About this volume (10)
The two major events in the autumn of 1927 were, for Carl Nielsen, the publication of My Childhood, and for Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, the installation and unveiling of the equestrian statue of Christian IX after nearly two decades of struggle, marking for both artists, husband and wife, a crucial point in their artistic careers and lives. Even if neither of them had any intention of standing still and rest on their laurels, they had nevertheless arrived and stood firmly in the public consciousness for who they were.
Already some years earlier, they had found each other again after the many years' crisis in their marriage, though Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen clearly had reservations with a recurring sense that something had been irretrievably lost in the relationship. From 1928 on, however, we can sense that she, too, is beginning to believe in the relationship again. The depressive relapses with statements about broken porcelain that can never be repaired seem finally to have been overcome.
Only once, alone at a spa in France, does she have a relapse and writes to Carl that 'it's like grass is growing up between us' [10:239]. All the old things well up in him again, and he replies: 'That hurt me so much and I am so tired of it all that I went to bed, but now I am feeling a bit better and will try to work again.' [10:248] Today's reader, observing from a cooler distance, can perhaps surmise that the remark about 'grass' might also have been understood as an opening, an admission on Anne Marie's part of a guilty conscience, now that they are again separated for such long periods.
It is also strange to read what Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen writes in some anxiety to her daughter Irmelin, who has been staying in Skagen for a long time with an American friend, while Eggert, her husband has been left alone in Copenhagen:
'Do you know what little Irme, I think about you so much; I feel it is a shame for Ekkert, a shame for both of you, that you are away from him and his work for such a long time, and is it right? I don't really think so, for as you say, while you do have obligations to your guests, you owe most to your husband and yourself. Yes, forgive me, as your mother, for speaking up, but I don't think it's quite right.' [10:695] It is hard not to read this as an expression of self-awareness as well!
In this new phase of their life, husband and wife make a concerted effort to spend as much time together as possible. It often fails, and at first it appears as though they are just as far apart as they have always been; perhaps no longer so much because of Anne Marie's work as because of the spa treatments that they both need, she for her bronchitis and her rheumatism, he for his bad heart – disorders that can only rarely be treated at the same sanatorium – and then due to the fact that increasingly he cannot find the peace he needs to work anywhere but at Damgaard.
Nonetheless, 1928 begins well. From 20 January to 12 February, they are together on a skiing holiday in Lillehammer in Norway prescribed by their doctor. It is pretty cold in all of southern Europe but the doctor thinks that, unless they want to go all the way to North Africa, the sun on snow is great for them both, and though Carl Nielsen soon falls on the hotel's stairs and breaks a rib, the local doctor tells him there is nothing to be done about it but to grin and bear it and allows him to continue skiing. He does this and is happy that in the mountains and the clear air his heart can copes better than it could back home.
Before their departure, they entertained old friends at Frederiksholms Kanal, the two spinsters who live together, the former court singer Elisabeth Dons and the specialist in skin and venereal diseases Johanne Feilberg, and the learned classical philologist and bachelor Ove Jørgensen, who tried more than anyone else to keep the couple together and acted as an intermediary between the spouses throughout the crisis years. There was also Anne Marie's student and younger colleague Helen Schou, the daughter of the banker and stockbroker I.M. Reé, now officially married to an heir of Schou's Factory, Schou's Soaphouses and Schou's Department Store, a successful manufacturing and retail business where almost every Dane would shop for the next half century. From the start, Anne Marie's student was free of the financial morass that was a condition of both Anne Marie and Carl Nielsen's artistic activity for most of their lives.
After this lively evening, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen wrote a long letter to Irmelin in New York and in it preserved a rare concrete glimpse of how a conversation and discussion might take shape in the circle around the artist couple. In this case, Johanne Feilberg initiates it with a statement that she would not consent to being operated on by a female doctor and that women have no notion of politics. Anne Marie counters this and thinks that the male and female characteristics are mixed up together. Christ and the Sermon on the Mount and Socrates come up, Ove Jørgensen spontaneously translating the Sermon on the Mount for the company since the Bible is not properly translated, as Anne Marie writes [10:13].
Symphony no. 1 is revived [CNW 25]
From Norway, Carl Nielsen continues a dialogue with Ebbe Hamerik, who has been chosen as the new conductor of The Music Society after Carl Nielsen's retirement due to illness and Christian Christiansen has acted as a less than successful transitional figure (See introduction volume 9) In Hamerik's first concert in this role, and in the interest of continuity and out of respect for his predecessors, he programmed works of the Golden Age and Carl Nielsen's Symphony no. 1 which had never been performed at The Music Society [10:41] Since Hamerik's performance of the symphony and sources for it involves a number of questions, including how to interpret the preserved rudimentary sources, the issue should not be passed over simply with the excuse that there is so much else not included in this introduction.
Carl Nielsen writes from Lillehammer that they will return home Sunday morning (on 12 February), because he wants to attend Hamerik's dress rehearsal at The Music Society taking place at 12.30 that day. Hamerik has studied the symphony 'with great thoroughness and love, which is evident from the letters, discussions before I left, and from various questions he has asked.' [10:33]
Hamerik's work with the symphony resulted partly in 'extensive changes and additions with regard to phrasing, dynamics and articulation,' partly in Carl Nielsen having composed a number of new measures in the finale, measures that Hamerik orchestrated and therefore premiered with the composer's acceptance and approval (Cf. CNU II/I foreword by Peter Hauge, pp. xi-xxvii, and appendix, pp. 156-169). In the process, the composer, too, must have acquired a renewed sense of the old work, which he does not seem to have conducted himself since 9 August 1909 in Aarhus [3:735]. To a lesser degree he may have concerned himself with it in connection with Wilhelm Stennhammar's discovery and performance of the symphony in Gothenburg in 1910 and 1918, [3:934] [6:36] (Cf. introduction volume 6) and again before his son-in-law's performance of the symphony in Gothenburg on 16 December 1925 [8:408].
Hamerik's performance of the symphony at The Music Society on 13 February 1928 [10:41] results in Carl Nielsen himself conducting the symphony at a Palace Concert already on 26 February [10:56] (Cf. TS p. 536). The orchestra is the same, the notes are the same. According to the newspapers, both Hamerik and Nielsen conducted without a score. That no reviews in either Hamerik's or Nielsen's case draw attention to the rewritten passage in the finale is perhaps not so strange; after all, no one would have been able to remember this music – apart from Hamerik, the composer and Emil Telmányi, who is the person who has shaped the story for posterity, first as an anonymous contributor to the first great Carl Nielsen biography (MS I, p. 119), where the 'villain' of the piece, Hamerik, also remained anonymous, only to be cited by name in a sharper version in his memoirs (Telmányi, pp. 106-107).
The crux of Telmányi's story is that Hamerik's 'improvements' in phrasing and articulation are actually mutilations and that, while it was true that Carl Nielsen had not expressed his displeasure to Hamerik, not even with the altered bars in the finale, which Telmányi regards as entirely Hamerik's responsibility, but instead chose to ask Schnedler-Petersen to be allowed to conduct the symphony so soon thereafter specifically in order to be able to present it in its proper form. It is obvious that Telmányi is on the wrong track in his opinion, and it is thanks to Niels Krabbe's+ that the episode has come under scrutiny (Cf. Niels Krabbe: Ebbe Hameriks påståede korrumpering af Carl Nielsens første symfoni, Fund og forskning, v. 39, pp. 121-147, Copenhagen, 2000. Also the supplement in Fund og forskning, vs. 40, pp. 229-232, Copenhagen, 2001) – with the caveat that neither Telmányi nor anyone else has directly accused Hamerik of corrupting the symphony. There is also reason to put the matter to rest in another way:
Copies of the score to the symphony have been preserved from three performances conducted by Emil Telmányi, Ebbe Hamerik and Launy Grøndahl, respectively, and, in all three instances, Carl Nielsen was in dialogue with the conductors during the preparation. In the preface to the critical edition of the symphony, Peter Hauge concludes: '... contemporaneous revisions, especially those by Hamerik and Telmányi, are not included in the list of emendations and alternative readings. Many of the present edition's emendations do, however, correspond with Hamerik's, Telmányi's and Grøndahl's, though they may have been made on the basis of a similarity analysis and not on the three conductors' scores and orchestral parts individually.' (CNU II/I Preface by Peter Hauge, p. xxvii. Carl Nielsen Studies, v. 1, Copenhagen, 2003; Peter Hauge: Carl Nielsen and Intentionality, Concerning the Editing of Nielsen's Works, pp. 60-68) The relative correspondence among the extant materials from the three performances is surely not surprising; Carl Nielsen was involved in all three cases and the addition of interpretive markings was necessitated perhaps not least by the temporal distance from the symphony's creation at the beginning of the 1890s when musicians still had a common tradition running in their veins. As Peter Hauge comments, it is striking that Johan Svendsen could premiere the symphony 'largely without additions of any kind.' (CNU II/I Preface by Peter Hauge, p. xxvi).
Next: It is of course not the case that the same notes played correctly produce the same performance with different conductors and orchestras, not even with the same orchestra and conductor in different situations. There could well have been a marked difference between Hamerik's and Carl Nielsen's interpretation of the symphony despite being based on the same notes, which is Krabbe's point and proof for his support of Hamerik's performance, and of course Telmányi could have noted this difference well enough even if, at the same time, he was under pressure and perhaps therefore not entirely objective.
