Subscribe to Dacapo's newsletter

Strygekvartetterne

Rued Langgaard

The String Quartets

Nightingale String Quartet

The Nightingale String Quartet’s survey of the complete quartet works of Rued Langgaard (1893–1952) heralded the arrival of a major new ensemble and won the maverick Danish composer thousands of new fans. Poised and restrained one minute, wild and emotional the next, Langgaard’s string quartets reveal the composer’s breathtaking originality and individuality, oscillating between luscious Romanticism and outlandish experimentation. They are played with love and understanding on these multiple prize-winning recordings, here gathered together in a single release for the first time.

NB: The CD box is temporarily sold out.

Buy album Stream
Download
  • mp3 (320kbps)
    119,50 kr.
    mp3
    €16.03 / $17.45 / £13.67
    Add to cart
  • FLAC 16bit 44.1kHz
    149,50 kr.
    CD Quality
    €20.06 / $21.83 / £17.1
    Add to cart
  • FLAC 24bit 96kHz
    199,50 kr.
    Studio Master
    €26.76 / $29.13 / £22.82
    Add to cart
© Nikolaj Lund
Kudos to these excellent musicians and to Dacapo for such a marvellous survey of this very fine music.
Dean Frey, Music for Several Instruments
Performing these fine works impeccably is the Nightingale String Quartet
Kevin Filipski, The Flip Side
CD of the week
Kevin Filipski, The Flip Side
These recordings stand up superbly
Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International
I hadn’t heard the cycle as a whole, but discovering its range of expression and frequent beauty has proved a great source of pleasure, especially in such winning performances - all of them superbly recorded
Rob Cowan, Gramophone
Efterhånden som du udforsker disse værker, vil du blive forbløffet og (forhåbentlig) stimuleret og/eller henrykt over de excentriske veje som Langgaard tog da han komponerede værkerne. [...] Hvilken berigende rejse, det har været!
Lynn René Bayley, The Art Music Lounge
Rating: 10/10 - The recordings are excellently successful
Hans Quant, Luister
On the Work with and Recording of the Quartets

by Tim Frederiksen

Neither in his own time nor later have Rued Langgaard’s string quartets been performed much on the musical scene, although in the course of time the second and third quartets have occasionally been in the repertoire of Danish string quartets both in Denmark and abroad. It has been said of Langgaard that he was born fifty years too late, and that his musical idiom, according to the taste of the time, did not follow the robust innovations that Carl Nielsen in particular represented. Thanks to that slightly derogatory attitude Langgaard’s works more or less disappeared from the awareness of the Danish musical establishment. With the re-emergence of his symphonies on the international scene the time has also come for a new generation to experience Langgaard in his own right as a composer, instead of the eternal opposite pole to Nielsen.

With the three CDs containing all the works of Langgaard for string quartet, it has been our aim to show what a striking personality and outstanding composer Lang­gaard is, and that his string quartets are an important contribution to Danish chamber music.

There is no doubt that in these works Langgaard shows that he is a great master of instrumentation for the string quartet, even though very many passages in the indivi­dual instruments may be particularly challenging. With an expressive register ranging from the lushly romantic to eruptive high drama, his string quartets make great demands on ensemble technique as well as the artistry and sonority of the performing ­musicians’ ­interpretation.

As teacher and coach of the Nightingale String Quartet and artistic producer on the three CDs, I have conducted close readings with the quartet of all the available musical material in order to achieve as authentic a result as possible: the composer’s manu­script scores and his wife’s transcriptions (in the Royal Danish Library); earlier printed scores and individual parts. Seven of the works that have never before been printed as sheet music have been produced by the Rued Langgaard Edition in parallel with the recording process. The project has thus also had the result that there is now a body of written music that has been played through and corrected and is ready for use.

In the interpretation of a work the performing musician must constantly assess whether the composer intended his slurs as indications of phrasing or articulation. At the same time it may now and then be necessary to make certain changes in the slurs to render it practically possible to play a demanding passage – of course without changing the overall content. Apart from String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 this has been a very compre­hensive process in the other works, where many possibilities have been tried out and compared. Since Langgaard’s lesser known string quartets, as mentioned before, have been performed very little, there has been no living tradition to draw on.

