Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996)

[calyptorhynchus]

 Yesterday I went through the list of VH's works (on Wikipedia). I had thought that there were lots of works unrecorded, and that is true, but most are smaller scale, vocal, piano &c works.

I found to my surprise that two CDs would probably do for the unrecorded VH I want to hear:

1. A string quintet disk with M206 Tropos and M326 String Quintet (the former has two violas, the latter two cellos).
2. A concerto disk with M286 Louisiana Concerto for Strings and M368 String Quartet Concerto

Plus it would be nice to have a disk of some of the unnumbered string quartets (VH's SQs 0, 00, 000  ). The numbered series starts so powerfully (and so late in VH's list of compositions) that some of the earlier ones must be worth listening to.

[Madiel]

It's been over a month since I wrote about a concerto. It's finally time for...

Concerto No.13 (op.67) for oboe and viola.

[asin]B000026AR1[/asin]

It's kind of worth reiterating what an outlier this last in the numbered concerto series is. Concerto no.1 was in 1939. Concertos 4 through 10 were whipped through from 1942 to 1946. Then we had 11 (1948) and 12 (1950). This last one wasn't completed until 1956, so it's a decade after most of the series.

And that's important because Holmboe's style has moved on in a big way. The strong folk influences, and the rhythmic pulse that came with them, has practically dissolved here. Often this music hovers, with one or both of the soloists weaving their way over an accompaniment that is static or, if it does move, doesn't have much sense of direction.

The 1st movement starts in this static fashion, with the viola appearing over an orchestra that gets stuck on the same ambiguous chord several times (a chord which recurs a number of times in the movement). When the oboe comes in, it seems to be doing quite different things to its companion. It's not so much that they're arguing, it's more that they happen to be performing at the same time in their own separate spheres of influence, only half-conscious of each other. Once the movement becomes more animated, traces of both can be found in the orchestra. There are times when the oboe and viola do work together, but the general impression is of music that pulses and flows in a tangled fashion. It's not chaotic, but it's hard to predict.

The 2nd movement has many of the same qualities. The orchestra supplies a single chord, and then the oboe and viola both play, often in ways that only half-acknowledge each other. It's like... two half-concertos playing at once! In the middle there's more of a sense of everything coming together, but then the orchestra starts fading out again, supplying isolated chords as the soloists carry the music, slightly more unified than when they started.

The finale starts with rapid strings and flowing woodwinds, before the oboe takes charge for a while. But it doesn't take very long at all before there's that same sense of everybody talking - oboe, viola and orchestra - and each doing a semi-independent thing. It's not dissonant, but it's very busy. The texture thins out, and then the viola takes the lead for a bit with the oboe supporting. After that, for the second half of the movement it starts feeling like just possibly everyone is trying to play the same piece at the same time and the conclusion is thoroughly orderly!

It's all very strange and I'm doing an absolutely terrible job of explaining it. But it's fascinating stuff. It's a very amorphous piece in some ways but it always feels as if the composer, at least, knows how he's shaping the material.

[calyptorhynchus]

Requiem for Nietzsche was last major recorded work by Holmboe I hadn't heard. Listened to it today. My reaction:

1.       The Short Version: brilliant music, listen to it if you like listening to choral music without bothering what the words mean.
2.       The Long Version: in the CD booklet notes to the recording Holmboe expert Paul Rapoport writes very politely about the words as a parable of Nietzsche as a suffering artist and thinker. In actual fact the libretto is a poorly thought-out and poorly-informed Christian strawman argument about Nietzsche exceeding the bounds of permitted thought and being stricken with madness (at the end of Part 2 (of 5), so clearly he doesn't get much of chance; medical biography is of the opinion that Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse in 1889 as a result of a brain tumour, not intellectual overreach). I find the libretto in quite extraordinary bad taste and think that it's a pity that Holmboe wasted so much great music on it.

It doesn't bother me that Holmboe was some sort of Christian (hence the Symphony No.4 and the Liber Canticorum), I'm fine with listening to those works because I understand he is writing in a particular tradition, which I understand, even if I don't belong to. What I object to in this work is the libretto appropriating Nietzsche for Christian purposes. If you want to critique Nietzsche then by all means do it, but only in terms of his own philosophy, or the history of philosophy or sociology, not in terms of a religion he never belonged to.
One curious thing in the music is this: in the First Part Nietzsche is conflated with Faust, as pursuer of forbidden knowledge. There is a passage which refers to 'Wagner' and at this point in the music Holmboe introduces a theme from Tristan und Isolde. However the reference is clearly to Faust's servant Wagner, not Richard Wagner. Rapoport explains this as the music dealing with a period in Nietzsche's life when he wrote extensively about Wagner's music. However, to introduce the quotation at the same moment as a reference to a different Wagner is just plain confusing.
Anyway, it has always surprised me that Holmboe's music isn't more widely played, but I think obscurity is a reasonable fate for this score.

[calyptorhynchus]

ps if anyone wants the disk, I'll send it to them.

[Madiel]

I know almost nothing about Nietzsche. I can't say I got the notion of some conservative Christian "wasn't Nietzsche awful" agenda out of the libretto at all. To me the main reason there are references to God is simply because dealing with God is one of the things Nietzsche is famous for.

[Karl Henning]

Who wrote the libretto?  (I have the disc somewhere, though I am not sure I've yet listened to it . . . .)

[Madiel]

Who wrote the libretto?  (I have the disc somewhere, though I am not sure I've yet listened to it . . . .)

A poet named Thorkild Bjørnvig. Holmboe had worked with him on one of his cantatas (no opus number). If I understand the liner notes correctly, the text was published as poetry and not specifically as a libretto.

[Karl Henning]

Thanks.

