Rued Langgaard

* Symphony No. 4 "Leaf Fall"
* Symphony No. 5 (version I)
* Symphony No. 5 (version II) "Steppe Landscape (Summer Legend Drama)"

Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard
Dacapo 8.224215 {DDD} TT: 57:17

Summary for the Busy Executive: Not quite my cuppa.

We know of composers who lived long enough to see their style superseded.
Most people recognize Richard Strauss, who died in 1949 and by then was
regarded as a relic.  The wonderful and little-known Georg Schumann (no
relation to Robert), who blended Brahms and Wagner, hung on, a
late-nineteenth-century Romantic, well into the nineteen-fifties.  On
the other hand, the case of Rued Langgaard, Danish symphonist, quacks
like the oddest duck that ever waddled.  Langgaard, born after Nielsen
and of the generation of Milhaud and Poulenc, sounds like he wrote twenty
to thirty years before.  He deliberately rejected Modernism, just as
other composers enthusiastically took it up.

Most composers so self-consciously retro produce pale imitations of
somebody who did it better.  While it's hypothetically possible to
write a wonderful piano sonata in the style of Haydn two hundred years
after the fact, as far as I know only Carlos Chavez has done so.  Those
listeners waiting for the Mahler Eleventh or the Tchaikovsky Eighth
really ought to spend their time more profitably on something else and
then be pleasantly surprised when such beasts show up.  Tonality may
have come back, but it's neither Brahms's tonality nor that of the classic
moderns, like Piston and Stravinsky.  In short, like it or not, the
Modern period has made its influence felt with most dedicated composers
-- that is, excluding the home hobbyists.

And then there's Langgaard.  I must admit, the music divides me.
Langgaard doesn't fall into the usual traps, mostly because he doesn't
follow the usual paths.  One describes the fourth symphony, for example,
with difficulty.  It doesn't use themes in the usual sense or even cells,
and it certainly doesn't put things together in normal symphonic ways.
It falls into thirteen marked sections, none of which have very much to
do with one another, and all played without pause.  At any particular
time, one might reasonably feel as if one has just dropped into the
middle of a symphony by Sibelius.  The musical language itself poses no
difficulties.  Unlike a Sibelius symphony, however, it lacks a symphonic
argument, as most of us have come to understand it.  It comes over as a
succession of localized textures, sharply defined, and gestures, in spite
of repetitions here and there.  For Langgaard, music seems feeling, first
and foremost, and feeling is all.  We seem to hear the soundtrack to an
internal drama.  The good news is that there is indeed feeling and drama
in the music.  The liner notes suggest that it represents an "autumn
diary," as good a description as I can think of.  Like a diary, one gets
the intensity of the moment, particularly the momentary disappointments
and downs as well as the rare up, without necessarily the perspective
on a life as a whole.  For instance, toward the end, there's a mind-blowing
passage titled "Sunday Morning Bells," in which the orchestra, minus the
percussion section, does a Straussian imitation of a carillon.  However,
it relates to nothing else in the work, and I know of no aesthetic law
that says it must.  Yet I miss a certain overarching perspective -- the
sensation I get when after hearing the entire Brahms Fourth, I suddenly
understand how the very first measures of the opening movement have bound
large sections of the entire symphony together.

The fifth symphony exists in two versions, finished roughly five years
apart, which Langgaard actually labeled Version I and Version II.  Some
of the same ideas carry over from the early version to the late, but
they really are two different works.  The first version, completed in
1926, has its Modern moments and, I think, in its insistence on simple
figures, shows the influence of late Nielsen.  Again, it consists of
sections played without pause and runs a little over fourteen minutes.
It hangs together a little better than the fourth but, again, not in a
symphonic way; the individual sections cohere, but not the whole.  Like
the fourth, it boasts astonishing expressive "touches," especially the
finale, with shimmering, sliding strings and a solo violin as rhythmically
untethered as Nielsen's snare drum in his Fifth.  Essentially, it's a
programmatic piece, rather than a symphony, on the order of Strauss at
his architecturally loosest, about a water spirit who plays unearthly
music to lure humans to their deaths.

Langgaard embarked on the second version mainly because he wanted to
tighten things up.  To a very large extent, he succeeds.  This symphony
combines Nielsen and Sibelius in idiom.  The Nielsen influence would
have rankled Langgaard, had he admitted it; he was fairly Oedipal when
it came to the older composer.  But the fact remains: the sounds here
are even more Nielsen-like than in the earlier version.  The architecture
lies nearer sonata form, although one would come closer to the truth to
call it a "sonata with episodes," somewhat like Strauss's Don Juan.  As
far as I'm concerned, it's all to the good.  Langgaard's very powerful
inspiration doesn't dissipate, as it does when he follows the will-o'-the-wisp
of a "neat idea."  One sees large sections of the symphony in a relation
to one another other than the merely programmatic.  And it's certainly
Langgaard who commandingly draws the relationships.  One loses individual
"shockers" of passages, like the solo violin of the first version, but
one gains in that each idea in the second makes an ever-stronger impression
as the symphony proceeds.

Dausgaard and the Danes do wonderful, insightful work.  To some extent,
Langgaard is so out of the mainstream that mainly those rare birds who
have something to contribute actually perform him.  God help him if he
ever became fashionable.  The sound is fine, though not fabulous.

Steve Schwartz