Fig. !.! (above) Carl Nielsen, c. !"#$: photograph by George LindstrømFig. !.% (right) Carl Nielsen, c. !$$#?

! Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge

C!"#"$%&&' $()#*+,&%#")- a composer’s iconography – the visual trace they leave in our collective imagination – can be a challenging but

worthwhile task. Carl Nielsen is a compelling case study. Two photographs of the composer stick obstinately in my mind. .e first is a portrait of an early middle-aged man, elegantly dressed in a pale linen suit with gold watch chain and walking cane, gazing nonchalantly towards the camera with a searching look in his eyes – an expression that suggests powerful, intense inner con-centration. .e second is a snapshot of the composer as a young boy in an almost comically oversized military uniform, carrying a cornet in his hand and a slide trumpet by his side (Figs. /./ and /.0). It is di1cult to try to rec-oncile the two sharply contrasting images with the same historical figure; both seem slightly unreal, and have the quality of dream pictures or memo-ries from an uncertain or mythic past. .e first, taken by portrait photogra-pher Georg Lindström in summer /234, midway between the composition of Nielsen’s Second and .ird symphonies and two years after the unexpected popular success of his second opera, Maskarade, presents a cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle artist or bohème at the height of his powers, the consummate homme du monde like a character from a .omas Mann novel. .e second photograph, in contrast, taken c. /443 of Nielsen as a fourteen-year old boy in the Odense town battalion, o5ers an image drawn from a predominantly agricultural society and the rural Danish working class. Even allowing for the thirty-year time di5erence between Nielsen as young boy and mature adult, the two images seem irreconcilable, pointing in opposite temporal directions: back towards the nineteenth-century world of provincial Denmark, and for-wards towards a confident, modernist European artistic future. .e compos-ite picture of Nielsen that emerges seems strangely fractured, broken, and incomplete. In this introduction, and throughout this book, I will argue that such appar-ently conflicting or opposed images are in fact central to a proper under-standing of Nielsen’s life and music, and that the twin ideas of Danishness and modernism which they support are a fundamental, but problematic, quality of his work. At the most basic level, they represent binary strands of his critical reception. In Denmark, Nielsen was widely regarded during his own lifetime as the greatest composer of his generation, and key works assumed the status of national classics: most notably Maskarade, the .ird and Fourth symphonies, and songs such as ‘Jens Vejmand’. .rough his col-laborations with .omas Laub in collections such as the Folkehøjskolens Melodibog (/200), Nielsen’s tunes entered schools, colleges, and parish halls across the country, and became an integral part of Denmark’s national

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism0

musical culture – so much so, in fact, that many Danes still grow up having learnt Nielsen’s tunes without consciously registering the identity of the com-poser. As Jørgen I. Jensen remarks at the start of his richly provocative cul-tural biography of the composer, ‘when he died, Nielsen had already, for many years, been regarded as unarguably the greatest composer Denmark had fos-tered for centuries, and today his name is such a self-evident idea in Danish culture that one can forget to marvel at him or his music.’ / But the canonic status of Nielsen’s Danishness is deeply ambivalent and contingent. As this introduction will demonstrate, the idea of Nielsen as a ‘Danish composer’ is a highly contested category, one which serves both to promote and to margin-alise his work.0 Tracing Nielsen’s Danish identity can be both liberating and restrictive. It can serve as a hermeneutic window that opens up a new critical space for analysis and close reading of his music. If not critically framed, how-ever, the image that results becomes an all-too-easy historical trope which peripheralises his work rather than locating it within wider narratives of early twentieth-century European musical modernism. As John Fellow’s analyses of the often circumstantial processes through which Nielsen’s work became associated with ideas of Danishness reveal (for example, through the success of his patriotic song ‘Du danske Mand’),6 such patterns of identity are complex and often contradictory. Jørgen I. Jensen’s notion of Nielsen’s essential ‘bi-per-sonality’ is useful here: the idea of the ‘double-man’ can itself be dismantled as a broader European modernist category (it is prominent, for example, in critical writing on Nielsen’s contemporaries such as Elgar and Mahler). .is book will hence interrogate models of individual subjectivity, collective iden-tity, and historical imagination in music historical writing generally, and con-sider issues of place and iconography in Nielsen reception. Closer examina-tion of Nielsen’s early works from the late /443s and early /423s, particularly his songs, provides a rich starting point for problematising issues of place, identity, and musical modernism in Nielsen’s work. And in turn, this enquiry prompts deeper questions about the trajectory of much writing on twentieth-century musical history and Nielsen’s proper place within broader histories of musical modernism. For Jensen, such questions point towards the profound

7 ‘Da han døde, havde han allerede i mange år været betragtet som den ubestridt største komponist, Danmark havde fostret i århundreder, og i dag er hans navn et så selvfølgeligt begreb i dansk kultur, at man kan glemme at undre sig over ham og hans musik.’ Danskeren, 2.

8 A recent attempt to resist the idea of Danishness, or rather to demonstrate that it is not in any sense an inherent property of Nielsen’s music, can be found in Karen Vestergård and Ida-Marie Vørre, ‘Danishness in Nielsen’s Folkelige Songs’, CNS 6, 43–/3/, which summarises an argument developed more fully in their ‘Den danske Sang – en undersøgelse af danskheden i Carl Nielsens Sange’ (PhD dissertation, University of Aalborg, 0339).

: John Fellow, ‘A Patriotic Song with Consequences: “Du Danske Mand” through Hundred Years’, CNS 6, 04–;2.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge 6

dualism at the heart of Nielsen’s music: ‘the composer who, unlike any other renewed the popular song and created a new, clarified and simple tone in the Danish language, is the same who led Danish concert music towards the abstract, di1cult, inaccessible, advanced and dissonant zones – towards ato-nality and modernism, and beyond’.; Understanding this dialectic provides a key to unlocking analytical and historical problems in Nielsen’s music. But it also prompts wider questions about the nature of musical modernism, and about the canons that such stylistic categories inevitably create. Strenuous e5orts have been made in recent years to o5er persuasive ‘mod-ernist’ reinterpretations of composers (including Elgar, Sibelius, and Vaughan Williams)< whose work has hitherto been regarded as essentially conserva-tive or backward-looking, not least as means of unpacking familiar narrative readings of twentieth-century music. Such accounts have often dismantled the binary model of twentieth-century modernism focused on the twin fig-ures of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, prevalent in academic writing ever since the publication of Adorno’s seminal Philosophy of Modern Music, and have energetically challenged the primacy of a particular avant-garde repertoire as the century’s progressive aesthetic mainstream. Other studies have enriched and widened our understanding of musical modernism by presenting con-textual interdisciplinary accounts of cities that became centres of modern-ist cultural practice (Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris), diverting attention from the authority of a single authorial figure towards their broader histori-cal milieu and place. It would be satisfying to locate the current book along-side these other studies, and make a strong case for ‘Carl Nielsen: Modernist’ within one of the categories (perhaps that of ‘indigenous modernisms’) iden-tified, for example, by a commentator such as Leon Botstein in his entry on ‘Modernism’ for the revised New Grove Dictionary. Nielsen gains only a low profile or is unaccountably absent from many major music-historical surveys: his work appears only peripherally in the Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, for instance, as a relatively minor player in a larger critical account of symphonic composition after Beethoven; his work does not figure

= ‘Den komponist, der som ingen anden fornyede den folkelige sang og satte en ny, afklaret og enkel tone til det danske sprog, er den samme, som førte den danske koncertsalsmusik ind i abstrakte, vanskeligt tilgængelige, avancerede og dissonerende zoner – mod atonalitet, mod modernisme, og endnu længere fremad.’ Danskeren, /;–/<.

