String Quartets Vol. 3

Up to Speed

By Thomas Michelsen

When he was just a young man, it was Vagn Holmboe’s (1909–96) goal to write great works for choir and orchestra. He wrote in his diary for 1928–33 that he wanted to compose ‘about 10 symphonies’, and through the decades he more than achieved this target. He became his generation’s great Nordic symphonist, producing 13 symphonies as well as his Sinfonia in memoriam and four single-movement works he called symphonic metamorphoses.

But the path towards Holmboe’s eventual standing as an acknowledged symphonist, professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and his dominant position in Danish musical life was long and hard, for the young Jutlander from Horsens had almost no qualifications when he was admitted to the Academy in Copenhagen at the age of 16 in December 1926.

The three years he spent studying at the Academy were followed up with hours spent with the composer Ernst Toch in Berlin. But Holmboe was not yet ‘up to speed’: that required further private coaching with his most important teacher at the Copenhagen Academy, Finn Høffding, in the first half of the 1930s, before Holmboe in 1939 could finally make his mark with his Symphony No. 2, which earned him first prize in a competition organised by the Royal Danish Orchestra. Vagn Holmboe was his own fiercest critic, and an even longer time passed before he was satisfied with his efforts as a composer of string quartets. He had the greatest respect for the classics, and for the string quartet as a genre. Because he took so long to reach the level he wanted, he ended up writing no fewer than ten quartets that he consigned to boxes before he could finally write out the first two that he gave opus numbers in 1949. Two quartets, which together with his 3rd quartet, premiered in 1951, bear the consecutive opus numbers 46–48, and mark Holmboe's maturation based on the compositional method that became his own, namely metamorphosis.

Vagn Holmboe, 1968 (private photo)

Holmboe began working on his String Quartet No. 4, Op. 63 in December 1953. By this point, he had fully mastered the compositional technique he was using, and was finally operating at his full creative capacity. Although his 1st quartet had been extremely well-received, even seen as a milestone in 20th century Danish music, the 4th quartet surpassed its acclaimed predecessors in richness and confidence.

Holmboe’s well-known student, Per Nørgård, has pointed to his teacher’s first four quartets as the group of Holmboe works which, with the Symphony No. 8, Sinfonia boreale, had meant the most to him. The 4th quartet is dedicated to Nørgård.

Over the years Holmboe increasingly repurposed musical material that had not found a place in one piece by including it in a later work. Due to the nature of the metamorphosis process of continuous development, his pieces increasingly became interconnected strands of a unified musical stream. Much of the material of the 4th quartet stems from a solo sonata for violin that he had worked on in the early 1950s. Like quartets 2 and 3, it is in five movements, with Holmboe ratcheting up the emotional intensity from the outset in a work that starts in D but harmonically speaking treats that as the dominant in a quartet, that ends in G major.

The process of metamorphosis which can be found crystalised in Holmboe’s first opus numbered quartets involves developing the music from a seed of a few tones forming one or a few intervals as the starting point for a widely branched motivic development. In String Quartet No. 4, this consists of a five-note motive, D-E-F-Gb-F, that can be heard from the outset in the 1st violin, which is then worked on, transformed, expanded, split apart, combined contrapuntally in various forms and compressed. This process governs the 1st movement with its emotionally ‘pressed’ intervals of seconds.

The 2nd movement of the quartet is based on the five-tone seed motif in a new, muted and nervous form, now in G minor, with fleeting, furtive gestures which continuously retract into a sotto voce that fades to a hazy ending, ‘wholly misty’, according to Holmboe’s instructions to the Koppel Quartet who premiered the work. The 3rd movement is brooding and dark. It treats the kernel motive in a fugal manner, before the music glides into the mere 16 bars long, almost frozen 4th movement. A short intermezzo, it begins with the kernel motive inverted, split up into octave-displaced single notes in a pointillistic way reminiscent of Webern. Release finally comes with the 5th movement, which after an intense run in the minor brings sensations of spring, light and birdsong as well as reminiscences of folk dance. Folk music remained a touchstone of authenticity for Holmboe throughout his life.

Speaking of folk music and music from other periods and cultures, it appears altogether in a tonality one can describe as G major, but which is mixolydian-tinged, played so that the music becomes ‘as light, clear and bright as possible’, as Holmboe instructed the Koppel Quartet, who premiered the five movements in January 1955.

The premiere of the 4th quartet gave rise to great excitement, not least from the critic of the newspaper Information, who said that ‘this year’s Danish chamber music event has come to pass only eight days into 1955’ – and now that Holmboe had finally found his legs as a metamorphosis composer, production could continue.

