Preface to Volume 11

About this volume (11)

The reader of The Carl Nielsen Correspondence can hardly have failed to notice that the constant changes in our daily life and the spirit of our times were already a condition of existence for Carl Nielsen and his contemporaries. There are barely two volumes of letters in which the mood and the spirit of the time is the same, and it makes even less sense to talk about Nielsen's day during his youth in the 1880s as being the same as in his final years, 1930 to 1931. Naturally, he comes closer to our time by the end of his life, but it will probably surprise most people to discover the degree to which his final years were marked by fragmentation and a collapse of values, which coincided with the culmination of the great (financial) world crisis. He also lives through this as an active participant even though his heart disease makes daily life more and more difficult, and the demands on him by his contemporaries as the undisputed leader of Danish music certainly do not make the end of his life any easier than his youth when he aspired to take part in music life and had to fight for everything.

The year 1930 begins with his composing 25 small piano pieces 'for young and old' [CNW 92]. At Damgaard from 1 to 22 January, he composes around one piece every day. Common to all these pieces is that the pianist's two hands, once they are placed on the keyboard, should not be moved within the same piano piece. Beyond the pedagogical usefulness this gives these compositions, the conscious choice of a sharply defined tonal range in every single piece contributes to the concentrated expression in each. On the other hand, the compositions are so different from one another that anyone familiar with Carl Nielsen's output can have a sense of these piano pieces as a chain of miniatures that bring most of the composer's well-known expressive features to mind: his grand statements scaled down to the children's nursery and the aspiring piano player's practice situation, a Nielsenian microcosm. The younger Norwegian composer Harald Sæverud reviewed the collection in a Norwegian newspaper and ended with the words: 'Carl Nielsen has managed to provide something of a musical guide in such a compact form that it can be used to great benefit by everyone. Employed in teaching, it will be a valuable aid already from the beginning in the attempt to reach something higher than what is typical now: the flesh willing, but the spirit weak. It aims to pave the way for a better and quicker understanding of the essence of music – life bound by rules, elevated to art.' [11:398]

Carl Nielsen is in a league of his own not least in that, throughout his life, he sought to go deeper and deeper into the musical substance while at the same time keeping up with the times and, to a greater and greater extent, became a friend to young people, many of whom had been and became his students. Piano Music for Young and Old [CNW 92] originated in the discussion evening of The Danish Society for Music Education, which was held at Borup's Folk High School on 22 December 1929, when he was invited to speak and where – though this was not in his script (Samtid no. 167). but reported by a newspaper – he 'ended with an appeal to composers to write good and popular music, which at the same time could be used as teaching material'. Politiken 22.12.1929. It is hardly a coincidence, however, that Carl Nielsen characterises the piano pieces to Hans Henny Jahnn as follows: '"Jugendmusik" in a somewhat different meaning than the completely innocent kind.' [11:741] Even here, where he was in tune with his time, there was still a distance. Music education had to have substance, it had to be something more than just musical activity, and it had to awaken a sense of and a longing for the very greatest manifestations of the human spirit both past and present.

This was not a new mode of thinking for Carl Nielsen. The large song project, which had really taken off in the collaboration with Thomas Laub on A Score of Danish Songs, I (1915) [CNW Coll. 9] and II (1917),[CNW Coll. 11] had grown out of the same idea that great music, great spiritual experiences, would be dead if they were not disseminated among common people (as one could still say at that time) in small edifying forms. Such words could still be used then and meant more along the lines of a greater liberation and revelation of life's resources than simply 'toeing the line'. 

In the 19th century, 'great' music had become a bourgeois music culture, and it goes without saying that the social upheavals of the 20th century were bound to send this culture into crisis. In Copenhagen, musical culture was sustained by The Royal Theatre but equally by The Music Society, where Carl Nielsen, after he and his views had suffered defeat at The Royal Theatre, had become conductor in 1915. Even then, The Music Society was running on borrowed time with a declining membership. In the years that followed, there had been efforts to create a proper symphonic institution in Copenhagen, and Carl Nielsen had also been active in these efforts, which did not succeed. Instead, on account of his illness, in 1927 he ended up having to hand over The Music Society to his successor, Ebbe Hamerik, in an even more fragile state than when he had taken it on (Cf. introduction to vol. 9).

Hamerik energetically embarked on a reorganisation but, in the spring of 1930, he too foundered. The prospect of a symphonic institution was raised again, and once more Carl Nielsen gave it his full support (Cf. Samtid no. 172). This attempt to create a true institution devoted to classical music in Scandinavia's prime city similar to those in most capitals and in many smaller Scandinavian cities was, however, no more successful than previous ones. It is against this background that the first director of Danish State Radio, Carl Nielsen's old friend, the chamber singer Emil Holm, an active organiser, also in attempts to promote a new symphonic institution, now approached his new post. As the next best thing, he worked to create a large radio symphony orchestra, which in Denmark would successfully carry the entire bourgeois musical tradition into the new era. As long as The Danish Broadcasting Corporation was a cultural institution for which the listeners were more than just a mass of people whose largest niche demands in conformity with the zeitgeist – created not least by the media – were to be serviced, and as long as classical music was allowed to be given special attention within it – in fact right up to its relocation to the DR-City at the beginning of the new millennium – Danish classical music scene hung on by the skin of its teeth and could thereby more or less hide the fact that it existed in spite of a rupture in its development at the beginning of the 20th century. This was a double paradox because, for the first time, Denmark had a composer who, more directly than most of his contemporaries, both reacted to and offered a solution to the (musical, spiritual and cultural) challenges of the new chaotic century.

A festival play [CNW 23] 

Even in times of crisis, life continues alongside the disruption as if nothing had happened. Our great composer still receives commissions for occasional works as he has throughout his entire composing career. The year 1930 marks the 125th birthday of the other famous native of Funen, Hans Christian Andersen. In the autumn of 1928, in preparation for a celebration of Andersen's birthday in 1930, a programme committee had been established to oversee the festivities in Andersen's home town of Odense. The leader was the head of The Hans Christian Andersen Society's board, Principal of the Odense Cathedral School H.S. Holbeck, while the city council was represented by, among others, the consul P.A. Kruuse. The programme committee must have contacted Carl Nielsen when he conducted The Dannevirke Society's concert in Odense on 2 November 1928 [10:334]; in any case, on 10 December, Carl Nielsen says in Politiken that he has been asked to write a cantata for the Hans Christian Andersen celebrations in Odense, but that he has had it changed to a little festival play for which Sophus Michaëlis will write the text.

