Conrad Baden

Conrad Baden was born in 1908 and received his basic musical training at the Music Conservatory in Oslo, where he qualified as an organist in 1931. He has also spent prolonged periods in Leipzig, Paris, and Vienna, studying under such notabilities as Jean Rivier, Arthur Honegger, and Hanns Jelinek. Baden has held three long-term appointments as a church organist, interspersed and concurrently with spells as a music critic and writer. He taught theory at the Music Conservatory in Oslo from 1947 on and was assistant professor at the Norwegian State Academy of Music from 1973 to 1978. As a composer Baden can look back on a large and varied series of works, both sacred and profane, ranging from simple songs, piano pieces, and organ pieces through chamber music to grandly conceived vocal compositions with orchestral accompaniment, including a Mass, several cantatas, six symphonies, orchestral pieces, and concertos. He describes himself as conservative with polyphonic leanings, but in his later compositions he has also revealed traces of having been influenced by, for example the twelve-tone technique. Baden´s orchestral works stand out in his production. These amount to some twenty compositions if we include the concertos. The Sinfonia Espressiva (1980) is so far considered to be the height of his symphonic production. His first symphonies, written in the 1950´s, bore strong traces of Viennese classical form. The symphonies from the 1960´s were in one movement and more concise. They could almost be called fantasies, in which some few thematic ideas are developed at the same time as new contrapuntal motifs are formed, the latter often subtly derived from the main ideas in the work.