Asger Hamerik's Choral Symphony - Life, Death and Immortality

Kor-Symfonien har været en slags åndeligt testamente for Asger Hamerik, og teksten og dens musikalske
realisering afspejler hans livssyn såvel som hans kompositoriske credo, nemlig en udogmatisk religiøsitet i slægt
med samtidige unitariske tendenser og en nærmest positivistisk holdning til komposition som en kunst, der klart og
entydigt skal formidle musikkens budskab.
Men budskabet i Kor-Symfonien er netop både kosmopolitisk og eklektisk, præget som det er af samtidens
religiøse tendenser, som søgte at bygge bro mellem tro og viden, og tonesproget er også eklektisk med
reminiscenser af Liszt og Wagner, tilføjet elementer af en art nordisk ‘kunstnerisk folketone’.
Med udgangspunkt i Kor-Symfonien vil jeg opfatte det som indlysende netop at fremhæve Asger Hamerik som
eklektikeren og kosmopolitten blandt det sene 1800-tals danske komponister og netop på dette grundlag se, med
hvilken kunstnerisk konsekvens og sikkerhed han gav sine værker et unikt og personligt indhold.
Asger Hameriks Choral Symphony - Life, Death and Immortality
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The Danish composer Asger Hamerik's so-called Choral Symphony (op. 40, 1898-1906) is written for chorus,
orchestra and mezzo soprano solo to a text by Hamerik himself. This opus is written in 1898 but revised 1901-1906
and published in 1908.
Hamerik figures in Danish music history as - according to the opinion of several sources - an important but
neglected symphonist, in who's opus this Choral Symphony plays a leading role in the fullfilment of his artistic
ambitions.
In his own time he often seems to have been blamed for being to eclectic, shallow and banal. In contradiction to
this, modern Danish music history has tried to position him as an important transitional figure between Niels
W. Gade and Carl Nielsen, especially due to his important symphonic production. Meanwhile, I find that this
positioning conceals the unique artistic values present in a great deal of his work, especially in the Choral
Symphony.
The issue in focus of this thesis is that the textual and musical structuring are formally linked to each other through
the use of leitmotifs in the Wagnerian and Berliozian sense, and by creating a symbolic analogy between the
content of the text and Hamerik's specific use of the principles of the sonata form in this opus.
Therefore, the central part of the thesis - the internal musical analysis - points in the direction that Hamerik with
this opus takes a completely different position than his eleged Danish role model Gade, and that he to a much
higher extent has been inspired by the new German school and it's ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where the
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