It has therefore been unknown territory to explore, and to many questions it has been necessary to find an answer – our answer – along the way. The sometimes inadequate indications of dynamics in the score have given us the freedom to point up our own contrasts, in order to demonstrate Langgaard’s special artistic format; for example in the first quartet, third movement, bars 25-41 and 102-118, where a mis­leading piano in the viola part is the only indication in a musical progression that deve­lops from a quiet beginning towards a very dramatic climax with a natural rise in the dynamics. We have also chosen to emphasize the intense explosion that suddenly interrupts the intimate atmosphere by playing molto furioso at a fast tempo, for example in the same movement, bar 57, allegro. In other places there have been such alien notes in the chords that we have had to discuss them and finally apply our sound musical sense to determine whether this was innovative thinking from Langgaard or an error in the transcription of the score.

When one is playing the collected works it is tempting to follow a habitual chronology. In this edition we have chosen to do it differently, and to gather the works in terms of their musical atmosphere. CD 1 has a strong dramatic element (Quartets Nos. 2 and 3), while poetic and idyllic expression is predominant in the works on CD 2. In the two quartets on CD 3 Langgaard draws on both aspects, and it was a pleasure after such long labour to sum up the whole expressive register of Langgaard’s composite personality.

As a performing musician I would venture to say that music lives through its interpretation. It is our hope that these interpretations will inspire new ideas, and that Langgaard will thus gain a place in the musical awareness of the present.

Tim Frederiksen, professor of chamber music and viola, the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen.

 

Rued Langgaard (1893-1952)

by Bendt Viinholt Nielsen

Rued Langgaard is an outsider in Danish music. His Late Romantic and Symbolist background 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 1920s and 1930s. 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 clash.

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 at home. 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 (Antichrist) (1921-23) were either not performed or not understood in Denmark.

In his native 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 exemplars. 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 for good. 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 remained unprinted, are being published.

© Bendt Viinholt Nielsen

 

Rued Langgaard's String Quartets

Rued Langgaard’s contributions to the string quartet genre were mainly written within an interval of just eleven years, from 1914 until 1925. In this period he composed eight quartets, four of which were created in the course of only twelve months (1918-19). The works were thus written in the composer’s productive and extremely expansive youthful years, when he also created major works like Symphonies 4 and 6, The Music of the Spheres and the opera Antichrist. In the next phase, from 1925 until 1940, when his composing almost came to a halt, he took several of the eight quartet works up for revi­sion and reworking, and thus new versions saw the light of day. However, no entirely new contributions to the genre came from Langgaard’s pen, except for two small pieces written around 1950: on one hand a small piece that has disappeared today, written in memory of the composer Niels W. Gade, and on the other an ultra-short Italian Scherzo.

The catalogue of his works lists ten known, independent compositions by Lang­gaard for string quartet. The composer’s typical way of working, characterized as it was by ‘re­cycling’ and repeated revisions, has meant that whole movements and certain themes ­recur in different works. Further confusion is created by Langgaard’s own numbering of the string quartets in the 1930s, which does not include all the works, nor does it correspond to the order of their creation. The following list gives a chronolo­gical overview:

String Quartet No. 1 (BVN 68)

E major, 4 movements. Composed in 1914-15, partly rejected but revised and recon­structed in 1936. Fourth movement incorporated in reworked form as fourth movement in String Quartet No. 5.

Variations on “Mig hjertelig nu længes” (BVN 71)

E major. Introduction and seven variations. Composed in 1914-15, revised and fur­nished with a new introduction in 1931/1940.


String Quartet No. 2 (BVN 145)

D minor, 4 movements. Composed in 1918, revised in 1931.

Rosengaardsspil (Rose Garden Play) (BVN 153)

E major, 4 movements. Composed in 1918. First and fourth movements reused in revised form as first and third movement in String Quartet No. 4.


String Quartet (A flat major) (BVN 155)

A flat major, 4 movements. Composed in 1918.


String Quartet No. 6 (BVN 160)

D minor, one movement. Composed in 1918-19.


String Quartet No. 3 (BVN 183)

3 movements. Composed in 1924.


String Quartet No. 5 (BVN 189)

F major, 4 movements. Composed in 1925, revised in 1926-38. The fourth movement is a reworked version of String Quartet No. 1, fourth movement.