Once again, as earlier in Gothenburg, Telmányi had made the mistake of trying to become his father-in-law's successor; he had applied for the position as The Music Society's conductor, which was ultimately given to Hamerik. Moreover, at this time, Telmányi was making the final decision to settle permanently in Denmark. He and Søs were in the process of building their own house, at Fuglebakkevej 93, Frederiksberg – the façade of the house is still adorned with a copy of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's lion relief for the bronze doors of the Ribe Cathedral and the ceilings inside the house by Anne Marie Telmányi's decorations. In this volume, there are also traces in the letters of a discussion that must have been held between Søs and her father, and surely therefore between Søs and Telmányi as well, a discussion about Telmányi's career and, related to this, about the significance of where Telmányi and Søs are to settle down. In this context, Carl Nielsen does not dismiss the idea that he and Anne Marie would be willing to join them in moving to a city in another country! [10:275]
Some of Telmányi's memoirs have been remembered incorrectly – The Carl Nielsen Correspondence has previous examples of this – but he is generally an honest – and keen – observer, and it is unusual for his memory to take an emotional wrong turning like here.
'Carl Nielsen expressly asked me to be at the rehearsal' (Hamerik's rehearsal of the Symphony no. 1, on 12 February 1928), writes Telmányi. Anne Marie and Carl Nielsen arrived home from Norway by ship that same morning, ostensibly so that Carl Nielsen would be able to attend The Music Society rehearsal of his symphony at 12.30 pm. From Lillehammer, he almost apologised to his son-in-law for coming home for Hamerik's rehearsal of the symphony: '... I have tried to persuade Mother to stay longer, but she thinks I should keep my word to Hamerik since he really is very green when it comes to performing my symphony in G minor.' His father-in-law also writes: 'You really don't have to pick us up; but thank you for your kindness; it is very easy to take a cab' [10:35]. There is not a word about seeing each other at the rehearsal, and we might well suspect that Carl Nielsen wanted to cancel his participation at the rehearsal more because of Telmányi's feelings of hurt at being passed over than because of Hamerik's 'improvements', which, after all, he had had a hand in crafting and even voices his respect for.
The day after the concert – that is, 14 February – Telmányi is present at Carl Nielsen's phone conversation with Frederik Schnedler-Petersen about the possibility of his being allowed to conduct his own symphony. About this he writes that the Palace Concert will take place three days later, though it actually took place on Sunday 26 February. Telmányi says that the 'house was packed' at the concert; but it was not. The next day, Politiken and Nationaltidende agree that the audience was thin on the ground. – Maybe the problem was the dwindling audience! Schnedler-Petersen needed Carl Nielsen as a draw; as it turns out, he was not making a sacrifice in letting Carl Nielsen conduct. It was nearing the end of the Palace Concerts and during their death throes, Carl Nielsen was a faithful supporter of Schnedler-Petersen's [10:691] (Cf. Samtid, no. 188).
On the other hand, others besides Telmányi were there for Carl Nielsen's performance of his Symphony no. 1 that day and experienced it as something quite special, and it is and will remain curious that Emil Telmányi and Niels Krabbe so unequivocally, each in his own way, tie Hamerik's and the composer's own performance to the score that Telmányi wrongly believes is different and Niels Krabbe shows is the same. After all, it is almost routine for musicians and orchestras to play from a score where indications of phrasing and articulation belong to every possible interpretation other than the present one, and good conductors can change interpretive details without necessarily first writing these into the score – and less good conductors may not even be able to help doing so!
The fact that Carl Nielsen wrote a dedication to Ebbe Hamerik in his copy of the score to the symphony at the rehearsal the day before the Palace Concert does not necessarily mean that the composer believes the work cannot be played differently but that he is grateful and appreciates his young friend's efforts; he has certainly got to know his own work better as a result. He is also counteracting any feeling in the talented young conductor that his own different interpretation is a correction or a reprimand.
Here, Gunnar Hauch in Nationaltidende gives this rare description of Carl Nielsen as a conductor: 'It was a successful performance, animated by the composer's peculiar and very characteristic conducting. There is no sentimentality, nor any emotional bombast, in the way he leads the orchestra, but his angular, almost mechanically accentuated movements have a formal ability to put things, or at least the main thing, into place; and he can achieve a charm of his own in the lyrical places simply by tilting his head with his own endearing expression.' Nationaltidende, 27.02.1928.
In 1965, without being familiar with Telmányi's memoirs but surely knowing the short anonymous version of the story about Hamerik's performance in Meyer's biography, Knud Jeppesen remembers 'the last time Carl Nielsen stood on the podium in the Odd Fellow Palace' – that is, at this very Palace Concert on 26 February 1928:
'Not long before, the same symphony had been performed in the same hall by a young conductor, competently, but a bit stiffly and tightly. – C.N., who seemed almost not to know it any longer, felt the urge to confirm once more that, despite everything, the work was still alive – and I have never heard it played more beautifully. He gave himself time – without sentimentalising in any way – to linger and sort of look around the work; it was as though his proud youth was once again flowing through him, a youth that he had no reason to be ashamed of. – I think I would dare to say that, in general, no one, whether during his lifetime or after, has managed to perform his works as captivatingly and convincingly as he himself.' (Knud Jeppesen: Carl Nielsen på Hundredaarsdagen, Nogle Erindringer af Knud Jeppesen; Dansk aarbog for musikforskning, 1964-65, p. 139)
As with Niels Krabbe, Jeppesen's version can scarcely be said to be another example of 'Telmányi's version of the story', and Knud Jeppesen comments neither directly nor indirectly on it. The sentence: 'C.N., who seemed almost not to know it any longer' echoes clearly, if not worded in precisely the same way, a statement by the composer himself.
The whole story of the two performances is about a felicitous encounter between an older and a younger composer, and about a gifted musician and son-in-law who, as a trusted collaborator and outsider, did not have an easy position in Danish music life. Still one more event in the story should be noted: when Carl and Anne Marie visit Søs and Emil Telmányi the night before Carl conducts his version of the symphony, they are present when Søs, sitting quietly, suddenly experiences 'heavy bleeding'. She becomes very anxious, is rushed to the hospital and sedated while doctors and nurses struggle for half an hour to stop the bleeding and save her life.
The next morning, the Sunday when Carl Nielsen conducts his Symphony no. 1 in the afternoon for the first time after many years, Søs tells her father, when he visits the clinic, about the dreams she had had while undergoing treatment. They clearly have the quality of a near-death experience and he writes them down [10:55] [10:56] Several months later, we learn in a letter from Søs to her mother, who is now in Greece, that it was a tapeworm she had had and that it now is gone [10:114].
Young at heart
During the 1920s, Carl Nielsen remains the young people's man of choice; they seek him out and ask for his support, and they promote him as the one person in the older generation who is closest to sharing their musical and artistic attitudes. He supports them also through the foundation boards he sits on, while some of his contemporaries doubtless felt overlooked. Think of N.O. Raasted, who had to wait for decades for the travel grant that Carl Nielsen had promised him, and of Louis Glass' appeal to Nielsen to 'get rid of the old debts before we begin to consider younger composers.' [9:762] [9:778] Carl Nielsen also supports the young musicians in struggles with older ones about positions and careers such as Johan Hye-Knudsen, whom he recommends in Gothenburg: 'He is the most talented conductor we have, ... a very attractive young man, a quite different sort than the talentless Høeberg, who has done everything to thwart the young people (including Hammerich [Ebbe Hamerik]), but he has not succeeded.' [10:390] And Carl Johan Michaelsen and Carl Nielsen can gloat together over the royal kapellmeister Georg Høeberg's royal performance [10:58] [10:62].
It is in early 1928 that Carl Nielsen composes his most advanced works when it comes to the tonal language: Preludio e Presto for solo violin [CNW 47] and Three Piano Pieces [CNW 90], The first develops at Emil Telmányi's request from the eight measures for solo violin, sent by Carl Nielsen sent to a poll in Politiken on the occasion of his childhood friend Fini Henriques' 60th birthday on 20 December 1927 (Cf. Samtid, no. 143). The work is ready a few days before Anne Marie and Carl Nielsen leave for Norway for relaxation and a skiing holiday. At the same time, he has finished the first of the three piano pieces, Impromptu. This advanced music seems to have been created in a pure marital idyll. The same day that the violin work is finished, Anne Marie writes to Irmelin in New York: 'So he's sitting here now and playing something very beautiful on the piano this evening, and I am sitting in the living room and listening. When I ask him what it is or will become, he says he doesn't know.' [10:13]
Carl Nielsen has once again regenerated musically and this time created works that fit hand a glove in the narrow new music circles that have arisen in Denmark as elsewhere. The premiere of the violin work [CNW 47] and two of the three piano pieces [CNW 90] takes place at an event at The New Music Society on 14 April 1928 in the theatre hall of Borup's Folk High School. It is (still) situated in Frederiksholms Kanal, 100 metres from the old artists' residence where the music was created and, since the music is difficult to grasp, it is decided in advance that the works should be played twice, one after the other. Naturally, it is Emil Telmányi who gives the first performance of the violin work; Christian Chistiansen will deals with the two piano pieces. Søs writes to her mother, who again is travelling alone to Athens:
'In "New Music" tomorrow, Emil will play Father's new pieces and they are very, very odd; have you heard any of them? Then Father will be having people in afterwards: "If you go down to the woods today..." [The Danish folksong is: "In the forest, there should be a party at the old eagle's place"]; and Maren chimed in that there would be more than a dozen. All of them from "New Music". Johanne will help.' [10:95] Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen must have found an excuse here to get Carl Nielsen to up his composing – no more little pieces now! So Carl must respond from Damgaard where he is now once again working on the new Clarinet Concerto [CNW 43]: 'The violin work is not a trivial thing, as you suggest, and I have put considerable effort into these new pieces.' [10:110]
The international Schubert Competition
While Carl Nielsen himself is reaching out toward new music, the musical establishment at home and abroad reaches out increasingly towards him as the standard bearer of Danish music. The year 1928 is the centenary of Schubert's death. For the occasion, Columbia Graphophone Company Ltd., with headquarters in New York, organised an international Schubert Competition. It became one of biggest media events of the day.