In a radio interview on Hans Christian Andersen's birthday, 2 April 1930, with Fyns Tidende's editor Svend Thorsen, Carl Nielsen discussed the festival play in detail. A radio recording has not been preserved, but the interview was written down, and Fyns Tidende published it on 3 April 1930. Carl Nielsen reveals here both a considerable and personal knowledge of the artist Hans Christian Andersen, whose tone of voice he describes as original:

'I, too, am a native of Funen, familiar with the peculiarities of the Funen language from childhood, and time after time when reading the fairy tales I have marvelled at the typical Funen intonation! Yes, I have been amazed that first Copenhagen and then the whole world became intimately familiar with this tone of voice. After all, sentences are constructed without traditional, grammatical considerations and can therefore appear somewhat irregular. The reader sometimes asks why Andersen puts the words just so. But if one tries to read Andersen in the Funen dialect ... well, then, the whole thing comes together immediately and falls quite naturally into place. In the fairy tale The Buckwheat, when I hear the old willow tree say to the wheat when the storm came:

"Close up your flowers and bend your leaves, and whatever you do, don't look up at the lightning when the cloud bursts! Even human beings don't dare do that, for in the lightning you can look right into God's Heaven, and that sight will strike even human beings blind!"

Yes, when I read that, I am reminded of the sound of my mother's Funen voice, when she warned us children against looking at the lightning. Hans Christian Andersen is more Funen than I can say, but maybe, after all, his natural, colloquial and easy language was just the garb his fairy tales needed, and the very thing that has helped to spread them right across the world is Andersen having his origins on Funen.'

So here we are given at the same time an explanation for the inner turmoil that Carl Nielsen has occasionally expressed throughout his correspondence when it comes to lightning and thunderstorms! 

But when the radio conversation took place, not one note of the Andersen festival play had yet been composed! And when the interviewer asks how he goes about getting started, whether he devotes himself to studying Andersen as a person and a writer, he replies:

'In my case at least, the starting point for a composition is often a single chord... just a couple of notes struck on the piano. You must understand, when in this moment I think about the writer Hans Christian Andersen, then I see before me something that looks a little like a futuristic painting. I see perhaps, among many other things, an old fir tree, a spinning top, yes, and the neck of a swan... a kaleidoscopic picture composed of bits and pieces of his fairy tales. If now only a couple of notes would just spark out of this motley mix, then the worst is already over. For once I have the starting point – the motif – then it is as though I myself fade into the background; I can perhaps say, along with Holger Drachmann:

I am but an instrument,

The master on me plays.

What happens after the motif has sounded in my mind is simply a logical shaping of this motif. It is precisely this process that is expressed in the claim that as long as the toe of a classical statue has been found in the ruins, then the sculptor can form the entire artwork on the basis of this.' Samtid no. 174.

Carl Nielsen composed the music for Cupid and the Poet[CNW 23] in the period from 4 April to 7 June 1930. The three performances that he himself was to have conducted at The Odense Theatre, including the premiere on 12 July, were supplemented with two more performances. At the festival performance, Hans Christian Andersen's one-act play The New Lying-in Room and Paul von Klenau's ballet Little Ida's Flowers (Lille Idas Blomster), based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, were also performed. The ballet had been performed 16 times at The Royal Theatre in the 1916-17 season, as well as once with new choreography by Elna Jørgen-Jensen on Hans Christian Andersen's birthday, 2 April 1930 [6:86] probably as a sort of dress rehearsal for the festival performance in Odense. Nielsen's and Klenaus's joint performances in Odense gave rise to a meeting between the two composers; on the day of the final performance, Nielsen gave a dinner at the Grand Hotel for The Hans Christian Andersen Museums' curator Christian M.K. Petersen, consul P.A. Kruuse with their wives and Klenau, who later wrote in his memoirs: 'I conducted my ballet Little Ida's Flowers at the Hans Christian Andersen celebration in Odense and met with Carl Nielsen and Sophus Michaëlis, who had written a little festival play for the occasion. I spent some time with Carl Nielsen, and we had long conversations about the various currents in the field of music; in particular, Carl Nielsen was very interested in Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone system.' Klenau's memoirs are being published in The Music and Theatre Department of The Royal Library by Eva Hvidt, to whom we are grateful for information about the relevant passage. Taking into account Nielsen's other statements about Schoenberg and Klenau, including 6:86, one can judge for oneself the veracity of what Klenau wrote and the nature of their relationship. 

Like Carl Nielsen, Klenau conducted his own work. It was a success for both of them, and Carl Nielsen was crowned with a laurel wreath, though not his lyricist Sophus Michaëlis. The composer himself was realistic enough to write: 'It went well here [in Odense] but that is of course due to the festive atmosphere.' [11:176]

Cupid and the Poet [CNW 23] was the closest Carl Nielsen came to a large, original stage work in his final years, and the number of performances has remained at the five it had on the occasion for which it was created. The original overture, which picks up the thread from the dialogue between the clarinet and the snare drum in the Clarinet Concerto,[CNW 43] together with the two songs that Jenny Lind sings for Andersen in the piece, are pretty much the only parts there has been a chance to hear a few times since, so here, at least, to provide some impression, we should add Nielsen's own account of the plot:

'When the curtain rises, we see Hans Christian Andersen in a hotel room in Berlin on "Unter den Linden". It is 1845, when he was at the height of his fame. But he is alone, and he is cold. Only when the servant has put more firewood into the stove, where the poet is roasting apples while enjoying a solitary glass of wine, does he feel better and lie down on the sofa to rest and dream. First, however, he locks the door and carefully looks under all of the furniture to see that no one is hiding there! 

There is a knock, he opens the door, and there stands the naked Cupid, whose yellow locks are dripping from the seeping rain. The boy is given wine, becomes playful, dances and is naughty, and when I especially want to underscore his naughtiness, I let him sing. – In the end, of course, he shoots the poet in the heart and is chased away.

"A Stranger" now enters, a German artist, who reports that Jenny Lind, who has just sung at the opera in Berlin, is on her way to the poet, who a little later receives "the Diva". In the glow of a lighted Christmas tree that she has brought him, they sit and talk together. And as the poet remembers his childhood, one sees the changing images: Odense River, the washing place from She Was Good for Nothing, the Bell Deep, the burdock forest, the elderbush. All of this is accompanied by music, and from time to time Jenny Lind sings, first an Italian aria by Guido Cavalcanti, which is ravishingly delivered in the Italian language, then, at the spinet, a song about the "northern lights".

Finally, the poet says that it has been foretold to him that he should see his home town "festooned with festive flares" in his honour. And lo and behold, it happens: the last picture shows us Odense, illuminated in tribute to Hans Christian Andersen as freeman of the city, and Jenny Lind is also there to celebrate him. Imperceptibly, the picture now shifts to the present: June 1930, with the festivities in the city of Odense.' Samtid no. 176.

On the basis of this description, it is clear that Nielsen and Michaëlis have simply taken the poet's wishful dream that Jenny Lind would appear and brighten his Christmas Eve in Berlin, not the disappointed and vain waiting for the object of his desire that he describes in his diaries (Hans Christian Andersen: Dagbøger III, 1845-1850, Copenhagen 1974, pp. 27-37); they have taken Hans Christian Andersen's own harmonised version, as he has told it in The Fairy Tale of My Life (Hans Christian Andersen: Mit Livs Eventyr, Revised edition by H. Topsøe-Jensen, Copenhagen 1975, pp. 241-243), to its conclusion since, on stage, they have merely realised that dream – and in the process also trivialised the fairy tale about the naughty boy.

