A Winter's Tale (Larsson)
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| A Winter's Tale | |
|---|---|
| by Lars-Erik Larsson | |
 The composer | |
| Native name | En vintersaga |
| Opus | 18 |
| Composed | 1938 |
| Publisher | Gehrmans Musikförlag (1945) |
| Duration | Approx. 9 minutes[1] |
| Movements | 4 |
A Winter's Tale (in Swedish: En vintersaga; subtitled: Four Vignettes after Shakespeare (Fyra vinjetter till Shakespeares)), Op. 18, is a four-movement suite for orchestra written from 1937 to 1938 by Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson. The Epilogue (No. 4) is often performed and recorded as a stand-alone concert piece.
Beginning in 1937, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation—the country's national, publicly funded radio—employed Larsson as a composer-in-residence, music producer, and conductor;[2] his main task was to write music to accompany various radio programs.[3] One of Larsson's colleagues was the Swedish poet Hjalmar Gullberg, who had joined Swedish Radio the year before and headed its drama division.[4] Together, the two men developed a genre of popular entertainment they called the "lyrical suite",[a] which alternated recited poetry with musical interludes.[5][4][6] Larsson's first commission of this type was to compose four orchestral vignettes to accompany the 1938 radio recitation of a Swedish-language translation Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; he subsequently published these as A Winter's Tale.
Structure
A Winter's Tale, which lasts about 9 to 10 minutes, is in four movements. They are as follows:[1]
- Siciliana: Andantino
- Intermezzo: Allegro leggiero
- Pastoral: Allegretto pastorale
- Epilogue (Epilog): Andante
