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Enthusiastic Reception...


 

Directly after the first performance of Langgaard's 6th Symphony (at that time designated the 5th), on 15 January 1923 in Karlsruhe, Langgaard sent this telegram home to this mother in Copenhagen.

The audience shouted 'bravo', and the composer was called out five or six times by the enthusiastic concert- goers.

 

According to the accounts given in Danish newspapers, Dr. Anton Rudolph wrote as follows about Langgaard in the Badische Presse after the performance: "Langgaard is active by nature, self-opinionated, severe, and most of all ascetically chaste. He seems to have 'grown wild', but this is a misconception. Only his rejection of all traditional forms and clichés is uncompromising."

Anton Rudolph was also of the opinion that in his works, Sfærernes Musik (Music of the Spheres) and Symphony No. 6, Langgaard had moved on from being an "imitator" to being a "creator". About the 6th Symphony he wrote that in this work the composer "has completely 'forgotten' the external framework, so that the glowing coals of the creative process are as it were completely embedded and melted in - hidden like the skeleton behind a handsome human frame. Expression, the inner movement of the music, and the rhythm of the heartbeat are sovereign throughout."


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