The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is part of our Western cultural heritage – a unique source material for anyone interested in the composer's music and in music that dominated the period from the 1880s to the 1930s. Carl Nielsen corresponded with everyone and anyone – with people from the rural social class he came from, with representatives from virtually all sectors and strata of Danish society and from both Nordic and European cultural life. At the same time, the letters and diaries are an entertaining and sometimes dramatic account of Carl Nielsen's life and art.

This app offers a vast array of opportunities to explore the text. For example, it is now possible to read all correspondence between Carl Nielsen and any given acquaintance of his, to find the letters and diary entries in which a certain work is mentioned – and to find all relevant information about said work. For more on this, see the following section.

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) lived during the period in which modern Denmark and the modern world were coming into being, when one social group after another gained a voice – and the right to vote – and achieved a sense of its worth and dignity. These were years when technological progress and material growth were high on the agenda and when the moral codes and restrictive ties of the past loosened, allowing psychological growth and inner development to demand wider attention.

Carl Nielsen himself provided an expression of this human expansion in many ways through his music. His rise from the poor farm labourer's world and the humble musical milieu he was brought up in on the island of Funen in Denmark to the Parnassus of the arts as his country's greatest composer is an extreme manifestation of a movement across time and society that really took hold in the second half of the 19th century. He corresponded with everyone and anyone – with people from the social class he came from, with representatives from virtually all sectors and strata of Danish society and from both Nordic and European cultural life.

The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is a web app based on Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven, a 12-volume printed work (2005-2015), edited and annotated by John Fellow.
The web app is aimed at anyone interested in Carl Nielsen's music – and in modern music and European cultural and musical history in general during half a century from the 1880s to the 1930s.

On the web app, you can:

• read the correspondence letter by letter (including diary entries).
• follow Carl Nielsen’s correspondence with any specific person.
• assemble letters in which specific compositions are mentioned.
• follow in which letters a work is referred to.
• obtain relevant information (opus numbers etc.) about the compositions referred to in each document, including links to further information at The Royal Library.
• view facsimiles, the letters in Danish and/or in English translation
• and much more.

If you wish to read the work as a regular e-book, it can be downloaded free of charge in Danish and English. In 2025, The Royal Library will publish The Carl Nielsen Correspondence in an e-pub3 version.
The web app is published by Multivers, which would like to thank The Augustinus Foundation, The Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation and The Louis Hansen Foundation, without whose generous support the web app could never have been realised.

Translating personal letters and diary entries written by hundreds of writers from different nations over the course of five decades is no small task. The Carl Nielsen Correspondence contains a unique collection of source material, offering the reader a glimpse into the everyday lives, conflicts and attitudes of people both from the elite cultural circles of Northern Europe and from the average farmer tilling Danish soil in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. We are introduced to a whole host of characters and, as a result, to a range of culturally specific references, which raise a plethora of questions for the translators to consider: How do you say ‘folkelig’ in English? It is often translated into either ‘popular’ or ‘folk’, but in fact neither is completely apt. Or what about a ‘lejlighedsværk’? How do you convey the difference between being ‘Des’ or ‘dus’ in Danish? And what is ‘kransekage’? The list goes on and on.

From the outset, the kind of reader being addressed and the purpose of the translation need to be defined. If literal accuracy is considered of primal importance, there might, for example, be an inclination to leave as many names of societies and institutions in their original language as possible, and linguistic peculiarities could be directly imitated. We quickly agreed, however, that such an approach would create obstacles to easy access to the text and, paradoxically, be somewhat idiomatically artificial. Instead, we concluded that the most important aspect of these letters is not the exact wording but the message each writer was conveying. Clarity, consistency and ease of access should therefore, within reason, override individual quirks, complex wording and poor sentence structure. This means, among other things, that dates, numbers etc. are standardised, and that places, titles etc. are translated into English. The same principle has been applied to the spelling of proper names, which at the time was, in fact, generally considered relatively irrelevant compared to today. Someone called ‘Louise’ could just as easily become ‘Lovise’, ‘Louisa’ or ‘Lovisa’ in the hands of even the closest of friends or family members. We have generally tried to use a single version of each name so that a given person can be easily identified in the register. However, while plain misspellings are generally ignored, factual or seemingly intentional errors are conveyed. An example could be the many times that ‘Carl’ is spelled ‘Karl’, which is ignored, while Lucie Petersen's affectionate references to Carl as ‘Carel’ are kept.

Naturally, some accuracy is lost when a letter-writer’s orthographic failings are not conveyed, and it can easily be argued that a writer’s level of literacy is indicative of their background, schooling, profession or position in society. However, while word choices do say something about a correspondent's personality and attitude, we believe that illiteracy, for example, merely serves as a distraction that can obscure the true meaning of a letter. This has arguably never been the intention of any writer. One of the most frequently occurring examples is Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen herself. She uses little or no standard punctuation, which can make her letters challenging to interpret at times. Many of the Nielsen family’s relatives from the countryside are also clearly less experienced writers than their acquaintances from higher echelons of society. Here, the translators have done their best to decipher the meaning, and punctuation has been added quite liberally to ease the reading experience. However, while errors are corrected, any writer’s individual voice is, of course, still captured to the best of our ability so that qualities such as a writer’s tone, level of formality, sense of humour etc., come through. That said, we would, of course, encourage any reader who wishes for a more literal understanding of each letter to refer both to the Danish original letters and to the facsimiles that can be found alongside each translation.

We have – after due consideration – decided to retain a number of terms that are otherwise considered dated or contentious in modern language. Here we refer specifically to negative stereotypes concerning race, disabilities and gender as well as gendered generalisations. As these are historical sources, this was decided to avoid giving the impression of a more inclusive worldview than was the case. This was no easy decision, and we acknowledge that there are readers who may, with some justice, disagree with this approach.

Not all letters are written in Danish. As mentioned earlier, Carl Nielsen was acquainted with people from across the globe. It should also be pointed out that a number of letters to and from Carl and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s daughters during World War I are suddenly penned in German, probably due to censorship. For the sake of clarity, the original language is always stated in square brackets if it is not Danish. Two exceptions are made – for Norwegian until around the time of Norwegian independence in 1905, when Norwegian and Danish were practically identical, and for English. Anything written in English is transferred 1:1 unedited. All of John Fellow’s original introductory texts are also translated as he wrote them, and so naturally reflect the reality of the time Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven was first published between 2005 and 2015.

It is our hope that The Carl Nielsen Correspondence will be accessible to all non-Danish readers. Though generally following standard British English, occasional non-British expressions may occur if the British equivalent is considered less widely used globally. When a society or an institution has been referred to in English in other contexts, we have used the established translation. Similarly, all Carl Nielsen’s titles and song texts have previously been translated to English and can be found in CNE, and these same translations are used in The Carl Nielsen Correspondence. Moreover, footnotes have been included throughout the text. Most of them are written by John Fellow, adding context where it is known, while others have been added specifically to the English edition where some information might hold connotations that could be considered too culturally implicit.

Our ambition has been to design a web app that works as intuitively as possible while staying true to John Fellow's structure.

Division of letters and diaries

The portal is divided into 12 volumes. Each volume represents a period of years while the final volume is a register of names.
In each volume, the letters are arranged in chronological order: volume:number, e.g. 7:108.
In the upper right corner, you can sort the letters by works or persons.

The page of the individual letter

You may flip through the letters, scrolling back and forth in order by clicking on the relevant arrows in the top left-hand corner.
The volume and number of the letter are shown in the top lefthand corner, e.g. 5:4. If you want to see a specific letter, simply change the number, e.g. to 7:108. References in one letter to another letter are marked with square brackets [7:108].
The line below shows the names of people who appear in the letter. If you click on a person's name, the black box on the right shows the letters and diary entries in which that person appears.

Information about the musical works (CNW numbers)

In the letters, you will find references to a work by Carl Nielsen as a CNW number (Carl Nielsen Works). Click on the number to display all relevant information about the work in the black box on the right. Under the name of the work in the box at the top right corner, you can click to obtain further information from The Royal Library.

Selection and deselection of facsimiles and texts in Danish and English

At the bottom righthand corner of the black box, you can select or deselect whether you want to see facsimiles, the letters in Danish or the letters in English. At the top of the black box, you can choose between works and people.

Notes and abbreviations

Notes in the text are marked with an asterisk. When you hold your mouse over the asterisk, the note appears.
Explanation of abbreviations: click on ABR in the bottom left corner.