String quartet No. 4 “Sommerdage” (Summer Days) (BVN 215)

F major, 3 movements. Composed in 1931 (on the basis of material from 1914-18). The first and third movements are revised versions of the first and fourth movement of Rosengaardsspil; the second movement is based on String Quartet No. 1, second move­ment.


String quartet movement “Italian Scherzo” (BVN 408)

F major. Composed in 1950.

Rued Langgaard did not write his string quartet works for particular ensembles – with the exception of No. 3, which was composed for one of the best chamber ensembles in Denmark in the 1920s, the Breuning-Bache Quartet. String Quartet No. 3 is also the only one of the ten works that was published during the composer’s lifetime, in 1931. The others have only been published after 1993, the last six as late as the present recording project and under the auspices of the Rued Langgaard Edition. Three of the works on the list were not performed in Langgaard’s time, and all in all there were only ten concert performances of the remaining quartets in his lifetime. Quartet No. 3 was performed four times, the last time by the Gerhard Rafn Quartet during the festival Nordic Music Days in Oslo in 1934. In addition, in the 1930s and 1940s there were sporadic radio performances of Nos. 2, 3 and 5. After this, interest in Langgaard’s string quartets ebbed out. In 1972 the first recording of one of the quartets, No. 3, was released featuring the Copenhagen String Quartet, and a ­milestone was reached in 1984, when the Kontra Quartet recorded six of the works and made Langgaard’s string quartets known in innumerable performances in Denmark and abroad.

The remarkable thing about Langgaard’s music for string quartet is the wide stylistic spectrum covered by the works as a whole. They were written in the time of new ­departures between Late Romanticism and Modernism, and it is in fact a typical feature of the period that in his musical idiom Langgaard veers off now in the ‘retro’ direction, now in the avantgarde direction, but without abandoning the classical formal norms. In Langgaard’s quartets we thus find Classicist, Romantic, Neoclassical, Expres­sionist and Modernist features – in short, the tonal idioms of the music span the whole scale from Mozart to Bartók. The Neoclassical tendency, which has no counterpart in Langgaard’s symphonies, makes its impact in the movement “Mozart” (of Rosengaards­spil), and colours the string quartet in A flat major throughout; the latter is almost a pastiche of Vienna Classicism. At the other extreme we find String Quartet No. 3, which with its aggressively Expressionist tonal idiom represents the wildest avantgarde in Danish music in 1924. One characteristic feature of the quartets, unlike Langgaard’s symphonic music, is that among the total of 29 movements we find both decided (and humorous) scherzo movements and some of the weightiest slow movements that Langgaard wrote.

Several of the works have a quite special inspiration. In 1913 the 20-year-old Langgaard was on holiday in Sweden, in the small spa town of Kyrkhult in Blekinge, where he lodged (with his parents) in a property called “Rosengården” (the Rose Garden). His stay there was to assume a lifelong significance for Langgaard, first and foremost, we are led to believe, because he had fallen in love with a girl called Dora (in all likelihood the two years older Dora From). At Rosengården Langgaard wrote some love songs to texts by Goethe, and five years later these songs and mood evocations from that summer formed the inspirational basis for a whole three string quartets. At first all three of these works were given the title Rosengaardsspil (Rosengaard Play), but later their titles were changed (one quartet, however, has been published in its original form under the title Rosengaardsspil, while the same piece in a reworked form is called String Quartet No. 4; the other two are String Quartet in A flat major and String Quartet No. 6). Quartet No. 1 is also related to Rosengården and at one point was called Rosengaardsspil . The scherzo movement is based on the Goethe song Gleich und gleich, which is about the little bird and the little bee! Motifs from this song recur in Rosengaardsspil (1st movement) and String Quartet No. 4 (1st and 2nd movements). Another leitmotif with references to Rosengården appears at the beginning of the final movement of String Quartet No. 1 and reappears in both Rosengaardsspil and String Quartet No. 4. Five of the quartets are thus part of a complex of works with the summer of 1913 as a shared source of inspiration. And clearly it is no coincidence that String Quartet No. 6 quotes the Swedish folk song “Och hör du unga Dora vill du gifta dig i år” (Oh tell me now, young Dora, would you married be this year?)


