Works for Choir and Ensemble

The Fulfilment

By Thomas Michelsen

Vagn Holmboe’s late choral works from the 1980s and 1990s are predominantly hymns. They range from Two Sarvig Hymns, Op. 154, of 1983, to the final movements of his lifelong motet cycle Liber canticorum, which the composer began in the 1950s, and to settings for mixed choir of two Psalms of David. There are other works too – lesser known, but no less significant.

In 1989, Holmboe composed Winter for soprano and eight-part mixed choir. It sets spiritual texts by the American poet John Gracen Brown, drawn from his collections, A Sojourn of the Spirit, and Passages in the Wind (1981). The following year, in 1990, Holmboe followed up with the major choral work, Die Erfüllung for soprano and baritone soloists, double choir, and woodwind and brass.

Die Erfüllung, which became Holmboe’s Opus 183, was composed to texts from the German poet Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen. It is an unfinished novel, in which the early Romantic’s magically idealistic worldview embraces the exalted idea of time and space being suspended. Novalis’ dark and fantastic text, with its talk of a new world, the manifestation of God’s face in all things, and the opening of a kingdom of love, appealed to Holmboe. Indeed, he said it felt entirely contemporary to him.

This may sound surprising, yet Vagn Holmboe was a profoundly spiritual composer who, through the musical metamorphosis technique he became known for, experienced the realisation of eternal transformation and the rebirth of all things. He felt a kinship with Haydn akin to that with a contemporary composer. It may initially seem odd, but Holmboe had, from his teenage years, been familiar with the Hindu scriptures and convinced of Buddhist ideas such as reincarnation and the cosmic unity of all things – so a few centuries are no distance.

Religious texts such as the ancient Mahabharata epic, which contains one of Hinduism’s most widely known and read works, the Bhagavadgita , he encountered at the age of fourteen. That Holmboe from a young age lived in a world of ‘deep’ truths inspired by Hinduism and Buddhism is evident from private letters and, most importantly, his diaries. For example, in early 1929, at the age of nineteen, he wrote: ‘Why is there development in life itself – and does it occur through all the many lives we must pass?’

Steiner Congress in Skanderborg
Die Erfüllung, with its opening brass fanfares and calm contrapuntal lines, was composed at the request of the English music therapist Jane Brewer, who was closely associated with the anthroposophical movement. She worked within the Rudolf Steiner movement and had originally wished to commission a work from Holmboe’s most famous pupil, Per Nørgård. But he had no time to accept the commission, and in the end Holmboe composed a roughly twenty-minute choral work in four sections.

In that form, Die Erfüllung was premiered at an international Steiner Congress in Skanderborg, situated in central Jutland, in October 1990. The premiere took place as a private performance in the Audonicon concert hall of the Steiner cultural centre, with soprano and vocal teacher Monika Mayr and baritone and anthroposophist Michael Deason-Barrow as the soloists. In addition, a choir was formed from festival participants, supported by students from the conservatoires in Odense and Aarhus. The performance was conducted by the Norwegian conductor Holger Arden, then, as now, deeply committed to anthroposophical thought, and who subsequently performed the work several times in Norway and once at a Steiner Congress in Prague.

At Brewer’s prompting, Holmboe added two more sections in the summer of 1993, because she wished to include more of Novalis’ text. The finished work thus comprises six sections with a total duration of around twenty-five minutes.

That Die Erfüllung was written for the Steiner movement, and that it has lived within that framework may explain why it has remained unknown to the wider public, where the expansiveness and obscurity of the text would likely have met with incomprehension. In the same way, in the late 1960s, Holmboe’s equally overlooked work Zeit, Op. 94, for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, was similarly neglected; the spiritually oriented and highly ambitious German text was by the Czech author Renata Pandula (1930–87).

Deep Cosmic Truths
The Austrian philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), founder of the educational Steiner movement, himself wrote several mystery plays. Novalis’ novel fragment, named after the medieval German minnesinger Heinrich von Ofterdingen, is deeply mysterious in content.