From the beginning, the competition was to involve the completion of Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony, but gradually, as local committees were formed, several of these turned against this aim. Carl Nielsen was appointed as the Danish representative on the Scandinavian judging committee, and a draft has been preserved in his handwriting that shows that he was the principal figure in the Scandinavian group behind the reformulation of the competition's outlines:
'This competition has a dual purpose, to pay tribute the master's memory by putting all of our countries' creative musicians to work in his honour, and through the spirit and nature of this task to determine how much ability to compose melodically exists in our time.
It is not the intention to place restrictions on the composers; the competition is simply pointed towards Schubert, who for his time was both new and original but also from the first to the last was suffused with melodic richness as he undeviatingly followed his abilities and his own genius. – It is these qualities that the present competition calls for. In other words: the composers have complete artistic freedom, but those works that are animated by the symphonic – melodic beauty – of our own time, as Schubert's was for his, will naturally be welcomed with a special joy.' (Cf. Samtid, no. 144)
In the letters, it is possible to follow the Schubert Competition's course from the meetings in March with the secretary for the Scandinavian section, the High Court barrister Holger Zahle, until early May in Copenhagen when Kurt Atterberg's Symphony no. 6 in C major, op. 31, is selected from 35 submitted works as the Scandinavian winner with a prize of $750. Second prize goes to the Norwegian composer Ludvig Irgens Jensen for his Passacaglia for Orchestra, which, in an interview, Carl Nielsen describes as 'a very weighty, somewhat Brahms-influenced work, that is not so outwardly flashy but perhaps of greater depth: one of those works that, upon reflection, we can derive more and more from.' He characterises Atterberg's symphony as 'a brilliant, flexible, large-scale work and excellently orchestrated. It is delightful that in places, especially in the Finale, it actually bears a relation to Schubert's great C Major, whether Atterberg is aware of it or not, the correlation and the flow are so alive that it still feels original' – a characteristic that indicates that the judges have not only made their determination based on what was best, but on what satisfied the competition's criteria and what had the best chance in the final round. There was little regard to Carl Nielsen's own music aesthetics and none to how he himself composed in 1928. When he is asked whether he himself might not have wanted to participate, he answers deftly and with media savvy:
'– In reality I might have liked to. But the way the matter came about, namely that I was broached about the whole thing from the American side, meant that it occurred to me only afterwards that an arrangement could easily have been made so that the judges could also have competed. Now I feel sad about it really – think of being able to wander in your imagination arm in arm with the dear Schwammerl – you know, that was Schubert's nickname – and to feel inspired by his warm, luminous spirit.' (Cf. Samtid, no. 148)
In the letters, we can also follow the final round in Vienna where Carl Nielsen is the representative for the Scandinavian group. On 16 June 1928, he travels to Vienna and checks into the Hotel Imperial, one of the expensive Ringstraße hotels; on the train journey, he has had a long conversation in English with an American couple and is pleased that 'it went really well (some of the time),' as he writes to Irmelin [10:181]. Since she and Eggert went to New York for the first time, he has been studying English regularly so as to be able to speak with their friends when they come for a visit to Copenhagen. Wine, cakes and fruit are delivered to his hotel room with greetings from the Columbia Company's director, Frederick N. Sard, with whom Carl Nielsen, immediately upon his arrival, had a long conversation – in German.
Carl Nielsen is busy that week in Vienna. He is in the company of the Danish minister (ambassador) Bigler, goes to lunch at The Society of Friends of Music, again for dinner with Guido Adler, on the same day visits the composer [Josef] Hauer for an hour. Also on a second occasion Hauer is there, Hauer who made such a big impression on Nielsen at the ISCM Festival in Frankfurt the year before (Cf. Samtid, no. 128 and introduction volume 9), and whose musical radicalism Nielsen can compete with in his latest works for violin [CNW 47] and piano [CNW 90].
No sooner has Nielsen left Vienna again than Hauer writes to both Jørgen Bentzon and Carl Nielsen [10:208]. In Frankfurt, these two have just taken the score of Hauer's Suite no. 4 to Copenhagen to try to get Publisher Wilhelm Hansen interested in publishing it. However, now Hauer seems to have succeeded in selling it in Vienna and asks that the scores be sent instead to Universal Edition in Vienna. Jørgen Bentzon must have written to tell Nielsen this in Sliac in a letter that has not been preserved; for Hauer's letter to Nielsen, which was redirected from Copenhagen, cannot have reached Sliac before Nielsen responds to Jørgen Bentzon, asking him to get Hauer's suite back from Wilhelm Hansen's. We also get Nielsen's updated view of Hauer, now with a reservation about where he is heading in his music: 'I like him a lot, he is an honest soul and there is a constant striving in him that is touching; but where his thoughts and principles can lead him is highly problematic. I received a collection of songs from him that you should see.' [10:210]
In Vienna, Carl Nielsen was also an ambassador for new Danish music. He brought Bentzon's second quartet in his suitcase 'but there was no question of going through it with anyone. I literally had not a moment's time or peace; however, I mentioned your name when there was talk of Scandinavia, and the Spanish envoy, a very attractive young man, Adolf Salazar, wrote it down in his notebook.' To Knud Jeppesen, he writes that he met the English writer on music Donald Francis Tovey, who is enthusiastic about Jeppesen's Palestrina book, 'and since he is a recondite, independent-minded person, this can only please us Danes to hear.' The famous musicologist Guido Adler has also spoken about Jeppesen's Palestrina and, regarding Nielsen's own works, he has said 'that in his opinion they will outlive our time.' [10:189] In Vienna, Carl Nielsen gets to bask in the glow of both his own and his students' merits.
By Friday the 22nd, the Schubert Competition is far enough advanced for Nielsen to telegraph Kurt Atterberg that there are only three works left, 'including yours' ... 'I fight and hope', and the next day there is another telegram to Sweden:
'You have won congratulations = Carl Nielsen' [10:191] [10:195].
The Schubert Competition was, fundamentally, supposed to be the celebrated musical event that would bring international attention to the gramophone industry; that it was classical music that could/should do this was not yet contested in 1928. In Carl Nielsen's notebook, there is a note that may look like the draft of a statement for a radio or phonograph recording [10:195]. Maybe it was here Carl Nielsen – and Kurt Atterberg! – came closest to the proverbial 15 minutes of fame. Atterberg's initial reaction can be read in the letters [10:202].
Politiken was the first to phone Atterberg with the good news. What follows is the most essential part of the newspaper's coverage of the event the next day, Sunday 24 June 1928:
A telephone conversation last night with the Swedish autodidact now facing world fame.
Yesterday afternoon – immediately after receiving a telegram about the result of the great Schubert Competition – we called Stockholm in order to interview the Swedish prize winner Kurt Atterberg. But he did not answer his telephone at the royal patent office.
Thanks to the kind hospitality of the women at the Östermalm Central Exchange, we managed to find where Kurt Atterberg was staying. He had gone out to Lilla Thyras's island north of Stockholm, and there we got to speak with Kurt Atterberg.
- Hello, we said ... may we congratulate you ...!
- I don't understand ... congratulations ...?
- Yes, you have won the first prize of $10,000 in the big competition.
- Have I? answered a weak, slightly doubtful voice ... have I really? – That is delightful ... oh, how happy this will make my wife.
In this moment I cannot stop thinking about Carl Nielsen, and send him a friendly thought; he is a wonderful colleague who has always shown appreciation for my music.
- How long have you been composing, we ask.
- Since 1909 ... I was 22 years old at that time. I am self-taught. I have never studied. Only by working and working, time and again, have I learnt what I know.
- You still have an official position?
- Yes, I am an engineer in the patent office – I specialise in radio patents.
- How can you manage to do this work and at the same time cultivate your music?
- I compose in the mornings. In the early hours when the sun is just coming up and the dew is still wet and glistening, it is my best time. So I sit down at my grand piano and play ... I often begin as early as five o'clock in the morning and continue until nine. That is my real life, I live in these morning hours.