> For recent vigorous interrogations of modernism as a canonising category in early twentieth-century music, see for example, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar: Modernist (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 0339); Tomi Maekelae, Sibelius: Poesie in der Luft (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 033?), and Alain Frogley’s trenchant editorial introduction in his anthology, Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, /229), ‘Constructing Englishness in music: national character and the reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, /–00.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism;

at all in the companion Twentieth-Century Music volume, e5ectively align-ing (and hence marginalising) his music within the historical trajectory of the previous century.9 On the basis of such startling neglect, the canonic impetus for a modernist reading of Nielsen’s work remains pressing. But this book in fact o5ers a more anxious reading of Nielsen’s modernism, one which draws its ambivalence from the idea of the ‘bi-person’ identified by Jensen as an essential character of Nielsen’s personality. .is need for ambivalence is not simply the result of a desire to avoid the centralising thrust of the ‘grand nar-ratives’ that have become increasingly unsustainable in recent historical and theoretical musicology: it is more properly a reflection of the tone of much of Nielsen’s life and work. But it also prompts questions about the way in which we understand and model musical modernism generally. And, in that sense, it concerns the ways in which modernism is itself defined. For many writers, the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ are e5ectively synonymous. .is, for instance is the thrust of Botstein’s proposition that ‘Modernism is a consequence of the fundamental conviction among succes-sive generations of composers since /233 that the means of musical expres-sion in the 03th century must be adequate to the unique and radical character of the age’.? .e premise that a musical language must somehow be ‘adequate’ to its time, whether radical or not, is surely one that is potentially problem-atic for any particular historical period. But this notion of modernity never-theless provides a fruitful and provocative angle for hearing Nielsen’s music. As John Fellow notes in the preface to the first volume of the monumental letters edition, for example, ‘Carl Nielsen lived in the years when modern Denmark and the modern world emerged, in the years when one section of the population after another found their voice, and the right to vote, and rose to honour and dignity, in the years when technological progress and mate-rial growth became the order of the day and when old moral and restrictive ties loosened themselves and thus set psychological growth and evolution on the programme. In a great many ways he translated this human expan-sion in musical terms.’ 4 Fellow’s vision of Danish modernity is interestingly conceived in terms of utterance and enfranchisement as much as scientific

@ An obvious exception is Arnold Whittall’s survey, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, /222), <0–2, which accords Nielsen a special place in discussions of early twentieth-century symphonic modernism alongside Sibelius and Vaughan Williams.

A Leon Botstein, ‘Modernism’, Grove Music Online (accessed /; October 0334). B ‘Carl Nielsen levede i de år da det moderne Danmark og den moderne verden

blev til, i de år hvor den ene befolkningsgruppe efter den anden fik stemme, og stemmeret, og kom til ære og værdighed, i de år hvor teknologiske fremskridt og materiel vækst kom på dagsordenen og hvor gammel moral og snærende band løsnede sig og også satte en psykisk vækst og udvikling på programmet. Selv satte han i mangt og meget denne menneskelige ekspansion på musikalsk begreb.’ CNB /, 2.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge <

progress or cultural change, an interpretation which grounds Nielsen’s music in its complex social contexts. Indeed, contemporary developments in infra-structure and the Danish built environment provide a telling backdrop: many of the architectural landmarks that now define Copenhagen’s townscape, for example, date from the time of Nielsen’s residence in the city and correspond, in more or less approximate ways, with particular phases of his compositional work: Martin Nyrop’s grand Italianate town hall at the heart of the city, for example, with its echoes of Siena and Venice, was completed in /232,2 and the central railway station, with its carved stylised figures from Nordic mythology

– still the gateway for most international visitors to the city – was opened in /2//, the years when Nielsen was working on his .ird Symphony, the Sinfonia espansiva. Similarly, Kai Nielsen’s stunning sculpted granite relief around the perimeter of Blågårds Plads in the Copenhagen suburb of Nørrebro depict-ing various forms of human work (including construction, motherhood, and music), completed in /2/0–/; in a suitably muscular style as part of the urban development of the quarter, provides a compelling counterpoint to the sym-phonic vision of a diverse social community confidently unfurled in the finale of Nielsen’s symphony – an image to which we will return in Chapters ; and < below. Nielsen’s music is hence clearly ‘adequate’, in Botstein’s sense, to the spirit, and the stonework, of its own time. But as Astradur Eysteinsson remarks, such easy parallels between mod-ernism and modernity can swiftly become overly reductive. In such circum-stances, ‘modernism, and the social experience it utters, assumes the role of a reverberation and even reflection of social modernisation. Such an analogy can easily miss the sociocultural and ideological positioning of modernism with regard to social modernity, or can reduce it to a unilaterally reproduc-tive or symbolic act.’ /3 In other words, the critical edge that defines modern-ism, the sense of mind that is somehow sharply fractured from its immediate cultural environment and hence alienated, can become flattened out and nor-mative. One aspect of this process, as Eysteinsson concedes, is the tendency for modernism simply to become a form of a1rmation through denial, where ‘modernism can be seen as the negative other of capitalist-bourgeois ideol-ogy and of the ideological space of social harmony demarcated for the bour-geois subject’.// Modernism thus undermines its own premise, the ostensible

C For an insightful discussion of the construction of the town hall, see Kristian Hvidt, ‘Københavns Rådhus – “et Gesamtkunstwerk”’, in Drømmetid: Fortællinger fra Det Sjælelige Gennembruds København, ed. Henrik Wivel (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 033;), 0/;–0?. Nielsen’s wife, sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, was awarded the commission for the decoration of the main entrance in /42< (CNB /, ;/6).

7D Astradur Eysteinsson, !e Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, /223), 0/.

77 Ibid., 6?.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism9

rejection of such bourgeois ideology, through its own mode of operation – a paradox which Peter Bürger, amongst others, has addressed through his the-ory of the avant-garde./0 It is not su1cient, in that case, for Nielsen’s music simply to reflect aspects of modernity or urban change in early twentieth-century Copenhagen in order to be heard as ‘modernist’. But neither would the blanket rejection of such bourgeois forms of cultural consumption ulti-mately fulfil the modernist criteria outlined by Eysteinsson above. Clearly, a more nuanced definition of modernism is required, one which conceives such processes as part of a dialogue or exchange, before any such study can proceed. .is need for critical reappraisal responds to Carlo Caballero’s recent call for a more cautious and historically contextualised approach to the use of modernism and modernity as descriptors in writing on music./6 As Caballero has suggested, it is all too easy for modernism to become a self-canonising category. .e simple appellation ‘modernist’ can lend a deceptive veneer of innovation, progressiveness and aesthetic autonomy to a particular body of work – qualities which have been highly valued in much musicological writ-ing, sometimes regardless of the extent to which such categories are histori-cally justified. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues that ‘the trope of moder-nity bears a libidinal charge: that is, it is the operator of a unique kind of intellectual excitement not normally associated with other forms of concep-tuality … to a1rm the “modernity” of this or that historical phenomenon is to generate a kind of electrical charge: … to awaken a feeling of intensity and energy that is greatly in excess of the attention we generally bring to inter-esting events or monuments in the past.’ /; It is hard to resist drawing upon the idea of the ‘libidinal/electrical charge’ of Nielsen’s modernity in herme-neutic readings of works such as the .ird Symphony, as Chapter ; will argue. But, as Jameson’s analysis suggests, attaching the label ‘modernist’ to a com-poser’s music, without proper regard to their actual aesthetic outlook, sim-ply elevates their work into a particular academic museum or pantheon, and often reflects more the political state of the discipline than the actual status of their work. Caballero thus argues for more careful attention to the ways in which the terms were historically used (as opposed to other near-cognate terms such as ‘ultra modernism’, the ‘avant-garde’, or ‘futurism’). As Caballero notes, documentary evidence suggests that the word ‘modernism’ itself was

78 Peter Bürger and Christa Bürger, !e Institutions of Art, trans. Loren Kruger, with an introduction by Russel A. Berman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, /220).

