Rating Nielsen

A few years ago, a Scandinavian composer proclaimed: "I believe in Bach, Mozart, Carl Nielsen, and absolute music." Carl Nielsen? At the mention of the Danish composer's name, most non-Scandinavians could only look blank or grope for their music dictionaries. Nielsen's reputation in his homeland had been supreme since his death in 1931 at 66, but unlike his Finnish contemporary Jean Sibelius, he was a nobody in the European and especially the U.S. music world.

Until recently, that is. In 1962 Leonard Bernstein began programming his works in New York Philharmonic concerts and spurred wider interest through a series of brilliant recordings. By 1965, the centennial of Nielsen's birth, his music was nudging into the general repertory. The number of Nielsen recordings on the U.S. market jumped from three in 1960 to 35 at the end of 1967; last year alone, 16 were issued. Today he is a "new" discovery who, like Mahler and Ives, appeals to this eclectic era by combining the breadth of the 19th century symphony with the experimental spirit of 20th century music.

Struggling Keys. Nielsen's relative isolation during his working years in Denmark helps to explain his early obscurity. But at the same time, that remoteness enhanced his originality. Such composers as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who were working in the late romantic tradition, projected their explosive forms out of subjective, often agonized emotion. Nielsen's free-flowing counterpoint and virile rhythms sprang partly from Danish folk roots, partly from a robust, wholesome objectivity. "What business have other people with my innermost feelings?" he asked.

He disdained the spicy suavity of French and Russian music, especially the orchestrations ("A harp in an orchestra is like a hair in the soup"). Yet his sonorous, spontaneous-sounding scores so deftly exploit the personality of individual instruments that they speak like characters in a drama--in fact, they often battle each other. His Clarinet Concerto, for example, is built around an argument between the clarinet and snare drum, with the orchestra kibitzing.

The basis of Nielsen's tensile construction, though, is the struggle between various keys within the same piece, a device that he carried to its logical limit while composers from Wagner to Schoenberg were melting down traditional notions of specific keys. The first movement of his Symphony No. 6 achieves a tragic effect by trying vainly to return to the idyllic G major from which it starts; it succeeds only in reaching the neighboring keys above and below it.

Flying Sparks. Like his music, Nielsen's temperament blended traditional peasant qualities with a progressive sophistication and disenchantment. Born on the bucolic island of Fyn, he made his first "instrument" from various lengths of cordwood, which he banged with a hammer; later he learned violin and trumpet from his father, a house-painter-laborer who played at village dances. He was barely 14 when he left home with a military band to start his career. For most of his life he had to play in orchestras, conduct or teach to support himself: when the Royal Orchestra premiered his Symphony No. 1 in Copenhagen, Nielsen could be seen sawing away dutifully at his regular stand in the second violin section.

Tucked away in Denmark, blotted out by World War I, overshadowed by the Stravinsky-Schoenberg revolution, Nielsen despaired for having failed to win the international success he sought. "If I could have my life again," he said bitterly at 60, "I would whip all artistic whims out of my head and be apprenticed to a trade or do some useful piece of work in which I could see a real result." But he never really despaired of his music. When his daughter asked him why his compositions were so harsh, he replied: "Beauty is a strange thing. Can't you see that it is beautiful if I draw my sword and strike a rock--hard against hard--so that blue sparks fly?" He was right. Today those sparks are flaring more brightly than ever.

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