FINALLY, EVERYONES TALKING ABOUT NIELSEN
Produced with permission from Gramophone - COPYRIGHT GRAMOPHONE SEPTEMBER 2011
Consult The Cambridge History of
Twentieth-Century Music for some commentary on the works of Carl Nielsen and
you'll run up against a problem pretty quickly: there isn't any. Here and
elsewhere, one of the most prominent cultural figures of the early 1900s is
literally edited out of musical history - too insignificant to warrant a
mention.
The truth is we've never really known what
to do with Nielsen. In any attempt to chart the story of music through
Romanticism and beyond, it's far easier to send the naughty little Dane to his
bedroom than attempt to crowbar his curious sonic realm into the narrative. At
best we pluck out the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and explain away their
compelling nervous energy and knife-edge tension as fitting symptoms of a
troubled, war-strewn age. No mention of their musical contexts - the three
outstanding developmental works that built up to them or the intriguing essay
in symphonic deconstruction that followed.
But we might be on the brink of change. In
this age of incessant rediscovery and renewal, it looks as though the spotlight
of revisionism is at last swinging its beam towards Carl Nielsen. There are
signs that musicians and audiences outside Scandinavia are finally "getting"
his music. The early symphonies are creeping into the concert hall, played for
the first time from clean critical editions. Major conductors appear to be testing
themselves with Nielsen's tricky textures and structures. A new cycle of the
six symphonies and three concertos began taping in January, not by a Danish
orchestra but by the New York Philharmonic under its American music director.
On paper, the act of airbrushing Nielsen out of musical history has been
reversed in uplifting detail: a new study from Nordic music scholar Daniel
Grimley recasts Nielsen as a visionary - a vital precursor to modernism and a
central protagonist in the playground scrap that was 20th-century music.
True understanding of his entire oeuvre
could at last grant Nielsen a genuinely significant place in the international
repertoire, the sort of acceptance afforded Leoš Janáček a few decades ago.
And if the Janáček
comparison feels a little stretched, musically speaking
it's wholly apt. Nielsen, like Janáček , was of rural, working-class stock. To
the rigorous discipline of composition he brought a vital, uncompromising
accent and a distinctly unschooled edge. In a Denmark awash with undercurrents
of rebellious anti-decadence and on the verge of a return to rural cultural
roots at the dawn of the 20th century, they lapped it up.
For the Danes, Nielsen was a gift. He
epitomised the democratic ideal of the "country boy made good" in a direct
parallel with Hans Christian Andersen (who hailed from the same windswept
island as the composer). But his music also embodied a handful of emerging
Danish ideals - from health and vigour to cheek and satire. These are the
contexts in which we should approach Nielsen's sometimes difficult but
ultimately life-affirming hallmarks: his wild attitude to tonality, his
incessant playfulness and joie de vivre, his intense emotional edge and his
extraordinary harbouring of musical energy.
A musical energy, that is, which has an
uncannily contemporary ring to it in 2011. It grabs hold of you, whether it's
striding inspiringly outwards or fighting against itself with fissile, chaotic
force. "It's physical music," says conductor Michael Schønwandt, Nielsen's most
prominent Danish exponent. "You actually feel this physical strength in the
music, it reaches out to you and gets under your skin." There's a sense of that
even in photographs of the composer: he seems to leap out from behind the lens
- the piercing eyes, the suggestive smile and the electrically charged hair all
hemmed in by neat, respectable tailoring.
Wrapped up in that image, in fact, is a
vital Nielsen truth. Though disagreement still dogs some of the composer's most
significant works, there's a gathering consensus around the theory that Nielsen
was a man torn in two. Behind the primeval energetic force that underpins so
much of his music, argues Daniel Grimley, was a tension created by the
juxtaposition of the composer's rural upbringing against his adult status as a
celebrated city sophisticate. Born to labourers on the island of Funen, Nielsen
was separated from the mainland of Zealand (and Copenhagen) by a cultural and
literal gulf - one he never really traversed and which arguably came to shape his
art.
This collision of radically different
worlds is heard directly in Nielsen's music - in the angst that undermines its
sense of structure, in its playful nonconformism and in the rogue forms and
modulations that invade its material. It can wrong-foot the listener
spectacularly, but it also lies behind the music's most compelling moments of
rupture, outburst and momentum. For Grimley, it represents "a rich and playful
dialogue that might be interpreted as a musical response to the diversity of
the modern world".
And so to our modern world - and across a
rather different gulf, that of the Atlantic Ocean - where Alan Gilbert is
returning his New York Philharmonic to the Nielsen sound world first introduced
to it by Leonard Bernstein. In January they recorded the Second Symphony for
Dacapo, The Four Temperaments, a piece with its fair share of stylistic
curiosities: the unsettling spasm of spatial confusion that lurches into the
opening movement; the oom-pah finale wrapped up in oddball bumbling nonchalance.
