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Symphonies 9-11

Rued Langgaard

Symphonies 9-11

Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Thomas Dausgaard

Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was an odd, lonely figure in Danish music. His 16 symphonies make up a thought-provoking, original contribution to the history of the symphony - on the borderline between Romantic idealism and beauty on the one hand and the doubt, fragmentation and absuridty of the modern world on the other. The works on this CD were written within a period of four years, but range wide in musical style. The light, classical-romantic Symphony No. 9 is followed by the dramatic evocation of nature in Symphony No. 10, which takes the form of a symphonic poem in the spirit of Strauss. With Symphony No. 11 the composer plunges into deep water with a demonstrative and provocative symphony.

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Total runtime: 
54 min.
Rued Langgaard

Rued Langgaard is an outsider in Danish music. His Late Romantic and Symbolist back-ground and his passionate views on art and the role of the artist brought him into conflict with the sober, anti-Romantic view of art that reigned supreme in Denmark in the inter-war years. Langgaard did not shrink from the visionary and experimental, the eccentric and extreme, and his music ventured into areas where the outlooks, musical styles and qualitative norms of the twentieth century break down.

Rued Langgaard was born in 1893, the son of a highly respected Copenhagen piano teacher, Siegfried Langgaard, who was also active as a composer and was greatly preoccupied with musical/philosophical speculations along Theosophical lines. Langgaard’s mother was a pianist too, and he had his basic musical education from his parents. In 1905, at the age of 11, he made his debut as an organ improviser in Copenhagen, and when he was 14 his first major orchestral and choral work was performed. But the young composer got off to a bad start, since the reviewers gave it the thumbs-down; and in fact Langgaard never succeeded in being properly accepted either by the press or by the musical powers-that-be in Denmark.

So in 1911, when Rued Langgaard had completed his hour-long First Symphony, it proved impossible to have the work performed in Denmark. Langgaard had been on several study trips to Berlin, accompanied by his parents, and the Langgaard family’s contacts with conductors like Arthur Nikisch and Max Fiedler led to a world premiere of the symphony in 1913 in Berlin by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Max Fiedler. Yet the overwhelming success enjoyed on this occasion by the 19-year-old composer did not result in a performance of the symphony in Denmark, and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 made it impossible for Langgaard to follow up his success in Germany itself.

The scepticism of the Danish musical establishment towards Langgaard meant that he had difficulty getting his compositions performed, and had to organize his own concerts to present his music. The expansive artistic development he experienced in the 1910s therefore went un­noticed by both critics and audiences. Important experimental works like Sinfonia interna (1915-16), Sfærernes musik (The Music of the Spheres) (1916-18), Symphony no. 6 (1919-20) and the opera Antikrist (1921-23) were either not performed or not understood in Denmark.

In this country Rued Langgaard was alone in striving for a visionary musical idiom as a continuation of the Romantic tradition with a Symbolist basis of the kind one finds in the works of Scriabin. The tendency in Denmark was towards a questioning of the whole Late Romantic spirit, and Langgaard had to go to Germany – at the beginning of the 1920s – to experience successful performances of his symphonies. Yet there was no question of any widespread or general interest in Langgaard in the south, and the performances soon ebbed out.

The years around 1924/25 marked a major turning-point in Langgaard’s life and music. After many years of openness and responsiveness to currents in the most recent music – not least in Carl Nielsen’s progressive works – Langgaard changed tack and turned to a Romantic, pastiche-like style with Niels W. Gade and Wagner as his mentors. He indicated that he felt betrayed by the age and by the musical establishment, and he hit out at Carl Nielsen, who in his view had a status that was far too guru-like. The result was that Langgaard was now given the cold shoulder in earnest. After 1930 concert performances of his works became rare indeed (they were however given quite a few radio broadcasts, especially in the 1940s). He was unable to find a job as a church organist, although he applied for innumerable posts all over the country. He did not succeed until 1940, at the age of 47, when he was given the position as organist at the cathedral in Ribe in South Jutland. In Ribe Langgaard’s music entered a new phase in which the defiant, the jagged and the absurd became more prominent.

After Langgaard’s death in 1952 his name seemed threatened by oblivion; but in the 1960s the renewed interest in ‘neglected’ Late Romantics shed new light on Langgaard: it was discovered that although Langgaard had fundamentally been a conservative composer, there were features in his music that strangely prefigured the static music, collage music and minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today innumerable of his 431 compositions have been recorded, his output and life have been recorded in book form, and his works, most of which are still unprinted, are being published.