- What will you do with all that money? It is around 37,500 kroner!
- I really do not know yet ... I have never before had so much money in my hands; a composer, after all, does not in general lay golden eggs... but maybe I would like to travel and to hear the new music out in the world.
Finn.
On the same day, Politiken also published a summary of the proceedings in Vienna and an interview with Carl Nielsen:
The vote, which was very exciting, took place led by Carl Nielsen.
Vienna; Saturday.
A Politiken exclusive.
In the old days when people were to party, it lasted for eight days straight. But Schubert could not be fobbed off with just a week or a month; Vienna gave him a year, a Schubert year. But every celebration must come to an end, and the climax, the grand finale, is always expensive. But one may be lucky enough to receive it as a gift from a rich uncle, in this instance it came from Uncle Sam. The prize established by the American gramophone society, to reward the best symphony on the occasion of the centenary of Schubert's death, was awarded yesterday to the Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg.
The decision was anticipated with feverish excitement in Vienna where the panel of judges, who were to assess the 12 symphonies, were assembled. At the end of last week, the noble gentlemen on the committee began to arrive. Of the 12 judges, the best known are our own Carl Nielsen, as the representative for Scandinavia, von Schillings from Germany, Glazunov from Russia, and from America, the conductor Walter Damrosch.
On Monday morning the court was in session. After five days of concentrated work, the verdict was handed down yesterday with the honourable result in favour of Scandinavia.
Atterberg won on the principle: 'After me, Pericles is the greatest'.
I ask Carl Nielsen to tell us a little about the voting process.
- How did the vote take place?
- Yes, it was the most exciting moment of the whole process. They chose me to be a sort of secretary – I think it really was because there were no Danes among the 12 who were to be judged, so I was quite impartial, says Carl Nielsen with his modest smile. We had to vote three times. Atterberg immediately received three votes in the first round, and each of the others one vote. This means every judge had voted for their own country's composer. Isn't it strange that national feeling still plays such a strong role, even in art, adds Carl Nielsen with a little sigh. So it was that I came to think about how the Greeks carried on when they were to select their first statesman. Can you remember all the Athenians voted like this: I am the first, but after me, Pericles is the greatest. I asked everyone in the new vote to choose one more besides the one they had already voted for. In this way the votes came in for Kurt Atterberg, the Pole Marek and the Austrian Franz Schmidt. With the third vote, the prize went to Atterberg.
Carl Nielsen on Atterberg's symphony.
- What do you think of Atterberg's symphony?
- Kurt Atterberg's work is the one which, in my opinion, best satisfies the requirements that were established for the competition. It is distinctly melodic-symphonic, it has lines of great breadth and it is very lively and entertaining in the very best sense of the word. It consists of three movements, two powerful, brilliantly orchestrated movements, which frame the perhaps less significant, but very appealing, folksong-influenced, lieder-like middle movement.
- What are the other two symphonies like that received votes?
- Marek's is a highly interesting and very modern work with strange and interesting episodes. As far as Schmidt's symphony is concerned, it is an extremely clever, but in my opinion a somewhat too Brahms-influenced work. It lacked the freshness of the two other works.
- So you are pleased with the outcome?
- Yes, I am, says Carl Nielsen. By the way, I have previously been involved in awarding Atterberg the prize. When Stockholm inaugurated its large concert hall two years ago, a competition was held where he was also the winner [8:453]. What has happened now is wonderful for him. Think about what that means to a composer. His work will now travel the globe, it will be played and heard everywhere. Also the money, added Carl Nielsen. That can completely change a man's life.
... From his heaven, the eternally young Schubert looks down on his city, the city of songs and waltzes where he is loved like no other. He himself helped to build it, the warming rays from his lovely mind have made it a home. Now his city thanks him by celebrating him for an entire year – he, who died a hundred years ago in want and poverty. And could one have celebrated Schubert more beautifully than by offering the one thing he lacked: money to a gifted young composer?
Bonne. (Merete Bonnesen, Politiken, 24.06.1928)
Kurt Atterberg's winning symphony travelled around the world as the 'Dollar Symphony'. On 16 October, the premiere took place in Cologne [10:317]. The entire commercial apparatus of classical music life at that time came into play; Sir Thomas Beecham had already recorded it, ready for release. In the same year, the composer also recorded it, and even Toscanini played it as late as 1943. In the years that followed, Atterberg was invited to attend performances all over the world, was interviewed, and had to receive criticism about the many allusions to other music, which the learned and less learned found in the work and which had already been noted by the judges assembled in Vienna [10:194] [10:201].
In the following months, the 'Dollar Symphony' gave rise to considerable controversy in both the Swedish and the international press, not least because the then well-known English music critic Ernest Newman was of the opinion that Atterberg had simply 'amused himself by making fun of the whole prize competition arranged by the Columbia Company.' And Atterberg did not make it easier for the international judging panel of the classical music luminaries with his statements:
'It is a misunderstanding that I have made fun of the award judges. My joke is at the expense of the critics and the competition. An award-winning work is always put down. That is why I have buried a couple of teasers which were picked up by the prize judges, but so far not by any of the critics.' Politiken, 27.11.1928.
When Politiken again asked for Carl Nielsen's opinion, he said:
'It is a very regrettable business, and I am just as surprised as the rest of the committee by Atterberg's quite incomprehensible statements. What does it mean that he has made fun of the competition? We approached the works in a completely serious and conscientious manner and chose his symphony – first here in the Scandinavian group and later in the main committee in Vienna – because we found his work was well written, well executed and excellently orchestrated, and everyone thought that, of all the anonymous symphonies submitted, it was the most suitable work for the purpose. Why does it now have to be made into a joke? When Mr Atterberg says that he wanted to fool people, I say that it is the music that has fooled him, for whatever he intended or wanted, he has written something – perhaps not great and significant, but in any case a skilful and rather festive work. If anyone has tripped up in this story, it must – now in hindsight – be Atterberg himself. As said, I do not understand it!' Politiken, 28.11.1928.
One can debate whether the small insertion 'perhaps not great and significant' was Carl Nielsen backpedalling or simply offering a glimpse of his real opinion. The next day Atterberg did backpedal a bit but stood firm in his disparagement of the critics:
'The joke that I allowed myself in the symphony's last movement is not of the type that in any way blames either the competition, the judges or myself. Similar jokes have been made by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss. It blames only all of the critics who boasted of expertise at the Schubert centenary and at the review of my symphony, yet could not identify an almost verbatim quote from one of Schubert's best-known large-scale works.' Politiken, 29.11.1928. Also on the same day, to Carl Nielsen: 10:368. Additional material in letters (not included) from Kurt Atterberg to Holger Zahle, 01 and 05.01.1929.
Entirely in the spirit of our times, the Schubert competition in 1928 got the music recording industry, competition participants, judges and large portions of the classical music scene completely caught up in the increasing demand for popularity brought about by a fragmented music development. The critics may have seen through Atterberg, but he – autodidact in an easy, 'popular' and epigonic compositional style – saw through them too! The luminaries had made themselves available and accepted the competition conditions which, even after the idea of completing 'The Unfinished' had been dropped, were more about kitsch than art – and what are we to think of Carl Nielsen, who during the vote pulled the wool over the eyes of luminaries and as a composer himself combined genuine modernity with a true folkelig spirit?
The Clarinet Concerto [CNW 43]
From Vienna, Carl Nielsen immediately travelled to a spa in Sliac Kúpele in Czechoslovakia where Søs was already staying. In this volume, she is in poor health much of the time and often has doubts about herself as an artist. Many months after her life-threatening ha0emorrhage the evening before Carl Nielsen was to conduct his Symphony no. 1 at the Palace Concert, she is still struggling to regain her strength, and this is why she is now in treatment.
Carl Nielsen has done what he could to encourage Anne Marie to come to Sliac as well, but on doctor's orders she ends up going instead to the health resort Les Bains du Mont-Dore in France for her bronchitis and arthritis, and Carl and Søs wait for her in Sliac in vain.
In the letters there are vivid descriptions of what spa life was like at that time, both from the one and the other resort, and when Carl Nielsen writes to Irmelin in Skagen: 'I now find myself doing absolutely magnificently, eating vegetarian or very lightly at the same table as Dr B. [Bienenstock]. The temperature is 20 to 22 in the shade, barometer reading 764, height above sea level around 400 metres. I compose in a secluded pavilion' – he is referring to the continued work on his last and most advanced orchestral composition, the Clarinet Concerto. He has been thinking about it at least since May 1926 when it is first mentioned [9:142] but subsequently laid it aside in favour of the Flute Concerto [CNW 42] [9:287].