7: Unpublished contribution to evening panel discussion, ‘Early French Musical Modernism: its Sources and Idioms’, Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Quebec City, /–; November 033?.

7= Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 0330), 6;–<.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge ?

employed relatively rarely, at least until the /263s, and that it was initially as much a term of abuse as a modicum of praise. .at was certainly the case in the reception of Nielsen’s music. Contemporary Danish writers used the words ‘modern’, ‘modernism’, and ‘modernity’ relatively freely, as we shall see below: often as pejorative terms, but sometimes as a more neutral description of his music’s perceived newness. But for many listeners, Nielsen’s ‘advanced modernism’ remained fundamentally problematic, up to and including a con-troversial performance of his Fifth Symphony in Stockholm in /20;./< Later works, such as the Sixth Symphony and the Clarinet Concerto, are no less ‘modernist’ in outlook than earlier pieces, a quality which will be addressed in the final chapter below. But the danger remains that, without further criti-cal scrutiny, the term simply becomes anachronistic, a way of canonising Nielsen’s work without fully accounting for its critical edge. Jameson’s writings suggest a deeper shift in the nature of modernism and modernity (significantly, he does not treat the two terms as equal), one

7> .e Stockholm performance of the symphony was described in a number of newspaper reviews at the time. .e Danish daily Berlingske Tidende, for example, recorded: ‘.e now 93-year-old composer unleashed such advanced modernity here that the impression was too powerful for a large part of the audience. In the middle of the first part, with its thunderous drums and “cacophonic e5ects”, genuine panic broke out. Around a quarter of the listeners dashed towards the exits with horror and rage painted across their faces, and those, who stayed in their place, attempted to hiss down the “spectacle” while the conductor whipped the orchestra up into the greatest intensity. .e whole of this intermezzo underlined the humoristically burlesque element in the symphony in a way that Carl Nielsen had never dreamt of. His description of modern life with all its confusion, brutality and struggle, all the uncontrolled cries of pain and ignorance – and behind it all, the hard rhythm of the side drum as the only discipline – gained, as the audience fled, a touch of almost diabolical humour.’ [Den snart 93-aarige Komponist afslører her en saa fremskreden Modernitet, at Indtrykket blev for kraftigt for en stor Del af Publikum. Midt i første Afdeling med dens skraldende Trommer og ,kakofoniske’ E5ekter udbrød der en virkelig Panik. Omtrent en Fjerdepart at Tilhørerne styrtede til Udgangene med Rædsel og Vrede malede i deres Ansigt, og de, der blev paa deres Pladser, forsøgte at nedhysse ,Spektaklet’, medens Dirigenten satte Orkestret op til den yderste Styrkegrad. Hele dette Intermezzo understregede det humoristisk burleske Element i Symfonien paa en Maade som Carl Nielsen sikkert aldrig har drømt om. Hans Skildring af det moderne Liv med dets Forvirring, Raahed og Kamp, alle de ubeherskede Raab af Smerte og Uvidenhed – og bag det hele Marchetrommens haarde Rytme som det eneste disciplinerende – fik, da Publikum flygtede, et Anstrøg af næsten diabolisk Humor.] ‘Carl Nielsens <te Symfoni vækker Panik i Stockholm – Publikum forlader Koncerten i Vrede men den,<te Symfoni’ besejrer Kritiken’ [‘Carl Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony awakes Panic in Stockholm – Audience Flees Concert in Anger while the Fifth Symphony Conquers the Critic’, article by ‘Pastel’, in Berlingske Tidende (Aften), 00 January /20;; Samtid, 63;–9, at 63;. It is interesting to note how Berlingske Tidende’s description of a ‘humoristically burlesque intermezzo’ in fact anticipates the second movement of the Sixth Symphony.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism4

that o5ers a stronger basis for reading Nielsen’s work. .e first stage in this process is an acknowledgement of the dual temporal perspective of moder-nity, the sense that it looks both backwards and forwards simultaneously, what Jameson calls a ‘dialectic of the break and the period, which is itself a moment of some wider dialectic of continuity and rupture (or, in other words, of Identity and Di5erence)’./9 .at is, the feeling or experience of modernity presupposes a sense of radical break or disjunction with the past, a category that in turn comes to shape and define a whole historical period rather than an isolated moment. .is periodisation, however, implies a broadly cyclic view of time, one premised as much upon the notion of recurrence and return as rupture and disjunction (for the reason that earlier moments of modern-ist crisis invariably result in the creation of a new hegemony, which in turn prompts a further crisis and process of displacement). Hence, as Jameson concludes, ‘the trope of “modernity” is closely related to that other chrono-logical or historicising, narrative, the trope of “for the first time”, which also reorganises our perceptions around the premise of a new kind of time line … the trope of “modernity” is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms.’ /? .is narrativi-sation of modernity has significant implications for the idea of Carl Nielsen as exemplar of a Danish modernist cultural practice. .e sense of rupture, or ‘breakthrough’ that characterises much of Nielsen’s work, analysed in greater depth in the following chapters, emerges here as a narrative category, as a mode of writing or composition. In other words, it becomes a rhetori-cal device or gesture, employed in order to evoke a particular sense of style, angle, or musical attitude./4 .is is, arguably, a strongly Nordic trend; as two important earlier commentators on literary modernism, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, suggest, ‘in trying to pin Modernism down – tenta-tively and crudely – in terms of men, books, and years, attention is first drawn to Scandinavia: to the publication in /446 of a series of critical essays by the Danish critic Georg Brandes with the significant title of Men of the Modern Breakthrough’. Nielsen’s relationship with Brandes will be explored more fully in the following chapter, but it is significant, in the light of Jameson’s essay,