Novalis was the pen name of the noble poet, philosopher and natural scientist Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772–1801). He was a friend of the writer Friedrich Schiller and the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, and in every way a central figure of early German Romanticism. His posthumously published novel, in its fragmentary form, embodies the ideals of Romanticism, showing how he, fully in the spirit of the age, fused his preoccupations with everything from philosophy to chemistry and mineralogy into a single artistic expression. This is an expression in which love is something universal, extending far beyond the romantic notion of love, and where the magical, as Novalis saw it, regains its place, which it had lost under Enlightenment rationalism.

In this so-called spirit of magical idealism, the worlds of language and physical reality are broken down and transcended, so that a ‘wunderseltsame Zukunft’ (a ‘marvellous future’) may be glimpsed, and what was once mundane appears ‘fremd und wunderbar’ (‘strange and wonderful’).

Novalis’ lofty words are introduced by Holmboe with festive yet serious brass fanfares. Together, the voices present the new world, before the soprano soloist, as a prophet, reveals what awaits when we recognise the deep cosmic truths.

Holmboe was never open publically about his deeply spiritual, cosmic view of life. Although, from the 1940s onward, he gave many interviews and presented his music publicly on radio, television and in concert, he kept the sources of his music private. Yet concepts as magic, ecstasy, and the cosmic lay at the heart of his musical thinking, as revealed when this author was permitted to read the composer’s unpublished letters and diaries during the preparation of the biography (Det dybe og det rene) (The Deep and the Pure), published by Multivers in 2022.

One in all, and all in one
Holmboe responds with perfect naturalness to Novalis’ starry clouds of words, which in Die Erfüllung – The Fulfilment in English – declare: ‘dann fliegt vor einem geheimen Wort das ganze verkehrte Wesen fort’ (‘then, at a secret word, the whole distorted being vanishes’). In the work’s second section, the baritone soloist joins the prophecy with the fairy-tale words of a queen who will awaken from a long sleep, ‘wenn Meer und Land in Liebesglut zerrinnt’ (‘as sea and land dissolve in the fire of love’).

‘Eins in allem und alles in Einen’ (‘All in one, and one in all’), it is written in the third section, where Holmboe, with his Buddhist-inspired outlook on life, could spontaneously respond to Novalis’ vision, one which corresponds well to Holmboe’s fundamental recognition that ‘you are nature, I am nature; you are part of that tree out there, and the tree is part of you,’ he remarked in a late-life interview with Dansk Musiktidsskrift (the Danish Music Journal), offering the public a rare glimpse of his worldview.

Holmboe’s music is not characterised by overt word-painting; rather, it reflects the depth and beauty of the text on a more profound level.

For Holmboe, music could certainly spring from concrete events or phenomena outside the music itself, but his work as a composer was to purify it and make it pure music. External influences could enter his works, but fundamentally he worked with organic development based on intervals or short motifs – seeds, as he called them. The perfect fifth, used as a final interval in many places in Holmboe’s oeuvre, is prominent. When the soprano soloist opens the fourth section singing: ‘Die Liebe ging auf dunkler Bahn, vom Monde nur erblickt’ (‘Love moved along shadowed paths, seen only by the moon’), and one senses an echo of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1907–08), it is an unusual allusion to another composer’s music – if indeed it is not a coincidence.

The music of Die Erfüllung respects the gravity with which Holmboe treats Novalis’ text. While not literally word-painting, it becomes notably more animated in the fifth section, which begins: ‘Die Fabel fängt zu spinnen an’ (‘The fable spins anew’). After the sixth and final sections concludes the vision of an era in which ‘Zahlen und Figuren’ (‘Numbers and Figures’) are no longer ‘Schlüssel aller Kreaturen’ (‘the keys to life’), the winds recall the fanfare motif from the opening of the work.

Ever the mutable!
When conductor Mogens Dahl and the Mogens Dahl Chamber Choir decided to perform and record Die Erfüllung, we looked for other Holmboe works to complement it in concert. The choice fell on Song at Sunset and Ode til sjælen. Neither work has been particularly well known or performed, but like Die Erfüllung, both betray Vagn Holmboe’s strong preoccupation with existence and the spiritual.

