Romanticism, Eccentricity, and Innovation in Rued Langgaard’s Works for Solo Piano

Rued Langgaard was an early 20th-century Danish composer known for his originality in composition and status as a defiant outcast. His works span from the most Romantic to the most eccentric, and while he went through different phases, his compositional development was not always linear. In many cases, he would compose music in a Romantic style one day, only to write highly experimental music the next. Much of his eccentricity is reflected through the written words fused alongside the musical notes: genre designations, titles, markings, and other expressive text are found in Langgaard’s music that exist nowhere else in this manner. As performers encountering these innovative and eccentric markings, we quickly realize that we have few frames of reference for the given instructions. This is not because the literal meaning of the text is unknown to us, whether it be in Italian, German, French, or Danish, but because the music itself is understood only within its own frame of reference. To be sure, Langgaard often imitates styles of past composers, but in doing so he erases our expectations, as familiar sonorities, structures, and expressions are decontextualized.

Overview

While Langgaard’s writing for solo piano is extensive and highly varied, a cross-section of it can help illustrate how he manifests his musical languages. The two versions of Flower Vignettes, from 1913 (BVN 56)[1] and 1951 (BVN 424), show how Langgaard retained Romantic idioms late in his life, when the deterioration of his mental health and paranoia regarding his status in music history had taken hold.[2] Despite his earlier experimentation with avant-garde and innovative writing, and despite mental struggles, his late compositions in the youthful Romantic style had become more refined.

In Coffee Party and Resignation (BVN 123:5) from 1916, a musical tableau depicting a comical situation, Langgaard heightens the comedic effect in part with written lyrics in the score. These false lyrics, appearing toward the end of the piece, are not meant to be declaimed, sung, or otherwise performed, but serve instead as an expressive instruction to the performer, as if the performer should imagine them during performance. By the third decade of the 20th century, Langgaard was writing music with extreme, often morbid and occult, titles, such as Insanity Fantasy (BVN 327), which includes beautiful, romantic passages juxtaposed with frantic music mirroring a mind on the precipice of insanity. Langgaard adds to the musical frenzy by again employing false lyrics, first in the form of a Heine poem, and later with words from his own pen. These lyrics have a similar yet slightly different function from those in Coffee Party and Resignation, as they provide associations to overarching rather than specific emotions. In Music of the Spheres of Hell (BVN 371), Langgaard uses modern sonorities and chance operations, allowing the performer to repeat the piece for as long as they wish while maintaining a steady accelerando throughout that is meant to push the tempo to its limits. Similarly, the Free Piano Sonata (BVN 309) from 1945–46 is to be repeated “for all eternity,” a marking he reused in his famous and highly satirical 1948 work for chorus and orchestra, Carl Nielsen, Our Great Composer (BVN 355b). Another morbid but humorous work, Insektarium (BVN 134), shows some of his most influential writing, as it includes numerous examples of extended piano technique used to depict various species of common insects musically.

Overall, the musical output of Langgaard can seem confusing and difficult to understand in the context of music history, both Danish and international. His compositions failed to live up to the expectations held by those who promoted new and innovative art during the first half of the century, and as such, he was never accepted as a genuine contributor to music history until recently. As Langgaard scholar Bendt V. Nielsen remarks in his monograph, Langgaard’s works should not be regarded as perfect, complete works, but rather as statements,[3] placing more emphasis on their existence as artistic expressions than on music for the senses.

Flower Vignettes (BVN 56 and 424)

The first version of Blomstervignetter (Flower Vignettes) was written in 1913, at the height of his first compositional phase, characterized by Romantic ideals and youthful optimism.[4] The set includes four vignettes, with the following titles:

Rødtjørn (Hawthorn)

Aakande (Waterlily)

Forglemmigej (Forget-me-not)

Tusindfryd (Daisies)

Each vignette is concise and has a distinct character in binary or rounded binary form, depicting an objective impression of a flower. Interestingly, the manuscripts suggest that Langgaard decided on the titles after writing the pieces, as they include two other sets of titles:

The consideration of different titles[5] indicates that Langgaard began the compositional process with the music first, letting its sound and character influence his internal images. The consideration of Album Leaves suggests a connection to Robert Schumann and his Albumblätter, op. 124, which, too, are character pieces with different genres of titles. The musical style in Flower Vignettes recalls the lyrical and florid writing of Schumann, highlighting Langgaard’s deep admiration for the German composer. The title “The 4 Temperaments” is an early example of his fascination with psychological matters, alluding to the four temperaments described by Hippocrates.6 Langgaard revisited Flower Vignettes in 1951, keeping the same movement titles as well as keys but changing the musical material. While clearly inspired by the earlier version, some movements, like the last, are vastly different in character:

Kafferep og Resignation (Coffee Party and Resignation) – BVN 123:5

At the beginning of his second compositional phase, Langgaard wrote a set of character pieces for piano while on vacation in the south of Sweden, appropriately titled Summer Vacations in Blekinge. Here, he used music to express real-life comic situations––in this case, people sitting and talking all at the same time while drinking coffee. The music features fast sixteenth-notes in arpeggiated patterns in both hands, with occasional sforzandi emulating a person interjecting during someone else’s argument. Toward the end, Langgaard provides lyrics in between the two staves for the piano, with the words, “My God, let’s get out of here. . . .” These false lyrics are meant for the performer only, suggesting the resignation with which the end should be played:

The use of extramusical writing in the style of false lyrics underlines a new current of compositions that Langgaard was entering in 1916. As time progressed, he would resort even more to this type of expression, not only heightening the listening experience, but fundamentally altering the interpretive and performative experience.