Here in 1928, it is constantly present and we can also follow the collaboration with Aage Oxenvad, the solo clarinettist in The Royal Danish Orchestra, both during the completion of the work and during the five performances that take place already in this volume. From the sidelines, Carl Johan Michaelsen closely follows its completion. The plan is for the launch of the Clarinet Concerto to be held at a private concert in Carl Johan Michaelsen's summer residence, Villa Højtofte, in Humlebæk. Since Emil Telmányi will conduct, the date must be arranged to fit in with his other engagements. On 14 September 1928 the big day arrives, as Carl Nielsen tells Lisa Mannheimer in Gothenburg:
'... I have just completed my Clarinet Concerto. On Friday it will be played for the first time with a small orchestra. There are 20 members of The Royal Danish Orchestra that my friend Michaelsen has engaged to play it out in his summer house in Humlebæk. They will all be driven out there in a big bus, then eat dinner and then the music; but we have two rehearsals beforehand, so it is really a rare private event.' [10:303]
On the same occasion, before the performance of the new Clarinet Concerto [CNW 43], young Thomas Jensen conducted a Concerto Grosso by Handel, a work by Vivaldi, and, with Christian Christiansen as soloist, Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, K. 488. The public premiere followed in the Odd Fellow Palace on 11 October 1928, again with the same 20 select members of The Royal Danish Orchestra. This time, Emil Telmányi conducted the whole concert, introducing it with the Harpsichord Concerto in D minor by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and concluding once again with Mozart's Piano Concerto, both with Christiansen as soloist (Cf. MS, p. 298, Telmányi, pp. 185-186, TS, p. 535 and Politiken, 12.10.1928).
Half of the critics were unanimously positive and impressed that Carl Nielsen, his age notwithstanding, continued to innovate. By contrast, Gunnar Hauch in Nationaltidende concluded: 'We do not doubt that Carl Nielsen's loyal, little phalanx will announce the birth of a remarkable, new work; we, on the other hand, are equally convinced that this work will not have a future.' Nationaltidende, 12.10.1928.
Ekstra Bladet wrote: 'Ever since Carl Nielsen turned 60, it has become customary – every time a work of his is performed and he happens to be present – for everyone in the hall to stand up and clap like crazy. The same thing occurred last night; but here there was just cause for enthusiasm, namely that it was something new for people to get excited about. However, we do not want to keep it as a deep secret until the day we die or content ourselves with whispering to our loved ones in hushed tones that we do not believe the enthusiasm was genuine. People clapped – well, yes, because it has become a habit to clap for Carl Nielsen. Probably not because his new Clarinet Concerto unleashed great emotion in the audience. {...} If we are to call this the Music of the Future, we do not think future generations will be particularly comfortable in concert halls, but nor do we think this work has any future. It is just one step on the way forward toward the goal that "modernism" is only vaguely aware of, but which no one can see yet.' M. Bj. in Ekstra Bladet, 12.10.1928.
There is no doubt that Carl Nielsen himself realised that the music went over the heads of many. When he himself conducted the Concerto for the first time at The Danish Concert Society two months later, he and Oxenvad had deliberately changed the interpretation:
'The day before yesterday, I conducted the Clarinet Concerto with Oxenvad here and think now the audience (and the magazines who were angry the first time) have already completely come around. Oxenvad played here too – by the agreement of the orchestra and me – with greater calm and this little tempo change made all the difference. It is interesting how taking it just a shade slower can – as it were clarify the structure and (especially) the melodic material. I have complete faith in this work, which I have put the greatest effort into and thought much about, but it must be heard, or rather: the ripening of every fruit takes its time.' [10:386]
A Swedish victory lap
Carl Nielsen was constantly on the go in his final years. He has every intention of keeping himself to himself in peace and quiet and to concentrate on new compositions, but the outside world constantly comes forward with demands and offers: More and more musicians take up his old works and expect him to participate in rehearsals and concerts and to give his opinion; works are commissioned and he cannot say no when the order comes from good friends, or when he falls for the person who asks him – or when he could use the money.
In Gothenburg, they want to produce Saul and David [CNW 1], perhaps the one of his larger works that had met the saddest fate. When the opera was premiered in 1902, it was performed just nine times in all; in 1904, it played two times in December, and in 1912 twice more in December; since then it had not been performed. The new production in Gothenburg had its first performance on 29 November 1928 at The Grand Theatre; the preparations can be followed in broad terms and in all its details in the letters from the spring of 1928. Alongside the premiere of the Clarinet Concerto's, the year's focus is on the revival of Saul and David. While the first production at The Royal Theatre in 1902 was the final breakthrough for Carl Nielsen, the work that earned him his first band of followers, the new production in Gothenburg was the performance that offered a first experience to the many supporters among musicians, artists and critics to whom he had been a revelation over recent decades, who had followed the emergence of the series of mature works, but who only knew the greatest work of his youth by reputation, and had perhaps heard the bellicose Prelude to the second act.
For Carl Nielsen, the end of the year was a veritable victory lap. On 13 December, the entire performance is broadcast over the Swedish radio, and on 21 December he has to travel to Gothenburg once more to conduct the performance himself. He features in one interview after another in Gothenburg's daily newspapers (Cf. Samtid, nos. 156-159), and in the first days of December he is in Stockholm – accompanied by many of his friends in Gothenburg, with bank director Mannheimer at their head as the one paying the hotel bill – to conduct Stockholm's Concert Society's orchestra in the new concert hall in a whole programme of his own works, including the Symphony no. 5 [CNW 29], which in 1924 had caused such a scandal with Georg Schnéevoigt as the conductor, and the new Clarinet Concerto with Aage Oxenvad as soloist. Two days later, he also conducts a live concert on the Swedish radio exclusively of his own works, including the revived Symphony no. 1, which both Ebbe Hamerik and he himself had recently conducted in Copenhagen as the main work.
Several of the critics, basing their views on Schnéevoigt's performance of the Symphony no. 5 in 1924 (Cf. introduction volume 8), and now agree that time has worked in the symphony's favour. After nearly five years, with more and more new music by Stravinsky, Hindemith and Schoenberg on their concert programmes, the public has now also matured to the point of appreciating Carl Nielsen's masterpiece. Even the programming itself in 1924, which had placed it last in a very long programme, had not given it much of a chance. People now felt that the acoustics in the old concert hall – Auditorium – had also contributed to the audience's having fled from the massive impact of the sound. The music scene in Stockholm seems almost embarrassed by this bygone blunder. With the composer as conductor, the Symphony no. 5 is now certainly a success; this must have been anticipated because, after this first work on the programme, Carl Nielsen already had to receive the evening's first laurel wreath from the orchestra.
Moses Pergament described the situation this way:
'It is remarkable how much our attitude matters in all assessments of artistic value. During the five years that have passed since the "scandal" of the fifth symphony took place in Auditorium, the music-loving public has realised that Carl Nielsen, both as an artist and as a person, is way above most other mortals, that his life and work are marked with deep seriousness and that his view of art is absolutely free from any circumstantial speculation. Such knowledge indices sympathy in any normal person. And it was certainly due to the sympathy he had gained that both the reprise of the fifth symphony and the new, extremely unusual clarinet concerto were now received if not exactly with understanding, then at least with respect.' Svenska Dagbladet, 06.12.1928.
Others concluded thus:
'The little, white-haired and youthfully vital 60-year-old composer conducted superbly and energetically, and anyone who attended the rehearsals can testify to his capabilities as an orchestra leader. He knows his stuff as few do. But then, in The Concert Society's orchestra he also had an excellent instrument to play on; the ensemble of musicians followed their leader with interest and devotion and demonstrated their exceedingly high standard this evening.' Nya dagligt Allehanda, 06.12.1928.
And the newspaper Stockholms Dagblad:
'The little Danish maestro, quick and nimble and full of energy, directed the concert with the desired result – an exceptionally lovely success. A full audience hailed him with thunderous applause, which was also rightly intended for The Concert Society's extraordinary orchestra. Flowers and two laurel wreaths were the visible proof of the great sympathy Carl Nielsen had won.' Stockholms Dagblad, 06.12.1928.
The Clarinet Concerto [CNW 43] was more difficult for the critics to relate to, but, having learnt from the experience with the Symphony no. 5, most of them believed it was a work that you had to hear several times before you could judge.
Then of course there was Dagens Nyheter's reviewer, the composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger, who, as Bror Beckman had already predicted in 1906, would become Carl Nielsen's enemy, if for no other reason than that in his report from the Swedish Music Festival, Carl Nielsen did not mention him at all (Cf. Samtid, no. 15) [6:41]. Peterson-Berger's opinion of Carl Nielsen had not softened over the years but on this occasion was expressed so strongly that he deserves to be quoted extensively, not least to put the poverty of music journalism in our day into perspective:
'With Wednesday's concert, The Concert Society gave its listeners a tough trial of their patience by offering an entire Carl Nielsen programme. That the composer himself conducted was no significant consolation: we get no more uplifting impression from his gestures beating time now than at previous concerts. However, conviction of his musical greatness seems to persist in academic circles, and there are still those who, under the influence if not of the masses then, at least, of the in-crowd, deny the evidence of their own ears as devout Catholics deny their reason. Carl Nielsen has had the good fortune to become good friends early on with influential people in Stockholm who, purely out of personal sympathy, it seems, have spoken out on his behalf both here and in Denmark. However, their propaganda misses the mark when they constantly talk about his great reputation outside Denmark without mentioning the powerfully dismissive criticism he has been subjected to in both Germany and France. In any case, he has only made an impression on a few conductors; the general public knows nothing about him, and that is quite natural. He is an extremely deviant composer; he abhors the profanum vulgus, and what he writes may interest the professional, but otherwise makes no one happy. Except for the minor works where for some reason he held back his inclination for brooding and an empty polyphony and wrote fairly freely from the heart; there we glimpse his great compositional gifts and regret his development in a small, cramped, self-satisfied country with a tendency toward nationalistic overestimation of itself. It is against this underlying, petty-bourgeois backdrop that Carl Nielsen's musical profile must be viewed; had he received more humanistic, aristocratically clear, bright, simple ideals, he would never have composed his long series of complicated, affected, over-intellectualised symphonies. For it is precisely by forcing oneself, being intentionally rough, deep, "titanically" subjective, that the petty-bourgeois nature thinks it will become refined and reach artistic nobility. (Nietzsche did not tire of developing this sharp psychological observation for his similarly too petty-bourgeois and spiritually unaristocratic compatriots.)