Carl Nielsen Correspondence

In Danish and English and with facsimiles of original documents.
Based on the printed Danish edition Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven, Copenhagen 2005-2015, edited and with notes and introductions by John Fellow.

Web version
© Multivers, 2025.

Translation and editing

• Henrik Borberg (project manager)
• David Fanning
• John Mason
• Anne-Marie Reynolds
• Catherine Venner
• Nanna Staugaard Villagomez

Editorial advice

• Michael Fjeldsøe
• Peter O'Connell Hauge

The web version is supported by

• Augustinus Foundation
• Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens Foundation
• The Louis Hansen Foundation

Database and editorial solutions

• Håkon Bergset

Web design and app

• Jens Voigt-Lund

Colophon page – the original Danish, printed version

Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven

Edited and with notes and introductions by John Fellow.
© Multivers, 2005-2015.
ISBN 9788779174252
E-pub (Danish)  ISBN 9788779174139

The project was hosted by The Royal Library, Copenhagen

The project steering committee

• Chief Consultant Søren Clausen, The Royal Library (chairman),
• Management Consultant at The Royal Library, Anette Faaborg
• Head of National Collections Anne Ørbæk Jensen, The Royal Library
• Professor Jørn Lund
• Executive Secretary Lotte Svenningsen, The Royal Library.

The project's support committee

• The Chairman, Professor Herbert Blomstedt
• Professor Torben Brostrøm
• Author Suzanne Brøgger
• Museum Director Torben Grøngaard
• Composer Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen
• Author Sven Holm
• Author and journalist Georg Metz
• Composer Tage Nielsen
• Composer Per Nørgård
• Composer Ib Nørholm
• Press and Cultural Counsellor at the Danish Embassy in Berlin Per Erik Veng
• Pianist Anne Øland
• Author Villy Sørensen

Editing, introduction and notes

• John Fellow

Editorial staff

• Esther Kielberg
• Hanne Hee Lange
• Gert Posselt

The project was supported by:

• The A.P. Møller Foundation
• The Augustinus Foundation
• The Beckett Foundation
• Herbert Blomstedt
• Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation
• The Royal Library
• The Research Council for Culture and Communication
• Gangsted Foundation
• Ministry of Culture
• Lundbeck Foundation
• The Oticon Foundation
• The Toyota Foundation
• The Weyse Foundation

John Fellow (1947-2023) has won international recognition for his research into Carl Nielsen, which resulted, among other things, in the major works, 'Carl Nielsen til sin samtid' (Carl Nielsen to his own age) and, not least, 'Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven' (2005-2015) (The Carl Nielsen Correspondence) (Vols. 1-12, Multivers, 2005-2015), in which his introductions to the individual volumes bear witness both to his in-depth understanding of the composer and to an extensive knowledge of Danish and European culture in the 20th century. See https://pure.kb.dk/da/persons/john-fellow/publications
John Fellow was also the author of a number of novels.

By John Fellow, editor of Carl Nielsen Brevudgaven

It is 140 years since the birth of Carl Nielsen, and 74 years since his death. His ascent from a humble background made up of farm labourers and fiddlers on mid-Funen to reach the Parnassus of music as his country's greatest composer is, however, not simply a repeat of the trajectory taken by the artistic phenomenon that was Hans Christian Andersen, 60 years his senior and also from Funen.

One thing we can probably all agree about is that, if we step away from the general amnesia that characterises our present day, the world into which we were born bears little resemblance to that in which, in adulthood and middle-age, we have come to live and work. This was something that Carl Nielsen and his contemporaries could say with particularly good reason. Being among the first to experience modernity, they may have been more conscious of its effects. It is characteristic of Carl Nielsen that, as an older man, he was able to regard it as an advantage that he had come from such humble circumstances and could even say: 'I do not think that money makes people happy. It is more likely to make them stunted and narrow, and it prevents them from fully developing their abilities.' (Samtid, pp. 383 and 470)

Television, computers and the constant stream of new innovations may have altered our world but hardly as fundamentally as water supplies, electricity, motorcars, airplanes, radio, penicillin, parliamentarianism and so on that in their day changed the world and human opportunities. Although Hans Christian Andersen had already written enthusiastically about technical progress and had also explored the problems in this development and spoken of the threat of 'Mr Massen' From Hans Christian Andersen's novel To Be, or Not to Be? from 1857. The name 'Massen' (the mass) is a pun and a pejorative term for uncultured and uneducated people, whose coming to power it was feared would lead to a cultural and political degeneration., it was in Carl Nielsen's time that the broad mass of ordinary people began to influence this development and to reap some of its rewards – for better or for worse. While Andersen and his talent had risen to prominence in spite of his time, the composer's talents developed in part due to his time – and were in part directed against it.

If all the good and evil are not to be laid definitively beyond the bounds of time and attributed to the Fall and expulsion from Eden, development – and complexity – must be said to have arrived in earnest with Carl Nielsen's generation. If we wish to understand ourselves, we cannot avoid considering our immediate past. And if we wish to put our own time into perspective, a concern for the era in which our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents lived is not the worst place to start. Even though we express the issues differently and have often forgotten their context, we continue to hammer away at the same problems as they did then.

Despite all the progress, some things inevitably lagged behind. Maybe that is why there has been a particular focus on developments in communications both then and now. Hans Christian Andersen, for example, had an interest in the new railways and the first telegraph cable under the Atlantic. In Carl Nielsen's time, it was the telephone and after that the motorcar that went from strength to strength. Carl Nielsen was quickly on board, so to speak, acquiring a car in 1924 and, the year before his death in 1930, even being involved in a traffic accident in which he was seriously injured after colliding with a tram – also one of the period's new creations. By then, the number of cars on Danish roads had reached 110,000, compared to the three million there are today, and they were beginning to present a problem.

As regards the telephone, we know that Carl Nielsen spoke on the telephone for the first time in 1887. At the time he was standing neither by a landline nor in a telephone box but at a 'call station' in Skive, and he asked an acquaintance in Viborg: 'Can you feel from my breath that I have drunk a glass of cognac?' (EDH, p. 54) When he later got a telephone himself, a private phone, he soon had to get a secret number to maintain the peace and quiet needed for his work, and he repeatedly had to get a new secret number when the secret became known to too many. Moreover, it was not installed by his desk but in the hall; it was, after all, such a source of disruption.

In this first volume of Carl Nielsen's letters, he has not yet got a telephone, but the new form of communication already makes its presence felt in the letters. In a letter from his sister-in-law, an elaborate and expensive telephone conversation from Copenhagen to his wife's childhood home on the Thygesminde farm near Kolding provokes a lively description, which every child born cradling a mobile phone could use to put their understanding and their culture into perspective. [1:675] It is also an old chestnut that the means of communication do not always enhance communication.

For all these new technologies, faced with the sheer quantity of his letters, it is tempting to think that Carl Nielsen communicated with everyone and anyone. He corresponded with people from the social class from which he came and with whom he never lost contact, and people who had scarcely learnt to write wrote to him. As he achieved success as a composer and was appointed to various positions in Danish musical life, he communicated with representatives of pretty much every segment and level of Danish society and with representatives from both Nordic and European musical life, at times in languages in which he was not proficient. What is most important in the present context is that the telephone did not stop him writing letters. There are no signs that the quantity of letters dwindles as the telephone becomes a more everyday feature – rather the contrary.

In other words, Carl Nielsen had other ways of communicating with the world around him than through musical notation. That he was a great composer is common knowledge. However, to explore and acknowledge the full extent and significance of Carl Nielsen the writer and wordsmith is a task reserved for our time. Carl Nielsen's writings comprise more than the little collection of essays Living Music from 1925 and of the memoirs My Childhood from 1927. We have suspected as much over the years from the little collection of letters that appeared in 1954 and from the selection from the diaries and correspondence with his wife published by Torben Schousboe in 1983. The publication of the composer's complete writings and observations in 1999, (The application was signed by Thorvald Aagaard, Emilius Bangert, Jørgen Bentzon, Christian Christiansen, Nancy Dalberg, Svend Godske-Nielsen, Godfred Hartmann, Knud Jeppesen, Ove Jørgensen, Henrik Knudsen, Carl J. Michaelsen, Peder Møller, Thorvald Nielsen, Aage Oxenvad, Adolf Riis-Magnussen, Poul Schierbeck, Rudolph Simonsen), however, made clear the extent of this material and the influence it could have on perceptions of the artist in matters both great and small. This set the scene for a systematic study and a critical edition of the vast mass of correspondence that has been preserved as the last stage in working with source material from the life and work of Denmark's greatest composer.