String Quartet No. 2

The work was written in January-February 1918 and was given its first performance in a concert arranged by Langgaard himself at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen in 1919. The boldness and aggression of the musical idiom did not go down well with the music critics, but the work must have made an impression in the progressive music milieu, for the quartet was performed again in 1922 at the Young Composers’ Society, which promoted interest in contemporary music. In 1931 Langgaard revised the work, but only to a modest extent, and in this form it was performed on the radio in 1938 by the Gerhard Rafn Quartet. The original title was Composition for Four String Instruments, signalling the work’s straightforward, ‘modern’ attitude. The first movement alternates between ‘fiery’ passages (allegro focoso), and passages of a contemplative character. The ending is dominated by the dissonant tritonus interval E flat – A, which also concludes the work as a whole. The second movement is ‘futuristic machine music’, with a train passing at full steam on screeching rails. This ‘realistic’ depiction of a locomotive was composed five years before Honegger’s famous orchestral workPacific 231. The third movement was originally entitled Landscape with a Fiddler, like the title of a painting. The music pans over a landscape, and along the way we pass a fiddler who plays a fiero alla zingaresa solo, after which the landscape again comes into focus. The final movement has a composite character, but is welded together by a repeated, energetic alla marcia risoluto section. The title Vandring (The Walk) should perhaps be understood quite literally as a ‘walking tour’ where the ‘march’ is interrupted by varying views characterized for example by romantic and mysterious sounds.


String Quartet No. 3

In 1924 the Copenhagen-based Breuning-Bache Quartet planned a concert of music by young Danish composers, and in this connection approached Langgaard to ask if he had a suitable work ‘in storage’. The approach inspired him to supply a brand new quartet, which was composed and fair-copied within a single week and given its first performance the same month (September 1924). Once more the music critics were entirely uncomprehending, but among Langgaard’s colleagues a certain interest could be detected, and this led to the printing of the quartet in 1931. Richard Hove’s review of the publication in Dansk Musik Tidsskrift was to be one of the most positive mentions ever accorded a work by Langgaard. Hove speaks of “the divine spark”, of “eruptions of a magical temperament” and of the work’s “great internal power”. The idiom of the quartet is the most wildly experimental musical language to be found in Danish music before Carl Nielsen’s Sixth Symphony (1925). Like Nielsen (in the Sixth) Langgaard ironizes over modern music, but at the same time furnishes a solid defence of it. Langgaard’s characterizations, for examplerapinoso (rapacious), artifizioso (artful) and schernevole (scoffing), suggest his attitude to the dissonant and aggressive in the idiom. The contrast to this is the chorale that begins the last movement, and which attempts to make itself felt in the middle of the movement amidst the maelstrom of modern music – and in the end carries off the victory. The melody was written for B.S. Ingemann’s hymn “Den store mester kommer” (The Great Master Comes), and a few years ago it was added as a four-part piece to the official chorale book of the ­Danish national church.


String Quartet No. 6

This one-movement quartet was composed in three days around New Year 1918/19 and given its first performance less than two months later in a concert arranged by Langgaard himself at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen. In the programme the work is called Rosengaardsspil (over en svensk Folkevise) (Rosengaard Play (on a Swedish folk song)), and the composition is clearly inspired by the summer stay at Rosengården in Sweden in 1913. It has the sound of a piece of programme music, depicting in a free form episodes and moods experienced by the composer. Idyllic and melancholy passages alternate with scherzo-like elements in the first part of the movement, in which two recitative-like solo sections, first in the viola and later in the violin, quote a Swedish folk song of unrequited love, “Allt under himmelens fäste” (Beneath the vault of heaven). An expressive passage leads into a festive waltz in Swedish folk-fiddler style (burlesco rustico), and this is followed by the concluding part of the work, which is based on the Swedish folk song “Och hör du unga Dora vill du gifta dig i år” (Oh tell me now, young Dora, will you married be this year?), this too a song of unrequited love. After the first performance the work was laid aside by Langgaard, but he looked it out again in the 1940s and furnished it with the title String Quartet No. 6 in One Movement (the numbers 1-5 were already taken). The second performance took place on Danish radio in 1980.


