A Winter's Tale
by Lars-Erik Larsson
The composer
Native name	En vintersaga
Opus	18
Composed	1938 (1938)
Publisher	Gehrmans Musikförlag [sv] (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.

Background

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]

Instrumentation

A Winter's Tale is scored the following instruments:^[1]

• Woodwinds: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (in B♭), and 2 bassoons
• Brass: 2 horns (in F), 2 trumpets (in C), and trombone
• Percussion: timpani
• Strings: violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and harp

Gehrmans Musikförlag [sv] published the suite in 1945.^[1]

Recordings

The sortable table below lists commercially available recordings of A Winter's Tale:

Notes, references, and sources

Notes

References

Sources