Further information: www.langgaard.dk

Langgaard as symphonist

One has to look hard through the music of
the twentieth century to find as long, distinctive and varied a series of symphonies as Langgaard’s. With 16 numbered symphonies – composed in 1908-1951 – he has only been exceeded quantitatively on Danish soil by Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000), who reached number 24. Langgaard’s symphonies vary enormously in duration, form and tonal idiom. No clear development from No. 1 to No. 16 is evident, but there are interfaces between Symphonies 3 and 4, 6 and 7 and 10 and 11. The formal extremes are the great Late Romantic Symphony No. 1 (60 mins.) and the monothematic one-move­ment Symphony No. 11 (6 mins.). There are vocal elements in Symphonies 2, 3, 8, 14 and 15, and Symphony No. 3 is in reality a piano concerto. In the musical style, the Romantic and Late Romantic preponderate, but there are striking examples of forms of expression that are a match for the progressive idioms of the period (Symphony No. 6 and the beginning of No. 15).

Langgaard had no wish to create an independent, original, modern musical language. On the contrary, he deliberately took his point of departure in the legacy of Gade, Wagner, Tchai­kov­sky and Richard Strauss. On the face of it some of the works in fact sound as if they were composed 50-75 years too late. But viewed as a whole Langgaard’s symphonic cycle is an original and thought-provoking contribution to the musical history of the twentieth century. In the first six symphonies he tries out the possibilities of the genre in very different styles. From Symphony No. 7 the outsider emerges in earnest with the paradoxical and hazardous project of demonstrating the continued relevance and potential of the Romantic aesthetic in a modern, secularized age.

The tonal idiom of the Romantic epoch exhibits ‘truth’ in Langgaard’s view, because it communicates a spiritual message that is generally comprehensible. Langgaard therefore culls all the shelves of Romanticism uninhibitedly, but often gives the familiar a special new emphasis and puts it in an unconventional setting, such that the demonstrative, abrupt and theatri­cal emerge. One feels a sense of awe, but also of distance from the Romantic clichés. In order to be understood, Langgaard felt that he had to go to extremes, and with Symphonies 11 and 12 in particular the concept of the symphony is pushed to the point of absurdity. Thus Lang­gaard sacrifices his own role as declared exponent of a harmonious message of beauty. The conservative, nostalgic composer at the same time becomes a modern ‘divided’ composer who relates with seismographic sensitivity, if not desperation, to his time and his isolated situation.

The concept of Late Romanticism is not adequate to Langgaard’s symphonies if in using it one thinks of organic breadth, great contrasts and symphonic climaxes. Langgaard is as a rule firm and succinct in his formulations and rhapsodic in his form. One can see an affinity with ‘effective’ utility music like Korngold’s film music or Prokofiev’s ballet music; but unlike Korngold, Langgaard eschews all sentimentality. It is characteristic that the symphonies begin pithily and clearly – there are no slow, searching introductions. And it is the mood and character of the beginning that institute the development of a work, not a predetermined form such as sonata form. With the one-movement form he often uses, Langgaard can maintain an evocative world peculiar to the work throughout its course.

The colourful titles express an insistence that music has a meaning beyond the musical, a mission religious in nature. Although Langgaard only began his career after the Symbolist epoch around 1900, it has proved fruitful to see Langgaard as a Symbolist artist. Each of the various stylistic idioms has its own symbolic meaning, and the sixteen works shed light on one another, together forming a universe with its own fascinating coherence.

Symphonies 9, 10 and 11

After Symphony No. 8 came a long pause in Langgaard’s symphonic creations. In the 1930s he wrote hardly anything but organ and piano music, as well as revisions of earlier compositions and reworkings of his father’s piano works. With his appointment in 1940 as cathedral organist in Ribe, Langgaard found a calm and secu­rity in his everyday life that was conducive to creation, and the inspiration to work with larger musical forms came back.

The German Occupation of Denmark in 1940-45 led to an increase in historical and national consciousness, and in keeping with this medieval Ribe furnished the programmatic material for Langgaard’s ninth symphony, From Queen Dagmar’s City, composed in 1942. Dagmar was a Bohemian princess who was married in 1205 to the Danish King Valdemar II. Historically, there is some doubt as to whether Dagmar was ever in Ribe, but the medieval ballads speak of both her arrival in the city and her death there in child­birth in the year 1212. The popular melody of the ballad “Queen Dagmar lies in Ribe” is played every day by the carillon in the large tower of Ribe Cathedral, and Langgaard incorporated it in the third movement of the symphony with the title Ribe Cathedral. The present recording includes the organ part (the score stipulates it as “ad libitum”), and the tubular bells of the orchestra are replaced by a recording of the cathedral’s authentic carillon. The scherzo movement The Dance at Riberhus refers to the royal castle of Riberhus, which perished in the seventeenth century. The old castle mounds on the outskirts of Ribe were archaeo­lo­gically investigated and described in 1941-42, the very time when the symphony was composed. The symphony was played for the first time on the radio in 1943 under the baton of Launy Grøndahl, and he included the two central movements in his programme many times in the subsequent years.