Variations on “Mig hjertelig nu længes”

The composition bears the subtitle Chamber music for 2 violins, 1 viola and 1 cello. The melody, best known in English as “O sacred Head! Now wounded” was composed by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612), but is used in a later traditional chorale form. The quartet was composed in July 1914, but only fair-copied in the summer of 1915. It was put on the shelf, but resuscitated by Langgaard in 1940. The original introduction, which had evidently been lost, was now replaced by a new introduction in the form of a reworking of an organ prelude to “Mig hjertelig nu længes” which Langgaard had written for a funeral in 1931. The hymn tune is only heard in its entirety in Variation I (in the cello part), but the ending reappears in Variation VII (in the first violin part). The variations are one of the composer’s most purely classicist works, with reminiscences of Beethoven’s late quartets. The composition was given its first performance in 1967.


The Rosengård Quartets

In 1913 the 20-year-old Rued Langgaard spent the summer in the little spa town Kyrkhult in Blekinge, Sweden, where he was lodged with his parents in a house called “Rosen­gården” (The Rose Garden). The two-month stay there was to prove of lifelong signifi­cance to the composer, first and foremost, we must assume, because he met and fell in love with a girl, a certain Dora. The young Langgaard was immediately emotionally awakened, and over the next few years wrote a quantity of songs, piano works and chamber music pieces whose texts, titles and musical substance refer to the memorable days at Rosengården. This is true not least of the four string quartets that all were called Rosengaardsspil (Rose Garden Play). Later three of them were given different titles. The first of these four “Rosengård Quartets” is the present String Quartet No. 1 (1914‑15; recorded on vol. 3), then come Rose Garden Play (1918), the string quartet in A flat major (1918) and the Quartet No. 6 (1918-19; on vol. 1). The final passage in the last of these works is based on the Swedish folk song “Och hör du unga Dora, vill du gifta dig i år?” (Oh tell me now, young Dora, is it married you would be?), a song of unrequited love. On this CD we hear Rose Garden Play and the A flat major quartet and the String Quartet No. 4, added in 1931, which is based on material from Rose Garden Play and Quartet No. 1. If we count Quartet No. 4, the complex of string quartets related to the Rosengård summer of 1913 thus consists of no fewer than five works.

At Rosengård Langgaard composed among other things three love songs to texts by Goethe, and immediately after his arrival back home in Copenhagen he added a fourth song to the collection Lieder von Goethe (BVN 60). The new song, entitled Vergeblich (In Vain) is about two young people who are constantly in each other’s thoughts – but in vain. A motif in the song appears as a ‘memory motif’ in very many of Langgaard’s works, including three of the string quartets. In the same three works there are also quotations from another of the Goethe songs, Gleich und Gleich – about a flower and a bee that are made for one another! The beginning of that same song is used as a theme in the scherzo movements of String Quartets No. 1 and 4.


Rose Garden Play

We know nothing of what actually happened in Sweden in 1913, but the music Langgaard wrote five years later in the light of his memories is typified by great contrasts with reflection and melancholy on the one hand and youthful optimism on the other. The com­plex emotions and moods are particularly expressed in the quartet Rose Garden Play, which was written in June-August 1918 during Langgaard’s stay that summer in the fishing hamlet Kerteminde on the island of Funen. The four movements –Interiör, “Mozart”, Drop Fall and Rococo – suggest that the music programmatically describes quite specific situations or moods related to Rosengård. The first movement has a first subject and a second subject, but otherwise is an improvisation-like course in which quotations from the two above-mentioned songs to texts by Goethe are interspersed. The leaping triad motif from Gleich und Gleich can be heard in the cello part at 2:37, 2:59 and 7:06, while the little turning motif (four notes) from Vergeblich comes at 6:18, first in the cello, then in violin I. In the second movement there is Mozart being played. Langgaard calls the movement “Mozart”, and the quotation marks in the title of course make a point in relation to this slightly parodic Mozart pastiche. The slow movement in C sharp minor, Draabefald (Drop Fall), shows the composer in a melancholy mood one rarely sees persisting throughout a whole move­ment. The title is cryptic, but surely refers to a tear being shed. The minimalist motivic material consists of a theme in a folk-like style (cello) and a ‘painful’ motif (designated espressivo dolente), which moves from part to part in shifting transpositions. In the final movement, Rococo, the good mood returns, although there is also room for an ethereal chorale theme before the movement is rounded off by a coda with an unambiguous refe­rence to the music of the eighteenth century. The composition was only performed once in Langgaard’s lifetime (in 1919); performance no. 2 took place in 2002.


