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Vagn Holmboe

Few Scandinavian composers apart from Sibelius and Nielsen have succeeded in claiming worldwide attention. Holmboe was an exemption and is now widely recognized as the utmost essential Danish composer since Nielsen. His 13 symphonies (1935 – 1982), 20 string quartets (1949 – 1975) and various other compositions, including three operas, Requiem for Nietzsche (1964), 13 chamber concertos and Epilogue (1962), are more and more been shown to be significant efforts to twentieth hundred years music. Holmboe’s musical advancement was cosmopolitan. He examined in Denmark, with Toch in Berlin and in Romania, where he arrived to connection with Balkan folk music and noticed the functions of Béla Bartók whose design he assimilated. On time for his homeland he continuing to are a composer and critic and was teacher on the Royal Danish Conservatory from 1950 – 1965 where he became immersed in Medieval cathedral music. Holmboe’s strategy, with its free of charge usage of melodic and diatonic patterns was, nevertheless, fundamentally neo-Classical, though even more austere and inward-looking than either Nielsen or Sibelius, whose impact is less noticeable than that of Stravinsky and Bartók. The First Symphony (1935) is normally a function of chamber proportions, as the third and 4th (a choral function), respectively subtitled “Sinfonia rustica” and “Sinfonia sacra,” are precursors of the later, darker design where the notion of “metamorphosis” — designs that progress through simple tonic and thematic romantic relationships — is similar to Hindemith, and sometimes, also Wagner. International interest emerged when his Fifth Symphony was performed on the International Culture for Modern Music Celebration in Copenhagen in 1947, and Holmboe received commissions in a variety of parts of European countries. The seventh and ninth symphonies will be the most extreme of Holmboe’s orchestral result, and the 4th Quartet one of the most seductive of his chamber functions. In some feeling, Holmboe is even more “main-line” than his Scandinavian contemporaries are. After his relationship in 1931 towards the pianist Meta Graf, he journeyed to her homeland, Romania, to get folk music, and later towards the Faeroe Islands on an identical pursuit though, except in the Rustic Symphony, folk components aren’t prominent in Holmboe’s main works. It continues to be for Holmboe to get the consistent encoding and advocacy that brought Sibelius to prominence in the ’50s, and Nielsen in the ’60s.

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