The ideas behind the music
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Emma Langgaard - painted in 1910 by Sally Philipsen (privately owned). Emma Langgaard's views on the development of music are expressed in a letter she wrote in 1912 to Hans von Wolzogen (a writer on Wagner topics who both read and wrote Danish): "Personally I am deeply committed to the task of the true Art here in the world, as both my husband and
my son (our only child) belong to the movement of ideal artists here on earth, which is the same as saying that they have
the call to perceive 'the narrow path' in contrast to that of the world, which also in terms of the art of music is becoming
more and more visibly an anti-Christian path. This statement is all the more interesting because it points directly forwards to Rued Langgaard's opera, Antikrist (Antichrist), which was written 10 years later. This opera was inspired amongst other things by Richard Strauss' musical idiom, which Langgaard undoubtedly imitated because he found it attractively decadent, and at the same time typical of the decline of the anti-Christian period. |
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