7@ Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 06. 7A Ibid., 6<. 7B A similar critique has been advanced in a study by Ian Hunter, who observes the

way in which the idea of the breakthrough becomes a philosophical trope in the history of critical theory, advanced by writers as diverse as .omas Kuhn and Jacques Derrida, in response to a fear of empirical formalism; Ian Hunter, ‘.e History of .eory’, Critical Inquiry 66 (Autumn 0339), ?4–//0. Hunter describes it as ‘a philosophical ascesis associated with the cultivation of a particular intellectual persona’ (p. //0). In this study, I use the term ‘breakthrough’ in a more focused historical sense, as a tool to analyse aspects of Nielsen’s musical style, although the parallels with early developments in phenomenological thinking are striking.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge 2

that it is the idea of modernism as a narrative trope that is subsequently fore-grounded by Bradbury and McFarlane, rather than a fixed or stable definition of modernism itself (and refreshing that, in spite of its later critical neglect in other accounts, Denmark emerges as the starting point for a European wave of modernism in the early /443s). And, furthermore, that attention is paid to the binary nature of such categories – as simultaneously cycle and break – rather than as a monolithic unity. .e next stage in Jameson’s reappraisal of modernism and modernity is more contentious. Having established that modernity is more properly a nar-rative category than a philosophical predicate, Jameson argues that ‘the narra-tive of modernity cannot be organised around categories of subjectivity (con-sciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated)’./2 For Jameson, this is because the idea of consciousness is itself already a representation rather than a transcendental (Kantian) category. Even Kant’s notion of synthetic apperception, for Jameson, merely reveals an attempt to try and bridge the distinction between the knowing subject and its conscious representation. Such distinctions therefore become unworkable, except through appeals to problematic mythic (e.g. Heideggerian) notions of being and becoming. .is is relevant because, to some extent, it illustrates Jameson’s desire to escape from the paradoxical critique of the subject that ultimately rea1rms its bourgeois status, as Peter Bürger has argued. In other words, it seeks to clear a genuinely critical space within which an idea of mod-ernism can intervene. But it is also significant because other scholars, for example J. P. E. Harper-Scott, have usefully invoked Heidegger’s work as an alternative model for the modernist musical subject, as a means of negoti-ating the complex status of representation and subjectivity in music analy-sis.03 A similar strategy will not be pursued here; rather, I will be concerned more immediately with Nielsen’s relationship with certain closely contempo-rary writers in German music theory (August Halm, Ernst Kurth, and Hans Mersmann). Nielsen’s music, I will argue in Chapter ;, is fundamentally bod-ily, and the task of musical analysis in this sense is to try and account for what we might call its choreography, the organisation of its corporeal gestures in time. Any attempt to describe this music’s referentiality, however, as in all forms of musical analysis, remains stubbornly metaphorical. But this meta-phorical discourse itself reflects another aspect of the process of modernity, namely the apparent autonomy of the subject and hence of the modernist work of art – an autonomy that is ultimately deceptive. As Jameson suggests, ‘autoreferentiality is the very dynamic of this process, in which the work of art designates itself and supplies the criteria whereby it is supposed to be used 7C Jameson, A Singular Modernity, <?. 8D Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar: Modernist; and J. P. E. Harper-Scott, ‘“Our true

north”: Walton’s First Symphony, Sibelianism, and the Nationalization of Modernism in England’, Music & Letters 42/; (November 0334), <90–42.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism/3

and evaluated. It is not necessary to see this level of the work’s meaning as an exclusive one; rather it constitutes one allegorical level – for the artists themselves, no doubt, the anagogical one – among many others.’ 0/ In other words, the subject’s appearance of autonomy, the crucial fracturing of artist and society that provides the foundation for many familiar readings of musi-cal modernism, in turn becomes another aspect of modernism’s narrative character. It is a disjunction that demands critical scrutiny and interpretation, in order to be properly heard, read, and understood. .e two photographs which hang beside my desk, of Nielsen the cosmopol-itan worldly composer and provincial military cadet, might therefore be inter-preted as part of this modernist narrative, as emblematic of the split or frac-tured personality that shapes and alienates the modernist artist. But they also raise intriguing questions about the precise nature of Nielsen’s Danishness, and how such notions of national identity accommodate or deflect the prob-lematic modernist trajectories discussed above. Interrogating such questions o5ers insight into the formation of Nielsen’s canonic status within Danish musical culture in the early years of the twentieth century. Evidence of his eminence is extensively demonstrated in his critical reception, not least from the tributes and obituaries that were penned in the months following his sud-den death in /26/. .e complex story of Nielsen’s legacy – and his influence on a younger generation of composers – will be addressed more fully below. But it is useful to register at this stage the almost universal degree to which Nielsen was hailed as a national figure in the final years of his life. .is was partly a reflection of his institutional importance – in some senses, not least through his work with .omas Laub on the Danish popular song, Nielsen’s legacy was as much pedagogical as compositional.00 .ough his earlier career had been marked by profound disagreements and sudden breaks with other national institutions, most notably the Royal .eatre, in the final decade of his life Nielsen had become almost an establishment figure, actively engaged in the creation, regulation, and maintenance of a local Danish musical tra-dition. For some writers, it was the creation of this tradition alone which ensured his status as national composer. Otto Mortensen, for example, wrote:

With Carl Nielsen we had the beginnings of an independent Danish musical culture. For too long we had been dominated by a distant, Germanicised musical life which, when it came to it, did not suit us. It

87 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, /<2. 88 On Nielsen and the popular song, see Anne-Marie Reynolds, Carl Nielsen’s Voice:

his Songs in Context (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 03/3), /0/–90. Nielsen was also active throughout his life as a teacher. He was first appointed on the teaching sta5 at the Royal Danish Conservatoire for a three-year period between / January /2/9 and 6/ December /2/2, succeeding Otto Malling – he was followed in his turn by his pupil Knud Jeppesen (Dagbøger, ;33); he later served as Head of the Conservatoire from January /26/ until his death later that year.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge //

is not romantic patriotism that we should desire our own Danish musi-cal life, but because that is the only satisfactory one.06

Mortensen’s tribute reveals a profound cultural-political anxiety about the geographical integrity and stability of Danish musical culture, a fear of mar-ginalisation. His sensitivity to the ‘Germanisation’ of Danish musical life can be understood on several levels – as a response to Denmark’s territorial bor-der disputes with Prussia in /4;4 and /49; (the year before Nielsen’s birth) in southern Jutland, for example, to the domination of Leipzig-trained musicians such as Niels W. Gade in nineteenth-century Danish music and of German cultural imperialism, or to the perceived ‘threat’ of avant-garde European modernism represented by Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, both of whom had visited Copenhagen in the /203s. But it is significant in terms of his reception that Nielsen here becomes the representative for an insular, inward-looking idea of Danishness, one which seems more content with the idea of Nielsen as ‘little Dane’ than as a challenging European modernist. Indeed, this tension between inward and outward notions of Danishness, between a nar-row conservative provincialism and a more cosmopolitan European impulse, remains equally pervasive in current Danish political debates: it is a familiar strategy for small nations (such as Denmark) who feel threatened by larger, more energetic neighbours (in Mortensen’s case Germany, but less precisely defined in recent years). For many commentators, this attitude is encapsu-lated in the notion of the Jantelov (‘Law of Jante’), a term first coined by Aksel Sandemose to describe the peculiarly Danish combination of uncertainty, crippling self-doubt, and apparent self-su1ciency, the conformist idea that ‘you must never believe that you have become someone’.0; For Jørgen I. Jensen, this attitude is expressed in the figure of the ‘biperson’, a ‘bystander’ or subor-dinate character – someone who feels removed from the centre of the action, displaced, or marginalised.0< According to Jensen, the tension between this dual sense of centredness and displacement, characteristic of the Jantelov or ‘biperson’, runs through Nielsen’s music. But his insistence that ‘Nielsen’s life and art are typically Danish and must be maintained as typically Danish’ is a problematic starting point, one which points to an ambivalence in Nielsen’s work that demands further scrutiny.09 .e extent to which Nielsen’s music

8: ‘Med Carl Nielsen gjorde vi en begyndelse til at nå en selvstænding, dansk musikkultur. I alt for lang tid har vi overtaget et færdigset, germaniseret musikliv, der jo, når alt kommer til alt, ikke rigtig passer os. Det er ikke romantisk patriotisme, når vi vil have vores eget, danske musikliv, – men kravet om det eneste tilfredsstillende.’ Otto Mortensen, ‘Musik og musikliv’, DMT 9/? (September /26/), /?0–<, at /?0.

