Knudåge Riisager: the composer's humour is alive and well in Danish music
‘We
have the same sense of humour, the English and the Danes, don't we?'
There's a teetering pause. Backstage at the Symphony Hall in Aarhus,
composer Bo Holten has me fixed with expectant eyes and a burgeoning
grin. ‘That's why we get along so well, isn't it?'
In the moment, it feels like the most un-sidestep-able question ever
posed. After all, laughter isn't easily faked. Something's either funny
or it isn't. And as the silence grows longer, it seems that something in
this situation is. In our wry, standoffish exchange of smiles, there
are sprinklings of irony, farce and rancour. Laughter spontaneously
takes over, and the question has answered itself.
I smiled, initially, because I took Holten's theory as a great complement. He's a funny man - in person and in his art: The Visit of the Royal Physician
has become his most celebrated work of late, an opera not without its
own amusing streak that cuts readily through barriers both linguistic
and operatic.
Physician has been a hit in Denmark, mostly because it's an
imposing piece of music theatre but also, one suspects, because it
references a distinct tradition of humour in Danish creative life which
has long found a welcome home in music - theatrical and otherwise. A
strong theme in William J Harvey's 1915 survey of the country and its
people is their singular sense of humour. Harvey's delightful Denmark and the Danes is
woefully light on music - it covers off Carl Nielsen in less than 20
words - but it does allude to a national musical style that errs towards
rebellion and rarely feels entirely secure in its own seriousness. A
century on, Danish musicians still talk most often of ‘irony',
‘playfulness' and ‘wit' when asked for the watchwords of their country's
musical style.
Back at the Symphony Hall in Aarhus, Bo Holten is doing just that. He
talks of his own music,
and also that of fellow Dane 
Knudåge Riisager
(1897-1974), whose symphonic works the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra is in
the process of recording for Dacapo, with Holten as conductor.
I first happened upon Riisager via Petrol (‘Benzin'
in Danish), the filling-station ballet he created in 1928 with the help
of the Danish cartoonist and comedian Robert Storm Peterson (‘Storm P'
to his friends, of which Riisager was one of the closest). Owain Arwel
Hughes recorded the piece with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in
2007. In a sense, it's the perfect introduction to Riisager's mature
style. In France in the 1920s, studying with Roussel and hanging around
with Stravinsky and Les Six, Riisager moved his post-Nielsenesque voice
towards a certain brand of neo-Classicism, French in its aesthetic
thrust but with a noticeably Danish accent. That break-out lyricism so
beloved of Nielsen to some extent survived, together with an acerbic
edge that provided another degree of separation from the showiness of
the Parisians.
Petrol failed dismally. ‘The funny thing wasn't that it was a
thundering fiasco,' commented Riisager at the time, ‘but that when it
was played...one of the well-known critics wrote: "it will probably remain
long in the repertoire". And that was in fact the last time it was
played.' The composer's comment says something about his pragmatic
irreverence - all the more for the fact that here it was reflexive; the
joke is on Riisager himself.
Petrol had its limitations and Riisager knew it. While it
does carry emerging examples of one of his most impressive strengths - a
remarkable facility for orchestral effects that casts him as the Danish
Ravel (try the first movement of his 1936 score Darduse for some of the best examples) - it remains effectively a procession of musical gags cast in fresh orchestrations.
But there's a sprinkling of something else emerging in Petrol,
too, which is the glottal physicality of a very Danish delivery. Just
as spoken Danish has a sort of anti-comedy - a dark, trowelling-out of
the words that can meet British ears as a curious hybrid of Liverpudlian
and Taiwanese - so those comic turns in Riisager often come with added
splatter. It's connected partly to the fact that Riisager's clean
neo-Classical tendencies mean the punchline is often nicely droll and
deadpan.
When Petrol was first performed at the old stage of the
Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, the audience would have done well to drag
their eyes upwards from the Picasso-inspired designs hatched by Storm P
himself, and towards the motto that still adorns the proscenium in gold
lettering. Ej blot til Lyst, it reads, ‘not for pleasure alone.'
Riisager must have read the phrase countless times; the trajectory of his compositional course after Petrol
suggests he came to cherish it. In the post-Nielsen climate, Riisager
would have known that the realisation of Denmark's true national humour
in music depended on the opposition of forces, both ‘serious' and
otherwise (in short, the opportunity to set things up and then knock
them down, in both a literal musical sense and a wider cultural one). He
knew that music had an intellectual, emotional and even social role to
play and he voiced his strong beliefs in its everyday value: ‘art is not
for cranks', he once said, ‘it is for living human beings.'
You could certainly argue that Riisager is at his most Danish and
arguably his most convincing when the surface comic imperative of Petrol
is actually nagging more ‘serious' musical structures from below,
rather than steering them from above. We'll get to know a little about
that with Bo Holten's cycle of symphonic recordings from Aarhus. On
their first disc, there's plenty of high-jinx in the form of Jack the Dullard and the Fastelavn
(listen below), but one of the most fascinating passages is the modal
slow movement of his First Symphony, a spacious and almost elegiac
movement that's prodded by a gentle bi-tonality; a weaving theme is
played on a flute, and in an entirely different key to the Coplandesque
strings.
Literally speaking, such a contradiction came easily to Riisager, who
wasn't quite what he seemed. He spent the vast majority of his working
life in the full-time employment of the Danish civil service, becoming a
departmental head at the finance ministry where he worked until 1950.