As parts of his music become increasingly firmly established in Danish cultural life and internationally, as distance grows between us and his time, and as more and more new listeners, musicians, readers, interpreters and researchers encounter him without having the authentic experience of him and of that period that was afforded to those first, now departed, generations, everything about his music and his life and times takes on greater interest and importance – everything that can shed light on and bring us closer to the background, the motivational forces, the circumstances surrounding its creation, whether this be at the private, the personal, the social, the historical or the cultural level. Carl Nielsen is not just one of Denmark's greatest artists; he is one of the few who have touched and been interwoven into its culture so deeply over several generations that Danes cannot fail to be interested in the movements for which he was an influence and a catalyst. Likewise, as a major figure in Europe's cultural life, we owe it both to him and to ourselves to devote our attention to him and his art and to what happened to us and our culture during those years. This attention naturally has to focus around the material that exists, including the large quantity of letters.

The background to this edition of correspondence

A large collection of correspondence like this does not appear out of the blue. It requires the preliminary work to have been done by previous generations. This is what happened in Carl Nielsen's case. In 1935, only a few years after his death and shortly before what would have been his 70th birthday, exactly halfway between the composer's birth and the publication of the first volume of the correspondence, a group of his friends and acquaintances took the initiative to 'honour his character and his art by founding The Carl Nielsen Archive'.

With Carl Nielsen's pupil, the composer Knud Jeppesen, as a central figure, and with advance notice from The Royal Library that they would establish such an archive, approaches were made to those people who had known and been in contact with Carl Nielsen. They were requested, immediately or at a later date, anything they might possess in the form of music manuscripts, letters and the like written in his hand to contribute to, as they put it, 'such a collection as will become a primary source for the study of Carl Nielsen's works and of the story of his life and will create a natural continuation of those collections of written records of prominent composers already in the possession of the Library.' Over subsequent years, new collections of letters from Carl Nielsen have regularly been handed in, not only to the Carl Nielsen Archive but also to several hundred other collections. Of the approximately 3,500 letters written by Carl Nielsen that the collected correspondence has managed to trace, just under 2,000 can be found in The Carl Nielsen Archive.

It is, then, no small number of people who have felt that here there was something worth preserving. The composer's letters were seen as being significant from the very start. Shortly after his death, a few were already published in journals and newspapers and, when the first more substantial biographies appeared at the end of the 1940s, they were based in part on a knowledge of some of the correspondence. This was the case, for example, with the biographies written by Torben Meyer and Frede Schandorf Petersen (Torben Meyer and Frede Schandorf Petersen: Carl Nielsen, Kunstneren og Mennesket, I-II, Copenhagen 1947-48) who were not only able to collaborate with the composer's older daughter, Irmelin Eggert Møller, as a partner, but who found that, for better or for worse, in her capacity as administrator of the family's private archive, she rather adopted the role of project manager (Torben Meyer: Sådan blev biografien "Carl Nielsen, Kunstneren og Mennesket" til, Magazine from The Royal Library, no. 4, March 1998, pp. 27-37). As a close friend of Carl Nielsen over many years, Ludvig Dolleris, who wrote the other major work (Ludvig Dolleris: Carl Nielsen, En Musikografi, Odense 1949), drew to a greater extent upon his own memory and his own sources to a greater extent, not least on his knowledge and understanding of the music.

Nielsen's daughter Irmelin Eggert Møller and the journalist Torben Meyer continued their collaboration, publishing some years later a volume of letters (Carl Nielsens breve, published by Irmelin Eggert Møller and Torben Meyer, Copenhagen 1954). Given the huge mass of material, this was an extremely modest selection, but preparatory work for it extended over several years, and over this period, the two editors worked hard to unearth additional letters from Carl Nielsen's correspondents who were still alive or from their heirs. Some of the newly found letters were passed on to The Carl Nielsen Archive at The Royal Library, while a large number of them were transcribed as extracts and with punctuation and orthography adapted for use in the projected volume of letters, after which the originals were returned to the original owners. The majority of these have since been handed in to public archives. However, despite considerable efforts trying to locate them for the present edition, there is a small proportion that it has not been possible to recover now half a century later. In the case of a few letters, the 1954 edition is thus the only source we have. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that the preliminary work of these two editors did result in many letters ending up in the archives before it was too late.

The many years that followed saw only a few new and minor publications of source materials and, strangely enough, none that were based on the substantial material that had already been collected in The Carl Nielsen Archive. In 1966, Karl Clausen published Carl Nielsen's correspondence with the Czech writer, Max Brod, (Karl Clausen: Max Brod og Carl Nielsen, Oplevelser og Studier omkring Carl Nielsen, Tønder 1966, pp. 9-36) and in 1980 Niels Martin Jensen published Carl Nielsen's letters to the theatre director Julius Lehmann (Niels Martin Jensen: "Den sindets stridighed –", Breve fra Carl Nielsen til Julius Lehmann, Musik og forskning 6, 1980, pp. 167-185). A more substantial edition of source material came only in 1983 with Torben Schousboe's edition of a selection of Carl Nielsen's diaries and of the correspondence with his wife, the sculptress Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen.

In its way, Schousboe's edition was a decisive breakthrough since it unveiled the violent conflicts that had characterised this marriage of artists over many years. Reading between the lines of brief passages of Meyer and Schandorf's biography and of the daughter Anne Marie Telmányi's memoirs of her childhood home, (Anne Marie Telmányi: Mit barndomshjem. Erindringer om Anne Marie og Carl Nielsen skrevet af deres datter, Copenhagen 1965), it had been possible to sense from some of the ambivalent wording that the marriage was far from idyllic. In Schousboe's selection, however, the marital conflict became the central story and the main theme. This seems paradoxical since the edition had come about as a collaboration with the daughter Irmelin Eggert Møller and based on the family's private archive, which was in her keeping, and it had deliberately aimed to omit anything that was too private.

At the same time, this edition left Carl Nielsen research, which at that time had scarcely got off the ground, in a situation whereby, due to various stipulations, the material presented could neither be assessed or supplemented, while the large quantity of available letters that Torben Schousboe had set aside remained unnoticed and untouched. Michael Fjeldsøe's edition of the correspondence between Ferruccio Busoni and Carl Nielsen was a solitary latecomer on the scene (Michael Fjeldsøe: Ferruccio Busoni og Carl Nielsen – brevveksling gennem tre årtier, Musik og forskning 25, 1999-2000, pp. 18-40).

On the other hand, now that source material was at least extensive enough for interpreters to have something to work with, Schousboe's selection triggered a series of newer biographies, all of which avoided taking on basic studies of source material themselves. The first, largest and most independent, Carl Nielsen, Danskeren ('Carl Nielsen, the Dane'), had even declared its premise that 'after Schousboe's work it is perhaps not so much a matter of uncovering new material as of trying to cast new light on what we already know, biographically and musically.' (Jørgen I. Jensen: Carl Nielsen, Danskeren, Copenhagen 1991, p. 13). One way of realising this programme was to interpret the music in terms of the marital conflict, and at the beginning of the 1990s this view carried such weight that it ended up establishing a norm, though in a less metaphysical manifestation, for the biographies that followed (Steen Christian Steensen: Carl Nielsen, Musik er liv, En biografi om Carl Nielsen, Copenhagen 1999. Karsten Eskildsen: Carl Nielsen – Livet og musikken, Odense 1999).

The story of the couple's marriage even translated into fiction and appeared as a novel (Kirstine Brøndum: Solen mellem tyrens horn, Copenhagen 1996). The first biography in English also appeared as a result of a growing international interest in Carl Nielsen's in music during the last decade of the 20th century (Jack Lawson: Carl Nielsen, London 1997). A large number of errors and misunderstandings were proof that broadening an understanding of his art from a language area as restricted as Danish is especially dependant on the original writings being available, not simply to reflect the views of their time but also as information in a more elementary form.