8= For a succinct definition of Janteloven, see Reynolds, Carl Nielsen’s Voice, /9. 8> Danskeren, 00. 8@ ‘Carl Nielsens liv og kunst er typisk dansk og må fastholdes som typisk dansk.’

Danskeren, 0/.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism/0

can be heard as ‘typically Danish’ is itself a questionable premise, even while it appears as a prominent thread in his critical reception. And, as I will argue below, Jensen’s category of the ‘biperson’ suggests another, more provocative reading than the notion of the bystander alone suggests. A more complex example of Nielsen’s canonicisation as ‘great little Dane’ is o5ered by Gunnar Heerup, in an article pointedly entitled ‘.e Way to the New Music’ published in /202. Heerup’s title alludes to Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, urgent topics of debate (and resistance) in Danish musical circles in the late /203s. But Heerup begins by comparing Nielsen with an earlier generation of European composers – principally Strauss, Mahler, Wolf, Puccini, Sibelius and Debussy – a group subsequently described by James Hepokoski, following Carl Dahlhaus, as ‘early modernists’.0? For Heerup, ‘Carl Nielsen’s ability to sculpt, form and develop the new, the lib-erated musical materials, sets him in opposition to all these composers’,04 who, according to Heerup, have either lacked su1cient formal discipline (a composer’s ‘formsans’ or ‘sense of form’ is a recurring trope in writing on, or by, Nielsen, and goes back to his first encounter with Niels W. Gade),02 or who have failed to engage with genuinely progressive new musical resources. Heerup’s claim is of course contentious, and considerable musicological e5ort has been expended in recent years to demonstrating the extent to which such ‘early modernists’ were no less ‘progressive’ in their outlook than many of their younger, more obviously avant-garde colleagues (a process towards which this book will also contribute). But more interesting is the way in which Heerup attempts to demonstrate the inherent value and meaning of Nielsen’s work. According to Heerup, in an explicitly canonising gesture, Nielsen becomes the proper inheritor of European nineteenth-century music – in that sense he becomes a truly cosmopolitan figure. But set against that image of univer-sality is a more strongly localist tendency that reinforces the inward impulse identified in Mortensen’s obituary note:

Carl Nielsen collects together the force from the previous century’s two strongest musical streams, he has the same unbending formal will as the classical romantic (Brahms), and he has the same desire to liberate himself from all classical-romantic dogma as the radical

8A James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony no. " (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, /22?), 6.

8B ‘[Carl Nielsens] evne til plastisk at forme og udvikle det ny, det frigjorte tonestof stiller ham i modsætning til alle disse komponister’. Gunnar Heerup, ‘Vejen til den ny musik’, DMT ;/0 (February /202), 0<.

8C Gade is supposed to have looked over the manuscript of Nielsen’s early Quartet in D minor, and said simply ‘You have a good sense of form’ [‘(De) have god Formsans’]. Min Fynske Barndom, 0/<. But the idea of ‘god Formsans’ subsquently becomes a Leitmotiv in much contemporary Danish music criticism – for example, in reviews by Charles Kjerulf and William Behrend.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge /6

nationalists. How much of his own is derived from these two direc-tions is di1cult to discern; his father was a smallholder, who was additionally a musician at farmers’ parties, and Carl Nielsen has retained the farmer’s primitive ability to approach his material from an unprejudiced and practical standpoint[;] he has not been limited through his growth by musical traditions, he has therefore only taken precisely what he has use for, influence from outside needs not have been absolutely necessary, even if his music’s melodic kinship with Danish folksong is unmistakeable. Carl Nielsen is from the folk him-self, in his works he has always retained some of folk music’s quali-ties, his music has therefore in some ways continued to remain folk music.63

Heerup’s discussion of folk music serves a powerfully ideological function – grounding Nielsen’s music, figuratively, in the Danish soil, and also presup-posing a national audience or community for his work in a way that seeks to establish collective ownership and identity. It also o5ers, neatly enough, a his-torical model for the development of Nielsen’s compositional voice, although concrete evidence of his music’s ‘melodic kinship’ with Danish folksong in fact remains elusive. .e very notion of a Danish folk tradition is ambivalent here, since it is unclear whether Heerup is referring to the ethnomusicological work undertaken by collectors such as Evald Tang Kristensen, of whom Nielsen was certainly aware even if he didn’t take part in such activities directly him-self, or the more synthesised, modernised idea of a ‘renewed’ popular song to which Laub and Nielsen contributed extensively. More significant, perhaps, in the cultural and social political milieu of early twentieth-century Denmark, is Heerup’s invocation of the Grundtvigian figure of the smallholder, and of the ‘farmer’s primitive ability to approach his material from an unprejudiced and practical standpoint’.6/ As Chapter < will argue below, the enfranchisement of :D ‘Carl Nielsen samler i sig kraften fra det udgående århundredes to stærkeste

Musikstrømme, han har den samme ubøjelige formvilje som den klassicerende romantik (Brahms), og han har den samme vilje til frigørelse fra alle klassisk-romantiske dogmer som de radikale-nationale komponister. Hvor meget af hans egenart, der skyldes direkte påvirkning fra disse retninger er vanskeligt at afgøre; hans far var en husmand, der tillige var spillemand ved bøndernes gilder, og Carl Nielsen har bevaret bondens primitive evne til at betragte sit stof fra et uhildet og praktisk standpunkt, han er ikke gennem sin opvækst blevet bundet af musikalske traditioner, han har derfor kunnet gribe netop hvad han havde brug for, en indflydelse udefra har ikke behøvet at være det absolut afgørende, selv om hans musiks melodiske slægtskab med den danske folkevise er umiskendelig. Carl Nielsen er selv af folket, han har i sine værker altid bevaret en del af folkemusikkens egenskaber, hans musik er derfor på en vis måde vedblevet at være folkemusik.’ Heerup, ‘Vejen til den ny musik’, 0<.