String Quartet (A flat major)

The neoclassical continues with even more consistency in this quartet, which was com­posed at the same time as Rose Garden Play – and was given the same title. The work was not performed in Langgaard’s lifetime and was not included in the numbered series of quartets. The present title comes from the 1940s, and the first performance was given as late as 1993. The work exemplifies how for Langgaard specific musical styles are compo­sitional tools just like form, tonality and themes. Musical history offers a wealth of moods and references from which the composer can choose freely, and which he can exploit for his own artistic purposes. The Rosengård summer was clearly under the auspices of the Rococo and Vienna Classicism. But at the same time interest in the classical epoch was part of the spirit of the age, and it seems reasonable to see Langgaard’s A flat major quartet as a parallel to Prokofiev’s Sinfonie classique, given its first performance just a few months before Langgaard wrote his work. Langgaard kept rigorously to the Vienna Clas­sical idiom with reminiscences of Beethoven in the first two movements. The third move­ment (C minor) with the designation Lento dolente has a recurring funeral-march theme that is played pizzicato, and two weighty contrasting sections. The last time the pizzicato theme is presented, it is in E flat minor. It comes to a halt before it is finished and sequen­ces downwards into darkest despair (where it ends in the key of the movement, C minor). The final movement, Allegro agitato, has a similarly original Langgaardian fingerprint which saves the quartet from pure stylistic imitation. In the middle section of the energetic movement a space opens up where time stands still and beauty is held in inward-looking contemplation.


String Quartet No. 4 “Summer Days”

Around 1930 the four Rosengård quartets from 1914-18 were at the bottom of Lang­gaard’s piles of music. He had even scrapped the last two movements of Quartet No. 1.

However, in the spring of 1931 he looked out two of the old works and on this basis created a new quartet in three movements. The outer movements from Rose Garden Play were reused as movements 1 and 3, and as movement 2 Langgaard inserted a short, recomposed version of the scherzo from String Quartet No. 1 – all now presented in the main key of F major, Langgaard’s ‘bright’ key (he wrote a whole eight symphonies in F major!). The first movement is by and large identical to the first movement of Rose Garden Play, while the final movement has been considerably expanded from the fourth move­ment of Rose Garden Play. Besides a new introduction and a new coda Langgaard has interpolated a ‘second subject’ which has been cut out of the first movement of String Quartet No. 1. The result was that Quartet No. 4, unlike Rose Garden Play, emerges as some­thing homogeneous and ‘Late Romantic’ in expression. We understand that over the years the memories of Rosengård have come to stand in a different light. It is striking that on the one hand the three movements are all designated scherzoso, and on the other that the two motifs from Lieder von Goethe have been given a more prominent place. The second movement is based on Gleich und Gleich, and the elegiac motif from Vergeblich is now also heard in the second and third movements: in the scherzo at 1:03 and 2:20, in the first bars of the third movement and in the coda at 8:48. In the first performance of 1933 (the only performance in Langgaard’s lifetime) the quartet was called Lacrimetta – that is, ‘the little tear’. In the end, as late as around 1950, Langgaard chose the title Summer Days.


String Quartet No. 1

The quartet is Rued Langgaard’s first major chamber music work. It was begun in May 1914 and finished on 15 January 1915 by the then just 21-year-old composer. To date the work has only been performed once, on 30 November 1916. The musicians were members of the Royal Danish Orchestra, and the first violin was Axel Gade, Rued Langgaard’s uncle. Since this was not a real public concert, no reviews appeared. The original name of the quartet was String Quartet in E major, but around 1918 it was renamed Rosengaardsspil like several other string quartets that Langgaard composed at this time.