"There's certainly a tension between the formality of the symphony and
Nielsen's folk, Danish and frankly slightly bizarre personality," Gilbert has
found. "It seems like he was a very unusual guy, which combined with the need
to function as a respectable member of society to form this paradox. I feel
that very much in the music; this balance of formal vigour and these
iconoclastic, unusual tendencies."
Likewise, another of Nielsen's strikingly
contemporary ticks: his frequent conjuring of structural and thematic chaos,
often at the front end of a work - as in the opening bars of the Third and
Fourth Symphonies and First Violin Sonata. "You have no idea what's going on
with these chords, they sound kind of random," says Gilbert of the opening of
the Third Symphony. "It's a kind of controlled chaos, and I think that's very
much one of the things he was trying to express in music - a sort of
reigning-in of chaos and of the desire to achieve randomness."
That lack of security in Nielsen's music is
both enchanting and intoxicating. Often he'll create passages of intense
physical strength while also appearing to place them on a tightrope, seconds
from structural and intellectual collapse. After the disorientating opening
thwacks of the Third Symphony, the music slips on to defined musical tracks
before rupturing again - juddering into a wild waltz as soaring brass cut
across manically trilling winds. It sounds wonderfully risky, but to get
musicological for a moment, it also echoes Grimley's theory of Nielsen the
fractured personality. The effectively rural feel of the movement's main theme
collapses into the urbane waltz - a form that for decades had danced its way
through the Germanic Danish music so fashionable in Copenhagen.
It's one thing to try and analyse these
musical gestures in the hope that it might turn disinterest for Nielsen into
adoring enthusiasm. In reality the music must speak for itself. Which is why
the chronological symphony cycle from New York - the first new cycle for eight
years (10 if you discount the most recent Danish cycle) - is so vital. Just as
the journey from Beethoven's early Classical symphonies to the Eroica, the
Fifth and beyond is inseparable from our vision of the artist and the man, so
the essence of Nielsen's symphonies is only really understood when you take a
completist view of them.
At the heart of that is Nielsen's
career-long battle with conventional tonality. Signs of the composer's urge to
ram major keys down the throats of minor ones are already prevalent in the First
Symphony. The finale launches in the ‘wrong' (major) key before instantly
correcting itself (into the minor) within three bars. Nielsen's letters and
diaries reveal constant frustration with the notion of perceived "rules"
surrounding the use of particular keys. The major/minor face-off continues into
the Second and Third Symphonies (note the mystical tonal shade of the latter's
Andante pastorale) and spectacularly in the Fourth. Nielsen may have been
disturbed by the crescendo of war - he wrote the piece in 1916 - but he really
only expresses himself through a continuation of ideals he's already
established.
And those ideals seem more relevant now
than ever, not least as the fundamental antitheses of life are pitted against
one another in the Fourth Symphony. "It's the most obvious realisation of the
eternal fight between good and bad, between darkness and light," says
Schønwandt of the piece. At the end of it you're left with an overwhelming
sense of renewal - a blazing but sudden "new dawn". When we get to the Fifth,
the major/minor battle has graduated into a full-on counterpoint of
modulations, a twisting harmonic tunnel-borer egged on by a confrontational
improvisation on the snare drum at the apex of Part 1. By the time of the Sixth
Symphony, Nielsen seems to have freed himself from the power of "major" and
"minor" altogether. Taken as a whole, it's a symphonic journey that's arguably
more lifelike, tangible and concise than that of any other 20th-century
composer.
Nielsen famously gave voice to his own
inextinguishable will to live, but he also reflected on the struggle for life
that his music itself ‘From fractured New York, will we at last begin to hear
the lone voices that so often pervade Nielsen's works as symbols of a true
cosmopolitanism?'would face. He once described his works as akin to "a powerful
root rising up through the manure, nourished by it, beaten by nettles in the
breeze, minding itself from all the weeds around it but nevertheless suckling
the same stuff from the earth". It's Nielsen's view of creative evolution; the
Darwinian struggle for musical survival. And how astute an observation it now
seems.
Certain advocates have tended to the root
since. Herbert Blomstedt's Decca recordings with the San Francisco Symphony
brought Nielsen's symphonies alive with striking verve, but despite the best
efforts of him and others - Bernstein, Horenstein, Vänskä and Elder among
them - the composer has never been presented as uncompromisingly as he should
be on disc or in concert. As for the brilliantly original vocal, chamber,
instrumental and stage works, they mostly languish in obscurity outside Scandinavia.
