Michael Dervan reports on the Danish stage première of Antikrist, the sole opera by Rued Langgaard.
Some of the more remarkable of musical undertakings remain all but unknown to the general public. In the middle of the 19th century, the Italian composer Pietro Raimondi produced a pair of operas - one a comedy, the other a tragedy - which could be performed separately, and then together, with plots and music knitting into a new whole. The Danish composer Rued Langgaard had a cantata, Musae triumphantes, for soloists, chorus and orchestra, performed at the age of 14 in 1908, and five years later the Berlin Philharmonic under Max Fiedler devoted a concert to his music, including his hour-long First Symphony.
Raimondi is now entirely forgotten, but Langgaard, whose Berlin Philharmonic début was the greatest success he ever knew, has been the subject of increasing attention in recent years. This outsider in Danish musical life was a romantic at a time when the establishment favoured other tastes. His exclusion left him angry and embittered. He maintained a critical stance on the achievements of Denmark's greatest musical son, Carl Nielsen. And it took him most of his life to land the sort of official position he had long craved, when he became organist of Ribe Cathedral in southern Jutland in 1940, 12 years before his death.
His later music, which found him turning in on himself as a result of his artistic isolation, looks backwards and forwards, adopting characteristics of pre-20th-century work and also prefiguring textural developments that would only be taken up again (completely independently of his own efforts) after his death.
One of his greatest disappointments was the rejection of his sole opera, Antikrist, which he finished in 1923, reworked from 1926-30, and which the Royal Danish Opera turned down on three occasions. The rehabilitation of the piece began with a radio broadcast in 1980, and last week, nearly 80 years late, the Royal Danish Opera in conjunction with Danish Radio, brought the work to the stage for the first time in Denmark.
The performance was given in the royal stables of Christiansborg, an unusual and successful conversion for musical use at the administrative heart of Copenhagen. With the members of the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra in full view in a sunken pit, and the singers roving freely on boards with lighting and props but no curtains or sets, the austere-looking venue has a warmth of sound that allows voices and orchestral tone to linger in the air in a flattering manner.
The composer, I suspect, would have approved of the spareness of the setting. His work is an allegory (it is subtitled "Church Opera, Judgement Day Scenes") and he used it to vent his spleen against what he saw as the ills of the age he lived in.
The Voice of God is heard, speaking in thunderous tones, but never singing, as if beyond the reach of music. The presences or, rather, mouthpieces that Langgaard lines up in opposition include Lucifer, The Great Whore (a sort of Virgin Mary from Hell in Bente Lykke Moller's costumes), The Scarlet Coloured Beast and The Lie.
Without a detailed comprehension of Langgaard's text - the work was sung in Danish, with Danish surtitles - the effect was of a series of rants, of words placed in enemies' mouths, but carefully chosen to be shown up and rejected without difficulty.
The composer has a compelling command of instrumental sonority, and the string, bell and organ effects of the opening, lovingly shaped by conductor Thomas Dausgaard, promise much. The heat of the argument is successfully maintained, but at one extreme the dissonance and violence are laid on trowel-thick, and at the other the harmonic language trespasses into banality. Danish commentators' comparisons with Richard Strauss do both composers a disservice, Langgaard for the depth and drive of his motivation, Strauss for his harmonic savoir-faire. Even some impressively impassioned singing, with Johnny van Hal's The Lie almost breaking ranks in persuasiveness, was not sufficient to erase the impression that in this work much more is striven for than achieved.
Staffan Valdemar Holm's production was severe and ritualised, but also packed a punch, Linus Fellbom's lighting resourceful enough to obviate the need for sets. The orchestrally imaginative opening apart, it was the closing chorus, an assertion of heavenly peace with something of the moving simplicity of the Fauré Requiem, which left the most lasting impression.
With the moral at the end, that is surely how Langgaard would have wanted it. And his heart would have been moved by the enthusiasm with which his 21st-century listeners received his message.