Song at Sunset, Op. 138b, dates from 1978. It is composed for mixed choir to a text by the American poet, journalist and author Walt Whitman (1819–92), from whom Holmboe had already borrowed words when writing his Tenth Symphony at the start of the decade. It was verses from Whitman’s poem with the Greek title ‘Eidólons’ (1876) that he chose as a preface to the symphony. Because they suited his Buddhist-influenced view of life and his vision of composing as a constant struggle to create cosmos out of chaos. The poem’s lines read, among others: ‘Ever the mutable! / Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering’.

In Song at Sunset, it is the sight of a sunset that fills the poet’s throat with air and opens his mouth in a pantheistic praise of the perfection of the cosmos and ‘the mystery of the motion in all beings’. As in the multi-volume choral work Liber canticorum, Holmboe here demonstrates his mastery of vocal polyphony in a surging, emotionally shifting four-part texture, where voice groups take turns dividing to make the texture fuller and more sensuous.

While Song at Sunset is pure a cappella polyphony, Ode til sjælen (Ode to the Soul), Op. 161, is written for mixed choir with brass sextet and organ. Holmboe composed this substantial work just before his last completed string quartet, No. 20, Notturno, setting the text ‘Til Sielen. En Ode’ (‘To the Soul. An Ode’) by the Romantic Danish poet Johannes Ewald (1743–81).

In addition to the choir, Holmboe composed for two vocal soloists ad libitum, a soprano and a tenor. The local Frederiksborg County Music Committee in North Zealand, where Holmboe lived for the last many years of his life, had commissioned a choral work, and the composer chose to present the amateur singers of the Frederiksborg Chamber Choir and Helsingør Chamber Choir with a serious challenge when they were to premiere the result in Frederiksborg Palace Chapel in November 1986 as part of an all-Holmboe concert. The use of organ and brass was due to Ode til sjælen being performed alongside Contrasti for organ and the second of Holmboe’s two brass quintets.

Like Whitman, the eighteenth-century poet Ewald finds his inspiration in nature – here among creatures from birds to predators and snakes – when explaining how only God’s ‘flame of love’ can lift the human soul with its ‘featherless wings’ up from ‘the clay’ in which it crawls, so that it may soar up to the angels from whence it came.

Holmboe’s musical language is characteristically unreserved in its bracing austerity. Against this background, Ewald’s Romantic text seems particularly bombastic compared to Whitman’s, which somehow manages to describe something equally lofty with words over which one does not stumble in the same way. Yet both texts deal with the ultimate in the form of the spiritual. And for Holmboe, it is typical that something which might seem old-fashioned and high-flown to many, seemed contemporary and natural to him.

Forgotten and Thoroughly Hidden
Vagn Holmboe has been perceived as a Nordic composer in the tradition of Carl Nielsen, although in fact his view of his great predecessor’s music evolved from outright negativity to nuance. Because he remained largely silent in public about how his artistic and philosophical outlook was grounded in Eastern religion and philosophy, the main work on this album, Die Erfüllung,has, until now, not been part of our picture of Holmboe and his musical oeuvre. Like Zeit, it has long remained hidden from view.

Holmboe’s chamber music – especially his more than twenty masterful string quartets – together with his thirteen symphonies, the symphonic metamorphoses, and the choral compendium Liber canticorum, have instead claimed attention. In the same way, his creative engagement with modernist twelve-tone music, aleatoric composition, and serialism in the 1950s and 1960s has received very little attention.

It is evident in many contexts that Holmboe tended to realise his ideas in pairs or ‘sister works’. Among the most familiar examples are his solo works for guitar and accordion. Considering Zeit from the late 1960s and Die Erfüllung from the early 1990s as such a sibling pair reveals this tendency: two ‘deep’ spiritual, text-based works presented vocally – one accompanied by four strings, the other by nine winds. Both tell of a composer who believed his music embodied the cosmic and the eternal transformation of all things.

© Thomas Michelsen, 2026

Thomas Michelsen has written about classical music for three decades and is currently Music Editor at Politiken. He holds a Master’s degree in Musicology and the History of Philosophy and in 2022 published the first biography of Vagn Holmboe, Det dybe og det rene (The Deep and the Pure) .