Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996)

[Karl Henning]

Cross-post

Quite possibly a first listen . . .

Holmboe
Requiem for Nietzsche, Op.84 / M.219 (1963–4)

I paced this, taking breaks between tracks/Parts.  Overall, I think it excellent music, thoroughly engaging to listen to.

That said, a non-fatal quibble.  I don't absolutely fault Holmboe for it, any more than I do Игорь Фëдорович for the comparable use in his Libera me) but each time I hear a choir speaking a text in rhythm, I think, Okay, that was kind of interesting the very first time I heard it, decades ago.  It's a technique which IMO does not rise to the level of a legitimate reusable item.  It just makes me wonder, Gee, could the composer not think of notes here, then? (that thought crosses my mind, even though I know perfectly well that both Holmboe & Игорь Фëдорович, e.g., never lacked for excellent notes). I just get impatient for the next actually musical passage to get started.

As I say, that is a mere footnote.  I hope someday to write a choral piece as fine and substantial as this 'un;  it is certainly a piece I shall revisit from time to time.

[Karl Henning]

. . . and a gorgeous, Stravinskyan coda, by the way.

[calyptorhynchus]

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

So one who lives in a predominantly Christian society is ever allowed to be anything other than Christian? Sounds like the Spanish Inquisition to me.

It is a reimagination, a rewriting of history, to write a Requiem (=eternal rest) for someone who wrote extensively of the idea of eternal recurrence.

[Karl Henning]

So one who lives in a predominantly Christian society is ever allowed to be anything other than Christian? Sounds like the Spanish Inquisition to me.

Your wilfully tendentious non sequiturs don't really invite discussion, do they?

If anything, your insistently hostile caricature of the composer's designating this as a "requiem" is more of an homage to those intolerant Spaniards.

[Karl Henning]

Comparing a Danish artist in the 1960s to Torquemada? Do you even listen to yourself?

[Scion7]

[Madiel]

*Quietly shelves proposal for Requiem honouring Gandhi, on the grounds it may deeply offend Hindus*

Some random thoughts after having another listen to this Requiem:

- I really wish that Da Capo had done 1 track per sonnet, rather than 1 track per 'Part'. There's enough of a clear change of music from one to the next to warrant it and it would have made study a little easier.

- Knowing a lot more Danish now than I did 9 months ago, I'm not totally in love with the translation. I can't read word-for-word yet, but it does irritate me a little when word/phrase order is switched for no good reason or a slightly different expression is used when the original was perfectly translatable. I don't feel that the English really changes the sense of it, but still literal is better in a musical context. The more literal the translation, the more you a reader in a different language can still understand exactly how the composer has worked.

- At one point the text refers to the gentle Nazarene's poison. Hardly a ringing endorsement of Christianity.

- I can understand Karl's dislike of rhythmic text. Some of the less rhythmic spoken text in the Requiem is amazing, though. Solhymne is a fractionally earlier Holmboe work using similar techniques.

- I still don't feel like I've got a great grasp of the work as a whole (listening without reading may be better for that), but there are very powerful passages in there. One of the ones that really struck me this time around is in Sonnet VIII - the first line as translated is "In hospital, in darkness, sounds of shots" and the music certainly evoked gunfire for me.

[calyptorhynchus]

Karl, you sound like a very stupid person, (you don't even recognise Monty Python references, for example), so I won't respond to any more of your posts.

Orfeo, the Nazerene's poison an opinion attributed to Nietzsche in the libretto, and, in the scheme of the sonnets, it is one more indictment amongst the others.

[ptr]

I have that incomplete set of string quartets on Fona LPs, the CSQ (Copehagen String Quartet) play very good, some of then even superior to the Kontra Quartet on DaCapo. Well worth to look for! (Fona is/was a chain of Record/HiFi stores in Denmark, who released a number of LPs of contemporary Danish music up till the beginning of the 80's, many very worth while to pursue if one is into Danish music)

/ptr

[Madiel]

Okay, look, this is now getting into ridiculous territory where confirmation bias is running riot.

If there's something about Christianity it's bad because Nietzsche wasn't Christian. If we point out something doesn't endorse Christianity, then it's bad because the libretto is attacking Nietzsche for attacking Christianity. Fundamentally it's becoming utterly wrong in your eyes for the libretto to deal with Christianity or God in any way.

Which is ridiculous because dealing with God and Christianity is EXACTLY what Nietzsche is famous for. No one is going to write a text on Nietzsche that makes no reference to religion and focuses on the contents of his vegetable garden, for exactly the reason that no one is going to talk about Monet and not mention art or discuss Beethoven without referencing music or deafness.

You're basically upset that the text focuses on the tragic aspects of Nietzsche and are utterly determined to take it all as a Christian statement that he got what was coming to him for daring to dabble in such matters. For goodness sake it's poetry. Statements about the medical causes of brain tumours belong in medical textbooks, and to the extent that you want to deny ANY connection between mind and body you're flat out wrong anyway, and science says you're wrong.

The text is thoroughly ambiguous as to the merits or otherwise of Nietzsche's views, and quite deliberately so in my opinion as it's all about allusions and imagery. Your lashing out at anything and anyone who doesn't immediately hop on your interpretation of the whole thing as a Christian Plot is really getting excessive. Karl is not a stupid person by any stretch of the imagination. And neither are you.