There were a number of things that spoke in favour of initiating The Carl Nielsen Correspondence at the time. The family's private archives, for which the daughter Irmelin Eggert Møller was responsible and on which Schouboe's edition of source material had been based, were transferred in 1976 to The Royal Library, where letters, diaries, accounts and the like were included in The Carl Nielsen Archive, though significant portions were subject to a proviso prohibiting publication for 25 years. At the end of 2001, this proviso expired leaving the entire archive available, with the exception of an envelope containing a few letters that the daughter's husband, Eggert Møller, had determined should only be made accessible after 2026.

The work on the scores being carried out by The Carl Nielsen Edition led to a recognition that it would be a good idea to have an overview of what traces the works and the process of their composition had left in this large quantity of letters. At the same time, in working with The Carl Nielsen Archive to prepare the publication of Carl Nielsen's writings, I had myself been completely convinced of the many seams that lay unexploited in this mass of material. The majority that were not subject to the proviso not been utilised at all. Furthermore, the private part, of which Torben Schousboe had published a selection and which no one had been able to re-examine for a couple of decades, also proved to be far more nuanced and fertile than anyone had imagined. Not only had the discussion lacked balance, since the couple's private life had filled the whole picture, but this private life had also to a large extent been interpreted and discussed on the basis of far too narrow a knowledge of it.

In addition, omissions were not simply in the private sphere – which, as a rule, we commonly think of as erotic matters. They applied also to a mass of realistic detail of everyday life, which gives the material life and atmosphere and which derives greater value the further we distance ourselves from his time. In Schousboe's edition, Anne Marie's letters from Mors were allowed neither to describe Carl as her 'Sanddune Prince' after he had visited her and they had been in the dunes together nor to tell him about all the mice in the bed straw.

Schousboe's edition of the correspondence between the couple in its abbreviated form gives us 381 letters from Carl Nielsen and 175 from Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, while today we have access not only to all the material that has been excised and which is not always uninteresting but also to almost twice the number of letters: 570 from Carl Nielsen and 346 from Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. In addition, countless other letters supplement and shed light on the content of the couple's correspondence. It is also worth comparing the nine pages that Schousboe's edition includes from the year 1897 with the 70 numbered letters and 10 diary entries that the first volume of this edition of the correspondence presents for the same year.

Having spent three years reading the many thousands of letters, it seems strange to me that Torben Schousboe focused on the most private part of this huge correspondence, that he did not choose instead, for example, to publish the extensive and significant exchanges of letters with Nordic composers, which did not demand the same circumspection as regards the couple's privacy. It also seems strange that the daughter chose to collaborate in this particular publication. Was this an attempt to control posterity's picture of her parents and their marriage? To restrict how much would come to light? In that case, it also seems strange that, as a condition for Torben Schousboe's edition, she required that the material be placed under a 25-year proviso restricting publication rather than destroying it. What is more, a remark in the interview with Schousboe could tempt us to conclude that, at the end of the day, the publisher was more interested than the daughter in wanting to 'protect' the two main characters: 'Later, she [the daughter] softened, however, and in the end it was I who had to resist.'(Dansk Musik Tidsskrift no. 1 1983/84, p. 8)

Given his choice of material and his method of publication, Torben Schousboe virtually left himself and Carl Nielsen research in a situation whereby everything would have to start from scratch once all the material became accessible. It might even be said with some justice that, in the slightly longer term, the work with Carl Nielsen that resulted found itself better placed than if it had started with the publication of wider but less private correspondence. In that case, future publishers would have found themselves in the same position as those publishing Hans Christian Andersen's letters have been for generations, namely being obliged to build further on an inadequate base and to allow a substantial part of the work of commentary to be dictated by the content of earlier publications and of letters yet to be published. By starting from scratch and including everything at once, The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is in the fortunate position that the material is to a large extent self-explanatory. Anything the material itself does not shed light on, we often do not know.

On the other hand, more letters will inevitably turn up both during the period in which work on the edition is ongoing and after its completion, and one day a supplement will be needed. Worse could happen, and the edition can hold its head up high if its existence and the attention it will hopefully generate could contribute to further letters coming to light.

When we read through this mass of letters today, both those previously subject to the proviso and those that have been accessible all the time, in the light of all the talk generated in the years following Schousboe's edition about things kept under wraps, about children born out of wedlock – possibly of more than the two Schousboe could name – the first thing that strikes us is the arbitrary nature of this restriction on publication. The diaries and the couple's correspondence were prevented from publication for 25 years, but those aspects of the marriage that his edition reveals and those it suppresses could have been found through material in countless letters that were never subject to that proviso, and we have to wonder whether Torben Schousboe and the heirs who drew up the guidelines for the proviso even had a real overview of the material.

Letters from the son Carl August Hansen, who was born to Carl Nielsen when he was 22 on 8 January 1888, and from the boy's mother, Karen Marie Hansen, for example, were not subject to the proviso. Anyone who wanted to had been able to explore the matter for years, and in September 2004, Carl Nielsen's grandchild, Carl August Hansen's daughter, the 78-year-old Joan Curran from Florida, travelled to Denmark herself to reveal her existence.

It can be no secret that the editors of this correspondence have currently no knowledge of evidence indicating any children born out of wedlock other than the two we already know of, but they will be able, elsewhere, to say more about them and their descendants and to put faces to their names.

The Carl Nielsen heritage

There were a number of things that spoke in favour of initiating The Carl Nielsen Correspondence at this point. The family's private archives, for which the daughter Irmelin Eggert Møller was responsible and on which Schouboe's edition of source material had been based, were transferred in 1976 to The Royal Library, where letters, diaries, accounts and the like were included in The Carl Nielsen Archive, though significant portions were subject to a proviso for 25 years. At the end of 2001, this proviso expired leaving the entire archive available, with the exception of an envelope containing a few letters that the daughter's husband, Eggert Møller, had determined should only be made accessible after 2026.

The work being carried out by The Carl Nielsen Edition in relation to the scores led to a recognition that it would be a good idea to have an overview of the traces left in this large quantity of letters by the works and the process of their composition. At the same time, in working with The Carl Nielsen Archive to prepare the publication of Carl Nielsen's writings, I had myself been completely convinced of the many seams that lay unexploited in this mass of material. Not only had the majority that had not been subject to the proviso not been utilised at all; the private part of which Torben Schousboe had published a selection, and which no one had been able to re-examine for a couple of decades, also proved to be far more nuanced and fertile than anyone had imagined. Not only had the discussion lacked balance, since the couple's private life had filled the whole picture, but this private life had also to a large extent been interpreted and discussed on the basis of far too narrow a knowledge of it.

Furthermore, what had been omitted were not simply private – by which we, as a rule, understand erotic! – matters. This applied also to a mass of realistic detail of everyday life, which gives the material life and atmosphere and which derives greater value the further we distance ourselves from his time. In Schousboe's edition, Anne Marie in her letters from Mors was allowed neither to call Carl her 'Sanddune Prince' after he had visited her and they had been in the dunes together nor to tell him about all the mice in the bed straw.

It speaks for itself that Schousboe's edition of the correspondence between the couple in its abbreviated form gives us 381 letters from Carl Nielsen and 175 from Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen while today we have access not only to all the material that has been excised and which is not always uninteresting but also to almost twice the number of letters: 570 from Carl Nielsen and 346 from Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. In addition, countless other letters supplement and shed light on the content of the couple's correspondence. It is also worth comparing the nine pages that Schousboe's edition includes from the year 1897 with the 70 numbered letters and 10 diary entries that the first volume of this edition of the correspondence presents for the same year.

Having spent three years reading the many thousands of letters, it seems strange to me that Torben Schousboe focused on the most private part of this huge correspondence, that he did not choose instead, for example, to publish the extensive and significant exchanges of letters with Nordic composers, which did not demand the same circumspection as regards the couple's privacy. It also seems strange that the daughter chose to collaborate in this particular publication. Was this an attempt to control posterity's picture of her parents and their marriage? To control how much would come to light? In that case, it also seems strange that, as a condition for Torben Schousboe's edition, she required the material placed under a 25-year proviso rather than destroying it. What is more, a remark in the interview with Schousboe could tempt us to conclude that, at the end of the day, the publisher was more interested than the daughter in wanting to 'protect' the two main characters: 'Later, she [the daughter] softened, however, and in the end it was I who had to resist.'(Dansk Musik Tidsskrift no. 1 1983/84, p. 8)

With his choice of material and his method of publication, Torben Schousboe virtually landed himself and Carl Nielsen research in a situation whereby everything would have to start from scratch once all the material became accessible. It might even be said with some justice that, in the slightly longer term, the work with Carl Nielsen that resulted found itself better placed than if it had started with the publication of larger but less private correspondence. In that case, future publishers would have found themselves in the same position as those publishing Hans Christian Andersen's letters have been for generations, namely being obliged to build further on an inadequate base and to allow a substantial part of the work of commentary to be dictated by the content of earlier publications and of letters yet to be published. By starting from scratch and including everything at once, The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is in the fortunate position that, to a large extent, the material is self-explanatory. Anything the material itself does not shed light on, we often do not know.