Dark Music

Insanity Fantasy (BVN 327)

Throughout his career, Langgaard grew increasingly frustrated that he failed to gain recognition as a composer. He became bitter and disillusioned and began writing music that was satirical, morbid, and sometimes spiteful in character. At the same time, he had cultivated constant attention toward religious subjects, visible in the decade-long project that culminated in his only opera, Antikrist (BVN 192), composed in 1921–23 and reworked in 1926–30.7 His fascination with religion in combination with desperation led to extreme ventures in compositions. The Insanity Fantasy from 1949 is an example of the extremes that Langgaard would go to in his subject matter.

The fantasy was first conceived in 1916 as Fantasy-Sonata (BVN 121), which again echoed Schumann in its use of a quatrain as a motto underneath the title, much as in Schumann’s Fantasy, op. 17. In the 1916 Fantasy-Sonata, Langgaard uses a quatrain by Goethe from Faust about the approach of death, framing the music as a heroic last stance. The work is free in form and characterized by episodes that appear either once or twice but lacks drive in its structure. Noticing perhaps its overly stretched scope, Langgaard decided to rework the Fantasy-Sonata much later in 1942 and condensed the form to have fewer and shorter episodes and no repeating sections. In this version, however, he doubled down on the motto and added to it, inserting a poem by Heine (“Lehn’ deine Wang’ an meine Wang’”) as false lyrics above the first 42 measures. During a contrasting choral section later in the piece, he inserted poetry by himself that evokes a religious atmosphere. In doing so, Langgaard mixed not only poets but also languages, as the lines by Goethe and Heine are in German and his own are in Danish. Adding to those the expressive markings in Italian, he left us with four layers of extramusical text in three languages: a genre-title in Danish, a motto in German, false lyrics in German and Danish, and expressive markings in Italian. The impression that remains is that of a de-nationalized statement, proving that artistic statements need not be confined to one language and one expression.

The final iteration of Fantasy-Sonata became the Insanity Fantasy in 1949 (BVN 327), which Langgaard decided to restructure into three discrete movements, each with its own movement title: “Insanity-Autumn-Night,” “Autumn-Angel,” and “Insanity-Walk.” In doing so, he reused material from the earlier fantasies in the first and second movements and composed a third movement with new material in a musical style that is defiantly Romantic. As further evidence of an eccentric mind, Langgaard decided to scrap the Goethe-motto but keep fragments of Heine and his own poem, further removing the poetry from context to the point that they leave but a suggestion of their meaning:

Music of the Hell-Spheres (BVN 381) and Free Piano Sonata (BVN 309)

As has already become evident, Insanity Fantasy was far from the only example of music that is obsessed with morbidity, darkness, and religion. Another example that touches dark subjects more directly is Music of the Hell-Spheres from 1948, a compact piano piece that allows the performer to repeat a majority of the piece until an “insane” tempo has been reached, and which imitates feelings of fright and paranoia musically. The provided motto and overall visual impression of the piece suggest an inclination toward the extremes of expression:

The provided tempo marking reads “Gradually insane tempo,” which, paired with a repeat sign at the penultimate measure accompanied by the text “repeat again and again,” signals to the performer to reach an expression in the furthest extreme possible.

This kind of chance operation––the infinity-loop––was explored further in the Free Piano Sonata from 1945–46, which features two different instructions to “repeat infinitely.” The sonata is divided into sections that are marked by numbers: section 1 in mm. 1–40; section 2 in mm. 41–85; and section 3 from m. 86. First, he asks the performer to repeat sections 3 and 2 infinitely; later, after m. 190, he asks the performer to “Repeat infinitely from the beginning [1].” If taken to their logical conclusions, the pieces are impossible to perform: there is no practical way to perform a section infinitely and then continue to the next section, only to perform both infinities an infinite number of times. These infinity-loops therefore function either as a performable chance operation, in which the performer chooses how many times to repeat, or as an artistic statement in the form of conceptual art.