To the relief of the many who, timid and bewildered, confess their inability to be in any way gripped or touched by Carl Nielsen's music, we can maintain with greater certainty than ever: from the point of view of normal musical perception, for the natural sense of music, most of what he wrote is pure – though of course unconscious – humbug. A new Danish version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" – not as witty, but more concretely convincing than the old one.
The concert opened with the allegedly "controversial" fifth symphony, cerebral like its predecessors, dry and unsatisfying. The composer himself admits in his analysis that much in the work "comes to nothing" (Carl Nielsen quote from the concert's programme booklet, coll. [10:355]), but does not seem to be aware that this is the case with the symphony as a whole.
[....]
However, the absolutely worst piece written by this too obviously experimental and criss-crossing Dane so far is the clarinet concerto, which was now offered as a novelty and whose cackling, crowing, whistling, howling and grunting solo parts were performed by the Dane Aage Oxenvad. Here, Carl Nielsen openly succumbs to pure cacophony. He strives to keep up with his times; he does not know any better. [....] By the way, it is not surprising that a competition judge who composes like that himself speaks with a forked tongue when it comes to judging works in "Schubert's spirit". There was a reminder – completely unnecessary and unexpected – of his participation and ambiguous stance in the infamous Dollar Symphony competition when Mr Atterberg himself appeared during the final tributes and handed his prize judge a laurel wreath. Then we can only laugh as we recall what we were thinking the whole time during that dreadful clarinet concerto (it does not sound beautiful to Swedish ears but is a strong and healthy Danish proverb that many people should ponder these days):
When you glorify a knave,
He does not know how to behave.
P.-B.' (Wilhelm Peterson-Berger in Dagens Nyheter, 06.12.1928)
Daily life
There is a common thread, which never quite manages to tie up, running through these years: the sense and the attempt to face the fact that it is now time to concentrate on the works to be written and not to be drawn into all possible peripheral, time-consuming projects. Illustrative of the situation is when, on 21 May 1929, Sophus Michaëlis commissions Carl Nielsen to compose the music for the coming H.C. Andersen Festival in 1930 [10:545], he says no and explains his reasons to his wife: 'Since I now have such a strong desire to work on my own projects, I have said no to Odense (the H.C. Andersen Festival). But the H.C. Andersen Festival ultimately did get its composition: Cupid and the Poet [CNW 23]. It is a lot of money to earn, but at my age I want to be allowed to do the things that interest me; I know you would say the same. They asked for an answer as soon as possible, which is why I could not wait to hear your opinion first.' [10:557]
But Carl Nielsen did end up composing the work for the occasion, which he had in fact himself proposed changing from a cantata to a small opera or a play when the first inquiry was made in 1928 in the hope that he would then be able to summon up greater interest in the task (Samtid, no. 174).
Damgaard is the constant refuge he seeks, now in a new and more luxurious car, a large Morris, and with a rail card for frequent ferry crossings. At Damgaard he feels guilty that while in Copenhagen he had not managed to visit Irmelin and Eggert as he had wanted, and he sends Irmelin the rhetorical question: 'Is life in the city a wheel that catches hold of one's clothes?' [10:532]
His music is no longer just performed by himself and with the young Johan Hye-Knudsen as conductor, Saul and David [CNW 1] is now finally being taken up again in Copenhagen. The result: Hye-Knudsen will be the sole purveyor of the work right up until the 1970s. If you count them up, it is altogether astonishing how many performances of his works, both in Denmark and abroad, there is evidence of in this volume. For example, on 23 October 1928, Espansiva [CNW 27] – and Carl Nielsen work – gets its first performance in Japan. Charles Lautrup has become Professor of Music at The Royal Conservatory in Uyeno in Tokyo. There is a full house and thunderous applause in the gigantic Nihon-Seinenkan Hall. Contact between Lautrup and Denmark can scarcely have been good; almost by chance, Berlingske Tidende reports the news more than two months later (Berlingske Tidende, evening edition, 04.01.1928).
Even when others perform Carl Nielsen's compositions, however, it disrupts his daily life. Musicians seek him out to discuss programmes and rehearsals, and when such concerts occur, the situation requires him to be present – and to have tributes paid; he also has to be present even when his musician friends play music other than his own. Naturally, he has a genuine interest in it all, but his daily life is nevertheless constantly being fragmented and although he has difficulty saying no, he still ends up letting some people down. Read for yourself how he formulates his apology to the painter Johannes Kragh, who complained that he is letting down his friends! [10:395]
The longing is not just for an undisturbed life with the opportunity for artistic concentration; the longing is also for the spiritual union with like-minded people which has become so rare. In Stockholm, he and Anne Marie spent one evening with Elisabeth and Ture Rangström and there, in a 'warm and natural company', they relived youth's 'preoccupation with the very flow life, with new, fresh impressions and new impulses,' feeling the contrast to the way 'the greatest part of our existence otherwise gets filled with banality and boredom, especially when you are not engrossed in a project that interests you but have to follow a daily routine among ordinary people.' [10:406]
During that evening at the Rangströms' house, Carl Nielsen also recalls their last meeting with Busoni in Paris. Busoni 'was delighted to see us and said: "Listen! We who have so many thoughts and views in common should tear ourselves away from this artificial life we lead and travel to a lonely island and live together in nature and cultivate our spiritual content through constant conversation."' [10:406]
It is of course based on the same sense of the fragmentation of daily life – also expressed in musical terms in the Symphony no. 5 – that another formulation of a humanistic way of thinking appears in Carl Nielsen's diary, so common and strikingly simple as to be valid for all times, and not least for the century that succeeds his, and it could stand as the motto of any real school reform:
'The life of the spirit is not born with arms and legs, limbs and other organs; it develops only through thinking, practice, knowledge, dedication, interest and love for everything our predecessors have created through books and works of art. What else? Through this work it is as if new organs are actually growing inside us. With every day we gather and practise, these organs become stronger and firmer, and eventually – within the limits that nature has set for everything – we can rely on them, as long as we keep them pure and in constant activity.' [10:421]
Art and interruptions
Even though 1929 also brings new major works, not least the Three Motets [CNW Coll. 24], it cannot be denied that the intrusiveness of external demands threatened now and again to turn the year into something of a treadmill for the composer. For Carl Nielsen, there is still and to the very last remains an artistic process developing, indeed developing rapidly, but the works do not follow one another quickly; there are many interruptions.
The Three Motets is a result of Mogens Wöldike's creation of the Palestrina choir, of the reintroduction of Renaissance music into the music of the day, but the composer's rehearsing and revisiting Saul and David and the large choral movements that he wrote for the opera's second and third acts in his youth must also have pulled him in the same direction. In the letters, we find proof that Carl Nielsen is working on the Three Motets in early April 1929 [10:486] but the initial evidence that he has plans to write such a work appears already in the interview he gives in 1928 for the revival Saul and David's in Gothenburg (Cf. Samtid, nos. 157 and 159). What motivates him is not only the external circumstance, the Palestrina choir, but also a thread in his works already present in his youth that he now picks up again, and which he is again confronted with by the Saul and David premiere in Copenhagen at the end of February 1929.
A few weeks earlier, Béla Bartók visits Copenhagen for the first time and performs on three evenings. On 12 February, at The Music Society's concert, which Ebbe Hamerik conducts and where The Inextinguishable [CNW 28] is the main work after the intermission, Bartók is the soloist in his own Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, op. 1! A fine work, but hardly one that could be said to represent Bartók, and if he felt far from modern with his second quartet when he met Nielsen in Budapest (Cf. introduction volume 6), how must he have felt now, eight years later in The Music Society in Copenhagen, upon encountering The Inextinguishable?
Carl Nielsen had surely travelled to Damgaard some days earlier not because he did not want to meet Bartók and speak with him but because he could anticipate that, had he been present at the concert at The Music Society, he would have eclipsed Bartók completely; it would almost have been a snub.
Gunnar Hauch, not exactly a Nielsen fan, wrote in his review of Bartók's piano evening at The New Music Society three days later: 'At The Music Society, he [Bartók] was unquestionably inferior to Carl Nielsen, and it must be said that nor did he triumph this evening.' Many reviewers felt that the piano pieces he played of Zoltán Kodály's were more interesting than his own. Bartók also gave a radio concert during his visit to Copenhagen; here, he simply played Baroque music and a selection of his own folk music arrangements. Who put together his programmes, I wonder?