:7 .eologian, philosopher, and educationalist N. F. S. Grundtvig (/?46–/4?0) was one of the formative figures in Danish social and cultural life in the nineteenth century. Influenced by German Romanticism, he developed an early interest

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism/;

the smallholders’ block was simply one component part of a broader shift in Danish culture, which shifted cosmopolitan perceptions of the rural popula-tion – Heerup’s farmers – from that of a backward, pre-industrial commu-nity to one recognised as a dynamic political and cultural force: one of the most significant social changes identified by John Fellow. .e ‘farmers’ atti-tude’ which Nielsen inherits, according to Heerup, is a radically anti-deca-dent movement, a modern wave in all but name, pointedly unbound by the weight of nineteenth-century musical tradition yet still tied to a more ancient notion of community and land. At this point, Mortensen’s and Heerup’s views e5ectively conjoin. .e rural modernity which Heerup advocates points towards the same goal as Mortensen’s musical independence. In both cases, Nielsen serves as a symbol of Denmark’s musical self-determination, a canonic status that ultimately both elevates and also marginalises his work. It is a moment of rupture and discontinuity which is simultaneously a new beginning. .is is a discourse in which Nielsen himself played an active part – indeed, certain works, pre-eminently the finale of the .ird Symphony, might be heard in this context as a musical expression of Heerup’s drive towards a new Danish modernity. Nielsen’s richest and most explicit attempt to write himself within this strand of his own critical reception is of course his erindringsbog (memoir), Min fynske Barndom (‘My Childhood on Funen’, /20?), an account which, as John Fellow’s research has shown, is a selective retelling of his early years in rural Denmark.60 As Chapter < will demonstrate, Funen serves partly as a site of authentication, a place where Nielsen can construct (and perform) his own imagined musical identity, as well as a source for compositional inspi-ration. And through the eyes of contemporary painters such as Peter Hansen and Fritz Syberg, as well as through Nielsen’s music, the Funen landscape becomes the focal point for the creation of precisely the kind of modernism which Heerup articulates. Yet Funen also represents a more retrospective, arguably anti-modernist tendency, the construction of a specifically Danish tradition. Nielsen himself points in this direction in Min fynske Barndom, when he recalls his mother talking about an older, even more famous Fynbo, Hans Christian Andersen, ‘who had been just as abject as me, and that over in Brendekilde there was once a poor boy [the linguist Rasmus Rask], who had learnt over twenty languages and who became recognised throughout

in Icelandic sagas and Anglo-Saxon and later became an educational reformer, founding the first Folk High School (Folkehøjskole) at Rødding in southern Jutland in /4;;. Among his reforms included a new hymn book for the Danish church, a project which strongly influenced .omas Laub.

:8 See the account in Emilie Demant Hatt, Foraarsbølger: Erindring om Carl Nielsen, ed. John Fellow (Copenhagen: Multivers, 0330), ?2–46, which describes the omission of two of Nielsen’s sponsors from his conservatoire years, Onkel Jens and Tante Marie, and illustrates the selectivity of Nielsen’s memoir.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge /<

the world.’ 66 Funen hence becomes a microcosm, a world in miniature. But it also serves a metonymic function: Funen in turn becomes emblematic of a Danish national identity. Nielsen thus accommodates himself within what Jensen later calls the ‘dream of a Dane, the dream of the little-great person’,6; the embodiment of a specifically Danish myth of cultural self-determination, and of the category of the biperson which Jensen identifies as essentially Danish. Even here, however, the picture becomes more complex than it at first seems. As Jensen notes, Min fynske Barndom is written at the same time as some of Nielsen’s most complex and challenging music – the Sixth Symphony and the two Wind Concertos. .ere is no straightforward correspondence, in other words, between the memoir’s nostalgic, retrospective tone and Nielsen’s large-scale composition in this period – precisely the contrary. .e modern-ism which Heerup identifies is therefore more complicated or contingent than even the contested category of the folk would suggest. Rather, it points towards a fundamental ambivalence in Nielsen’s compositional development. Nielsen again provides some insight into this aspect of his musical career, in a much earlier attempt to write his autobiography. In a note which John Fellow dates between /2 January and 0; February /23<, perhaps written for use by the Norwegian composer Knud Harder in an article for the German periodi-cal Die Musik, Nielsen began: ‘I was born in the country town Nørre Lyndelse, mid-Funen, where my father was a country-town musician and had quite a wide field of activity’,6< establishing through patrilineage his bond with a highly localised region of central Denmark. Nielsen further recalls some of his earliest musical experiences, as retold twenty years later in Min fynske Barndom:

When I was /3–/0 years old, a music society was created in my home region, of which my father was a member. It consisted of farmers, school teachers, priests and others, who had an interest in music. .e society’s single goal was to cultivate good music, and one even went as far as playing excerpts of Mozart’s and Beethoven’s symphonies. As a special favour I was permitted to attend these gatherings; every time I returned home after such a meeting, I was enchanted. I still remember how on the way home after these musical evenings through the beautiful landscape I used to dream and fantasise in music,

:: ‘… der havde været ligesaa ussel som jeg, og at ovre i Brendekilde var der engang en fattig Dreng, som havde lært over tyve Sprog og var blevet bekendt over hele Jorden.’ Danskeren, 6;.

:= ‘Han var drømmen om en dansker, drømmen om det lille-store menneske.’ Danskeren, 60–6.

:> ‘Jeg er født i Landsbyen Nørre Lyndelse, Midt-Fyn, hvor min Fader var Landsbymusikant og havde et temmelig stort Virkefelt.’ Samtid, ;4.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism/9

and I am certain that it had an important influence on my artistic development.69

A number of characteristic themes from Nielsen reception are adumbrated in this autobiographical sketch: Jensen’s evocative ‘dream of the little-great Dane’; of the Funen landscape as the privileged site of a rich sonic imagina-tion; and of Heerup’s homely image of the gathering of farmers and other country people as the true Danish folk, a modern community dedicated to self-improvement through cultivation, both artistic and practical. But the sketch also reveals a complex intermingling of di5erent spheres and layers of musical thought. .e activities of the musical group, named Braga after the mythic Norse god, to which Nielsen and his father belonged, strongly parallels the work of similar groups called glee clubs in nineteenth-century England. Nielsen’s upbringing, and his ‘homespun’ (to borrow Lewis Rowell’s phrase)6? upbringing and musical education resembles that of a close English contem-porary, Edward Elgar. Indeed, the comparisons between the two composers are in many ways compelling: both were born in relatively modest social cir-cumstances in the provinces, a significant distance, both geographically and culturally, from metropolitan centres of musical training and performance. Attempts (of varying degrees of success) to overcome this distance becomes a vital thread in their later biographies. Furthermore, both composers gained their initial practical training through informal gatherings of the kind described above – even the repertoire, a mix of popular dance tunes, opera numbers and ‘lighter’ classics, including individual movements from Mozart and Beethoven symphonies, is likely to have been similar, if not the same.64 More significant still is the tension in their work, and in its reception, between conservative and progressive tendencies, notions of centre and periphery, and between the sense of a classical tradition as something inherited and essential

:@ ‘Da jeg var en halv Snes Aar gammel, blev der paa min Fødeegn dannet en Musikforening, hvoraf min fader var Medlem. Den bestod af Bønder, Skolelærere, Præster og andre, som havde Interesse for Musik. Foreningens eneste Formaal var at dyrke god Musik, og man drev endog saa vidt, at man spillede Brudstykker af Mozarts og Beethovens Symphonier. Som en særlig Begunstigelse fik jeg Lov til at komme med til disse Sammenkomster; hver Gang, jeg kom hjem efter et saadant Møde, var jeg aldeles betagen. Jeg mindes endnu, hvorledes jeg efter disse Musik-Aftener paa Hjemvejen gennem det smukke Landskab drømte og sværmede i Musik, og jeg er sikker paa, at det har haft en væsentlig Indflydelse paa min kunstneriske Udvikling.’ Samtid, ;4–2.