The String Quartet No. 5, Op. 66 in three movements was written the same year, and runs for a little over 20 minutes in this recording, less than its predecessors. It had its Danish premiere at a concert in Kolding in February 1956, given by Den Nye Danske Kvartet (The New Danish Quartet). The performance is described in the printed score as having been the first, despite a number of newspapers reporting that the quartet had already played the work in Paris.

It is labelled with the word, ‘metamorphosis’ in its title, and the beautiful and nearly weightless music begins with a dark kernel motive consisting of a turn of a major second down followed by a turn of a minor second up, played in unison by all four strings: C#-B-C#-D-C#. The musical metamorphosis process immediately commences, as in all of Holmboe’s mature works, and as already in the 1st quartet and so often later in Holmboe's output, a leading role is assigned to the viola, which initiates the quartet’s slow 2nd movement and also plays the final articulated statement before the deep C# in the cello descends a minor second to C at the very end. Here the motive from the 1st movement has in a sense pupated before taking wing in a surprising new upward form, as the final movement reveals a light and energy that allows the dark work to end in the same key as the 4th quartet – G major.

Holmboe published his book, Mellemspil (Intermezzo) in 1961. In it he defended metamorphosis as an alternative to the avant-garde practices of the time, serialism and aleatoric music. He wrote that metamorphosis could unfold in two ways, either ‘through a continuing development’ or ‘through a complete working through of the basic material, an exhaustion of all its possibilities, an atomising of its forces’. It is the first of these types that we experience in the 5th quartet – the development through stages or movements is clear, while the working-through of the kernel motive and its intervals permeate the work. The metamorphic process that leads organically from one manifestation to another justifies Holmboe’s use of progressive tonality so that, seen tonally, the music ends in a different place to that in which it began.

There is a gap of around a quarter century between the 5th quartet and Holmboe’s String Quartet No. 16 from 1981, which is the last of his standalone, completed quartets. After it come only the four six movement quartets, numbered 17–20, which together realise his longstanding ambition to musically depict the 24 hour cycle of a day, as well as the unfinished Quartetto sereno, Op. 197, which Holmboe was working on at the time of his death.

In the spring of 1982, not many months after the composer had published his definitive musical manifesto in the form of a book, Det uforklarlige (The Inexplicable), Københavns Strygekvartet (The Copenhagen String Quartet) celebrated their 25th anniversary by premiering this work, the industrious composer’s opus 146. Though the Koppel Quartet were, initially, the ensemble which most frequently gave the first performances of Holmboe’s string quartets, as the years passed it was the Copenhagen String Quartet led by first violinist, Tutter Givskov, that he collaborated with.

Holmboe’s two greatest composer influences were Bartók, whom he had admired since he was young, and Haydn, for whose music he developed increasing esteem over the years. In most of his early and middle period quartets, Holmboe had structured his material in three or five movements, inspired by Bartók’s palindromic forms. But the 16th quartet follows the Viennese Classical model in its layout, with four movements, an allegro, a scherzo, a slow movement and a rapid finale.

By the 1980s, Holmboe had become Danish musical life’s ‘grand old man’. Respected and canonised, but also somewhat overshadowed by the arrival of a new generation, largely consisting of his own students. Nevertheless – or perhaps for precisely that reason – it was Holmboe, that, in October 1982, was selected to be the first featured composer in a series of portrait-concerts, ‘Meeting the Composer’ at Louisiana. The art museum had already released his 4th quartet on record played by the Koppel Quartet in the early 1960s, and the fall 1982 concert spanned from Holmboe’s 1st quartet and his Japanese-inspired Moyasongs to newer works like the 16th quartet.

However, the critic Jan Jacoby did not hide his opinion that Holmboe had become stagnant in the early 1980s: ‘Holmboe’s composition workshop’, he wrote in Politiken after the concert, ‘drifts aimlessly with an uncommitted, lightly diverting tone ...’

This prompted the Copenhagen String Quartet’s cellist Asger Lund Christiansen to defend Holmboe in the same newspaper. But interestingly, the critic’s point corresponds directly to what Holmboe himself had noted earlier that same year in the third and last volume of his diary, where he considers whether he ought to renew himself artistically.

From a laborious beginning, which had seen him work at his own professional development well into the 1930s to realise his artistic ambitions, the composer in the 1980s was overtaken by new trends and younger colleagues. His music functioned perfectly, but it also prompted calls for renewal.
 

The text is based on Thomas Michelsen’s biography of Vagn Holmboe, Det dybe og det rene (The Deep and the Pure) (Multivers, 2022).