In 1927 Langgaard scrapped movements 3 and 4 in a fit of dejection, and at the beginning of the 1930s, when he reviewed and numbered his string quartets, his first quartet was not part of the picture. He apparently considered it ‘used up’ inasmuch as he had reused the last movement in an abridged form as the final movement of String Quartet No. 5 (1925), while the second-subject section from the first movement and the theme from the second movement were used in String Quartet No. 4 (1931). A few years later, however, he looked out the first two movements of the old quartet and revised them. At the same time he regretted that he had scrapped the last two move­ments, and in 1936 he wrote them down again “from memory”. In this way Langgaard’s first quartet was recreated under the title String Quartet No. 1. The revision of the first two movements involved many details, but the original form of the movements was preserved. In both movements there are personal references to the Rosengård summer of 1913 in the shape of quotations from the above-mentioned Goethe songs. In the first movement, for example, the small “memory motif” from Vergeblich is quoted in the passage 3:08-3:30. The same bars can also be heard in Langgaard’s sixteenth sym­phony, fourth movement (1951). The scherzo movement (second movement) is based on the song Gleich und Gleich, while the memory motif also emerges in this movement (for example at 1:33). The slow grave movement, which as mentioned – like the fourth movement – is a reconstruction from 1936, is one of Langgaard’s strong-willed original creations. Static, in reality subjectless music is interrupted by ‘agitated’ eruptions that come like bolts from the blue. They can be understood as destructive comments on the surrounding music. In the final movement (whose initial sostenuto reappears in String Quartet No. 4, last movement), the main theme is a hymn-like mel­ody that could be a quotation from a Romantic Danish hymn tune.
 

String Quartet No. 5

The quartet is the last conceived of all Langgaard’s string quartets. The first version of the work is from 1925, but movements 1 and 3 in particular were considerably revised in 1926-28 and in a later phase up to 1938. A version of the quartet was performed in 1929 under the title “Faraway Melodies”, and it was very well received by the press, which emphasized the composition’s natural melodiousness, the relatively contrastless progression and the “beautiful and fresh musicality” of the work. The final version of the quartet was performed on Danish radio in 1942 with the title “Moods of Forget­fulness”, a title Langgaard later abandoned.

The work was written in 1925 after Langgaard had turned his back on “the horrors of modern music” and set out to create uncomplicated works based on Classical and Romantic ideals. The musical idiom is anachronistic, in the style from around 1850. It was undoubtedly Langgaard’s intention to transport the listener into an undisturbed Romantic-nostalgic atmosphere. And the key is in fact the idyllic, ‘pastoral’ F major.
 

String quartet movement “Italian Scherzo”

From time to time in the thirties and forties Langgaard wrote down small draft subjects for string quartets of which nothing more came. In 1948 he created a small piece which has unfortunately disappeared, and which had the title In the Chapel of Holmens Church (Sigh at the grave of Gade). On the other hand Langgaard’s very last contribu­tion to the string quartet genre is preserved – the movement recorded here with the title “Italian Scherzo”. It was written in Ribe on 21 October 1950 between 7 and 7.30 a.m. On the sketch the disillusioned composer wrote: “Can’t be bothered composing the remaining parts, perhaps to no avail!”

© Bendt Viinholt Nielsen

Release date: 
November 2019
Cat. No.: 
6.200004
FormatID: 
SACD
CoverFormat: 
Box
Barcode: 
747313300464
Track count: 
36

Credits

Recorded at the Concert Hall of the Royal Danish Academy of Music: on 10-12 December 2010, 16-18 June and 19-21 August 2011 (Vol. 1); on 18-21 August 2012 (BVN 215), 16-17 November and 20-21 December 2012 (BVN 153) and 7-10 January 2013 (BVN 155) (Vol. 2); on 19-24 August 2013 (No. 1), 3-6 September 2013 (No. 5) and 10 January 2013 (Italian Scherzo) (Vol. 3)

Recording Producers: Tim Frederiksen and Simon Brinkmann
Sound Engineer: Simon Brinkmann, www.simonbrinkmann.dk
SACD Mastering: Preben Iwan and Mikkel Nymand, www.timbremusic.dk

Previously released on 6.220575, 6.220576 and 6.220577

℗ 2012-2014, © 2019 Dacapo Records, Copenhagen

Liner notes: Bendt Viinholt Nielsen
English translation: James Manley
Proofreader: Svend Ravnkilde

Artwork: Denise Burt. Flower image courtesy of the Library of Congress LC-DIG matpc-10209,
LC-DIG matpc-10205

Publisher: The Rued Langgaard Edition, www.langgaard.dk/rlu

Dacapo Records acknowledge, with gratitude, the financial support of Langgaard-Fonden and Solistforeningen af 1921. We also wish to thank Tube-Tech for providing preamps for the recording

This series was recorded and released in cooperation with the Royal Danish Academy of Music, ­Copenhagen

randomness