On the other hand, more letters will inevitably turn up both during the period in which work on the edition is ongoing and after its completion, and one day a supplement will be needed. Worse could happen, and the edition can its head high if its existence and the attention it will hopefully generate could contribute to further letters coming to light.

When we read through this mass of letters today, both those previously subject to the proviso and those that have been accessible all the time, in the light of all the talk generated in the years following Schousboe's edition about things kept under wraps, about children born out of wedlock, possibly of more than the two Schousboe could name, the first thing that strikes us is the arbitrary nature of the proviso. The diaries and the couple's correspondence were placed under a proviso for 25 years, but both those aspects of the marriage that his edition reveals and those it suppresses could have been found through material in countless letters that were never subject to the proviso, and we have to wonder whether Torben Schousboe and the heirs who drew up the guidelines for the proviso even had a real overview of the material.

Letters from the son Carl August Hansen, who was born to Carl Nielsen when he was 22 on 8 January 1888, and from the boy's mother, Karen Marie Hansen, for example, were not subject to the proviso. Anyone who wanted to have been able to explore the matter for years, and in September 2004, Carl Nielsen's grandchild, Carl August Hansen's daughter, the 78-year-old Joan Curran from Florida, travelled to Denmark herself to reveal her existence.

It can be no secret that the editors of this correspondence have currently no knowledge of evidence indicating any children born out of wedlock other than the two we already know of, but they will be able, elsewhere, to say more about them and their descendants and to put faces to their names.

Marie Møller

Marie Møller also appears extensively in this material, not only in those parts which had been subject to the proviso but also in those that had never been. She had been attached to the Nielsen family from 1897 to 1915, and it was her relations with the husband that formed the principal cause of the longest and most serious crisis in their marriage. Until Schousboe's edition of 1983, Marie Møller did not exist in the Carl Nielsen literature. Schousboe introduced her in a footnote and did what he could to avoid overdramatization (TS p. 389). This turned Marie Møller into something resembling a myth, since she remained anonymous. What we did know was the name. Once uttered, it was out of the bag! The Carl Nielsen Correspondence allows M.M. to step out of the shadows of anonymity, so that she, too, becomes a person we can encounter, both in her own words and through those of others. The account of her role as the family's 'governess', as she was formerly known – in the Carl Nielsen literature for a little longer than elsewhere – is one of the serial stories that continues over a number of volumes.

In this edition of the letters, Marie Møller is allowed to feature with the substance and the significance that the material itself accords her; she is given no special treatment. The negative cast to which she has so far been subjected, however, requires her to be treated positively in this introduction. Marie Møller is an interesting and doughty personality in her own right, about whom material can also be found outside The Carl Nielsen Archive, both in print and in private ownership, and her role as a secondary player in the cultural, ecclesiastical and artistic circles of the time suggests that she may one day be the subject of a biography of her own. Marie Møller is more than simply a figure who disrupts the harmony in the marriage between the composer and the sculptress.

Andresine Marie Møller was born at Letbæk Mill, north of Varde, on 13 February 1869, the youngest of the mill owner Niels Møller and his wife Nikoline Kirstine's five children. At home, she was known as Bettemie or Mostermie so as not to confuse her with her older sister, Karen Kirstine Marie, who was called Søstermie. Her father, who was born in 1829 and died in 1914, held throughout his life a range of public offices. As a member of Venstre, the agrarian liberal party founded in 1870, he represented the Varde constituency in parliament from 1880-90 and was member of Landstinget (Established in 1866 and roughly equivalent to an Upper House from 1894-1910). Niels Møller and his wife turned Letbæk Mill into a well-known meeting place for adherents of Grundtvig,N.F.S Grundtvig (1783-1872) was a pastor, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher, politician and central figure in the formation of the Danish state. and had close links to prominent individuals such as the writer and priest Jakob Knudsen and the priest of the constituent church Valdemar Brückner in Aagaard near Kolding.

Marie Møller joined the household of Jakob Knudsen and his first wife while Knudsen was a teacher at Askov Folk High School. Marie Møller was not enrolled as a student at the school but, being in service with one of the teachers, she had free access to attend classes and lectures. When the Knudsen couple moved away from Askov, Marie went with them and became the cause, presumably against her will, of Jakob Knudsen's divorce. This did not, however, lead to him being able to win the hand of Marie Møller, and we know that she retained her links with his divorced wife. Marie Møller was also in service with Valdemar and Marie Brückner in Aagaard, and it is probably here that she met the artist Elise Konstantin Hansen, who also had links to the constituency in Aagaard and who was a close acquaintance of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen. When Valdemar Brückner later presided at the wedding in Aagaard of Jakob Knudsen and his second wife, it caused considerable indignation in church circles. Subsequent volumes will provide evidence that Valdemar Brückner and Carl Nielsen were also in contact with each other.

We first meet Marie Møller in the correspondence in the summer of 1897, Letter 1:646. shortly before the Nielsen couple meet her for the first time. At the age of 28, she has landed back at Letbæk Mill and seems stuck in the doldrums, and her older friend Elise Konstantin Hansen has set herself the task of helping her to free herself from her home once again and to start afresh. Initially, there is some talk of Marie Møller entering service with Elise's mother, but thoughts of Copenhagen and a broader cultural stage appeal to her and the idea of a position with Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen begins to be discussed. The subsequent course of events can be followed through the progress of the correspondence, but her fate after the rupture with the Nielsen family deserves a few words. For she did not remain entirely anonymous after that break.

Marie Møller had previously qualified as a masseuse and had for many years been employed by the neurologist and professor of medicine P. Dethlefsen as well as having her own private practice. As a result, in 1918, after her break with the Nielsen family, she co-founded and took the vice-chairship of The General Danish Massage Association (today The Association of Danish Physiotherapists). For its first five years, the association had male doctors as chairs. After that, Marie Møller was elected the first female chair and was re-elected with acclaim until she chose to stand down when nigh on 70 in 1940. At the association's first council meeting after her retirement, she was made honorary member and she was awarded a silver service medal and thanked at an audience with King Christian X (Tidsskrift for Den almindelige Danske Massage Forening, no. 10, 1940, and Tidsskrift for Danske Fysioterapeuter, no. 12, December 1953).

We also know that, throughout her life, she maintained contact with a group of female artists such as Suzette Holten, who painted her several times. She also kept in touch with a couple of Carl Nielsen's closest friends whose contact with the family also ceased after the rupture with Marie Møller, the head of department Svend Godske-Nielsen and the pianist Henrik Knudsen. Godske-Nielsen and Knudsen both appear as co-signatories on the appeal to establish The Carl Nielsen Archive. Even if Marie Møller had wanted to join them, she most likely would not have been allowed. She died on 21 November 1953.

The material

The count of letters made for the project description commissioned for The Royal Library in March 1998 had estimated that around 3,000 letters from Carl Nielsen had been preserved, and that the total correspondence relevant for work with an edition of the letters would amount to around 10,000. The first three years' work with the edition have exceeded expectations. More than 12,500 letters have now been unearthed, registered, copied, read and partially filed in chronological order, 3,500 of them from the composer himself.

The majority of the letters are to be found in their original form at The Royal Library, primarily in The Carl Nielsen Archive but also in hundreds of other files in their departments for Manuscripts and for Music and Theatre. In addition, in Denmark there are Carl Nielsen letters at The Carl Nielsen Museum, The Danish Music Museum and The Carl Claudius Collection, at Willumsen's Museum, The Theatre Museum and The Hirschsprung Collection. Abroad, the archives in Stockholm have most of the larger collections, but there are also Carl Nielsen letters in, for example, Gothenburg, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Leipzig.