Sven Erik Werner suggests the composer saw his working life and his
compositional live as fully integrated - ‘two sides of the same coin' he
puts it.
n parts of the Concerto for Orchestra, which I had the chance to
watch being recorded in Aarhus and which forms the core of the second
disc in Dacapo's series, there's the enchanting feeling of a rabble of
feisty instruments being subjected to some sense of enforced orchestral
bureaucracy. Though that feeds into the very real habit of Danish
composers to design their music in as neat and clipped a manner as their
counterparts do furniture and buildings, it's also an obvious piece of
game-play: Riisager the civil servant reigning-in his own sense of
creativity and adventure; wearing two masks, so to speak.
Which is itself a very Danish pursuit. ‘The whole idea of playing
identity games has a lot to do with Riisager's aesthetic viewpoint' says
Bo Holten. He points to Fastelavn, in which the composer quotes the
tune of the traditional Danish carnival song Can You Guess Who I Am? It echoes Nielsen's portrayal of the Danish carnival tradition in his opera Maskarade,
where the ‘joke' of identity confusion actually proves the rather
profound nub of the opera's narrative. ‘Riisager is saying, well, I'm
wearing this mask today and maybe tomorrow I am wearing another one',
explains Holten. ‘The attitude is really that you can be anything.'
Riisager cultivates that thought in the soil of his First Symphony,
the first movement of which seems to be a sort of theatrical symphonic
identity game - themes poke their heads out from behind the orchestral
curtain and pop up on the other side of the ensemble in a seemingly
different guise; is that the theme we've just heard, slightly altered?
It seems impossible to tell, until Riisager renders the question
irrelevant by uniting the orchestra in brief moments of soaring
rhapsody, not unlike Nielsen would have.
In fact, it's easy to understate Nielsen's influence on Riisager,
particularly when tracing the course of that irreverence and freedom.
The latter's earliest major orchestral work Overture for Erasmus Montanus opens
Volume One of Knudåge Riisager: The Symphonic Edition. There are two
uncannily Nielsenite moments contained within: an extraordinary braying
trombone and a theme that strongly references the first movement of
Nielsen's Second Symphony. Holten, though, also points to Charles Ives.
‘Riisager unfolds all of these lines in a neo-Baroque sense. It's a
stylistic plurality - the absorption of all these things that were in
the air.'
Erasmus Montanus just pre-dates Riisager's French training.
By the time of the First Symphony (1925) his personal hallmarks are
beginning to flower: whirling melodies fly over the top of distinctive
modal harmonies; bitonality and unprepared modulations abound. Riisager
scholar Claus Røllum-Larsen points to Riisager's cheeky dig at Sonata
form in the symphony - he effectively leaves his expositions both
thematically and harmonically unresolved. More than anything
theoretical, though, is a sense of simplicity and individualism that's
always on the look out for an authority to spike.
It's difficult, even in Danish music, to find a more rampant sense of humour than that of Knudåge Riisager. But despite Grove's
conclusion in 2001 that contemporary Danish music has distanced itself
from the ‘irony and pastiche' of the 1970s (perhaps a Riisager
reference), the reflection of Danish humour in music is still a vital
strand in the work of current composers. In fact, as Holten and leagues
of other Danish musicians suggest, it's integral to the notion of a
national style, to whatever extent that exists. ‘In Germany and France,
fun is something extra you have' says Holten, ‘but in our countries
[Britain and Denmark] it's not something extra - it's a basic part of
life.'
Holten and most notably Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen have further
cultivated these ideas in their music. Through the wry fanfares of The Visit of the Royal Physician there
seems to peer the silhouette of Riisager. Holmgreen's profound wit is
entrenched; pitched deep within often dark, troubling sounds. But it has
intense playfulness, too - from his famously droll settings of
pedestrian newspaper articles for vocalist and guitar Three Songs with texts from Politiken to the grim games of his Plateaux for Piano and Orchestra.
Holmgreen could easily be the subject of a probing analysis of humour
in music - a PhD thesis in fact. ‘Music is a monster...you allow yourself
to be chased by it', he says in the documentary snapshot of his life
made by Jytte Rex. The composer's own talking-head snippets are
saturated with piercingly intelligent eccentricities and plain-speaking
analysis. But among its most telling insights is the sequence in which
the composer dances to his own orchestral work Triptykon (see
video below). Watching this intense, dark playfulness reminds me of a
passage in Jack Lawson's biography of Carl Nielsen referring to the
Sixth Symphony.
Here, Lawson suggests, among the parps, hoots and scrapes of
Nielsen's ‘simple music', could be the composer's Mahlerian realisation
of mortality. The big fight is over, and we're left with a joke: a
symphony titled ‘simple' which actually contains some of the composer's
most complex (and farcical) music. ‘I feel, that like in life, in art
tragedy is completely next to total happiness, and that's dominant in my
own music', is one of the last things Bo Holten says to me back in
Aarhus. ‘And I feel it in my life so often; that wonderful happiness is
just next to total tragedy.' He laughs straight afterwards though - a
man who can see the funny side.
Suggested listening and viewing
Bo Holten The Visit of the Royal Physician
Knudåge Riisager Benzin
Knudåge Riisager Orchestral Works
Knudåge Riisager Symphonic Edition Vol 1
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen Plateaux Dacapo Records
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen Music is a Monster Dacapo Records