The two giants of 20th-century Scandinavian music, Danish composer Carl Nielsen and Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, were born in the same year, 1865. Though they sound nothing alike, together they account for my initial love of music. Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony and Nielsen’s Fourth, both written around 1915, are the two works that revealed to me, in an overwhelming way, what human beings are capable of expressing in sound.
Explaining the differences between the two composers might be helpful in understanding Nielsen, whom Sibelius once told, “I don’t reach as high as your ankles.” Sibelius’s music is a revelation of nature in all of its solitary majesty. Man is the spectator of the awesome drama that is unfolded before him and before which he must tremble, even in his exhilaration. In Nielsen’s music, on the other hand, man is very much a participant in the cosmic drama. The revelation is one of the human spirit in contention against, and often triumphant over, terrible and malignant forces that seek to extinguish that spirit.
While, in some of his works, Sibelius deals with mythic figures from the Finnish epic Kalevala, there are no people in his music. Nielsen’s music concentrates especially on the human to the extent that his Second Symphony is subtitled The Four Temperaments, after the four human psychological types. This is a subject Sibelius would never have thought of addressing.
This is not to say that Nielsen neglected nature but simply that he included man as part of it, if not at its center. Man’s rhythms are the same as those of nature but not reduced to them. Nielsen wrote, “I have no doubt that the laws of the motions of the sea and air are reflected in every piece of good music of any length and (symphonic) extent.” Yet Nielsen was more than a nature poet. Speaking of the Fourth Symphony, he said, “It’s all those things that have Will and the Craving for Life that cannot be suppressed that I’ve wanted to depict. Not because I want to reduce my art to the imitation of Nature but [rather] to let it attempt to express what lies behind it.” Nielsen thought music was uniquely able to do this because “music is a manifestation of Life, in that it is either completely dead—at that moment when it is not sounding—or completely alive and, therefore, it can exactly express the concept of Life from its most elementary form of utterance to the highest spiritual ecstasy.”
Ironically, both Nielsen and Sibelius are often thought of as late Romantics. The opposite is true. In different ways, they both rejected late Romanticism and its bathetic sentimentality. Nielsen scathingly criticized its “reckless gorging.” He said, “Romanticism’s reveling and rioting in its own emotion was detrimental to art. With one hand on its heart and the other gesticulating wildly in the air above its flowing locks, it quite forgot to settle accounts with the craftsman.” Such composers, he explained, “begin by expressing moods, feelings, colors, and impressions instead of learning voice-leading, counterpoint, and so on.”
Those skills were among the first that Nielsen learned and mastered as a youth, first in a poor village where his father taught him the violin and, then, as a trumpeter in the military band at Odense. During his four-year, teenage military career, he taught himself Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier and devoured the scores of Mozart, Haydn, and other Classical masters. From 1884 to 1886, Nielsen studied at the Copenhagen Conservatory on a scholarship. Afterward, he was engaged as a violinist in the Royal Orchestra, a position he kept until 1905.
All the while, Nielsen was composing. When he was only 17, he persuaded a reluctant visiting composer, Olfert Jeperson, to come to his rooms in Odense to listen to his new Violin Sonata. Having expected the worst from a musical country bumpkin, Jeperson exclaimed that “in this beautiful sonata, there was no Beethoven, no Bach. Rather, it was filled with Mozart’s gentleness and grace, which was the sign of the young man’s true musical blood.” In fact, Nielsen himself claimed, “There is far more to learn in Mozart than in Beethoven.” There are certainly places where one hears Mozart’s influence in Nielsen’s music—for example, in much of his gorgeous wind writing and in the opening movement of the Sixth Symphony—but it is the influence of Beethoven that is most pronounced in Nielsen’s symphonic works.
Nielsen’s loathing of 19th-century sentimentality must not be confused with any lack of drama or passion in his music. In fact, overwhelming drama is its most distinguishing feature. Nielsen drew this forth from opposing tonalities in very much the same way as did Beethoven when constructing his symphonies. Nielsen wrote, “There must be conflict so that we may have clarity. Perception must be preceded by opposition.” Like Beethoven’s, Nielsen’s symphonies move forward through a series of conflicts based on the clash, and ultimate resolution, of tonalities. Nielsen used the counterpoint he mastered as an engine for generating these conflicts. The orchestra is constantly in motion, asking and answering itself, issuing and meeting challenges. “Without a current, my music is nothing,” Nielsen explained.
Nielsen’s best symphonies are every bit as engaging as Beethoven’s great works, as inexhaustible in their attraction, and as inevitable in their feel. The “alpha and omega” of music, Nielsen said, are “pure, clear, firm, natural intervals and virile, robust, assured, organic rhythm.” No matter how harmonically adventurous, Nielsen’s works are always classically structured in their tonality and are brought to immensely satisfying conclusions in their “home” keys—even when these are not the keys in which the works begin. Though Nielsen’s music seldom “sounds” anything like Beethoven, these structural features of his work make him Beethoven’s true symphonic heir in the first half of the 20th century.
Nielsen’s faith in the inexhaustibly expressive nature of tonality made him wary of the atonal experiments in the works of Schoenberg and others, which were rife at the time. He saw no need to abandon tonality or “free” dissonance, though he made ample and powerful use of the latter within a tonal context. He once remarked, “The glutted must be taught to regard a melodic third as a gift from God.” Nielsen expressed this traditional disposition in a very beautiful way:
And should our path take us past our fathers’ houses, we may one day allow that they were after what we are after, we want what they wanted; only we failed to understand that the simplest is the hardest, the universal the most lasting, the straight the strongest, like the pillars that support the dome.