Despite the astonishing quantity of the material, gaps remain, and the editorial team have, of course, regarded it as their task to attempt to fill out as many of these as possible. The positive experiences in undertaking this work have included the discovery that many private individuals are still in possession of Carl Nielsen letters. It has been possible to trace some of these through our knowledge of the circle of people surrounding Carl Nielsen, while others have come forward when they became aware of the existence of this edition. It has been a delightful revelation to discover that publishing the Carl Nielsen letters is not simply an academic business best conducted in silence. Even though there are few people still alive today who have met Carl Nielsen in the flesh, he continues to make his presence felt in many places among us, indirectly but nevertheless vitally, and a project such as this edition of the correspondence benefits in more than one way from the interest devoted to it by the public.

Shortcomings

Olfert Jespersen, café musician and composer of revues, and Carl Nielsen got to know each other at the beginning of the 1880s in Odense and, regardless of the different musical worlds in which they lived and moved, they became lifelong friends. Fifteen really lovely and interesting letters from Jespersen to Nielsen have been preserved but none from Nielsen to Jespersen, although, knowing the content of Jespersen's, it is completely impossible to imagine him destroying those he received. If they were to be found, or are found, they would unquestionably be a jewel in the crown of this edition of the letters, but Olfert Jespersen died a sick and lonely man three months after Carl Nielsen and his belongings are likely to have been removed and be scattered to the ends of the earth.

Another serious shortcoming in the mass of letters is the absence of Carl Nielsen's letters to the composer Thomas Laub. There must have been many of them, but only one has been preserved among Laub's papers in The Danish Music Museum and The Carl Claudius Collection. The close collaboration between these two men over many years is well-known and represents a milestone in Danish music history. Carl Nielsen kept more than 50 important letters from Laub as evidence of their collaboration and of their discussion of musical aesthetics. We can get more than a sense of what gems have been lost here, but investigations and conversations with every conceivable living person who might be considered to have had some knowledge of the matter have led nowhere. To make matters worse, the papers that Laub left behind are so few and so selective that it is not inconceivable that Laub himself chose to destroy the letters from Carl Nielsen. Given the significant and indispensable nature of this material, a considerable number of Laub's letters will be included in the edition. The collaborative nature of relations between Nielsen and Laub can also be followed in Laub's letters to Thorvald Aagaard, pupil and musical partner of both Laub and Nielsen, which is why some of these letters will also be included in The Carl Nielsen Correspondence.

We know that other letters have been burnt. Torben Schousboe spoke of this in an interview when he published his collection of sources. The decision was taken by Eggert Møller, the husband of Irmelin, Nielsen’s daughter, after her death and before he passed on the private archive to The Royal Library (Dansk Musik Tidsskrift no. 1 1983/84, p. 4). No objection can be made to that. It is the right of any heir to decide what they wish to donate to public collections. We know from other sources that among them were letters from Marie Møller. That leaves us with even more reason to pay attention to those that have survived.

One aspect of Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s biography that until now has remained shadowy is the relation to her parents and to the family farm at Thygesminde, which for some years they tried to continue running with her sister Lucie Brodersen. The archives contain, however, only a single letter from the composer and his wife to the Brodersen family, while there is an abundance of letters going the other way. Through them, the correspondence and the story behind it can at least be followed as a mirror image, and this edition also takes the opportunity to do so.

Discoveries

It goes without saying that registration in a database of letters makes it possible to form a picture of what is missing and what might be open to discovery. In that sense, 2004 has been a rich year with a wealth of correspondence and contacts far and wide, much of which has resulted in previously unknown letters coming to light. This also meant, however, that the project appeared to be growing and growing at a point when we had otherwise thought that we had a clear overview of its scope.

One particularly time-consuming task during this same phase involved trying to localise the original letters among the many copies of letters from private individuals and institutions in Denmark and abroad that had been incorporated over the years into The Royal Library's collections. In this we succeeded by and large, even to the extent that, in several cases, other institutions – such as The Royal Library – have since received new collections. This, too, has meant that the material making up the correspondence has been increasing during its final stage.

In the autumn of 2004, as a result of Torben Schousboe moving house, four boxes were delivered to The Music and Theatre Department at The Royal Library, the contents of which have now been included as The Torben Schousboe Archive. A few original letters and a small number of copies of letters that this edition had not itself managed to unearth have been found in this archive but, as far as 'sensitive' subjects are concerned, there is nothing here that extends beyond what the correspondence already had at its disposal from other archives and private owners.

A large part of The Torben Schousboe Archive is made up of copies of letters, including the basic material for his publication of sources in 1983. The corresponding originals are to be found in the part of The Carl Nielsen Archive that was placed under a proviso for 25 years, but, for inexplicable reasons, a number of envelopes that were available to Torben Schousboe and which he used to date the many undated letters have not been preserved in The Carl Nielsen Archive at The Royal Library but exist as copies in The Torben Schousboe Archive. Here, access to The Torben Schousboe Archive at the last minute ended up solving a delicate problem for the correspondence. While the massive task of going through all the many copies of letters in The Torben Schousboe Archive has delayed the publication of the first volume, it has at the same time been a great relief to be able to defuse the myths that have at times accumulated about the content of Torben Schousboe’s material before this collection of correspondence began to be published.

When we look for something, we do sometimes find it. Once in a while, we find something different than what we were looking for. The Regional Archives in Lund, for example, revealed not only letters from Carl Nielsen to the ombudsman at Helsingborg Council, Gustav Schlyter, but also the manuscript of a choral composition, Hymn to Life [CNW 376]. The work was already known in a version written in Poul Schierbeck’s hand, in a duplicate originating from the performance of the work that he conducted with The Echo Ladies' Choir in 1925. The manuscript differs, however, from Schierbeck’s version, and proves to have been composed for a boys’ choir not, as previously assumed, in 1923-24 but, according to the correspondence with Gustav Schlyter, in October 1921. The work was even published in and written for a book published by Gustav Schlyter about the cremation movement (Die Feuerbestattung und ihre kulturelle Bedeutung, Herausgegeben von Gustav Schlyter, Leipzig 1922). This discovery came about thanks not to some indication in the material but to the wonderfully alert and helpful head archivist, Veslemöy Heintz, at The Music Library of Sweden in Stockholm.

The most remarkable discovery, which came about through the systematic task of editing the letters in the archives, was made after only six months' work. In a capsule in Manuscript Collection at The Royal Library, there lay not only a collection of previously unknown letters from a youthful Carl Nielsen to his sweetheart of the time, Emilie Demant Hatt, who would later become an ethnologist and painter, but also a complete manuscript, her memoirs of him and the youth they had shared. The manuscript, which had been subject to a proviso for 25 years until 1983 and had never since been opened, was immediately published. This allowed the youthful years before Carl Nielsen’s first journey abroad in 1890 to be released from the shadows in which they had previously been confined. It also brought to life, as people of flesh and blood and no longer simply faceless names, the rich merchant from Odense, Jens Georg Nielsen, and his wife, Marie Demant Nielsen, to whom is primarily attributed Carl Nielsen’s success in tearing himself away from military music in Odense and moving to Copenhagen, where he would attend the music conservatory and make his mark as a musician and composer. In her book Spring Torrents, (Foraarsbølger) Emilie Demant Hatt included the majority of the surviving letters from Carl Nielsen in more or less abbreviated form. In the first volume of this edition of the correspondence, they are all included in their entirety.

This edition

Of the remaining 8,500 or so letters that have been collected and registered, letters to Carl Nielsen, to and from other members of the family and letters from others to other parties with some relation to the Nielsens, a selection has been made of a couple of thousand, bringing the estimated number of letters in this edition to around 6,000 letters. The aim, then, is that the main body of letters regarded as being essential will make up about two thirds of the total number in the edition.

To enable as broad and extensive an explanation of all the contexts and themes to be found in the material within a realistic number of volumes, the editorial panel will take a more liberal stance with regard to the last third of the letters. These will be included both in their complete form and as extracts or citations in notes and introductions, allowing other ways for references or information to be included from the comprehensive material.

The letters are ordered as far as possible chronologically according to their date of dispatch. Considerable efforts have been made to fit as much of the undated correspondence as possible into that chronology. In cases where no basis for dating is immediately evident from the letter or its content, this is indicated in a note or introduction. Faults in the dating are not corrected in the text of the letters but in the editorial heading for the individual letter. This means that differences can arise between the letters' own dating and the dating given in the editorial heading and these indicate that the editor considers the date on the letter to be erroneous. The remainder that it has not been possible to date will be included at the end of the edition.