After this light, airy, classically oriented symphony in F major, Langgaard leapt back with Symphony No. 10 (1944-45) to the dramatic evo­cation of nature in a symphonic poem along the lines of Symphony No. 4 Leaf-fall – both symphonies are incidentally in the rare key of E flat minor. However, Symphony No. 10 was composed for a large orchestra with three piccolos (playing in unison!) and five clarinets. The title of the symphony, Yon Hall of Thunder, is a poetic name for the rocky peninsula of Kullen (Kullaberg) in Scania, Sweden, borrowed from an Ossian-inspired poem by Steen S. Blicher (1817). Langgaard spent 26 summers at Kullen, and the symphony is an expres­sion of his love for the landscape there. But the composer also had another agenda, hinted at by the related motto from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act One):

“What if it tempt you to the dreadful summit of the cliff – ”

This is said by Horatio, who fears that the ghost of Hamlet’s father will lure Hamlet out into the perils of the sea. Langgaard had an idée fixe that the cliffs mentioned in the lines must have been Kullen on the other side of the Sound. After all, there is only a flat sandy beach by the bastions of Kronborg (“Elsinore”), where the ghost appears. But Langgaard loved ambivalence of expression and the dubious Kullen point is hardly the only reason why the composer chose this motto. It is evident from earlier suggested titles such as Flying Dutchman over Kullen that he regarded the work, with its clear reminiscences of Wagner and Richard Strauss, as a kind of ghost music. New music of such a conservative persuasion was viewed askance by the pace-setting circles in the Danish musical life of the day, and the motto is very probably an ironic comment on this fact. That is, take care with this alluring ghost music – you risk enchantment! That the music involves a particular personal symbolism is suggested by the quotation at the end from the Judgement Day hymn Sions vægter hæver røsten (“The watchman of Zion lifts up his voice”), an adaptation of Philipp Nicolai’s Wachet Auf (1599). The symphony was given its first performance on the radio in 1947 with Grøndahl as conductor. This recording presents the score for the first time in a new, critically revised edition.

With Symphony No. 11 (1944-45) Langgaard takes the symphonic genre to the point of absurdity and into a new category where one can view the work as a contribution to the debate on “the future of the symphony”, a declaration of war on the spirit of the age, or a desperate reflection of the world situation in January 1945, when the work was completed under the title Evighedskrig – “Eternal War”. After several suggestions Langgaard finally chose the title Ixion, thus giving the music specific programmatic content: Ixion was a figure in Greek myth who, as punishment for offending the gods, was fixed to an eternally rotating, flaming wheel. Langgaard undoubtedly felt that as an artist he had ended up in a similar situation. That he had been able to take things to such an extreme he regarded as an aesthetic victory, and he actually called the symphony “the summit of all music”.

The music consists of a fragmentary waltz theme that is repeated 11 times. The whole orchestra plays fortissimo and at first one senses few changes; but the thematic periods are in fact of different lengths and there is constant modulation. Towards the end four extra tubas enter, which Langgaard wanted placed in front of the orchestra. They play (in unison) a seventh-chord motif which, with note lengths of 5, 7, 9 and 12 crotchets, crosses the rhythms of the waltz music. Could this be the last trump? Does the flourish at the end mark the death of the symphony and the end of Romantic music? Or is the symphony just a desperate composer’s expression of powerlessness? The work is open to interpretation.

The symphony was given its first performance on Danmarks Radio in 1968 and hitherto has only been performed once in concert.

Bendt Viinholt Nielsen

Release date: 
November 2001
Cat. No.: 
8.224182
FormatID: 
CD
CoverFormat: 
Jewel Case
Barcode: 
730099998222
Track count: 
6

Credits

Recorded at Danmarks Radio 7-8- April 1999 (No. 9), 12-13 January (No. 10) and 23 June 1999 (No. 11)
Recording producers: Michael Pedersen (No. 9 and 11) and Preben Iwan (No. 10)
Sound engineer: Jørn Jacobsen
Editing engineer: Preben Iwan

Publisher: Edition Samfundet

This CD has been recorded in cooperation with Danmarks Radio

Cover picture: J.F. Willumsen: Himmelgåden" (1938)"

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