The idea was Nielsen's own; when he was asked for a cantata, he had replied that a cantata could hardly inspire him so he would prefer a small opera or a festival play. 'Well, and then I leafed through the fairy tales in my mind and soon stopped at the fairy tale about The Naughty Boy. This tale about the poet's heart, which may be old but, alas, is still so vulnerable to Cupid, has, among other things, the advantage that it contains a very dramatic situation... You know, the moment when the naughty boy, whom the poet has let in, shoots him with an arrow to the heart. It is this fairy tale that Sophus Michaëlis has now dramatized using Hans Christian Andersen's love for the great Swedish singer Jenny Lind as well as several additional motifs.' Samtid no. 174.

Before the author of the festival play had written his words, the composer may have had a broader perspective when he spoke of 'a small picture of life seen through the wrong end of the binoculars, everything quite small... and yet so large.' Samtid no. 160.

Cantata or festival play, neither choice was artistically satisfying in the end; on the other hand, the result cannot have been without a certain piquant charm. It may also have caused a playful little flutter in the aging composer's heart that among the listeners in the packed theatre hall was his first flame from his time in Odense, the theatre painter's daughter Gerda, whom the leather merchant Wiggo Dreyer had snatched from under the nose of the young musician, who had continued to write letters to Gerda from Copenhagen in vain. She now sat in the hall with Wiggo the leather merchant, and we know for sure that they communicated with each other, perhaps about the old days, because Carl Nielsen, his wife, and Frederikke Møller had lunch Tuesday 15 July 1930 at the Dreyer family's villa in the stately Fruens Bøge district (11:178), and Gerda thanked them afterwards for the visit (11:184). 

Several Cantatas

Carl Nielsen may have managed to avoid a Hans Christian Andersen cantata, but he was not done with cantatas entirely. Modern developments still had many requirements, which it was hoped the great composer would satisfy. He was commissioned to write a cantata, Poetry in Song and Music for the Inauguration of the Public Swimming Baths [CNW 115] in Copenhagen's sports park on 1 November 1930, and a mini-cantata, Song for Five-Part Mixed Choir for the Jubilee of the Danish Cremation Society on 23 March 1931,[CNW 354] which was performed in a radio broadcast about The Cremation Society on its 50th anniversary. There was also another rather larger matter: Cantata for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Society for the Education of Young Merchants [CNW 114], performed in the Børsen Hall on 3 November 1930.

Again, the cooperative Hans Hartvig Seedorff Pedersen  was able to deliver the sonorous words. Carl Nielsen threw himself into the project with heart and soul, and he was so taken with it that he repeatedly affirmed his commitment: 'I must do an occasional work like this as well as I possibly can as a sign to the composers of the future here at home that we should not slack off in minor pieces, because if we do, it will also be noticed in the major ones.' [11:291] Or: 'Otherwise I am immersed in the big Cantata, into which I have poured all my strength, since it has captured me like its slave.' Later, in the same letter, he states this even more directly: 'I consider this Cantata to be the best I have written, and it will probably be the capstone of this type in my output.' [11:299]

It must be admitted that the Cantata radiates both skill and refinement, and with immediate, captivating musicality. But one cannot help but think that here we have the same tension between musical quality and an impossible message in the text as in Bach's secular cantatas: music rooted in the greater awareness of life and existence that the major works reveal, composed for a message which, in Carl Nielsen's case, trivialises the market mania of his day's great economic crisis (and very nearly, our own):

There ran – and there runs! – a train o'er the earth,

an army of traders all weighted with freight.

We earned there our name as the blondes of the North

and stars of the future will find us in wait.

What Denmark has built with such hardworking hands

before we have borne as a burden, bent low.

We lift it again... And return to our lands

with joy and the future in tow!

Concealed behind this Cantata stands Carl Nielsen's childhood friend Emil B. Sachs, cousin of the Brandes brothers, the composer Victor Bendix, and one of Carl Nielsen's original patrons from Odense, the wholesale merchant Albert Sachs (Cf. Vil Herren p. 34). From 1902, Emil B. Sachs was the financial inspector and librarian at the Copenhagen Business College of Nørrevold and, using this position as the base, built up a unique culture of lectures and music at this business school, a youth education programme in which Carl Nielsen, both as musician and lecturer, figured repeatedly over the years (follow the references to Sachs in this volume of letters yourself), even after Emil B. Sachs' death in 1920 and after Sachs' favourite student, Axel Nordqvist, had taken over his posts and his pedagogical and cultural endeavours. Nordqvist also commissioned the anniversary cantata from Carl Nielsen. It is in memory of Emil B. Sachs that Carl Nielsen wrote perhaps his most beautiful reminiscence, and it is he who gave Carl Nielsen the opportunity to formulate his humane point of departure in the most sublimely simple and modern Socratic way:

'Anyone who uses his mind is elevated; even the most simple-minded person becomes more worthier every time he thinks about something, no matter what it is. But it has to be an independent endeavour, using the chambers of his own mind and heart as best he can in purest and simplest sincerity. Then it is good. Then it is like the first spade thrust in the earth that hides veins of gold. So it is all about getting people to think independently, and we can say that all the world's books, philosophy, art, science and religion are no use to us at all, even if we could grasp, encompass and remember it all. In reality, all of these high-flown things have, in one sense, no importance for us for now. Only from the moment that a seed from those worlds falls into our soul and takes root, only then does something happen that affects us in earnest and can become a matter of life and death. In this moment of fertilisation, our inner life begins and, with it, what we call our personal culture. For the seed may be a foreign body, but the ground is our own, and all those fine roots now seeking nourishment on every side find it only in our own being. And now a complete transformation takes place. Everything that we did not care about and had no use for before now becomes a source of enrichment whose streams at once nourish our spirit and clarify our understanding. We ourselves now become more beautiful. A great benevolence shines out of us. Something is growing inside us. What happiness, what joy!' Samtid no. 75.

The 'Merchant's Cantata' was noticed by Nielsen's contemporaries; it was not only performed on the ceremonial occasion at Børsen on 3 November 1930, but was also repeated at The Danish Concert Society's concert on 23 February 1931, again with the Palestrina choir and Mogens Wöldike [11:492] [11:493]. Carl Nielsen listened to the concert on the radio in Damgaard. Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen wrote from Copenhagen: 'You're a brick; it sounded beautiful and masculine and spicy.'

