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Tag: Danish composer

Rued Langgaard: A Rediscovered Genius

Here we are again, the birthday of Rued Langgaard. The months just fly by, don’t they?

Langgaard lived from 1893 to 1952. Despite a promising start – born to musical parents, a prodigious childhood, meetings with major conductors, and a symphony performed by the Berlin Philharmonic – his personal and creative eccentricities worked against him.

Langgaard was 46 by the time he managed to obtain a permanent job, as an organist at the cathedral in Ribe. It was the oldest town in Denmark, and situated far, far from Copenhagen, the center of Danish musical life. He would die in Ribe at the age of 59.

Langgaard composed over 400 pieces. Perpetually out of step with the times, and particularly with the tastes of his fellow Danes, performances of his music were scarce. He found himself ignored by the musical establishment, with the result that his achievements really only started to be recognized in the 1960s – 16 years after his death.

It was in 1968 that no less a personage than György Ligeti found himself on a jury alongside Danish composer Per Nørgård. In this capacity, he examined a large number of new scores by Scandinavian composers. Unbeknownst to his fellow jurors, Nørgård had slipped in the score of Langgaard’s “Music of the Spheres.” Ligeti became captivated by what he found. When the ruse was revealed, he exclaimed, with a twinkle in his eye, “Gentlemen, I have just discovered that I am a Langgaard epigone!”

Langgaard had anticipated some of the technical aspects – tone clusters, layers, and so forth – which would appear in Ligeti’s avant garde experiments of the 1960s, in works such as “Atmosphères.”

It was a Rued awakening that was long overdue.

Langgaard’s “Music of the Spheres” (1918):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j959i5k6RjM

Ligeti’s “Atmosphères” (1961):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0P1NnUFxc

PHOTOS: Kindred eccentrics, Rued Langgaard (top) and György Ligeti

July 28, 2015
Carl Nielsen Celebrates 150 Years

For you admirers of great Danes, today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s most celebrated composer.

It would be several decades following his death (in 1931, of heart disease) before Nielsen’s music really started to gain traction abroad. It was Leonard Bernstein who prophesied, “I think many people are in for pleasant surprises as they get to know Nielsen: his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability – all these are irresistible. I feel confident that Nielsen’s time has come.”

Though Bernstein put his money where his mouth was by turning in one of the great Nielsen recordings (of the Symphony No. 5, in 1962), the composer’s reputation failed to blossom in anywhere near the same way that Bernstein’s other “rediscovery,” Gustav Mahler, had. Even in the pantheon of Nordic symphonists, Nielsen has consistently sat at the feet of Jean Sibelius.

Which is really too bad. Nielsen’s music may be an acquired taste, but it is a rewarding one. There really is nothing else quite like it. The puckish wit, the ambiguities, the quirky juxtaposition of seemingly disparate melodies, harmonies and key signatures, all shot through very often with a sense of hope and optimism that rises above the chaos.

Here’s Lenny, conducting the Danes on their own turf, in what may be my favorite Nielsen symphony, the Symphony No. 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5sbcF7p0Pk

Happy birthday, Carl Nielsen!

PHOTO: In his most optimistic gesture, Nielsen wears white to a vineyard

June 9, 2015
Rued Langgaard Eccentric Danish Genius

Rued Langgaard, a name to challenge the English-speaking tongue if ever there was one, followed a vision quite unlike any other in Danish music. A precocious pianist, organist and composer, he studied theory under C.F.E. Horneman and later Vilhelm Rosenberg, with lessons in counterpoint, briefly, under Carl Nielsen.

His first compositions were published when he was 13. By the time he was 19, his first symphony was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic. After such a promising start, sadly it was all downhill from there.

Langgaard followed his own eccentric muse deep into the realm of late Romanticism at a time when most of the musical world was exploring modernist territory. Though he was given a state grant at 30, he failed to secure a permanent job until the age of 46, as an organist at the cathedral in Ribe, the oldest town in Denmark – which somehow seems appropriate for this most anachronistic of Danish outsiders.

An eccentric, shabby figure with wild hair, Laangaard died in Ribe 13 years later, in 1952, just shy of his 59th birthday, still largely unrecognized as a composer.

His reputation would not begin to gain traction for another 16 years. In all, he composed over 400 works, including 16 symphonies – which bear evocative titles such as “Yon Hall of Thunder” and “Deluge of the Sun” – and an opera, “Antikrist.”

Langgaard believed he was living in a corrupt age, the age of Antichrist, where the clash of good and evil was coming to a furious climax. The final movement of his “Music of the Spheres” suggests an encounter between Christ and his malevolent doppelganger.

“Music of the Spheres” was composed between 1916 and 1918. In the preface to the score, the composer describes the work as “celestial and earthly music from red glowing strings, on which life plays with claws of a beast of prey – life, with a crown of iris on its marble face and the stereotypical – yet living – demonic smile on its lily-white cheeks…”

The descriptive titles of the movements are as follows:

I. Like sunbeams on a coffin decorated with sweet-smelling flowers
II. Like the twinkling of stars in the blue sky at sunset –
III. Like light and the depths –
IV. Like the refraction of sunbeams in the waves –
V. Like the twinkling of a pearl of dew in the sun on a beautiful summer’s morning –
VI. Longing – Despair – Ecstasy –
VII. Soul of the world – Abyss – All Soul’s Day –
VIII. I wish…! –
IX. Chaos – Ruin – Far and near –
X. Flowers wither –
XI. Glimpse of the sun through tears –
XII. Bells pealing: Look! He comes –
XIII. The gospel of flowers – From the far distance –
XIV. The new day –
XV. The end: Antichrist – Christ

Here is Langgaard’s “Music of the Spheres”:

And his name pronounced by a native speaker, on Forvo:

http://www.forvo.com/word/rued_langgaard/

You go, Rued Langgaard! Happy birthday.

July 28, 2014

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