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Rued Langgaard: Sfaernes Musik (excerpt; 1916-1918)
From the album Music of the Spheres / Four Tone Pictures
Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) was a Danish composer in the grand tradition: prolific, eccentric, and obscure. His most ambitious and best known composition is the opera Antikrist, which was inspired by his mystical-eschatological religious beliefs. The rejection of this work by the Royal Theater in Copenhagen in 1925 played a part in Langgaard’s withdrawal from public musical life, which corresponded with a shift in his music from hyper-expressionist modernism to a more neo-Romantic style. He would be an outsider for the rest of his life, composing a vast body of more than 400 works in embittered isolation.
Sfaernes Musik (Music of the Spheres), composed from 1916 to 1918, was performed only once in Langgaard’s lifetime, in Germany in 1921. Made up of a series of distinct tableaux characterized less by thematic development than by the exploration of particular sonic moods and textures, this composition is vaguely reminiscent of a piece such as Debussy’s Jeux of 1913. But in its intensely quiet and static nature, its exploration of timbre and texture, Sfaernes Musik has few parallels before 1950. When it was rediscovered in the late 1960s, it was seen as a predecessor to the contemporary tendency toward Klangkomposition exemplified in the music of Ligeti, Penderecki, and others. Upon looking through the score, Ligeti supposedly exclaimed, “I didn’t know I was a Langgaard imitator!”
This roughly five-minute excerpt from Music of the Spheres comprises three distinct sections, labelled by Langgaard as follows: ”How dewdrops shimmer in the sun on a lovely summer morning,” ”Longing—Despair—Ecstasy,” ”World-soul—Abyss-All-souls.”
“Collage-like features, expressive of desperation and fragmentation, and a preoccupation with visions of destruction make Langgaard’s music distinctive, despite the often late Romantic and at times demonstratively retrospective nature of his musical language. He often went to extremes to achieve expressiveness, and his works frequently transcend traditional perceptions of musical form and temporal progression.” (Bendt Viinholt Nielson)
Played 131 time(s).
December 07, 2010, 5:45pm
