After receiving homophobic hate mail over a concert that included music by LGBT composers, a Swedish orchestra has responded by turning the messages into music.

The anonymous letter to the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra initially praised the great setting and fine wine served during the show, but went on to say the performance had made the sender “want to vomit”, and that the orchestra was “hopping aboard the fag train”. The writer said they would cancel their membership at the concert hall.

The composer Fredrik Österling wrote earlier in the year that the anonymous nature of the five-paragraph letter made it difficult to respond to the person or people sending it – but then the tenor Rickard Söderberg suggested turning it into music.



Österling told the website Queerty: “The hate letter I received reeked of contempt and fear for the love between human beings. I had no hesitation when Söderberg suggested that I should set it to music. By considering the text as an opera libretto, we were able to scrutinise the emotions that the anonymous sender was seeking to express. And at the same time, we are doing exactly what an artistic institution should be doing: we are reflecting our times in our art.”

The resulting cantata, Bögtåget (“The fag train”), was premiered by the orchestra on 26 May, as part of a performance that also featured the German composer Robert Schumann’s Frauen-Liebe und Leben. The latter was performed with a new orchestral arrangement by Österling, and sung by a man, changing the theme from a woman’s love over time for her husband to a more universal expression of life-long love in a relationship.

In advance of the performance, Söderberg posted a sample of the piece to his Facebook page, filmed while he was wearing an LGBT rights rainbow shirt. “I cannot let hate with such poetical ambitions go unnoticed,” he said in the post, expressing delight that he would be able to present the piece in the concert hall. Of the original letter writer, he observed: “It’s a shame that they cancelled their subscriptions, so that they cannot hear their nice libretto.”