The car accident

Carl Nielsen was not in attendance for the first performance in the Børsen Hall either. A few days before, on 28 October 1930, at 10 o'clock in the evening, he collided with a tram in his right-hand drive Morris, reg. K 2928, as he was trying to  cross Østre Farimagsgade from Skovgaardsgade to Lundsgade. In the collision between the car's left front wing and the tram's front carriage, the car was flung back against the pavement in such an unfortunate way that the tram caught one of its rear wheels and dragged it approximately ten metres along the street. Carl Nielsen had not seen the tram; his left side window was fogged up; he had wound down the one on the driver's side. Nor had he heard the tram's warning signal, which the conductor admitted he had only given when he saw that the car was not slowing down; he then had 'gravelled', i.e. triggered the throwing of gravel onto the rails to enable emergency braking, but without being able to prevent the collision.

Carl Nielsen's already weak chest and heart region were jammed against the car's steering wheel during the impact, shards of glass flew all around him and he was severely cut. Before he passed out and was brought, unconscious, to the district general hospital, the composer managed to register that many people were crowded around him, felt some severe pain, and thought: 'Now I'm done for!' He was able to respond that yes, he was Carl Nielsen, though he could not remember his telephone number. Anne Marie was holding a meeting of The Women's Artists Association in Frederiksholms Kanal when the police phoned her, after which the meeting broke up and she went straight to the district general hospital. 

News of the accident was immediately reported on the radio and, the day after, in all of the newspapers. Over the coming days many anxious and sympathetic letters were written to the composer lying in hospital, including one from his old flame Gerda Dreyer in Odense, whom he reestablished contact with. The composer Kristian Sandby lived on the first floor at the corner of Lundsgade; he was, if not exactly an eyewitness, then an earwitness to the collision, but he was used to accidents with the tram at that spot, and only the next day, when he saw the newspaper, did he realise whom it had happened to this time [11:340].

However, as the days passed, it turned out that Carl Nielsen was not as badly injured as was first feared. On 18 November he was discharged from hospital [11:332]-[11:364]. The legal follow-up ended with a sentence in the Copenhagen City Court on 18 February 1931. The composer received it in absentia, while he was working on the major composition of the period, the organ piece Commotio [CNW 99], at Damgaard. A fine of 50 kroner had to be paid within three days, with half going to the state and half to the Copenhagen municipality. The composer and his insurance company were ordered to pay for the repair of the damage to the tram: 36 kroner and 50 øre. The cost of repairing the damage to his own car amounted to 1,261 kroner and 67 øre, for which the insurance company made an unsuccessful attempt to have The Copenhagen Tram System made partially liable on the grounds that the driver had contributed to the damage by not giving a signal in time [11:485].

Carl Nielsen was weak for a long time after this heavy blow. The autumn's big Nielsen event was the staging of Masquerade [CNW 2] in Gothenburg, where it had been assumed that he would attend the first night. It was postponed to accommodate him, while the concerts he was to have conducted in Finland had to be cancelled entirely. The Masquerade performance in Gothenburg ended up taking place without the composer after all, on 1 December, though there was talk of his coming to a later performance. He was too weak to travel alone, and only on 13 December did he make the trip together with Anne Marie to Gothenburg, where they were met by the press who had managed to arrange an extra performance on 15 December in his honour. Cf. Samtid no. 179.

The top post

No sooner was he home again, still in a weakened state, than the top of the Danish music hierarchy was struck by the next misfortune: the 84-year-old Anton Svendsen, director and unifying force at The Royal Danish Academy of Music, died on 23 December 1930. Throughout The Carl Nielsen Correspondence, the letters testify to the friendship between Anton Svendsen and Carl Nielsen, his erstwhile student, whose works Svendsen was one of the first to perform. For Nielsen, the situation was further complicated by the fact that the music conservatory's board had already decided in 1926 that he should be the next chair when Anton Svendsen resigned or died. The weaker Nielsen became and the more he longed to be left in peace, the more Danish musical life seemed to demand of him. On Boxing Day, Carl Nielsen's eulogy for Anton Svendsen could be read in Politiken, beginning with the words:

'Anton Svendsen's death will leave a gaping hole in the arena in which he lived and worked, but his great sincerity, his determination, goodness, rigour and warm humanity will continue to act as a model for those who must now continue his work. After his death, he will then be helping to close the hole and heal the wound in our musical life that his sudden passing has caused.' Cf. Samtid no. 180.

At Anton Svendsen's funeral in Garrison's Church on 29 December, Carl Nielsen conducted the second movement of Schubert's B minor Symphony, the 'Unfinished'. The widow's personal thanks to Nielsen for his subsequent efforts to secure a small pension for her can also be read in The Carl Nielsen Correspondence (11:639 and 487). 

On 7 January 1931, when the board appoint the new chair, formally confirming the old agreement from 1926, and add two new members, Carl Nielsen gives another memorial speech to the assembled teachers and pupils. He is characterising not only Anton Svendsen but the current state of music when he say: 

'... he was actually the only significant living figure from that great period in Danish music history, the only representative of the time when music meant something in this country. It was also for this reason that he had unflagging faith in his work and in the art of music as a cultural factor. He had inherited the bold artistic vision that sheds light and life on existence.' Cf. Samtid no. 182.

In accordance with cultural developments, the chair's role had been redefined in 1926, which was lucky for Carl Nielsen who was now to assume the position: 'When Anton Svendsen retires from the chairmanship, this position will be given next to Carl Nielsen, but in such a way that the chairman's day-to-day responsibilities, of both a musical and administrative nature, will be handled by Rudolph Simonsen and Godfred Hartmann respectively, who will at the same time join the Board of Directors, filling the vacancy left by Anton Svendsen's resignation.

For other future appointments to the position of chairman, our view is that central consideration be given to the need for the person to be selected, by virtue of his musical qualifications, to occupy a particularly prominent and esteemed place in our musical life, so that his administrative qualifications should only be a secondary consideration, the assumption being that the day-to-day management of artistic and purely administrative matters can be handled by other members of the board.' Signed by Anton Svendsen, A.P. Weis and Carl Nielsen, and certified by Rudolph Simonsen, Minutes of the Board meetings 1919-30, 5420-01-4, 23 November 1926, The Royal Danish Academy of Music, archive no. 1579, National Archives, Cf. Samtid, no. 183.

Saul and David [CNW 1] in Stockholm

That same evening, Carl Nielsen travelled to Stockholm, accompanied by his daughter Anne Marie, to be present at the first performance of Saul and David, originally scheduled for 10 January 1931. It ended up being postponed, however, due to David Stockman being ill; he was supposed to have sung David, at the age of 52 and rather portly, but was replaced by the Norwegian Conrad Arnesen, who had sung David to the composer's satisfaction in Gothenburg. The delay of the first night, which finally took place on 13 January, meant, on the other hand, that there was an extra day of rehearsal, 'and that was also a stroke of luck, because though Järnefelt is a fine and gifted musician, several tempi weren't right (four places too slow, and once too fast) and we corrected that.' [11:447] The performance was a great success, and Carl Nielsen also had many good things to say about both the performers and the production.

