My Friend Sigvard

Sigvard Hammar lived his life in a wheelchair, and while that is a true fact, it is perhaps one of the less important ones about him. Here’s another fact: Once you got to know Sigvard you forgot about the wheelchair – mostly.

He was a small man, and not much of him was functional except his brain, his mouth, and one hand. Nothing stopped him from doing anything. Anything. He traveled the world, he wrote columns which made people mad as hell, he loved classical music and opera especially.

It was impossible to forget his eyes; they burned past your brightly polished exterior, and before you knew it, you had the clear impression that Sigvard had burrowed into your core and was beginning to pull open the dresser drawers where you store your ideas, opinions, plans, hopes, and fears. Most of what he found, he tossed into the corners, but when he came across a part of you he found interesting, then the questions would begin, coming at you in a cascade. It was fun and exhausting.

If you asked him a question about himself, often he would deflect it….I knew him for over two decades and in spite of valiant attempts, I could tell you nothing about his growing up, just a little about his education, nothing about his family. He was the most interesting cipher I’ve known.

You should know that Sigvard was Swedish, worked as a columnist for several newspapers through his career and also as a music presenter for Swedish National Radio, and he began a chamber music festival in a small town in the North of Sweden. His live was spent in almost perpetual motion, in spite of his handicapped. (Friends, bear with me, not being able to walk ever is not a “challenge,” it is a handicap.)

He rolled into my life when I was program director at Minnesota Public Radio. I thought I was just being hospitable to colleagues from another public service broadcasting organization. What happened was that Sigvard changed my life.

He peeled back the smooth carapace of the touristy Sweden and made sure I met singers and conductors and instrumentalists and broadcasters and people in the recording business, the symphony business, the opera business, the music management business.
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åTwo of them were the baritone Hakan Hagegard and Elisabeth Soderstrom (because of the variability of the internet, I have not entered the Swedish diacritical marks which are an integral part of their names, and I hope they will forgive me.) You may remember Hakan from Ingmar Bergman’s film of The Magic Flute and his long and notable opera and recital career, and Soderstrom, now retired, was a performer of such intelligence and good judgment that I had wanted to meet her for years. So, we ended up making a radio series with them in Hakan’s country church in the west of Sweden.

That wouldn’t have happened without Sigvard and other friends of his in “the radio.” He was like a chef who took ideas and sprinkled them with people – or maybe it was the other way around. The chaos he created upset some, delighted most, himself particularly, and he managed his way around the world with the help of the magical Monika who calmed the waters he’d just passed through and loved him through all kinds of weather.

I last talked with Sigvard at Christmas. He said he had cancer, but it was nothing to worry about. He left us during the midsummer celebrations in Sweden. Typical of him to wait until everybody’s attention was somewhere else, and then he just slipped out a side door.

I shall miss him to the end of my time.