[calyptorhynchus]

I know almost nothing about Nietzsche. I can't say I got the notion of some conservative Christian "wasn't Nietzsche awful" agenda out of the libretto at all. To me the main reason there are references to God is simply because dealing with God is one of the things Nietzsche is famous for.

True, but when Nietzsche was writing Christianity was the reference point for almost all western thought, he could hardly ignore it. What Nietzsche never did was take a famous Christian and say they were a bad Nietzschian; the libretto of this work says, basically, Nietzsche was a clever man but a bad one because he transgressed the boundaries of permitted thought, God smote him and his madness and all its symptoms were proof of this. I find it very Ted Cruz/Fred Nile type stuff.

[Turner]

A poet named Thorkild Bjørnvig. Holmboe had worked with him on one of his cantatas (no opus number). If I understand the liner notes correctly, the text was published as poetry and not specifically as a libretto.

Bjørnvig´s 11 Nietzsche sonnets were published in 1959, as a part of the poetry collection "Figur og Ild / Figure and Fire". Holmboe I think worked with his piece in 1963-64.

[Madiel]

True, but when Nietzsche was writing Christianity was the reference point for almost all western thought, he could hardly ignore it. What Nietzsche never did was take a famous Christian and say they were a bad Nietzschian; the libretto of this work says, basically, Nietzsche was a clever man but a bad one because he transgressed the boundaries of permitted thought, God smote him and his madness and all its symptoms were proof of this. I find it very Ted Cruz/Fred Nile type stuff.

That's what I mean, I don't get that vibe from it. It would be profoundly odd to write a "requiem" (Holmboe's own title) for someone you were trying to gloat over.

[calyptorhynchus]

Well, I think it's offensive to write a Requiem for someone who was never a Christian, pretty much like the Mormons posthumously rebaptising people into the LDS.

The sonnet sequence reimagines Nietszche in Christian terms and appropriates him for Christianity, I find that contemptible.

Having said that I reserve the contempt for the poet, I hope that Holmboe simply got cornered into agreeing to set the words without reading them, and didn't pay very much attention to them when he was setting it. The confusion over Wagner and Wagner I mentioned earlier might be a sign of this.

[Madiel]

*shrug* I'm not going to continue discussing our differing reactions to the text because at the end of the day there's inevitably a subjective element to it.

I do think, though, that any suggestion that Holmboe disliked the text involves a very high degree of wishful thinking.

[Karl Henning]

I do think, though, that any suggestion that Holmboe disliked the text involves a very high degree of wishful thinking.

Word.  Why would any composer invest the time to write an hourlong piece setting a text he didn't like?  Life is too short.

[Madiel]

Word.  Why would any composer invest the time to write an hourlong piece setting a text he didn't like?  Life is too short.

Well, such things might happen in, say, Stalinist Russia. But not in 1960s Denmark.

[Karl Henning]

Well, such things might happen in, say, Stalinist Russia. But not in 1960s Denmark.

Point taken.  And it doesn't interfere at all with my finding the Prokofiev Op.74 cracking good fun.

[Karl Henning]

Bjørnvig published his cycle of eleven sonnets under the simple title "Nietzsche" in his collection Figur og ild (Figure and Fire) in 1959.  He himself once suggested what may have interested Holmboe in these poems:  the endeavor to maintain one's convictions and develop higher orders of artistic totalities and truths in a time of confusion, disruption, even despair.  The combination of the sonnets' dispassionate formal control with their stark imagery and network of allusions might also have attracted Holmboe;  for these features, or their musical counterparts, are characteristic of so much of his music.

Bjørnvig also wrote, "In Vagn Holmboe I found the ruthless intellectual curiosity, the firsthand relationship to phenomena, the unfailing aim for the heart of problems from no matter what angle, which characterize significant artists as well as philosophers and scientists, and which are features they have in common" (DMT, vol. 45, no. 7, 1969).  Certainly Holmboe's deep creative and human sensibility found a spiritual counterpart in Thorkild Bjørnvig.

The sonnets make vivid use of events and ideas from the life of one of the most influential German writers, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).  They create a symbolic interpretation of Nietzsche – his expectations, aspirations, discoveries, conflicts, and tragic decline.  The cycle does not tell Nietzsche's life story, nor does it proceed straightforwardly, but rather integrates references to Nietzsche's life into an imaginative recreation of his struggles.

From that, I get nothing like this:

Well, I think it's offensive to write a Requiem for someone who was never a Christian, pretty much like the Mormons posthumously rebaptising people into the LDS.

The sonnet sequence reimagines Nietszche in Christian terms and appropriates him for Christianity, I find that contemptible.

By the way, Nietzsche lived in a predominantly Christian society; that is history, not "reimagination."

[Madiel]

I'm about to listen to the thing as it happens. Nothing to do with this discussion, it's simply where I'm up to in my chronological listening.

It's been a bit over 9 months since my initial listen so I don't remember much of it clearly, only that I was quite taken with it. It's certainly an exceptionally large-scale work by Holmboe's standards.

[Karl Henning]

The sonnet sequence reimagines Nietszche in Christian terms and appropriates him for Christianity, I find that contemptible.

How peculiar that the final sonnet is titled Asgaardsreien, then.  No Christian theology that I am aware of refers to Asgard . . . .

[Karl Henning]

There is a passage which refers to 'Wagner' and at this point in the music Holmboe introduces a theme from Tristan und Isolde. However the reference is clearly to Faust's servant Wagner, not Richard Wagner. Rapoport explains this as the music dealing with a period in Nietzsche's life when he wrote extensively about Wagner's music. However, to introduce the quotation at the same moment as a reference to a different Wagner is just plain confusing.

I'd call it a pun, rather than just plain confusing.