Carl Nielsen

While Jean Sibelius of Finland may rank highest among Nordic composers, his contemporary Carl Nielsen—celebrated above all for six strikingly original symphonies together with unadorned popular songs—occupies a revered position as Denmark’s leading post-Romantic musical envoy and has earned widespread admiration from performers and listeners.

Although employed chiefly as a painter, Nielsen’s father devoted comparable or even greater effort to his violin playing, and it was through this pursuit that young Carl obtained his earliest musical guidance. At the age of fourteen he tried out for a post in a military wind band stationed in Odense and was accepted as a bugler despite never having studied the instrument formally. While visiting Copenhagen in 1883, Nielsen encountered composer Niels W. Gade, who urged the young musician to undertake rigorous training at the Conservatory. Throughout his three-year course of study there between 1884 and 1886, Nielsen concentrated on violin and theory and received no formal lessons in composition. Still, his Suite for Strings, Op. 1 enjoyed a favorable premiere in Copenhagen in 1888.

In 1889 Nielsen joined the violin section of Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, a post he kept until 1905, although he traveled to Paris in 1891 and there married Danish sculptress Anne Marie Brodersen. Throughout the 1890s he produced music at a rapid pace, much of which appeared in print. By 1903 he had entered into an agreement with the Wilhelm Hansen publishing house in Copenhagen, thereby concluding his association with the Royal Theatre even though he did not formally resign for another two years. His conducting career commenced in 1908 upon accepting a staff appointment with the Royal Theatre Orchestra. From 1916 until his death from heart disease in 1931 he served on the faculty of the Royal Danish Conservatory.

Nielsen’s music displays a strongly personal character in both substance and design, yet only the symphonies and the three concertos—for violin, flute, and clarinet—have secured a foothold in the repertoire beyond Denmark, where numerous choral works have entered the national patrimony. Each concerto offers a notable addition to its instrument’s literature, although the Clarinet Concerto may claim particular distinction. Beginning from the vantage of classical form and harmony, he later cultivated an expanded tonal and occasionally atonal idiom rooted in his intensely expressive melodic manner.

In common with his colleague Sibelius, Nielsen channeled his most distinguished writing into symphonic form. From the First Symphony of 1892—one of the earliest such works to open and close in differing keys—to the celebrated Fourth Symphony, subtitled “The Inextinguishable” in allusion to the lasting force of life and music, each stands as a dignified expression of an exceptional artist’s perspective on his surroundings.