Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0108/01080.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 19KB | 327 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01080}
$Pretitle{411}
$Title{Denmark
Carl Nielsen}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Nils Schiorring}
$Affiliation{Press and Cultural Relations}
$Subject{carl
nielsen
music
danish
copenhagen
symphony
musical
works
first
life}
$Date{1988}
$Log{}
Country:     Denmark
Book:        Fact Sheets on Denmark
Author:      Nils Schiorring
Affiliation: Press and Cultural Relations
Date:        1988

Carl Nielsen

His life

     In autumn 1883 an 18-year old bandsman left Odense for Copenhagen in
search of fame, precisely as Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark's renowned
writer of fairytales, had done at age 14 half a century earlier. There is no
way of telling whether Carl Nielsen, consciously or subconsciously, was
inspired by the example of Hans Christian Andersen but somehow their destinies
resembled each other. Hans Christian Andersen's naive but irrepressible
aspirations were strangely successful in gaining the attention of influential
people in Copenhagen. They organised his education and thus laid the
foundation for his development. In similar manner, and directly on his arrival
in Copenhagen Carl Nielsen introduced himself to the composer Niels W. Gade,
prime mover of Danish music life, and, together with J. P. E. Hartmann, the
greatest name of the Danish Romantic School in music and director of the
Copenhagen Conservatoire. Carl Nielsen who despite his tender age possessed a
respectable musical background showed some of his compositions to Gade and was
immediately admitted to the Conservatory. During his three obligatory study
years he matured into a talented violinist but he wanted above all to become a
composer.

     He was born on June 9, 1865 in a small house in the village of Norre
Lyndelse - today a museum for him - some ten kilometres south of Odense, and
was, as it were, raised on music. His father, Niels the Painter, was a
craftsman, mostly a housepainter as witness his nickname but he would derive
his greatest satisfaction from music. He was the local fiddler but versed in
much more than the traditional dance tunes with which he would delight young
and old alike at weddings, christening parties and other gatherings in the
countryside. The cornet was his principal instrument but he was a nimble
fiddler as well. In the local music society he would join in the playing of
both Haydn and Mozart whose music became enchanted and familiar to young Carl
who early began to play his father's instruments. Already as a boy he would
join his father on long and arduous evenings and nights to entertain the
carousing peasants - even though he had a long day's work as a cowherd behind
him.

     Music soon became Carl Nielsen's sole preoccupation but he had to do a
brief stint as a grocer's apprentice before his father suggested that he
devote himself to the wind instruments, which might open up a career for him
as a military musician in Odense. He auditioned for the first vacancy and won,
even though at 14 he was the youngest applicant. Carl Nielsen has himself
written about this period of his life in his memoir My Childhood (1927) which
is a worthy companion piece to Hans Christian Andersen's famous The Story of
My Life.

     While in Odense he began playing the piano and composing profusely. At
the tender age of 8 he had composed a couple of dance tunes and the musical
talent he demonstrated in Odense was obvious enough to gain him the confidence
of the circles which were to back him throughout his study period at the
Conservatory. In Copenhagen the violin became his principal instrument
although the lessons in theory and composition were what fascinated him most.
Only a year and a half after leaving the Conservatory His Official opus 1 was
performed in Tivoli Gardens in summer 1888. This was the lovely Suite for
Strings which was critically acclaimed and has since become a regular item in
the Danish concert repertory.

     Although he hoped to be able to make a living as a composer he saw the
necessity of applying for a regular position and in 1889 auditioned for and
won a place as a violinist in the Chapel Royal, opera and ballet orchestra of
the Royal Theatre, where he remained until 1905. There he immediately sensed
the pre-eminent musicality of the Theatre's conductor, Norwegian-born Johan
Svendsen, in his capacity of both conductor of operas and composer. The operas
performed at the Theatre in those years and new additions such as Othello,
Falstaff and Carmen, greatly impressed the young people playing in the
orchestra, and the earliest Nielsen compositions show traces of Svendsen's
boldly unsentimental and national Romanticism of pure form, to wit the G minor
string quartet and the G major string quintet (both 1888), the F minor string
quartet (1890) and the first symphony in G minor (1892). No matter how finely
tuned Carl Nielsen's inner musical world would become as years went by his
music will always feature a line going back to something simple and serene
even though in terms of rhythm and tonality he quickly developed a sense of
greater differentiation. His preoccupation in particular with a tonality going
beyond the major-minor modes must be linked to his studies during his
relatively young years of the works of Palestrina which inspired him to
emphasise the horizontal-linear structure rather than the vertical-harmonic
movement.

     At an early age Carl Nielsen was awarded Det Anckerske Legat, at the time
the most prestigious and most coveted fellowship for young Danish artists and
authors wishing to study abroad. He first went to Germany where in Dresden he
was spellbound by a performance of the entire Ring of the Nibelungen, then
proceeded to France and Italy. Later extended tours took him to Germany and
Austria, to Greece and then to Sweden - mostly to conduct his own works. In
his mature years he would go to Germany again, as well as to England and
France to conduct own works. 1908-14 he held the post of conductor at the
Royal Theatre after Johan Svendsen, a job that would cause him several
disappointments, and from 1915 conducted in The Society of Music. In 1916 he
joined the board of the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music and was promoted to
chairman in 1931, less than one year before his death.

     During the last 15 years of his life he thus had opportunity to live and
work almost exclusively as a creative artist the way he had wanted it from his
earliest youth. His last years were, however, marred by failing health and as
an artist - despite all manner of official recognition - by the wholehearted
appreciation by only a relatively modest part of Danish musical life whose
members often found it difficult to understand his progressive, non-Romantic
tonal language. Nor did he arouse the kind of attention abroad - except in
Sweden - which his music has increasingly attracted after the Second World
War. As late as his 60th birthday Carl Nielsen spoke poignantly of his
bitterness about the social status of a creative artist. Not until after his
death did he - undeniably Denmark's greatest composer since Buxtehude - win
the recognition he so rightfully deserved.

His work

     The oeuvre of Carl Nielsen the composer became very comprehensive and his
creative capacity was astonishing even during the years when the theatre
demanded so much of his time, first as a violinist, later as a conductor. It
is amazing as well that within nearly all musical genres did he succeed in
formulating new norms for what might be called the national genius in Danish
music. He did not see himself as a revolutionary but in nearly all his works,
large or small, does one discern his ability to give new life to the major
musical forms of the past such as the symphony, opera and other vocal music,
including the simple and unpretentious Danish song so rich in tradition.
Romanticism was his point of departure, but Romanticism without excessive
sentimentality. It was shaped very early as Romanticism with fresh features in
terms of harmony with a twist towards modalism, in terms of melody with a
distinct dislike f