:A Lewis Rowell, ‘Nielsen’s Homespun Philosophy of Music’, in !e Nielsen Companion, ed. Mina F. Miller (London: Faber, /22;), 6/–<?.

:B It is interesting, for example, to compare the music Elgar wrote for inmates at the Powick Asylum in the late /4?3s and early /443s (published as vol. 00 in the Elgar Society Edition, ed. Andrew Lyle (Rickmansworth: Elgar Editions, 0334)), with the Nielsen’s description of Braga’s repertoire: they are often very similar in style and design.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge /?

and of the desire to achieve genuine originality and discover their own indi-vidual compositional voice.62 .is tension arguably becomes a creative stimu-lus for both composers. But most striking of all, perhaps, is the role played by sensibilities of place in writing on their music. For Elgar, this sense of place is configured primarily in terms of rural Worcestershire – the Malvern hills, the River Severn, and its local environments (the hills around Birchwood where he composed the Dream of Gerontius and the ‘Enigma’ Variations, or Longdon Marsh where he sketched !e Apostles). Elgar’s association with this sense of place in turn serves as a marker of his musical identity.;3 Funen sometimes plays a similar role in Nielsen reception. It becomes a way of fram-ing and containing his work, packaging it as part of a process of commodi-fication so that his work somehow seems more assimilable and less abstract than it might otherwise appear.;/ It also legitimises his music, attaching it to a conspicuous site of performance and consumption that repeatedly forms a base layer or reference point in Nielsen’s reception and compositional devel-opment. For Hjalmar Bull, for example, writing in /209 and anticipating that crucial passage in Min fynske Barndom, Nielsen ‘thus sprang from the same :C Nielsen returned to the question of originality much later in his life, in a revealing

interview for the regional newspaper Fyns Tidende on 6/ October /204. He is reported as saying: ‘I obviously regard originality as a necessity. But originality is a fundamental property, something one either has or one doesn’t. It is certainly possible to produce an ostensible originality by venturing out to the periphery and performing weird things there. .at applies as much to the composer as to the draughtsman. Both can for a time obscure the issue’s real context with the help of di5useness, but we can see in an instant from a single line drawing on a sheet whether there is talent or not, for sure. It strikes me as completely wrong to conceive me as adherent of an unrestrained freedom. If someone who would seem to master all the basic requirements should from time to time wish to allow himself some liberties for the sake of experiment and exploration – well, can you blame him? I think not.’ [Jeg anser selvsagt Originalitet for en Nødvendighed. Men Originalitetet er en fundamental Egenskab, noget man eller har eller ikke har. Dog er det jo muligt at fremkalde en tilsyneladende Originalitet ved at springe ud i Periferien og dér foretage sig sælsomme Ting. Det gælder saavel Komponisten som Tegneren. Begge kan for en Tid tilsløre Sagens rette Sammenhæng ved Hjælp af Vidtløftigheder, men ser vi et Øjeblik bare en enkelt Stregtegning paa et Papir, saa er vi klar over, om der er Talent eller ej, ikke sandt. Det er, forekommer der mig, ganske forkert at opfatte mig som Tilhænger af den tøjlesløse Frihed. At den Mand, der mener, han har det fundamentale nogenlunde i Orden, nu og da forsøgmæssigt tillader sig Friheder, det kan man ikke bebrejde ham, synes jeg.] Samtid, ;29–4, at ;2?.

=D On the privileged status of Worcestershire and its ideological role in Elgar reception, see Matthew Riley, Elgar and the Nostalgic Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 033?); also the opening section of my essay, ‘“.e Spirit-Stirring Drum”: Elgar and Populism’, in Elgar and his World, ed. Byron Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 033?).

=7 See, for example, Karsten Eskildsen’s book, Carl Nielsen: Livet og Musikken (Odense: Odense Bys Museer, /222). .e first illustration (pp. 9?) is a ripening rye field, an iconic image I will return to in chapter < below.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism/4

rich soil and fertile Funen nature that over the course of time has given such a great contribution to Danish intellectual life; we need simply in this connec-tion name such names as H. C. Andersen, Rasmus Rask, Kai Nielsen, and in painting the whole of the Funen School.’ ;0 .at both Elgar and Nielsen were themselves implicated at times in such localist patterns of thought (albeit in rather di5erent ways) underlines the pervasiveness of such myths of origin. But it also points towards the dialectical nature of such critical models: what at first seems peripheral or marginalised, remote from mainstream centres of cultural consumption and production, in fact emerges as central or core. Nielsen’s ultra-localist ‘mid-Funen’ becomes one of the focal points of a par-ticular vision of Danish culture, just as Elgar’s Worcestershire becomes the idealised embodiment of an essentialised Englishness. Fredric Jameson comments on this strategic play of localities, centres, and peripheries when he observes that modernism constructs a world

that is still organised around two distinct temporalities: that of the new industrial big city and that of the peasant countryside … .is simulta-neity can no doubt for the moment be cast in terms of some distinc-tion between the metropolis and the provinces; but it might better be imagined in terms of a situation in which individuals operate in a ‘pays’, a local village or region to which they periodically return, while pursu-ing their life work in the very di5erent world of the big city.;6

Nielsen’s peripheralism is accordingly double-edged, both exclusive and inclusive, conservative and modern. His journey across the Storebælt (the ‘great sound’ dividing Funen from the island of Zealand, where Copenhagen is located in Eastern Denmark) in January /44; to attend the Royal Danish Conservatoire, from the rural landscape of his childhood to the urban town-scape of his professional career, is in fact part of a continual shuttling back-and-forth between di5erent musical worlds or modes of thought and perform-ance as much as a rite of passage.;; But Nielsen’s sketch also points to another kind of edginess. Braga’s activities on Funen provided primary access to a par-ticular privileged body of musical works – the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven here represent the heart of the Austro-German musical tradi-tion, and not simply a neutral (value-free) repertoire. It therefore deconstructs the idea of an insular Danishness – the dream of the Funen myth – from

=8 ‘Han er saaledes sprunget frem af den samme rige Muld og frodige fynske Natur, der i Tidernes Løb har ydet saa store Bidrag til dansk Aandsliv; vi behøver i denne Forbindelse blot at nævne Navne som H. C. Andersen, Rasmus Rask, Kai Nielsen og for Malerkunstens Vedkommende hele “Fynske Malerskole”.’ DMT 0// (October /209), 0–?, at 0.

=: Jameson, A Singular Modernity, /;0. == See John Fellow’s discussion in his preface to Demant Hatt, Foraarsbølger, ed.

Fellow, ?–6/.