Nielsen was celebrated with dinners and parties at the homes of the opera director, his old friend John Forsell, and the city's Danish ambassador, Erik Scavenius, who later became better known – and infamous – as prime minister during the German occupation of Denmark, and whose brother Ove had been Carl Nielsen's student (and Søs' boyfriend). The year before, the Scavenius's manor house on Møn had been home to the composer while he composed the overture to the Hans Christian Andersen festival play Cupid and the Poet [CNW 23].

Saul and David was performed only three times in Stockholm before the Theatre replaced the success with a more secure source of income: a guest performance with the conductor Leo Blech in Puccini's La Bohème (11:461). At the end of the year, however, Saul and David appeared once again on the bill, and on 19 September it was broadcast over the radio and heard by friends in Gothenburg [11:811].

Cultural collapse

Time was not so far advanced in 1931 that one could not speak of great music – classical music and music built upon it – as the music, but the schism in our culture, and in music, during the great world crisis was made clear as never before in the space of just a few years. Musical life – if I can dare to refer to it in the singular – that is, the material foundation of the ideal musical life, which almost a couple thousand years had developed from the oldest religious chant to the various innovations of the 20th century, crumbled in the course of a few years. Music societies lost their members and shut down, music teachers lost their students, musicians lost their jobs, piano production in the world fell by half, while radios, gramophones and jukeboxes took hold everywhere. In a musical scene where art music and popular music had lived in a symbiosis, where there had not been a sharp distinction between the small live ensembles of restaurant and café musicians and the musicians of the symphony orchestras, where, indeed, they complemented each other, and where many musicians performed in and were economically dependent on both worlds, this development was a disaster. In his first official speech as the director of The Royal Academy of Music, Carl Nielsen said as follows: 'We will soon have no musical life left here in Denmark. Nearly half of the country's music societies have had to close. We have nothing left but the music conservatory, which is music's last bulwark. This is what we, students and teachers, together must fight to preserve.' The next day these words appeared in Politiken. Cf. Samtid no. 183.

As soon as he was home again, several sombre interviews followed (Samtid nos. 186 and 187), and when the Palace concerts, which Schnedler-Peterson had been responsible for and which had taken place every Sunday afternoon during the winter season since 1896, had to be discontinued, he wrote an open letter to Schnedler-Petersen, in which he bemoaned the loss but was not surprised: 'In the last few years, our entire musical life has slid rapidly downhill.' ... 'Give me your hand. I will clasp it while we hope for better times for our art. But we are forced to bow our heads before the icy indifference that now prevails towards good music throughout the whole country.' Cf. Samtid no. 188.

The final movement

Carl Nielsen had not yet given up composing. Though, from our distant perspective, the need for a steady income might seem to have been allowed to dominate the last few years, he had one more major work in the offing, and he had no intention of letting the top post of Danish musical life swallow him up completely. He wrote to Lisa Mannheimer in Gothenburg: 'I would have preferred to take the opportunity to leave the Conservatory, and Marie agreed with me about that, but I cannot escape, as every voice without exception is demanding that I stay at least until we can see that things will work out and gradually get into a good rhythm. After all, I can always free myself as soon as I see it running smoothly without me, and no human being is indispensable, least of all me!' [11:419] To Sigrid Rabe, he writes that he hopes he can relinquish his position again in a year's time [11:424].

The major work that he will still manage to complete is the organ work Commotio [CNW 99]. We do not know precisely when he began working on it. We can read that he dreamt of composing for the organ already in 1913 in a letter to his wife: 'I've been wanting to write a fantasy for organ and have already begun. It's tremendous what an organ can sound like when a great master handles it.' [4:761] Shortly before this, he had met Karl Straube, who had given concerts in Copenhagen. It is striking that he used the word 'fantasy', and that he pointedly avoids using the same word about Commotio in 1931 when, prior to Emilius Bangert's performance of Commotio in Lübeck, he tries to formulate a programme note: 'I do not want anything about "fantasising" in there. The work is so strict in its form and part writing that I am incapable of making anything tighter.' [11:759] 

In the letters, however, Commotio does not appear until later when, on the morning of 17 February, Nielsen travels by train to Damgaard. In Jutland there is a snowstorm, and on the same day he writes from Damgaard that he 'is here for 10-12 days to put the finishing touches on the large organ work that I have wanted to try for many years.' He does indeed succeed in this; that is, he puts the finishing touches to it, as he already reports on 1 March that Commotio is finished [11:510], and the next day writes his wife:

'Now my great organ composition is completely finished, and I'm happy with this work because it was done with greater skill than all of my other pieces – that I think I can judge myself, but not how it otherwise is in spirit. It's a large work and probably lasts around 22 minutes. Bach's largest organ work (Prelude and Fugue in E minor) is 368 bars, mine is 511, so as far as the scope is concerned – – ? Bach is unmatchable!' [11:512]

Commotio will follow him like a red thread until he dies seven months later. No other work has received as many previews as Commotio, nor been the object of so much attention from colleagues and peers before the public premiere. As many as six performances were arranged for private occasions before Emilius Bangert gave it an officially premiere at the organ festival in Lübeck on 6 October 1931, four days after the composer's death.

The six performances: Peter Thomsen in Christiansborg Palace Chapel on 24 April [11:567] [11:569]; Finn Viderø in Nicolai Church on 14 June [11:640]; Emilius Bangert in Roskilde Cathedral on 23 June [11:663] [11:667], in the cathedral in Bern on 22 July [11:708], for the author and organ builder Hans Henny Jahnn in Hamburg on 29 July [11:716] as well as in Aarhus Cathedral on 14 August [11:738].

In a letter to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, Bangert himself recounts how he was approached in Lübeck by the president of The Nordic Society, who told him that Carl Nielsen had died, and how the day before the performance of the work, at a meeting for the participants in the organ week, he was invited to give a eulogy for Carl Nielsen, which he then did, 'struggling both with the foreign language and my own feelings. Great emotion rippled through the audience, and no less so on Tuesday at the work's premiere. I hardly know how it went, but according to the judgement of competent listeners, it must have gone well. The enthusiasm over the new organ work was overwhelming; at the gathering after the concert, the manuscript was circulated – all of the organists studied and discussed it and expressed a unanimous wish that it should be made available through an immediate publication.'  [11:844]

In Copenhagen, Peter Thomsen first performed Commotio in public, at the Church of the Holy Spirit on 9 November 1931. For the last private performance in Aarhus on 14 August, in a letter from Skagen, Carl Nielsen was especially pleased to invite Margrete Rosenberg to go from Damgaard to Aarhus at his expense [11:738]. But the two did not meet in Aarhus; it appears from letters that had not formerly been known in the literature that Carl Nielsen was too sick to make the long trip from Skagen to Aarhus and back again [11:740][11:742]. Some of the letters from his final months show that Carl Nielsen attempted to get Commotio published quickly, but the work was ultimately published only after his death. The manuscript for Commotio lay on his writing desk at the time of his death; the full title read Commotio no. 1. This title was entirely his own; he did not take the word 'commotio' from any other composer. The word means 'movement', which Carl Nielsen also understood as 'spiritual movement' [11:759]. It is perhaps more than a curiosity that Carl Nielsen's op. 1, Suite for strings [CNW 32], is comprised of the three movements Prelude, Intermezzo and Finale, three movement designations that refer to something that is not in the work, and that he now ended with 'Movement no. 1', and wrote the number 1 knowing full well that there would not be more.

