Wandall’s substantial song output, containing both songs published in the composer’s lifetime and songs that have lain hidden in archive drawers, unpublished until recently.

That these previously silent archives now come to life as sounding music again was something the composer herself believed in fully and firmly, even when she had been forgotten by the public towards the end of her life. As she wrote in a letter in 1917: ‘When we have a number of significant female composers, the first among them will surely be remembered.’ Though she was not the first – far from it – there is much to suggest she was right that her time would come. This premiere recording of her songs marks at least a first step toward giving Tekla Griebel Wandall’s music the place it deserves.

© Thomas Husted Kirkegaard, 2026

Thomas Husted Kirkegaard is a musicologist specialising in women in Danish music history.