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge /2

within, turning the microcosmic world created by Nielsen’s autobiography inside out. Nielsen’s peripheralism – his centredness in Funen – in fact pro-vides a means of articulating his universalism, his critical engagement with a musical mainstream. In that way, his attitude to modernism is more compara-ble with another of his contemporaries, Gustav Mahler. Like Mahler, Nielsen remained e5ectively an ‘outsider’, a composer born, as was Elgar, in a provin-cial setting, but whose later work was largely undertaken in a more cosmopol-itan environment. Writers on Mahler have dwelt extensively on this extrater-ritoriality in his life and work – for many, it shapes and defines the character of his musical modernism, lending his work its particular edge or sense of immanent critique. Nielsen may not have faced precisely the same obstacles as Mahler in his career – he didn’t su5er, for instance, from the kind of insti-tutionalised anti-semitism that confronted Mahler at the Vienna Opera and formed a persistent subtext in his critical reception. But in other ways the two composers are comparable: both, for example, brought the sound of stylised nature imagery and military bands from their early childhood experiences into their music as a means of widening (and destabilising) their symphonic vision. And to some extent, Nielsen’s experience was even more marginal than Mahler’s – provincial Denmark was arguably more remote from main-stream centres of cultural practice than Bohemia, located in at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. .roughout the early years of the twentieth century, Scandinavia maintained a strongly dialectical relationship with continental Europe, adopting both assimilationist and isolationist positions in response to a broader sense of cultural and geographical distance. In that sense, Nielsen’s modernist angle, his engagement with received musical tradi-tions through his own compositional work, is no less critical than Mahler’s. And, as the following chapter will argue, the particularly Mahlerian experi-ence of breakthrough (Durchbruch), the sudden incursion of material seem-ingly from outside the boundary of normal expectation which Adorno iden-tifies as a key component of his modernist aesthetic, is no less relevant for a proper understanding of Nielsen’s own musical discourse. It therefore seems all the more striking that Mahler’s place in the modernist canon should have been relatively assured, and that critical coverage of his work has in recent years extended far beyond the realm of a small group of specialist scholars, whereas Nielsen remains e5ectively on the periphery of academic discourse. It is hard not to draw a direct line in such circumstances between geography, Denmark’s position on the edge of continental Europe, and scholarly coverage. Nielsen’s modernism, his ‘edginess’, is therefore intimately bound up with his Danishness, rather than simply opposed to it, but the two seemingly polarised points of reference are overlaid in a complex, critical way. His work is both highly localised and highly cosmopolitan – it operates (or speaks) on several levels simultaneously. .ere is a rich stylistic counterpoint within his work that resists easy categorisation or containment, another factor

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism03

which has perhaps precluded deeper analytical engagement with his music for many years. An adaptation of Jensen’s ‘biperson’ syndrome might there-fore be advanced, moving beyond the purely passive image of the Jantelov or subordinate character proposed above, which reads Nielsen’s work rather as exemplifying the characteristics of a ‘double-man’ or, more properly, a mul-tiple personality. .is figure itself can be understood as a modernist para-digm – the tendency to decentralise and di5use the authority of the subject (often the composer themselves) through multiple modes of utterance or address. In Elgar, this image of the ‘double-man’ can be located in the tension between the outwardly confident, richly imperialist ceremony of the Pomp and Circumstance marches and the closing bars of the ‘Enigma’ Variations, on the one hand, and the more introverted, self-doubting Innigkeit of the qui-eter passages in the symphonic study Falsta# or the Second Symphony, on the other.;< In Mahler’s music, too, scholars have often dwelt on the sense of a multiple personality, the strains and anxieties that underpin the force of the artist-hero in works such as the Sixth Symphony and ultimately lead to crisis and collapse in the first movement of the Tenth.;9 One task of a more nuanced analysis of Nielsen’s modernism is therefore to identify the di5er-ent styles or musical voices that are present in his work, and to locate the moments of crisis where such voices fracture and collide. In the final chapter of this book, I will invoke .eodor W. Adorno’s notion of the novelistic character of music, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of the dis-course of the comic novel, through a close reading of one of Nielsen’s most challenging and complex works, the Sixth Symphony. Close study of the Sixth o5ers vital insights into the nature of Nielsen’s modernism, and to the mean-ings of the multiple voices or instrumental characters that inhabit and ani-mate his work. It also provides a provocative case study in patterns of Nielsen reception, both in Denmark and beyond. We can therefore return momentar-ily to the two photographs hanging alongside my o1ce desk. .eir seeming incompatibility no longer seems quite so puzzling: Nielsen’s musical cosmos embraces both the cosmopolitan artist and the Funen military cadet, and the comic force (in Bakhtin’s sense) of his work collapses the temporal and geo-graphical distinctions between the two figures so that they become the play

=> Several recent studies address this duality in Elgar’s work. See, for example, James Hepokoski’s essay, ‘Edward Elgar’, in !e Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York: Schirmer, /22?), 60?–;;; and Harper-Scott, Edward Elgar: Modernist. To my knowledge, the ‘double-man’ reading is first advanced in Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, /294).

=@ See, for example, Michael Kennedy’s reading in his Mahler (London: Dent, /2?;), supported by Henri-Louis de la Grange in Gustav Mahler, vol. 6: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, $%&'–$%&( (Oxford: Oxford University Press, /222), 4/4–;/ (on the Sixth), and Julian Johnson’s recent study, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 0332).

Introduction: Carl Nielsen at the Edge 0/

of a single novelistic musical imagination. In this light, a third photograph begins to seem more appropriate (Fig. /.6). Taken in the late /443s on vaca-tion in Nykøbing, north Jutland, the photograph is a series of vignettes of the young Nielsen, pulling a series of expressions for the camera: a grumpy troll, a drunken slob, an avuncular wink, and, at the bottom of the portrait, the figure of a mischievous boy, eyeing up the photographer’s audience with a wry smile. Nielsen’s early amour, Emilie Demant Hatt, described the origin of the photograph in her remarkable memoir, Foraarsbølger, recently rediscovered by John Fellow in the Royal Library, and wistfully recalled Nielsen’s talents as a character actor:

And how Carl could narrate! Stories and anecdotes, witnessed, made up, or invited for the hour. He was a clown, when that aspect turned up – he illustrated it all with mimicry and gestures and sounds. He invented the figures which he represented: the monk, the jester, the idiot, the great lady, the bashful young boy, etc. – a whole gallery of caricatures.;?

It is not di1cult to project this image of the playful composer captured by camera and retold by one of his closest friends in the late /443s onto Nielsen’s subsequent music, and on to the Sixth Symphony in particular. .e symphony is just as much a play of caricatures, a theatre of mimicry and gesture, as his Nykøbing photograph. And the work’s comic tone need not detract from the music’s underlying seriousness – precisely the contrary, since it reinforces its ultimately a1rmative force, the idea that music can (and, for Nielsen, must) successfully confront and overcome conflict, opposition and violence, and renew itself. .is image from the /443s thus adds a new dimension to Nielsen’s place within a more critically scrutinised idea of musical modern-ism. His peripheralisation is not so much a technical or aesthetic deficiency, an inability to meet the demands of a particular modernist musical agenda, but a challenge to received notions of musical development and authority. His edginess is properly a playful transgression, a non-conformism that is ener-gising and uplifting. And here perhaps lies the essence of his Danishness, in its combination of the passive Jantelov (the bystander) and the dynamic split personality, whether real or imagined. It is a world vision in microcosm, a carnival that takes us full circle, from H. C. Andersen’s fairy-tale Funen, out to the modern city and beyond, and back again.

=A ‘Og som Carl kunde fortælle! Historier og Anekdoter, oplevede, opdigtede eller opfundne for Stunden. En Bajads var han, naar den Side vendte ud – han illustrerede det altsammen med Mimik og Fagter og Lyde. Han opfandt Figurer, som han fremstille: Munken, Narren, Idioten, Damen, den generte Dreng o. s. v. – et helt Galleri af Karikaturer.’ Demant Hatt, Foraarsbølger, ed. Fellow, ;/.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism00

Fig. !.& Carl Nielsen, !$$'