When Bartók's solo concert in The New Music Society took place on 15 February, Carl Nielsen was back in Copenhagen. It is difficult to imagine that he would not have been present – he must surely have felt duty-bound both for Bartók's sake and for the sake of his friends in and around New Music – but no evidence of his attendance has been found.
During the spring, daily life really begins to fall apart for both husband and wife. In April, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen is admitted to The Home for the Disabled's clinic, placed on her back with weights and traction on one leg, and is laid up like this for over five weeks. When she is released after seven weeks, a longer rehabilitation awaits. It is barely over before she crashes while riding her bicycle on Skagen in June [10:594] [10:601] and despite not breaking anything, she is still so badly injured that she has to be hospitalised again, first at Frydenstrand near Frederikshavn [10:600] and later at the Silkeborg Sanatorium [10:653].
Meeting with the Earth
In the midst of all of this, Carl Nielsen receives another commission. He has been asked to write music for a cantata [CNW 112] for the centenary of the Polytechnic College to be celebrated at The Convention for Nordic Engineers in Copenhagen in 1929 in the Grand Hall, that is to say what is now Forum in Frederiksberg, which opened with an automobile exhibition in 1926 and appears to have set a new standard, also for cultural events in those years.
The commission came from H.I. Hannover, professor and earlier director of the Polytechnic College, and the matter was delicate for the institution. The government had previously granted funding for a competition for both music and text for a jubilee cantata, but with a change of government the new administration did not consider itself bound by the commitments of its predecessor. When the Polytechnic College finally had a sense of the funds available, it was too late to think about a competition. If a cantata was to be written in time, there was no other option than to turn to the ne plus ultra of Danish music, Carl Nielsen, and ask him to take it on and to give him free rein to find the lyricist [10:537]. This H.I. Hanover is permitted to do; he is married to Carl Johan Michaelsen's sister Laura and belongs to Carl Nielsen's circle of friends.
There are several reasons, then, for Carl Nielsen being unable to say no. He also wants to help his old friend L.C. Nielsen, who is the only lyricist he can imagine working with, and he gets Nielsen's fee increased in advance from 400 to 500 kroner for the little project, a cantata of 10 to 15 minutes:
'First a song (3 to 4 verses) for men's chorus and orchestra, then a recitative (a sort of overview of science, history, and so on) for a male voice with orchestra. Then comes the speaker and after that a song for choir and orchestra, and finally, two, at most three, verses to the melody 'Sing, Danish man!' [CNW 288] where the audience should sing along. The cantata must be such that it can be sung not just at the centenary celebration but also at the annual celebration in the future.' [10:530]
This leads to a lengthy correspondence with L.C. Nielsen. L.C. has been sick and is recuperating on Sjællands Odde. Carl Nielsen drives in his Morris back and forth between Damgaard and Skagen. And let us make no bones about it: – here, we encounter one of the absurdities of The Carl Nielsen Correspondence:
When the composer sits in his solitude creating a major masterpiece from the depths of his soul and of his fertile sense of the world, we do not necessarily get to read anything much about it in the letters, but when, as here, he has major practical problems with a trivial little piece, which he would rather have been without, he dispatches one letter after the other to umpteen different people, and we seem to know all about its origin. Even though we know that the finished cantata [CNW 112] was sometimes played at subsequent annual celebrations as well, it is unlikely to have been played at all in the last 80 years, and perhaps the best reason for performing it again would be that, knowing so much it, we can only be curious to hear it, and from the other occasional compositions that we have heard, we know that almost always somewhere or other we will get a glimpse of something brilliant.
So far there is nothing at all. The composer cannot start composing before he has at least a verse or two to begin with. Carl Nielsen reminds L.C. time after time and feels bad about persisting, knowing that L.C. is still sick. L.C. for his part, does not want to let him down and promises several times that a couple of verses will now shortly be arriving. He does, however, find it easier to pen sarcastic remarks about 'the artwork' and party committees. L.C. Nielsen's opinion is: 'I will undertake the cantata especially because I will be collaborating with you yet again, even though the fee is relatively speaking the smallest I have received since I set up my stall in Aabenraa. If you had not got it raised to 500 kroner, I would have refused, because I received 400 kroner in 1902 for a cantata for the men of the iron industry, and even professors must know that 400 at that time was considerably more than 400 now, just as their professors' salary – scarcely too high, I have to say – is probably considerably more now than then.' [10:536]
Later L.C. writes: 'It is becoming increasingly clear to me what the fee suggested at the start, that it was not a poet you should have turned to but one of the writers of songs who advertise in "Politiken". There is one who calls himself Jacob. And you can still choose him; his verse will probably suit Professor Hannover best!' [10:584]
Carl Nielsen is still patient and supportive – he has no illusions about this being great art – but on 2 July, L.C. gives up and announces that he cannot write the text [10:624]. He has spent many nights tinkering with developments from H.C. Ørsted's The Soul in Nature (Aanden i Naturen) to Einstein and Bohr without being able to get started.
Now he urgently needs to find a new poet. Carl suggests Sophus Michaëlis but, in the meantime, he had declined Michaëlis's commission for music for the H.C. Andersen Festival in 1930 to devote himself to his own projects, and Michaëlis is now in no mood to discard his current projects to write poetry for the Polytechnic College. Ironically, the fee for the music for the Andersen festival play was of a somewhat different order: 3,000 kroner! [10:545]
At L.C.'s suggestion, it is the younger Hans Hartvig Seedorff Pedersen who will now take on the task. He immediately enters into the collaboration with the great composer heart and soul based on the evident premise that what they are looking for is enduring art and that the transitory is to be avoided. One senses in the correspondence with the composer that the latter has had to keep the poet at something of a distance.
Within a short time, however, Seedorff delivers a cantata text with the title Meeting with the Earth, and hereafter that is the title of the cantata for the Polytechnic College [CNW 112] Seedorff is not content to start with H.C. Ørsted but moves the seed of human knowledge back to the creation of the earth. It is bombastic, passionate, abstract Golden Age poetry, and the learned scientists, who have stipulated that the text must be submitted to a committee of three professors 'to make sure that the poet does not commit purely technical blunders' [10:530], find no blunders; there is simply nothing about technique in the text. In fact, there is nothing in the text that speaks to the polytechnic professors at all, but they resign themselves when they understand that Carl Nielsen is satisfied and thinks that the text is suitable for a composition.
On the other hand, there is one sentence in the text that they become politically concerned about. Toward the end – that is, in the verses to be sung to the tune of 'Sing, Danish man!' – as an expression of people's eternal thirst for knowledge, Seedorff has written the words: 'Extend once more your borderlines', and the science professors believe these words could be interpreted by the Germans as Danish aggression, a desire to move the border of Denmark to Hamburg [10:668] (Danish territory included a large part of northern Germany until Denmark lost around a third of its territory during the Second Schleswig War in 1864).
Seedorff smoothly makes the change to: 'Extend your knowledge's borderlines', and after Carl Nielsen has finally driven all over the country in his private car – postage is reimbursed by the client, but not petrol consumption – and has enlisted several music people to copy out choral parts for The Student Choral Society and to arrange the music for concert band, as it is The Band of the Royal Guards that is to provide a certain fullness and weight in the Grand Hall, the little man can dutifully stand in the same hall on 30 August in the morning and inaugurate the work before a mass audience from several countries.
And then that summer was over.
Hymn to Art [CNW 113]
There will be another new cantata that autumn; in Carl Nielsen's letter to Lisa Mannheimer on 29 June 1929, we hear for the first time that he has agreed to compose it: 'a hymn (cf. Samtid, no. 165) for the opening of the great Forum Culture Week that will take place in October.' [10:604] Once again, the Grand Hall is the setting for an exhibition of Danish art, old and new, sculpture, painting, literature and music. In a large number of stands (as we would call them today), everything is presented in groups and themes, poets and writers read, chamber ensembles play classical and recent Danish music and, in the middle of the hall, a number of large concerts of symphonic music from the Romantic period to modern times take place during the event.
Most Danish conductors and many soloists take part. At the first concert on the opening day, Carl Nielsen's new cantata is premiered and the slightly stiff picture of Carl Nielsen as conductor, the only photograph that exists of him in that role, is taken on this occasion (see photo at [10:755]).
This time it is Sophus Michaëlis who has written the text, and in such good time that Carl Nielsen can make steady progress on the composition at Damgaard from 3 to 13 September. However, he has to ask to be excused from the entrance examinations for the Conservatory in Copenhagen and would like an answer as to whether he can stay at Damgaard 'with a good conscience!' [10:729] To which the old Anton Svendsen replies:
'If we in the Conservatory wanted to prevent you from writing a beautiful work, then it would be us who would forever have to walk around with a guilty conscience. Therefore we absolutely prefer you to stay at Damgaard with your guilty conscience.' [10:730]
Before we reach the opening of the massive event on 12 October 1929, it has been renamed the Art Convention. The people of Copenhagen are all walking in the same direction, towards Forum in Frederiksberg, and the authorities have to intervene and manage the flow of people to comply with the fire authorities. Several times the convention is extended, and what should have lasted a week keeps going for a month. It does not close until 10 November.