[Madiel]

And to be clear, it's not your dislike of the libretto I have a real problem with, it's the extraordinary vehemence with which you are expressing it.

You are actually putting me in mind of a fundamentalist dogmatic preacher, far more than the subjects of your attack have done.

[Jo498]

I cannot quote chapter and verse but the "poison" is very probably a literal allusion to or quotation from Nietzsche, not slander. Roughly (and simplified), one main strain of Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity (and Judaism and Socratic preference for rather suffering wrong than doing wrong) is that this is an attitude of resentful slaves, not of archaic aristocrats (like Homerian heroes) who do as they please.

Because most of us are not strong enough such a dogma is sweet poison for most of us, because we can fault the supermen for immorality instead of celebrating their powerful, life-affirming way. And of course most of us are not meek sufferers but sly bastards and hypocrites who only use such religious or moralist doctrines to keep the "natural aristocrats" down. So the main point is not a plea for a brutal domination of the weak by the strong (although this was part of it and might have dominated the popular reception around 1900) but the hypocrisy Nietzsche sees in those religions and moral systems.

[Scion7]

The book, New Music of the Nordic Countries by John David White and Jean Christensen, ç2002 has six pages on Holmboe - interesting info.  It briefly touches on his life during WW2.

[Scion7]

Karl, you sound like a very stupid person ...

You're out of line, mate.  Way out.

[Karl Henning]

Well, passions sometimes run high.  He's mistaken, but at the end of the day, I've been called (wrongly, I hope) much worse things than stupid 

[Madiel]

I cannot quote chapter and verse but the "poison" is very probably a literal allusion to or quotation from Nietzsche, not slander. Roughly (and simplified), one main strain of Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity (and Judaism and Socratic preference for rather suffering wrong than doing wrong) is that this is an attitude of resentful slaves, not of archaic aristocrats (like Homerian heroes) who do as they please.

This would make sense and fits very well with the material.

Nothing in the context, as far as I can see, would indicate a stance by the poet whether it's wrong or right to describe Christianity in those terms. It's merely an allusion to Nietzsche's thoughts. Let me set out the whole relevant sonnet (in its English translation):

He saw in wind of dawn the golden dice,
the fair-haired heroes' brisk and brutal deed
before the poison of the gentle Nazarene
could penetrate the marrow of the strong.

And be perceived a danger-laden tide,
that rose and levelled every tower off.

And full of wisdom he came down with word.
He stood now in the low and sultry land.
About him suddenly was purple air.
He saw a horse's head, a painful grin
so moving, suffering and strangely near
in cool air as in a sudarium,
he put his arms around a horse. And there
that winter two in Turin were made one.

Certainly, from what you've said the first part of the sonnet contains a description of Nietzsche's views. I honestly can't see how it contains a condemnation of them.

[calyptorhynchus]

Orfeo

"For goodness sake it's poetry." So therefore it would be expected to be nonsense?

You mentioned as a joke "Quietly shelves plans for a requiem for Gandhi because it would offend Hindus", yes it would offend Hindus.

I really don't know where a lot of the stuff and Karl are saying comes from, not from me.

Just to put the matter as simply as I can:

1. Nietzsche was a philosopher and historian who proclaimed "God is dead" and wrote voluminously (and I think rather sillily) about Christianity, attacking it.
2. In 1889 he had a mental breakdown as a result of some organic cause, possibly a brain tumour, and thereafter was completely incapacitated.
3. In the 1950s a Danish poet writes a sequence of sonnets which narrates details from the life of Nietzsche in a framework that implies his mental collapse was a result of thinking forbidden thoughts, which dwells tastelessly on details of Nietzsche's state after his breakdown, implying that the breakdown was a result of thinking those forbidden thoughts, and purports to tell people that Nietzsche after his death rested with God (whom he had declared to be dead).
4. Holmboe then, in a huge artistic mistake, dignifies these rubbish poems with some very good music and seems to go along with the author's intent, adding the title Requiem.

My vehemence about all this is that I am aware of many musical works which are not much good because of their poor words, but I don't know of such an artistic mistake by someone whose music is otherwise so excellent. My most charitable explanation is that Holmboe's choice to set the words comes out of an unthinking, insular Danish Lutheranism (where everything is seen through the spectacles of Lutheran piety). The poet, however, I believe was motivated by malice.

[prémont]

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

I have to shudder. 

Asgaardsreien  quoted from
http://www.lexabc.dk/87/asg%C3%A5rdsreien =

Nocturnal rider crowd, which according to Danish folklore riding through the air Thursday night and especially on Christmas night. Headed by Guro Rysserova (Gudrun with ponytail), originally a death goddess who dragged the dead to the underworld. A meeting with Asgardsreia considered baleful and perceived often like a death notice.

[Madiel]

Calyptorhyncus, your 3rd point is a matter of interpretation. You're entitled to your interpretation. However I don't think the text is anything like as clear on those matters as you seem to think it is.

You see divine judgement where I only see tragedy.

[Scion7]

(Fona is/was a chain of Record/HiFi stores in Denmark, who released a number of LPs of contemporary Danish music up till the beginning of the 80's, many very worth while to pursue if one is into Danish music)

/ptr

I have a few Danish-pressed Jazz LP's, but never picked up anything Classical back in the day .... today you'd have to pay the big bucks for anything like that on eBay.    I see some re-issues on CD by the Copenhagen String Quartet but not these.