The quantity and the richness of the material exceed anything the editor could have imagined, and even an almost ideal edition of the Carl Nielsen letters such as that introduced here cannot include everything. Those with particular interests might still need to delve further into the letters that have not been included, and the editors have therefore done their best to shape the edition, the introductions and the notes in such a way that the reader is given relevant cues to pursue any supplementary material. For the same reason, the plan is to conclude the edition by publishing a database, in some form or another, so that readers can seek information about the letters that are not included and will, for example, also be able to find out whether letters that are mentioned in the text but not included have been excluded through editorial choice or because they have not been accessible.

Many readers will surely be surprised at how close to events and to people the material brings us. However, precisely because The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is so extensive and because it will in the future be the largest comprehensive source of material about Carl Nielsen and the people around him, it is worth issuing a warning by making it clear that there are holes in the material and that important events are occasionally not even mentioned. In the first volume, for example, no traces are to be found, either in the letters or the diaries, of the first concert exclusively devoted to Carl Nielsen’s own works, the Composition Soirée in the small hall of The Concert Palace on 28 April 1892.

The danish text

All text is reproduced precisely in the individual writer's own orthography and punctuation including inconsistencies and mistakes. Underlining in the original letters has, however, been replaced by italics in this edition.

In old letters, it is not unusual for punctuation, or the lack of it, to be compensated in some degree by the correspondent’s graphic relation to the paper. Typically, a new line might result in the omission of a punctuation mark that would otherwise have been inserted, or, instead of using punctuation, the letter writer might vary the distance between words. Moving from old handwriting to modern type is, therefore, not without its problems. We have chosen not to attempt to replace these graphic variations in the old handwriting with punctuation, but instead to facilitate the reading by introducing individual punctuation marks in square brackets. In the same way, spelling that renders reading particularly difficult may be corrected in square brackets. Extraneous words and letters are also enclosed occasionally in curly brackets. In those letters not deemed obligatory, three dots in curly brackets represent an excision from the text.

It should be pointed out that the use of editorial brackets is by no means consistent. That would lead to the text being peppered in a way that would render it unattractive and hard to read. Brackets are used sparingly and as far as possible with common sense where we have judged that the reader had most need of help. This means that a precise but wayward repetition of a previously corrected word does not necessarily lead to it being corrected again. On the contrary, it has been seen as an editorial virtue not to correct the same mistake more than once in the same text, nor to continue to correct a mistake that might recur across many texts. We have permitted ourselves to give more consideration to the ideal reader who reads contextually and continuously rather than one who dips into the text intermittently.

There are countless 'linguistic idiosyncrasies' in these texts, but for the majority of readers, these will present no problems once they have got used to them. This might justify the assistance of editorial bracketing appearing more commonly at the beginning than later.

Individual names are a separate issue. Given the extent of this work and the range of its cast of characters, both well-known, lesser known and unknown alongside the unidentified, we considered it most appropriate to enter all basic information about these people in the index of names while all other information is included in introductions and footnotes for the individual texts. For well-known personages who can be found in ordinary encyclopaedias or reference works, information will be limited and serve primarily to identify the individual. For those with a connection to the circle of people central to the correspondence, information can to a greater degree be tailored to their appearance in the edition. Considerable efforts have been made to identify those who are unknown and, while only the year is given for more well-known people, for these lesser known we have provided dates of birth and death as precisely as possible to facilitate research. In other words, if there are also inconsistencies in the register of names, this is due to an attempt to exercise common sense in the service of the edition and the material.

In addition to an index of names, the edition is equipped with a register of those works by Carl Nielsen mentioned in the texts and with an index of correspondents. These indexes accumulate from one volume to the next and as a result will only be ready for publication once the entire edition has been concluded. To ease and enable use of the volumes during the preparation of the edition, temporary indexes will be attached as loose booklets or will be available on the internet. Any supplementary information about individuals and corrections to the registers will be gratefully received by the editors. Indexes covering the provenance in archives or in private hands of the material in the letters and diaries and of the picture material will, however, be available in each volume.

The diaries

The word 'diaries' was included in the title of Torben Schousboe’s 1983 edition of the source material and it did, indeed, contain a selection from the preserved diaries and calendars, but on closer inspection, the supplementary selection from the couple’s correspondence occupies by far the greater part of the text. The reason for this lies not so much in their inclusion or exclusion but because Carl Nielsen was no regular diarist. Apart from the diaries from his two major trips abroad in the 90s, it was more the exception than the rule for Carl Nielsen to keep a diary.

One New Year's Day, he writes: 'In the year 1893 I will begin to keep a diary. If I can succeed in this, I will regard it as a good omen for the future and for the development of my character.' It speaks volumes that in this particular year, which is one of the more substantial diary years, he managed to write his diary no less than 72 times or, on average, every fifth day, and that the majority of these diary entries are to be found in the first quarter of the year and in October when he was confined to the district general hospital.

As a rule, Carl Nielsen’s diaries are written in his engagement calendar, but there is also a clear difference between the engagement calendars used for regular diary writing and those he used for their main purpose. Schousboe did not distinguish between them, calling them all diaries, despite there being a difference between an entry in a diary that one has spoken with somebody and noting in a calendar, a time manager, that one has an appointment to meet that person.

In The Carl Nielsen Correspondence, the complete diary and engagement calendar entries have been inserted in such a way that they come first on any given date and are designated as they are: diary or engagement calendar. In the first volume, there are only diary entries. Entries in diaries and calendars comprise only a small fraction of the entirety of the text, but in the first volume, which covers both major trips abroad and which in this respect is atypical, they make up substantially more.

The argument for including them is, of course, that they supplement the letters and that they have constantly to be borne in mind not only by the editors of the correspondence but also by future readers and researchers whose work would be made more difficult by any independent publication of them at a later date – which, indeed, would also increase the requirement for commentary. Readers who only wish to follow the diaries and engagement calendars can do so by using the register of correspondents where they are included as Carl Nielsen to diary or engagement calendar.

A large number of photographs of Carl Nielsen or with links to him and the circles around him have been preserved, primarily in The Collection of Prints and Photographs at The Royal Library and at The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense. Alongside the collection and registration of the large quantity of letters, the essential elements of this photo material have been registered, scanned and, if possible, dated. With the exception of a quantity of variant images and some photographically very poor-quality pictures that contribute no new aspects or information, this photographic material will be included in its entirety in this edition of the letters, supplemented by other picture material that can shed light on the extensive correspondence.

 Aims and perspectives

It is not the task of the editor of an edition of source material to tell readers and users of the edition how and for what purposes they should use the edition but to publish the material in such a way that as many aspects as possible can come into their own. This is particularly true of such a large and 'all-embracing' edition of letters as this.

There has been more than enough secrecy and tendentious expunging. The Carl Nielsen Correspondence has been edited without fear of the material touching raw nerves, even when it comes to its more private aspects. Despite the many problems, conflicts and tragedies that run alongside all its more edifying and cheerful parts, we do not have to read many pages of these letters to sense that these are people that lived by worthier values and greater aims than to seek fame or material well-being and security. After all the material has been carefully perused, they and their art will have survived and be reinvigorated, making room for a deeper understanding – maybe even of ourselves.

What might cause concern is not that we are dealing with all of this material, with parts of it and details in it. All that is permitted. What could cause concern is that we might interpret and assemble the chain of events too loosely and be content to find ourselves and our own weaknesses reflected in a clearer and larger issue of another age. This will be more difficult to get away with once this correspondence becomes a reality. The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is not a biography of the man, nor is the purpose of the introductions and the notes to make it approximate a biography. On the other hand, after the publication of this edition, it will be possible and feasible for the first time to use the source material as a whole to write a biography of Carl Nielsen from different viewpoints. After that, the edition of the correspondence will continue to have independent authentic value as the place where we can get closest to the individuals and the conditions determining their art. We get closest to their art through art itself, but maybe knowledge can contribute to that closeness.

For the edition of his source material, Torben Schousboe gave as his aim 'to contribute to shedding a clearer light than hitherto on the composer's personality, his artistic activity and environment, and on the circumstances under which his music was created.' The Carl Nielsen Correspondence can share this endeavour but would point out that the release of material, new finds and a greater distance in time have radically altered the situation, and that opportunities since Schousboe carried out his work have dramatically changed and expanded hugely.