Plato

After completing Commotio, Carl Nielsen only composed the choral song Nordic Harp [CNW 365] [11:604] and a few notes for the Grundtvig Easter Evening [CNW 24], which was presented at The Royal Theatre on 4 April 1931 to support the completion of P.V. Jensen-Klint's Grundtvig Church in Bispebjerg [11:117] [11:541]. The summer was dominated by his bad heart; although he does not complain, closely reading of the letters nevertheless reveals frequent allusions, however restrained, to his poor state of health. It is also clear that he would like to start composing something larger; he had even said publicly that that he would probably embark soon on writing music for a new opera, and as late as 19 September The Royal Theatre's new director, Andreas Møller, felt it necessary to inquire further so they could accommodate the forthcoming work in the season plan for 1931-32 [11:786].

Everyday business and the dealing with his position in (what remained of) Danish musical life filled up and fragmented his time. He compensated with intensive reading of Plato, who had been his lifelong interest and whose works, he tells Emil Telmányi in July, he now possesses in their entirety. This is an interest he clearly shares with Margrete Rosenberg, whose commentary on Plato's dialogue Theaetetus  [11:780] may not only portray the original structure of consciousness in that ancient philosophy but also the fundamental experience still present in Carl Nielsen and others in the unusual autodidact environment of artist intellectuals of the time:

'As yet, no gulf separates the interior of one person from another, which in our time so often creates bitterness and lonely contempt between people. The images Socrates uses are not arbitrarily chosen. Just as in olden times, he still experiences his thought process half outside of himself, as something that has to be hunted down, and his inner life as the wax tablet written upon from the outside.' [11:580] It was not only in music that the answer to collapse lay in a search harking back to the original human experiences and modes of thought.

There are two letters from Carl Nielsen to Margrete Rosenberg [11:738] [11:920] in this volume though Margrete, reportedly at Carl's behest, destroyed all letters from him. There must have been many; more than 170 letters from Margrete Rosenberg to members of the Nielsen family have survived, 52 of which are included in The Carl Nielsen Correspondence.

The eternal return

The old Wilhelm Hansen publishing house and publishing issues continue to intrude and to generate both meetings and letters. Not least Masquerade [CNW 2], which Carl Nielsen had sold to Wilhelm Hansen in 1906. The contract's full text is:

'The undersigned hereby acknowledges that he has assigned and sold to Mr Wilhelm Hansen, Music Publisher in Copenhagen and Leipzig, the unrestricted and exclusive property rights to the following work composed by me:

The opera Masquerade

so that Mr Wilhelm Hansen has the exclusive right to publish and distribute said composition, both in the form in which it is delivered by me and in any other arrangement, adaptation or revision, for all time and in all of the Scandinavian countries. The time of the work's publication is left to the discretion of the publisher.

In compensation for the transfer made, I have received from Mr Wilhelm Hansen, on this date, a total fee of 1,000 kroner, and have no further claim on him in this respect.

Copenhagen 24 November 1906

Carl Nielsen.'

Now the trouble was that this contract had not yet given rise to the publication of anything but a piano reduction for rehearsal purposes. In particular, the opera's overture and 'The Dance of the Cockerel' had become favourite orchestral excerpts over the years, which could only have been performed because Carl Nielsen himself lent handwritten scores and parts to Danish, Scandinavian, and European orchestras.

The Society for the Publication of Danish Music had been founded in 1871 and, over the years, had played various roles in Danish musical life influenced by social developments and the changing position of classical composers and classical music within society. Even though its statement of purpose spoke of 'working for the advancement of Danish music by financing or supporting the publication of musical works of lasting significance, both older and newer, especially those whose publication by others means is associated with difficulty', the society's role had for many years been primarily to disseminate piano transcriptions of orchestral music for use in middle-class homes. The society also published several of Carl Nielsen's early works in this way.

Gradually as the new century progressed, however, active, living composers gained a stronger position on the board, the so-called Societal Council, and the society began to publish more and more works in original versions for performance by orchestras and ensembles. In this way, the society got into trouble for publishing Carl Nielsen's Masquerade [CNW 2] Overture in the autumn of 1929; the parts were needed after all. However, this resulted in a lawsuit being filed by Wilhelm Hansen. This happened at the same time as the Stockholm Philharmonics corresponded with the composer about borrowing the handwritten scores, which Wilhelm Hansen now also wanted to forbid the composer from providing even though this was the practice that had made the many performances possible up until now. In this way, the Stockholm Philharmonics became a kind of hostage in the affair between the society, Wilhelm Hansen and Carl Nielsen, and the result was an almost absurd correspondence. (Cf. [11:460] [11:509] [11:518]  [11:520] [11:537] [11:539] [11:544] [11:564] [11:650] [11:665]) The Masquerade case was not made emotionally simpler by the fact that the company Wilhelm Hansen appeared to be acting provocatively with parallel cases. Two booklets of pedagogical piano pieces were published, for example, which younger composers had composed as a result of the meeting of The Society of Music Education on 22 December 1929 (Cf. Samtid no. 167). It was at this meeting that Carl Nielsen had given the lecture that resulted in his composing Piano Music for Young and Old [CNW 92], which Wilhelm Hansen refused to publish, thus putting Carl Nielsen in a difficult position with his own students [11:145] [11:206] [11:481]. On the other hand, Wilhelm Hansen offered their assistance in sending the handwritten scores for a performance of the clarinet concerto [CNW 43] in Germany even though no contract for the work had been discussed, let alone signed [11:290] [11:293].

Carl Nielsen, for his part, asked for copies of all of his publishing contracts, and sought legal assistance as well [11:305] [11:380], but he also made an appeal from his sickbed after the collision with the tram [11:359]. 

The problem with the Masquerade Overture was finally resolved in a settlement that Peder Gram brought about. Take note of how many times Carl Nielsen and Peder Gram encounter each other in this volume or even hold meetings together. Peder Gram became chair of the Societal Council in 1931 and, on 16 February of the same year, he was also elected chair of The Danish Composers' Society on Carl Nielsen's recommendation [11:476]. The settlement meant that the society accepted Wilhelm Hansen's rights to the overture in exchange for the society's being allowed to sell 125 of the copies already printed, and at the same time receiving compensation from Wilhelm Hansen of 450 kroner, of which the 200 kroner went to the composer as an 'acceptable fee' (Cf. [11:528] and Elly Bruunshuus Petersen: Carl Nielsen og Samfundet til Udgivelse af Dansk Musik, 1899-1931, Fund og forskning, vol. 40, Copenhagen 2001, pp. 222-224).

