Gösta Nystroem

Who was Gösta Nystroem?

Gösta Nystroem was a Swedish composer.

Nystroem, originally Nyström, was born in Silvberg, Sweden, a parish in the province of Dalarna, but spent most of his childhood in Österhaninge near Stockholm, at the time a small village but nowadays a suburban district. His father was a headmaster and an organist. In his younger days, Nystroem was both a composer and a painter, but when he was about thirty years old, he eventually decided to focus on music.

He studied composition in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Paris. Among his teachers in Paris were Vincent d'Indy and Leonid Sabaneyev. After living in France, mostly in Paris, for several years, he moved to Gothenburg on the Swedish west coast in the 1930s, where he also worked as a music critic. In the 1950s he settled in Särö, a rather wealthy village about twenty kilometres south of Gothenburg, where he had a house that originally belonged to the family of his first wife, Gladys Heyman, whom he married in 1921 in France. The couple had three daughters. Gladys died in 1946, and in 1950 Nystroem got remarried to Helen Lyon, who, like Gladys Heyman, came from an upper class Gothenburg family.