Rued Langgaard

Sommerferie I blekinge (BVN 123)

The 'Ten short piano pieces' with the title Sommerferie i Blekinge (Summer Holiday in Blekinge) (1916) have not been preserved in their complete form. The only existing source is a manuscript in Rued Langgaard's hand that lacks the first and last pages with sections of the music. This means that the entire first piano piece with the title Paa rejse (Travelling) is missing as well as most of Piece II, Møde (Meeting) (only the conclusion of this piece has been preserved). A large fragment exists of Piece X, Aften med Dans (Evening with Dancing), but the conclusion is missing. The manuscript is to be found at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen (RLS 83, 2). On the first page, Langgaard has merely written 'Piano Pieces 1916': the real title and titles of the movements in the first two pieces derives from other sources. In 2008, the Rued Langgaard Society asked the Danish composer Niels Marthinsen (b. 1963) to add to the work, the aim being to create a 'performance version'. Marthinsen composed a complete new first piece - Paa rejse (Travelling) - and allowed it to merge with the preserved concluding fragment of Langgaard's second piece, Møde (Meeting). Niels Marthinsen further composed a conclusion to the incomplete Piece X, Aften med Dans (Evening with Dancing), and in it incorporated a reference to the first piece, so that his additions came to form a frame round what hasbeen preserved of Langgaard's work. This supplemented version was given its first performance by Berit Johansen Tange in 2008. The overall title and titles of the individual pieces refer to a summer stay in 1913, i. e. three years before the work was composed, when the then 20-year-old composed was on holiday in Kyrkhult in Blekinge (Sweden).