Idyll and catastrophe

By Leif Thomsen




Nordic

The road to idyll and catastrophe

The earliest period in Nørgård's creative career, the 'Nordic' phase, lasted until about 1960. Admittedly, the music of this period also contains elements of conflict, but the metamorphosis idea which characterised the composer's technique at this time holds together even those works that are violently dramatic in expression, such as the 1st. Symphony.

Collage style
This picture began to change with the more collage-style works that Nørgård composed in the mid-1960s. In the ballet music, Den unge mand skal giftes (The Young Man Must Marry) from 1964, one meets many different styles and musical quotations.
'Ecological music'




'Der ganze; der rühmliche Teppich...'

In the orchestral work Iris, from 1966, we meet a composer moving towards a kind of music we could call 'ecological': music which has as its theme a vibrant whole, culminating in the 3rd Symphony in 1975. "Fühl', daß der ganze, der rühmliche Teppich gemeint ist" (...remember: what matters is always the whole of that marvellous tapestry), runs the text of the Rilke sonnet on which the end of the symphony is based. This music is organic and hierarchical, but is not predominantly meditative or 'cosmic'. The point is that even in the hierarchical works one comes across dramatic passages, even passages full of conflict; but these are precisely legitimate aspects of an ordered universe composed of many parts.

Suffering and the absurd

Nørgård's aim is the development of 'the full potential' in music, as he himself puts it. And the absurd is an aspect of the human totality: the banana skin one slips up on when walking unconcernedly along. The human condition also includes suffering and even catastrophe. Such elements cannot be hidden away within a system; they remain a foreign body, a stake thrust into our hearts.

It is difficult to portray catastrophe using the kind of systematic approach to composition which hierarchical techniques are an expression of: in the nature of things, such an element falls outside the system.

Siddharta

The problem of portraying suffering as a sudden incursion of catastrophe became acute for Nørgård in connection with his major opera, Siddharta (1975-79). The opera depicts how Prince Siddharta, who later became the Buddha, was brought up in an artificial environment. His father, Suddhodana, did not want his son to be confronted with suffering, and therefore the whole of his upbringing took place within a sort of stage: all those at the court were ordered to hide from the prince the otherwise unavoidable dark sides of life. Even so, he cannot avoid meeting them: in Act III he is confronted with the illness and death struggle of a dancer. He loses his innocence and his illusions, and revolts against his father, his father's deception, and the false world of the court. Thus began Siddharta's long road towards his later life as the Buddha.

Formørkelse (Darkness Falls)

In the main the opera was composed using hierarchical techniques, but the actual part of the work where Siddharta is faced with death was not included in the version presented at the first performance. This scene had simply not been composed, so that the confrontation with death was left to the imagination of the audience. However, Nørgård added this scene in 1984, calling it Formørkelse (Darkness Falls).
In the Second and Third Acts, the music composed to portray the false life of the court, which refuses to recognise grief, death and suffering, was, as Nørgård says, partly:

    an artificial, idealised tonal universe pepped up with pop elements: Suddhodana's make-up mirror of reality designed to pull the wool over Siddharta's eyes.

This tonal universe is then followed by the moment of breakdown, about which Nørgård has this to say:

    And this is what I was not able to compose - and Sarvig was not able to write - at that time, in 1979, when I had reached the stage in Act III when Siddharta experiences death, sees the (grotesque) death-struggle of the dancer and the consequent, even more terrifying moment, when she ceases to show signs of life.

    In other words, the composer left this part out, leaving the audience to imagine how terrible Siddharta felt inside.

    (....)

    After the complex, adulterated effects used in the Wölfli works, I felt that I was able, or rather, was compelled to compose the missing aria. Who more than Wölfli was in a position to find words for the unprepared mind violently assailed (...), and it was in his works that I discovered the pungent, hard-hitting words suitable to express Siddharta's situation...

What had happened?