Due to the multiplicity of the material and the large cast of characters it involves from pretty much every stratum of Danish society and from both Scandinavian and European musical and cultural life, this edition will be more than an edition of sources relating to a great Danish composer. It will provide new and, in a broad sense, accessible source material for a significant period in the recent (cultural) history of Danish society, a period that increasing numbers of people approaching it from many directions are sure to find interesting in the years ahead.

In the figure of Carl Nielsen, Denmark was given not only a great composer of the kind of music that we today call classical but an artist who took music as his starting point to influence the development of modern society and modern culture, and who never accepted that his music or music as a whole and the composers he admired and on whose shoulders he stood should only exist for a minority. This meant that he wrote not only his major works but, as he became increasingly conscious of his own situation and that of the culture of the day, also his small 'folkelige'The Danish 'folkelige' has no adequate translation in English but denotes 'of the people', which is not to be confused with 'popular'. songs. Thinking about music for the people, he wrote to the social democratic politician A.C. Meyer, on 23 February 1918, that it had to 'be started, otherwise all our musical life hangs in the air'. More recently, he had, as he wrote, 'proved that without returning to what is easy to understand in art, music – including the more elevated musical art – is on a hiding to nothing and has lost its significance as a means to expand people's minds.' The highest and the lowest, all of it, had to fit together, not least in culture, and culture was not there solely to provide leisurely pastimes and experiences but to expand minds.

If the songs became more Danish than 'folkelige', that took second place. What started as a cultural project was turned, especially as a result of the songs' role in the mobilisation of Danishness during the occupation, into a force for nationalism that had consequences far into the post-war period, before being almost completely forgotten along with the 'folkelige' songs, overtaken by international cultural developments of the past decades, which do not in the same way allow themselves to be framed as Danish or nationalist. Meanwhile, the symphonies, operas and chamber music have become increasingly firmly established in the cultural niche we would now call classical music.

Carl Nielsen was no ordinary great composer, either in a Danish or international context. At a time when innovative music was going through hard times and having to isolate itself, locking itself in and out to survive, as, for example, the Schoenberg circle in Vienna with the founding of The Society for Private Musical Performances, Carl Nielsen maintained communication between the various layers of society and culture – and, it should be said, could get away with it in Denmark. Here, we are approaching what may be one of culture's central dilemmas and his response is one that even now we could derive benefit from if we can appreciate and try to export it. The task here is not simply about exporting music.

However, since Danish is read and written by only a very small number of people around the world, it is important that the rich primary source material for Carl Nielsen's work is made accessible in one of the primary languages. This has to be done if Carl Nielsen's work and his particular cultural standpoint are to be discussed and assessed in an international context on the same academic level of interest as other great contemporary composers. This would supplement an increasing familiarity with the music and allow Carl Nielsen to take the prominent position in the international world of music and culture that he deserves but which his origins in a small country with a limited musical environment has made difficult.

It is no secret that the original dream was for The Carl Nielsen Correspondence to be able to include an English version to accompany the Danish. Realism did not puncture the dream but fortunately postponed it in time for us to concentrate on creating the proper basis for a translation to a primary language: namely a reliable version in the original language.

The Carl Nielsen Correspondence enables the resurrection – like a phoenix from the remnant ashes – of the contours of that historical, cultural and social context into which the works were born. It was about more than a composer, his eroticism and a growing familiarity with his works. In modern societies in which historical interest and creeping amnesia go hand in hand, where memories fade of how ordinary lives over generations were lived, and of the dreams and hopes nurtured by more modest lifestyles, here is a chance to step away from our own time and experience the opportunity provided both by an individual and society to put ourselves and our time into perspective. A process necessary for any innovative thinking.

The Carl Nielsen Correspondence offers the Danish reader the first major step along that road. The task has given the editorial team plenty to be getting on with!

Thank you!

The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is not a project that could be completed by one person and working on it has not been a lonesome task. A warm debt of gratitude is due to the other three members of the steering group, Executive Management Consultant Anette Faaborg, Solicitor Niels Gangsted-Rasmussen, lic. jur., and Head of Research John T. Lauridsen, PhD., for their faith in the project and its importance as well as for the considerable efforts they have devoted to the work of the group.

Heartfelt thanks, too, to Chief Librarian and Head of The Carl Nielsen Edition, Niels Krabbe, for his enthusiasm and the work he devoted to the first important stage of the project, and to The Royal Library for housing us in The Department of Research and to the director Erland Kolding Nielsen for his enthusiastic support.

Thanks for all their help and support to the staff at the library's departments for Manuscripts, Music and Theatre, Photographic Atelier, The Pamphlet Collection and to the editors of The Carl Nielsen Edition.

Special thanks to former lecturer Georg Simon for endless advice and, not least, assistance when dealing with conflicting documents and with archive searches outside The Royal Library, and thanks to the head archivist at The Music Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Veslemöy Heintz, not only for the ease with which The Music Library made their own extensive collection of Carl Nielsen letters available for the present edition but also for having shared with such enthusiasm her knowledge of Swedish music and of the entire Swedish archival establishment.  I owe special thanks to Henrik Wigh-Poulsen, theologian and researcher into Jakob Knudsen, from the Grundtvig Academy, for his knowledge of significant private material about Marie Møller.

The work has involved constant new contacts to institutions and individuals both at home and abroad. My thanks to them all for generous help and good collaboration:

The Carl Nielsen Museum, Odense; The Danish National Art Library; The Hirschsprung Collection; The Folklore Archives; Willumsen's Museum, Frederikssund; The Archive of Catholic History; Herman H. J. Lynge & Søn Antiquarian Bookshop, Copenhagen; The Danish Music Museum and Carl Claudius’ Collection; Nordfyns Museum, Bogense; Nyborg's Archive for Local History; The Danish National Archives, Copenhagen; The Skovgaard Museum, Viborg; The National Gallery of Denmark; The Theatre Museum, Copenhagen; Vangsgaard's Antiquarian Books, Copenhagen; The National Library of Sweden, Section for Handwritten Documents, Stockholm; The National Archives in Lund, Sweden; The Regional and National Archives, Gothenburg; The National Archives, Stockholm; The Music Library of Sweden, Stockholm; Uppsala University Library, Department for Handwritten Manuscripts; Bergen Public Library, The Grieg Archives; The National Library of Norway, Oslo, Department for Handwritten Manuscripts; Helsinki University Library; The National Archives of Finland, Helsinki; The Netherlands Music Institute, The Hague; The Bavarian State Library, Munich, Department for Handwritten and Rare Manuscripts; The Berlin State Library; The Saxon State and University Library, Dresden; The National Archives of Saxony, Leipzig; Sibley Music Library of the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, NY, USA; Violinist Elisa Andersen; Jens Bang, Frederiksberg; Jens Bastholm, Ryslinge; Flautist Johan Bentzon; Anna Bro, DR; Civil Engineer, Henning Buhl, Allerød; Anthony Cane, Newton, NSW, Australia; Ebba Castberg, Randers; Børge Colberg, Bagenkop; Joan Curran, Florida, USA; Art Historian Elisabeth Fabritius M.A.; Lecturer Michael Fjeldsøe, Phd; Bent Frydshou, Hellerup; Professor Emeritus Henrik Glahn; Organist Mette Høeberg, M.A.; Erik Kurtz, Fredericia; Lilleba Lund Kvandal, Slependen, Norway; Find Lassen, Hellerup; Robin Mannheimer, Gothenburg; Georg E. Nelson, Livingston, NY, USA; Claus Nielsen, Eriksholm Research Centre (Oticon); Langgaard Specialist Bendt Viinholt Nielsen; Hayo Nörenberg, Hamburg; Former Programme Secretary Henry Petersen; Palle E. Petersen, Nordfyns Museum, Bogense; Erik Rask-Sørensen, Holte; Smith Villy Rasmussen, Otterup; Kirsten Rohweder, Svendborg; Leif H. Rosenstock, Hellerup; Consultant Jens Rossel, Danish Arts Foundation, Centre for Music; Research Librarian Claus Røllum-Larsen; Susanna Tarini Stage; Peter Storm, Middelfart; Inge Trier, Copenhagen; Dr. Günther Weiss, Haus Marteau, Lichtenberg, Upper Franconia, Germany; Margaret Wunderlich, CA, USA; Dr. F.W. Zwart, The Netherlands Music Institute; Clarinettist Lars Åbo, M.A.

Not least, thanks to Herbert Blomstedt, sine qua non.

The Royal Library, February 2005

John Fellow