The Danish composer Carl Nielsen occupies a place in the hearts of his countrymen analogous to that of SIBELIUS in Finland and Grieg in Norway. His compositional idiom was tonal, and he remained aloof from most of the musical innovations of 20th-century Europe and America, although he explored new avenues in key relationships and musical form.
Nielsen was born in Funen, Denmark, on June 9, 1865, in a cottage that housed two peasant families. His father was a musician who played both violin and cornet at local festivities, and Carl learned to play the violin by ear at age six. He was also introduced to the piano by his uncle who was, despite being blind, the organist of the Dalum Church in Odense. The district’s musical society held many sessions at which the musicians would improvise, and Nielsen joined some of these.
Nielsen’s first composition was a polka, which he played at a wedding. From 1879 to 1880, he was a regimental bugler in the army, rising to the rank of corporal, but he continued to teach himself the elements of music. In 1884, Nielsen was sponsored at the Copenhagen Conservatory, where he was a composition student of Nils Gade. After graduation, in 1898, he became a second violinist in the Royal Chapel Orchestra, and remained there until 1905, making his debut as conductor in 1893. In 1891, on a visit to Paris, he met and married Anne Marie Broderson, who was a sculptor.
Nielsen was impressed by Brahms, whom he met, but less so by Wagner, whose leitmotifs Nielsen regarded as a simplistic device. During the period from 1890 to 1905, he composed works for piano, songs to texts by J. P. Jacobson, and the Hymnus amoris, a choral work showing the influence of Palestrina. He also wrote an opera, Saul and David, which had its premiere at the Royal Theatre in 1902 with the composer as conductor. Nielsen finished his Symphony No. 1 in 1891, and in 1903 he went to Greece to study archaeology and to compose.
In 1901, Nielsen was awarded a state pension and, in 1905, the music publisher Hansen gave him a small stipend, which enabled him to resign his post as a violinist and devote more time to composition. His most well-known (in Denmark) product of this period was the comic opera Maskarade, which had its first performance on November 11, 1906. Nielsen became second conductor of the Royal Opera in 1908, and frequently conducted the popular Maskarade there.
In 1911, Nielsen finished his Symphony Expansiva and, together with Thomas Laub, published a book of Danish folk music. From 1915 to 1919, he taught composition at the Copenhagen Conservatory.
Nielsen wrote six symphonies but in later life preferred the finer texture of chamber music. His Wind Quintet remains one of his most popular pieces. He also wrote many songs and one of the constants of his work was the composition of songs and hymns for educational use. In this, and in the melodic and rhythmic emphasis in his compositions, he never forgot his musical roots in the popular music of his village. His style seems to owe more to his studies of 18th-century polyphony, filtered through his own original voice, than to late 19th-century developments elsewhere in Europe. However, Nielsen’s use of tonality in his later works was unconventional: for example, a work might end in a different key from its beginning.
In 1922, Nielsen’s health began to fail, although he continued to compose and perform. He died on October 3, 1931, a day after hearing the radio broad-cast of Maskarade from the Royal Opera.
Alan Blackwood
SEE ALSO:
CHAMBER MUSIC; FOLK MUSIC; ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.
FURTHER READING
Lawson, Jack. Carl Nielsen (London: Phaidon, 1997);
Simpson, Robert. Carl Nielsen: Symphonist, 1865–1931 (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Complete Piano Music, Orchestra Music Selections; Pan and Syrinx; The Six Symphonies; Symphony No. 4.