Insectarium (BVN 134)

Insectarium (BVN 134)

The Free Piano Sonata is not the first example of Langgaard employing chance operations in his music. If so, he would have been in company with Charles Ives and others who had begun allowing for improvisational aspects in classical compositions in the 1930s.8 Instead, Langgaard had explored this and similarly innovative ideas much earlier, before it had become a novel mainstream among international composers. Insectarium features chance operations, extended piano techniques, and performance art, compositional devices that were unusual (but not unseen) in 1917. While some scholars have suggested that Langgaard was a pioneer in extended keyboard techniques,[9] Katharina Bleier proves that this is not the case. In her German article, “Rued Langgaard, Henry Cowell und die Anfänge des Extended Piano,”[10] Bleier points to a clavichord sonata by Friedrich Wilhelm Rust from 1792 that asks the performer to play on and hit the strings of the instrument to simulate orchestral sounds as the earliest example, but shows also how Schoenberg, Cowell, Grainger, and others were experimenting with similar techniques in the first and second decades of the 20th century.[11] What makes Langgaard remarkable, Bleier notes, is that he developed these techniques in complete isolation. Where Schoenberg, Cowell, Grainger, and other international composers existed in the same social circles, becoming inspired by each other’s innovations and carefully implementing one new technique at a time, Langgaard used a plethora of different extended techniques in one and the same work, most likely unaware of any such developments abroad. In addition, Langgaard employed chance operations, allowing the performer to improvise rhythms and repetitions over a set of tritones:

While extended piano techniques were slowly entering the normal mainstream at the time, true chance elements were still highly avant-garde and unique. Taken together with the instructions later in the piece to hit the knuckles on the lid of the piano, grab the strings of the piano, raise the hands above the head, and play glissando on the highest strings inside the piano, Insectarium stands out as a modernistic work much ahead of its time in expression and purpose.

Final Thoughts

Through a brief survey covering a cross-section of Langgaard’s solo piano works, it becomes apparent that his methods of musical expression are highly varied and unlike those of most other composers of the early 20th century. His use of Romantic idioms, mixed with comical, satirical, morbid, and modernistic expressions, creates an impression of a composer trying to locate his place in the canon of music history. What also becomes clear, however, is that Langgaard was not in search of a singular personal expression that would define him as an individual but was trying instead to further musical traditions by adding to them. In 1932, he remarked, “Music has been discovered and cannot be further discovered.”12 This mindset suggests a belief that music had nowhere to go, save for rediscovering and reimagining its potential. Occurring then is a clash between the old and the new––a clear sense of tradition and retrospection in his music, juxtaposed with unfamiliar expressions that feel decontextualized. The expressions are, to the extent that is known, genuine. This is perhaps the glue that keeps together the messy, unorganized span of his oeuvre, seemingly pointing in no direction and every direction at once. Candidness, in a Langgaardian context, was not divorced from yearning for recognition––a hunger he made abundantly clear in his letters and remarks––but was instead accompanied by that yearning based on a fundamental belief that his musical persona had to be voiced and deserved to be heard.

Bibliography

Antokoletz, Elliott. A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a Theoretic-Analytical Context. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Bleier, Katharina. “Rued Langgaard, Henry Cowell und die Anfänge des Extended Piano.” In Rued Langgaard: Perspektiven, edited by Juri Giannini. Wien: Hollitzer Verlag, 2021.

Langgaard, Rued. Piano Works I: Collected Works for Piano Vol. 1. Edited by Berit J. Tange, Ole U. Jensen, and Bendt V. Nielsen. Copenhagen: Edition Wilhelm Hansen, 2018.

Langgaard, Rued. Piano Works II: Collected Works for Piano Vol. 2. Edited by Berit J. Tange, Ole U. Jensen, and Bendt V. Nielsen. Copenhagen: Edition Wilhelm Hansen, 2018.

Langgaard, Rued. Piano Pieces 1902–1951: Collected Works for Piano Vol. 3. Edited by Berit J. Tange, Ole U. Jensen, and Bendt V. Nielsen. Copenhagen: Edition Wilhelm Hansen, 2018.

Langgaard, Rued. Piano Works, Vols. 1–4. Performed by Berit T. Johansen. Recorded 2005–2022. Dacapo Records 8.226025, 6.220565, 6.220631, and 6.220662, 4 CDs.

Merenda, Peter F. “Toward a Four-Factor Theory of Temperament and/or Personality.” Journal of Personality Assessment 51, no. 3 (1987): 367–74. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa5103_4.

Nielsen, Bendt V. Den Ekstatiske Outsider: Rued Langgaards Liv og Musik. Klampenborg, Denmark: Engstrøm & Sødrings Musikforlag, 2012.

Nielsen, Bendt V. Rued Langgaards Kompositioner: Annoteret Værkfortegnelse (Rued Langgaard's Compositions: An Annotated Catalogue of Works, with an English Introduction). Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag, 1991.

Nielsen, Bendt V., and Langgaard-Fonden. “Rued Langgaard: En Dansk Komponist Præsenteret i Tekst, Billeder, Musik og Tale.” Last modified January 15, 2024. http://www.langgaard.dk/. Accessed April 27, 2024.