It is safe to say that the Carl Nielsen-Wilhelm Hansen dispute was passed on to posterity and remained an open wound and a topic of conversation in Danish classical music right up until the complete Carl Nielsen Edition (including, among other things, the two operas for the first time in print) was published between 1998 and 2009 – by the Wilhelm Hansen Publishing House. When the many eulogies came out in the days following Carl Nielsen's death, Asger Wilhelm Hansen's did not quite ring true: 'Carl Nielsen was a good friend of the house, for many years a friend of my father and uncle. After all, we were his main publisher and printed most of his works. The two operas Saul and David and Masquerade, four symphonies, four quartets, a couple of concertos and a number of songs and small piano pieces.' Cf. Berlingske Tidende 03.10.1931. The truth is that Wilhelm Hansen published symphonies no. 1, 2 and 4, and the first three quartets; the violin concerto and two wind concertos were published by The Society for the Publication of Danish Music, the clarinet concerto in 1931 and the flute concerto not until 1952.

Cultural Criticism

The Wilhelm Hansen conflict was probably the most burdensome of the conflicts Carl Nielsen had to contend with in his final months and years. And yet the even larger, less private, more objective and still more serious issue he lived with increasingly, as his life and the century progressed, was art music and the threatened position of its values in our culture. It affected not only the conditions of his life as a musician and a composer but penetrated the deepest layers of his artistic creation, and the publishing problem was perhaps a manifestation of the same issue.

On the same day that he completed Commotio at Damgaard, his friend the writer Karl Larsen penned an editorial in the newspaper: 'Live Music and Mechanised Music' (Karl Larsen: Menneskemusik og mekanisk Musik, Politiken 01.03.1931.) This gave a new impetus to the criticism of the situation facing the world of music, which  Carl Nielsen himself had brought to the fore before leaving for Damgaard.

For Karl Larsen, the villain was 'the sound-altering mechanisation of music, which has been unleashed in the arena of culture itself, the home, and which has already shut down one living music society after another all over the country, made solo concerts of the highest quality difficult, and – last and worst of all – destroyed musical education and practice in schools and especially in the family, which is the very foundation of all music life in a community. If the poisoning of these sources of musical understanding continues unchecked, we shall be completely at the mercy of mechanical music...

In its own surreptitious manner, the battle between live music and mechanised music has been going on here in Denmark curiously below the public radar until the statue of the radio god now rightly stands in the new building of our national, literary and musical arena (The Royal Theatre's new stage, the so-called 'starling-box', which had been set up as a radio studio). Mechanisation seems to have triumphed with us in a kind of insidious material battle against living flesh and blood and musical sense without any bulletins being issued or any lists of the war casualties being published. Musicians and music teachers have been impoverished, the music literature thinned out and the musical culture has deteriorated with every passing day, but the only impression the public had was of the quantitative and commercial power of the radio, which of course, in the spirit of the times, was perceived as proof that the whole movement was not only viable, but also meant genuine progress.'

A response to this diatribe came not from Carl Nielsen but from two of his young friends: Jørgen Bentzon, his student since 1915, and Finn Høffding (Politiken 08.03.1931). Both young composers, who had come into contact with the new folk music movement in Germany, now took the opportunity to strike a blow for their view of how the masses could best be educated musically. There was little disagreement about the horror of the situation, though the young people were less negative about the possibilities of the radio and the gramophone. 'The mechanical instruments have only aggravated the situation,' as Finn Høffding expressed it, 'one finds the huge gulf between concert life and musical life. ... While concert life is going downhill, music life is making faint progress. ... Concert life, in its present form, will undoubtedly die.'

By contrast, Karl Larsen, like a good conservative, claimed in a new editorial: 'The concert hall must – together with the church and the opera – be and remain the stronghold of live music, which must be maintained at all costs even with the greatest sacrifices. If it falls, it will collapse with devastating effects on even the most splendidly directed individual activity of amateurs. The artist is and must remain the ardently cultivated and necessary model and instructive guide for the amateur. Just as even the finest symphony orchestra will end up playing to empty seats where active musical education is lacking, so will even Fritz Jödes' education of his pupils end in both pretentious and "damaging" amateurism if the guardianship of true artists is lost sight of.' Politiken 13.03.1931 and Karl Larsen: Levende Musik – mekanisk Musik, Copenhagen 1931, p. 44.

Carl Nielsen arranged for The Danish Musicians' Society to publish Karl Larsen's editorials, supplemented with Jørgen Bentzon's and Finn Høffding's responses, and he himself wrote one of his best forewords to the little book, which came out already at the end of April 1931 [11:573].

Now it was said of the situation: 'Never before has the art of music been in such dire straits as it is in this moment. From being a spiritual value that we all gathered around to support, it has become a harlot who offers herself from open doors and windows, from cellar passageways and stinking jazz dens. Not even far out at sea can we be free from the ugliest and most intrusive tunes of the day.

The art of music is a strange creature. – None of the other – so-called beautiful – arts are capable of instantly expressing such banal and base emotions as music but, on the other hand, neither are they capable of evoking such exalted and uplifting images. Between these two extremes, the high and the low, lies a whole world of the most marvellous values; it is therefore sad that the vast majority of the population is incapable of receiving the best, but instead prefers the absolute worst {...} If it were possible to translate (transpose) one of the worst pieces of music or melodies into words, it would be prohibited by the morality police as offensive to the public good.' Cf. Samtid no. 190.

In the journal Musik og Handel, Organ for Musikalie – Grammofon – samt Musikinstrumentbranchen, he was attacked for turning 'very sharply against popular music' and for 'depriving our dance music of all cultural value' and believing that 'if a dance tune could be transposed into words, it would be banned by the police'.

In his reply, Carl Nielsen considers that the two music publishers have read his foreword like the devil reads the bible and clarifies his point of view:

'My remarks in the said foreword apply of course to no particular category, but only to what is bad and banal in all forms of music, whether it be found in a large-scale symphony or a dance. Naturally, there is always a greater likelihood that the worker who is employed in the lowlands will more easily encounter rottenness and filth than one who works higher up on the mountainside. But dance music is fully equal to all other music; we have only to mention such names as Gungl, Lanner, Strauss, Offenbach and Lumbye to be clear about this. The worst kind of music is probably the tepid, sentimental salon music, which often pretends to a certain higher aspiration but, in reality, moves in an air that is suffocatingly thick and nauseatingly sweet. This whole question of taste is, of course, difficult as we have no real criterion for determining value in music; I will therefore conclude with a declaration that I care just as much for a good dance as a good symphony, whether they belong to the past or the present.' Cf. Samtid no. 193.

