With the specter of COVID looming over the prospect of a trip to the hair salon, perhaps the time is ripe for a resurgence of the Carl Nielsen haircut?
Of the great composers of the North, why is Sibelius so widely lauded (in Scandinavia, England, and the United States, anyway), while Nielsen continues to languish as the Ugly Duckling of Danish music?
Far from being a simple Sibelius knock-off, Nielsen forged his own, immediately-recognizable style – which can’t always be said, with as much conviction, about a lot of other fin de siècle Scandinavian composers. Not that I don’t love their music.
Leonard Bernstein believed Nielsen’s rightful place was as Sibelius’ equal:
“I think many people are in for pleasant surprises as they get to know Nielsen,” he said at a centennial celebration of the composer’s birth, “his rough charm, his swing, his drive, his rhythmic surprises, his strange power of harmonic and tonal relationships – and especially his constant unpredictability – all these are irresistible. I feel confident that Nielsen’s time has come.”
That was in 1965. Yet, fifty-five years on, with many more recordings and performances to choose from, Nielsen continues stubbornly to be an acquired taste.
What’s not to like? There’s struggle in the music and harmonic ambiguity – key relationships don’t always play out the way you expect they should (they don’t always in life, either, so why should they in music?) – there is conflict and violence, anxiety, but also great beauty and even humor. At its core, and at the end of the journey, there is, for me, an optimism in much of Nielsen’s output, a love for life, a belief that there is indeed, as the subtitle of his Fourth Symphony professes, something “Inextinguishable” in all of us, that I find inspiring.
A tip of the blond brush cut to Carl Nielsen on his birthday!
Take a gander at the Duckling on film! This is the only known surviving footage of Denmark’s greatest composer. You’ll find translations of the intertitles when you click on “show more” beneath the video.