Nielsen’s music became one of the pillars of which he spoke, and the growing number of recordings of his music testify to the increasing appeal of his path (to say nothing of the salutary influence he had on succeeding generations of composers, including the great Danish symphonist Vagn Holmboe, who did not abandon tonality). Music writer Lewis Rowell gets it exactly right in describing Nielsen’s artistic stance as post-Romantic/premodern.
The main body of Nielsen’s work consists of six symphonies; three concertos (for violin, flute, and clarinet); four string quartets; a wind quintet; two operas, Saul and David and Maskarade, which has taken its place as the Finnish national opera; and several major choral works, as well as a large number of songs. I only have space to briefly remark on the central symphonies, Nos. 3-5, though no one should miss the first two, which are well beyond a beginner’s efforts. In fact, the First, written when Nielsen was 27, is one of the finest debuts of any symphonist (indebted as it is, in its orchestral language, to Brahms).
Beginning with his Symphony No. 3, a flow of musical molten lava poured out of Nielsen into three successive symphonic inspirations, which are most likely to leave his name to posterity. Nielsen’s Third Symphony, Sinfonia espansiva, is a glorious paean to the joy of being alive. If the First Symphony immediately brings Brahms to mind in its orchestral garb, the opening of the Third recalls Beethoven. It charges forth with the most arresting hammer-blow motif since the beginning of Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Nielsen aptly describes it as “a gust of energy and life-affirmation blown out into the wide world.” It is tremendously exhilarating. The gust of energy is eventually harnessed to a lilting waltz: Life is a dance.
In the second movement, Andante pastorale, Nielsen expresses the “idyllic and heavenly in nature.” Even more, this music depicts, as Nielsen wrote, “the peaceful mood that one could imagine in Paradise before the Fall of our First Parents, Adam and Eve.” Life is also song, and toward the end of the movement, a soprano and baritone sing a radiant vocalise on the vowel “a.”
The third movement returns us to the world of Beethoven, where an element of struggle is mixed in with idyllic wind writing that contains reminiscences of the earlier waltz. The music generates a powerful sense of striving that is successfully resolved at the very end of the movement. The glorious peroration in the finale conveys “a general joy about being able to participate in the work of life and the day.” This symphony is Nielsen’s hymn of thanksgiving.
Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4, The Inextinguishable, is one of the greatest symphonic dramas ever written, a towering masterpiece that is at the pinnacle of Scandinavian and European musical genius. This is highly expressive, visionary music of apocalyptic power. Nielsen wrote: “In case all the world was devastated…then nature would still begin to breed new life again, begin to push forward again…. These forces, which are ‘inextinguishable,’ I have tried to represent.”
As one can imagine from Nielsen’s description, this music relies on a sense of overwhelming forward drive. Its four movements are continuous, evolving tonally and thematically through a number of hazardous encounters with the powers of extinction into the eventual and exhilarating triumph of the “inextinguishable.” The elemental, furious struggle between the life and antilife forces takes its ultimate form in the finale in a battle between two sets of timpani placed at opposite sides of the orchestra, which fiercely try to extinguish all else. Amid these tympanic eruptions, the winds shriek and take off like scared flocks of geese. The brass and strings eventually subdue the timpani and harness them to the main, triumphant theme, bringing the work to an exultant, unforgettable conclusion.
Many consider Nielsen’s two- movement Fifth Symphony his greatest, a judgment from which I demur, though I would not want to be without this magnificent music. The late English Nielsen expert, Robert Simpson, said of the Fifth: “Here is man’s conflict, in which his progressive, constructive instincts are at war with other elements (also human) that face him with indifference or downright hostility.” This may well be the theme, but in the first movement, it is less organically developed than in the Fourth Symphony. The work begins with an obsessive, Bolero-like theme in the strings that meets with a martial interruption from a snare drum, whose player is instructed by Nielsen to play “in his own tempo, as if he wants at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra.” A struggle for supremacy ensues. However, the impression exists that something extraneous to the music is trying to stop it (unlike the more integral tim-pani attacks in the Fourth). This makes a dramatic, but not a musical, point. This is the only miscalculation in this towering work.
The adagio in the first movement contains a premonition of victory over the forces of evil in the ascendancy of a gorgeously lyrical theme that overcomes the timpani attack in a breathtakingly sweeping climax that then trails off in a plangent clarinet solo. Only the faintest echo of the defeated snare drum’s rhythm is heard underneath. The second movement bolts forth in one of Nielsen’s most vigorously developed and exciting pieces of music that tumultuously reaches for and achieves a triumph of the human spirit.
Not all of Nielsen’s works are about life and the forces opposed to it. It is clear from Springtime in Funen, a work of magical innocence and charm, and other intensely lyrical and gentle music that there was a tremendous tenderness in Nielsen, along with a good deal of fight. In fact, I think Nielsen’s fighting spirit was to protect this vulnerable tenderness, which can also be heard in his lyrical Wind Quintet and songs. The listener must explore these works, as well, to gain a complete picture of this genius.
Unlike Sibelius, Nielsen enjoyed little renown outside of his native country during his lifetime, and toward the end of it, he wondered if he had hit a false chord. In the year of his death, 1931, Nielsen said to his daughter, “I know I’ve done it as well as I could, but I wonder if it’s all any use?” The answer is in his music, which is “inextinguishable.”