Langgaard - Antikrist / Byriel, Dahl, Elming, Gjerris, van Hal, Ketilsson, Lundgren, Resmark, Suurballe, Dausgaard, Copenhagen Opera
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Anne Margrethe Dahl, Helene Gjerris, Johnny van Hal, Poul Elming, Sten ByrieBrand: Naxos OF America INC
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language)
Format: Classical, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-10-18
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Dacapo
Movie Reviews of Langgaard - Antikrist / Byriel, Dahl, Elming, Gjerris, van Hal, Ketilsson, Lundgren, Resmark, Suurballe, Dausgaard, Copenhagen Opera
Movie Review: Turn Off the Subtitles!
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm serious! Let the music tell you its own meaning. Or else choose the CD rather than the DVD. The music is magnificent, both emotional and sensuous. In compositional idiom, it's "Late Nordic Romanticism" preponderantly influenced by Richard Strauss, but don't let its 'lateness' distract you from its originality. There are passages in it far bolder than Strauss ever approached; there are premonitions in it of 'minimalism' and of the 'tintinnabulation' style of Arvo Pärt and other European modernists still composing today. Heard but not seen, Langgaard's 'Antikrist' is an immense choral symphony, on a scale and of an oral impact comparable to the choral symphonies of Gustav Mahler. The voices are instruments of a specific timbre and the words are musical articulations, to be heard but certainly not to be read.
Alas, however, "we" have to deal with the libretto and the dramaturgy of this "church opera" that was first composed in 1921 and not staged until 1999. Assuming you have this DVD in your sweaty hands, again I urge you to hear it first without the subtitles. The overture is powerful stuff. Then you'll see a stark set, almost bare but inside what might be a church. A group of somber Danish peasants -- recognizably religious pietists -- are gathering for a communal supper... a communion? ... which apparently evolves into a queer cult ritual, possibly a dramatization of the cult's doctrines. Eventually teh cult is 'challenged' by nefarious 'others' -- a slick top-hatted schemer and a scarlet harlot, plainly representing evil. The cult ritual ends vividly in the music but rather uncertainly in the staging.
If you then listen again, with the subtitles on, you'll have, I think, a good deal less coherent understanding of the action than you had from simply hearing the music. The libretto is gibberish to my ears, as it must have been to the impresarios of Langgaard's lifetime who rejected the 'opera' again and again. Langgaard was the product of a extreme pietist upbringing. His reactionary hatred for 'modernity' was total and rancorous, even after he claimed to reject the orthodox theology of his youth. "Antikrist" is a perfervid symbolist declamation of Langgaard's vision of Apocalypse. The central figure of the staging, whom you might well have taken for the pastor of the pietist flock, is in fact identified as the Antikrist - Satan - and his flock represent as the depravities and debaucheries of "modern times".
Let m confess that "apocalyptic" religiosity is hateful to me. When I consider what's "wrong" with modern times, apocalyptic thinking heads my list. If you, dear opera fan, have an opener receptivity to Jeremiads of the apocalyptic sort, you may be able to make more sense of Langgaard's libretto than I can. Historically, I have to acknowledge that apocalyptic visions -- some derived from orthodox religions and some from pure Expressionism -- were prominent in the music, painting, and literature of the 1920s, following the reality of devastation that was The Great War. And such visions of cataclysm grew more vivid as World War 2 crept closer, like William Butler Yeats's "beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born." One of my favorite writers of that era, the Austrian Joseph Roth, wrote an apocalyptic screed against modernity which he titled "The Antichrist." Langgaard's opera and Roth's screed have a lot in common, beginning with deliberately ecstatic incoherence. Their ultimate model -- the Biblical text called 'The Revelations of Saint John' -- sets the bar very high for apocalyptic raving.
The singers in this production, all Danish, cannot be faulted, either musically or dramatically. Likewise the orchestra, under the baton of Thomas Dausgaard, the most convincing advoacte for the music of Rued Langgaard. You'll find that Dausgaard is the conductor on most of the best recordings of Langgaard's symphonies and symphonic works. I hesitate to recommend this music to anyone who doesn't already have a passion for 20th C musical experimentation. How ironic it is, by the way, that the music of modernity-hating Rued Langgaard should be so preternaturally "modernist" in every way!
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Summary of Langgaard - Antikrist / Byriel, Dahl, Elming, Gjerris, van Hal, Ketilsson, Lundgren, Resmark, Suurballe, Dausgaard, Copenhagen Opera
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