But the coming months will be good to the
Nielsen discography - in a symphonic sense, at least. The First and Sixth
Symphonies will arrive shortly as the second instalment of Sir Colin Davis's
Nielsen cycle for LSO Live. Gustavo Dudamel's recording of the Fourth and Fifth
with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra is released later this month. Dacapo
will reissue Schønwandt's recordings with the Danish National Symphony
Orchestra (repackaged with the original video recordings included) as an overture
to the first release in their New York cycle, beginning next year with the
Second and Third Symphonies. If a composer's ascendancy is judged on his or her
recording projects, Nielsen appears to have been cleared for take-off.
And with good reason, believes Alan
Gilbert. "I totally believe in him as a composer and I believe he stands up to
Sibelius, without question," he says. "I firmly believe Nielsen's time has
come." Carl Nielsen Composer Focus Audience response to his introductions of
the early symphonies in Chicago and Philadelphia, Gilbert claims, has been
surprising and encouraging. "In this particular age, when we're looking for
anything that has a truly personal voice, well, Nielsen does that. I think his
music speaks to the time."
Particularly, one suspects, in fractured
New York - that city of arrivals, departures and the endless grind of cultural
gears. For the big shift in Nielsen's historic position, from sideshow
curiosity to proto-modernist, one could hardly wish for more fertile ground. From
this city of diversity, will we at last begin to hear the lone, disenfranchised
narrative voices that so often pervade Nielsen's works as symbols of a true
cosmopolitanism - the diverse elemental forces that connect art to the essence
of human life?
Maybe. But rather more tangibly, we might
be about to witness a shift in the Nielsen performing tradition. "There's been
a kind of dry approach to recording Nielsen's music in the past; I have the
sense that people think this is a cool, Nordic sound and so they should be
rather dispassionate about the way they play it," Gilbert says. "I don't see it
that way at all. I think it's really full-blooded, passionate, dramatic and
ultimately human music. That's what I'm going for, and that's what the
Philharmonic is good at." The Danish producers from Dacapo, Gilbert says, were
taken aback by the sound of the New York Phil's first live recording. "They'd
never heard anything like it - they found it refreshing and absolutely new."
Bold words, but welcome ones - whether or
not they're fulfilled. What Nielsen needs more than ever is some renewed sense
of controversy - a rigorous interpretative debate to replace the blanket apathy
and confusion that have held sway for decades. The side effect is also,
essentially, the reward: we get to hear more and more of this beguiling,
enchanting and fortifying music.
NIELSEN: BEYOND THE SYMPHONIES
Maskarade
Soloists, Danish RSO & Chorus /
Schirmer Decca 478 0146-2DM2
Denmark's national operatic touchstone that
frequently travels abroad, Maskarade offers a vital sonic picture of "old
Copenhagen", all it stood for and, indeed, hid.
Violin
Sonata No 1
Jon Gjesme vn Jens Elvekjær pf Dacapo 6
226075
Nielsen once railed against the
harmony-leading dominant seventh chord but he uses it with touching (ironic?)
beauty in this luminous stylistic exercise.
An
Imaginary Journey to the Faroe Islands
Danish NSO / Dausgaard
Dacapo 6 220518
A tone-poem which foreshadows the very
distinctive style Nordic
orchestral music inhabits today. Did Aho,
Rautavaara and Brødsgaard hear those crazy clarinet riffs?
String
Quartets
Young Danish String Quartet Dacapo 6 220521
People talk of Mendelssohnian traits in the
First Symphony but the Germanic influence is far more keenly felt - and then
edged away from - in Nielsen's finely balanced chamber works for strings.
Three
Motets
Canzone Choir / Frans Rasmussen Danacord
DACOCD386
Nielsen marinated his early ideas for these
choral works in the structural language of Palestrina, creating stark, bracing
and rigorous manifestos for his late stylistic turn to polyphony. Technically
challenging and uncompromisingly Nielsenite.
NIELSEN: A LIFE IN SEVEN YEARS
1888 - Niels Gade, head of the Copenhagen
Conservatory, dismisses his student Nielsen's Op 1 Suite for Strings as "too
messy"
1893 - Symphonic Fantasy. Consolidates some now-discernable Nielsen
hallmarks: muscular energy, playful tonalities and waltzing broadsides
1907 - Nielsen writes the song "Jens Vejmand"
which becomes a staple of the Danish musical psyche and the tune every Dane
sings at school
1914 - Nielsen resigns his conducting and
violin-playing post at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen; problems with his
marriage escalate
1923 - In the year of Gramophone's founding,
Nielsen visits Britain and takes the LSO through his Fourth Symphony
1925 - Nielsen meets Schoenberg and sees his Sixth
Symphony condemned as disorganised and tonally moribund
1931 - Nielsen's turn to contrapuntalism reaches
its apex with the organ monolith Commotio; he dies later that year in
Copenhagen