Yesterday, I inadvertently committed a crime against Danish music by ignoring the birthday anniversary of Carl Nielsen. 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 music. Not that I don’t love the stuff.
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 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. Happy belated birthday!