This also means that the number of concerts has been increased. So Carl Nielsen ends up conducting four concerts in all. On Saturday evening, 26 October, he conducts a whole programme of his own compositions: Espansiva, the Clarinet Concerto [CNW 43] and the Aladdin Suite [CNW 17]. At the final concert, Sunday 3 November, there is once again an entire Nielsen programme with Nielsen as conductor for wind instruments only: the old Festival Prelude for piano [CNW 84], now arranged for winds, a suite arranged for the occasion of the music for Ebbe Skammelsen [CNW 21] from the 1925 play in Dyrehaven and, finally, Hymn to Art one last time. Politiken reports the same morning:
'The Art Convention is, of course, preparing for yet another big Sunday, and a programme has been planned that can keep the large crowds in good spirits. It begins with music in the early afternoon and continues late into the evening, with, among other things, a Carl Nielsen Concert. Experience suggests that Carl Nielsen is perhaps the person who "is the biggest draw" at the Art Convention.' Politiken, 03.11.1929.
The death of a friend
Now, do not think that the above was necessarily the most important thing to happen that year. Something else was also happening the whole time, simultaneously or adjacent to it, and the letters do not describe it in chronological order but as things crop up.
Bror Beckman, the fine, quiet, cultured man of music with the depressed temperament; Bror Beckman, who had met Carl Nielsen for the first time in Berlin in the autumn of 1894, already then an admirer of Carl Nielsen's music and who therefore could not contain himself when he came face to face with the man himself for the first time; Bror Beckman died on 22 July 1929. Bror Beckman, the Swedish composer, who earned a living at the Fylgia insurance company, in 1909 became the business manager of The Royal Swedish Academy of Music and the following year director of the music conservatory in Stockholm, and took his teaching duties so seriously that, in the words of Carl Nielsen, he 'burned his ships and put his music pen under lock and key in the bottom drawer and probably threw the key far out into Lake Malar so as not to fall into temptation and fail his post.' Bror Beckman, who more than anyone actively worked on behalf of Carl Nielsen and his music in Sweden; Ture Rangström, Julius Rabe, Moses Pergament, Gunnar Jeanson, among others, were all his students. Bror Beckman died the day Carl Nielsen, who had not locked up his own music pen, began composing the music for the hopeless Polytechnic cantata: Meeting with the Earth [CNW 112].
Bror Beckman had a bad heart, but in a different sense than Carl Nielsen. Bror Beckman's heart has been racing incessantly for the past few years, and Beckman apologises for talking about it in every single letter. Only on very rare occasions for a day, or seldom even for half a day, does his heart leave him at peace, and in the end that dwindles to never, and the doctors believe that there is nothing he can do about it but live with it for as long as his heart holds out.
So that is what Bror Beckman does, doing his work as one who responsible for the musical education and upbringing of young people and the continuation and progress of musical culture, and then discovers, to his surprise, that he still has the key to the drawer with his music pen. So, before he dies, he prepares a few old works for publication and performance including the only symphony he had ever written. It gets a few performances from Helsinki to Tivoli in Copenhagen where Frederik Schnedler-Petersen puts it on the programme, though Nielsen ends up not being able to attend because of the important matters his music pen gets him tangled up in.
On the other hand, he manages to send Politiken a brief foreword about Beckman's old symphony (Cf. Samtid, no. 164). Beckman has sent him the score with the words: 'I understand completely what trash it is. However, I am sending you a copy of the score anyway, just to show my gratitude for everything you have given me. Say nothing about it, but forgive this sin of youth and remember that it was written 34 years ago.' [10:576]
As a substitute for Carl Nielsen's presence, Søs and Emil Telmányi are invited by Schnedler-Petersen to lunch the day after the Tivoli concert with Bror Beckman and his young friend and housemate Alrik Wede, whom Beckman calls 'my so-called foster son' [10:267]. During the lunch, Carl Nielsen calls – not from Damgaard as there is no telephone there, but from a place nearby – and speaks with Bror Beckman and everyone else [10:615]. Bror Beckman also goes out to Fuglebakkevej to see Søs' and Emil's new house and, after his death, Søs writes to her depressed father: 'I can understand that you are grieving. But he was very weak, dear Father, and he often suffered a great deal[.] I'm so glad that he was so radiantly happy with his brief visit down here, he thought he was feeling so well. It's strange to think that he came all the way up the stairs in our house and stood with that nice, bright smile of his and looked out of the windows and found it so "vackert" [beautiful]' [10:677].
Carl Nielsen apparently tries without success to get in touch with Alrik Wede to find out something about Beckman's final days [10:723] [10:780]. All we know about Alrik Wede is that he was born in 1903, became a lawyer in 1928, was employed at various courts before he became mayor of Sollefteå in Norrland in 1938. In 1935, he married the drawing teacher Ella Engholm, born in 1904, with whom he had three children between 1940 and 1942.
The old publishing house
In a letter edition, it is not a bad idea also to read what does not appear in it. This we need to do if, for example, we want to know something about how matters stood between the composer and his old publisher. A letter from Søs to her father [10:151] could indicate that it lies just beneath the surface, not just for the main characters but generally with the members of both the Hansen and Nielsen families. Søs reports on an extremely strained conversation with Svend Wilhelm Hansen, in which they were both treading on eggshells while the tensions between business and art shout to the rooftops [10:151].
In April 1929, the publisher wants to reduce the royalty on an old contract [10:505]. Carl Nielsen declares himself so strongly in agreement with this – 'for the sake of life and death' – that we cannot help but be puzzled. In the original letter from Carl Nielsen [10:507] the company has noted: 'reduced 23 April.' – that is, in 1929. But on the original contract from 1918, Carl Nielsen had already confirmed with his signature on 4 November 1922 a reduction in his fee to the 15% that was now, once again, being proposed!! – And the publisher has paid 14 kroner in royalties for the copies sold before the price reduction [7:348]. These are serious matters to address!
Against this background, it is something of a surprise that, in January 1929, the publisher asks Carl Nielsen and Hakon Andersen to prepare a supplement to Melodies for the Songbook 'Denmark',[CNW Coll. 19] a supplement that Carl Nielsen submits to the publisher, fully edited, on 22 April 1929 [10:511].
He signs the contract on 27 April. The sum guaranteed amounts to 300 kroner, to be divided between Hakon Andersen and Carl Nielsen although, to start with, the publisher had proposed the same conditions as the contract for the original edition of Melodies for the Songbook 'Denmark' [CNW Coll. 19]: 15% of the retail price and a guaranteed sum of 500 kroner [10:433] [10:449] (Cf. the contract from 11.04.1924, EWH. The new contract for the supplement of 27.04.1929 appears to be the last the parties entered into).
However, the supplement was not published during Carl Nielsen's lifetime. The publisher did not receive security straight away for the guaranteed sum paid out. In August 1940 (Cf. the publisher's advertisement in the publisher's own Musikbladet, 1940, no. 5 and in Berlingske Tidende and Politiken, both on 18.08.1940. The obligatory copy for copyright purposes entered in The Royal Library in a larger combined submission from Wilhelm Hansen on 10.01.1941; hence the erroneous statement of the year of publication in the library's catalogue and in parts of the literature), however, the Songbook was published in a new, enlarged edition, undated, and also called 'new edition' by the publisher. It was precisely when the community singing movement reached its height in the first year of the occupation, and it was probably community singing that finally made the business viable.
Up to and including no. 279, the 1940 edition is identical to the first edition from 1924, and both editions, like sheet music editions in general, are published without the year – whether it is considered timeless music or not! The supplement to the 1940 edition consists of 81 new melodies, numbers 280a to 346b, and although the editorial material submitted by Carl Nielsen in 1929 has not been found, there is no doubt that it is part of the supplement. The edition also has the print number: '24 to 29,000' – that is, from 1924 to 1940: 23,000 copies, the new edition in 1940: initially 6,000 copies.
Among the new melodies there are 17 by Carl Nielsen, identical to the 17 that FS 111 counts under 'New revised edition (1926/27)' – with a strangely senseless and incomprehensible misstatement of the year. Most of these involve the reuse of previously published songs and therefore present no problem for later publishers. Two of the 17, however, were clearly created during the editing of the intended supplement in 1929. The one, no. 291a 'On straw and on feather' [CNW 389], is even marked with an asterisk as a first printing in this edition, in accordance with the edition's reuse of Carl Nielsen's preface to the 1924 edition, while CNU III/4-7, 273 makes do with publishing the song based a sketch with divergent sheet music. CNU III/4-7, 396 publishes the second, 'Skylark wings I used to carry'[CNW 377] (no. 312), based on a manuscript, which – submitted to The Royal Library's collection by the collaborating partner Hakon Andersen in 1935 – must also be presumed to be a sketch – and evidence for the melody having being written as part of their collaboration in 1929 (For the CNU edition to reject the relevance of the 1940 edition of Melodies for the Songbook 'Denmark'[CNW Coll. 19] may well be considered over-hasty, Cf. CNU III/7, p. 508 and pp. 104-105).
So, publisher Wilhelm Hansen and composer Carl Nielsen continued to communicate about song publications. There was no talk of new works. A few of these were published by other publishers, but several of Carl Nielsen's major works from the final years were not published until several years after his death. So at the time in his life when the composer had the greatest success and was the most celebrated and played, even outside of Denmark, he had no publisher.