Karl Larsen wanted Carl Nielsen to have argued against Jørgen Bentzon's and Finn Høffding's belief that, despite everything, something good could come of mechanisation; he would not, and defended his position even though he basically agreed more with Karl Larsen than with Bentzon and Høffding: 'Neither of the two men – Bentzon and Høffding – believe that radio is anything other than a reflection of the real music; that is for me the heart of the matter, and so there is no reason for opposition on my part on that point. Nor is there any rudeness or lack of courtesy shown towards you or I would have stepped up anyway, for you should receive nothing but gratitude from music people.

The thoughts and suggestions put forward yesterday (in the editorial) will surely neither hurt nor help, and I believe they will be forgotten tomorrow; your inescapably true statements, on the other hand, will be remembered, and I certainly believe they have made an impact and will continue to do so.' [11:522]

What Karl Larsen probably did not know was that Carl Nielsen had already had a 'run-in' along similar lines with the person he himself probably considered his most gifted pupil, Jørgen Bentzon.

In 1930, Bentzon was on a trip supported by the Ancker Grant. On 8 April, he wrote home to Carl Nielsen from Seville a letter that does not just indicate but acknowledges that he is having a very hard time relating to the great art and music he has travelled to experience (11:98). On 27 November, he wrote again, now from Berlin, having made contact with the German folk music movement and believing he has found his new path, which means that the music he had hitherto composed no longer means anything to him.

Carl Nielsen answers the letter a few days later. He takes a SocraticSocratic tone, trying a more indirect approach like a midwife; yet it is hard not to read the letter as an expression of the greatest distancing and disappointment at a student who is reneging on their shared values, and indirectly he gives the explanation. To the young man who has found not just a new form of music, but also the proletariat, he says with pain in his shoulder after the collision with the tram:

'I myself have come from the proletariat, I know it all, but say: People are people at all levels of society; they eat when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty, reproduce because of the same desire. The poor take far more pleasure in life than the rich because they know hunger and thirst, cold and sweat, while the rich never get down to the heart of the strongest of the elementary functions of life. I have no special sympathy for the term "proletariat", and I believe that if you move forward collectively, you easily lose the sense of the individual. You must not listen to me, though, but follow your own enquiring and rich mind, and if you believe it is important for the sake of humankind to work for the poor in spirit and to erase one's own self, for that is the price, you will do it anyway even if I shout myself hoarse about your abilities. But what about art? It still persists and makes demands.' [11:377]

How they had discussed the matter upon Jørgen Bentzon's return home we do not know, but we do know that Carl Nielsen maintained this Socratic distance from his student, sustained by the hope that the student would find his bearing within himself. During the research for his doctoral thesis, Michael Fjeldsøe discovered that Carl Nielsen signed The Music Theatre's appeal, written by Svend Borberg, for financial support a few days before his death on 24 September (Michael Fjeldsøe, Kulturradikalismens musik, Copenhagen 2013, p. 183 and note 53, p. 712). As one of his last acts, then, Carl Nielsen supported the environment in which Jørgen Bentzon was now the prime mover. Many years later, on 12 March 1949, after having spoken about his loneliness in relation to people and his isolation from reality, Jørgen Bentzon wrote to Richard Hove these contradictory words, which say a great deal: 'Just think, I believe that Carl Nielsen – despite the vast difference in his wealth of abilities, predisposition, temperament, etc., etc. – had the same experience as I; I knew him for 16 years; I was very close to him, I loved and admired him. But I never managed to find out what was really going on inside that man even when I thought we were closest to each other.' Morten Topp: Jørgen Bentzon, Musik & forskning 4, Copenhagen 1978, p. 75.

Last birthdays

Despite illness and physical weakness, Carl Nielsen managed his role in Danish musical life to the end. In June, he was a judge in a conducting competition to fill the position of assistant conductor in the Tivoli orchestra. Svend Christian Felumb and Thomas Jensen had to share the first place in the competition; Felumb got the post. In the same days, Carl Nielsen himself celebrated a birthday, and the day after he appeared for what turned out to be the last time as conductor in Tivoli, conducting his flute concerto [CNW 42] with Holger Gilbert-Jespersen as soloist for The Danish Soloist Society's celebration day.

The day after was Maren's birthday; she was, after all, an absolutely indispensable member of the household, and even though we do not know how she was paid, it is certainly not a home as a person she is treated meanly; rather, it was her own sense of her position within the household that set boundaries. In 1931, on her 65th birthday, Maren has six family members over for chocolate, but even though Carl Nielsen has said that they may of course use the dining room, Maren will not. She takes all six with her up to her room. 'Søs was here with a nice present and was so sweet to Maren,' [11:636] writes Carl to Anne Marie in Bad Brambach. She had left for a treatment on 30 May and no one knew when she will be home again. The Carl Nielsen Correspondence know, of course, that she was back in Copenhagen again on 16 July.

On her own birthday on 21 June, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was not home either, and it is surely reasonable to imagine that memories of the conflicts and separation of earlier times sometimes occurred to the sick husband during these weeks, and the thought that he might never see his wife again also disturbed him. 

On 19 June, he writes the most beautiful, lovesick letter a woman could wish for from a 66-year-old husband after 40 years of a stormy marriage. The evening before, he was so ill that Søs and Emil, who had been by to see him, phoned the chief physician Knud Faber and asked whom they should call if he took a turn for the worse during the night, but Faber knew his case well, the patient himself commented, and simply said that he should take plenty of drops. 'I feel very well today and the pain was caused by a cold fever which has now passed.' ... 'Now, my own love! I am sitting in the sun and writing and thinking of you. On Sunday I will celebrate your birthday by gathering all my loved ones here and then you know that we'll all be thinking of you and of course missing you a lot.' [11:654] Enclosed with the letter is the most beautiful four-leaf clover, which he himself had found, and which still clings to the letter in the archive. 

The daughter and son-in-law of Carl's brother Anders from California, Kirstine and Einar Petersen, are on their first visit to Europe with their 6½-year-old daughter Norma, and they have just arrived in Copenhagen in time to take part in Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's birthday celebration, the birthday without the guest of honour. Joining them, of course, are the childless children and children-in-law, Søs and Emil and Irmelin and Eggert, and finally Eggert's mother, Frederikke Møller, whose heart is not in great condition either. 

The day is spent visiting the Christiansborg's riding arena and showing off Christian IX, and driving out to eat a picnic lunch with Irmelin and Eggert at their new cottage in Tibirke. In the evening, there is dinner at Frederiksholms Kanal, and the lonely husband himself describes it in a letter to his wife the following day: 

'We had lovely soup (tomato soup) with buns and Søs served. Then boiled ox tongue with peas, cauliflower etc., then those hot pea-sticks and, finally, vanilla ice cream with fruit. I had decided what we should have and it all went well. Then I made a speech for the birthday child down in Brambach and Einar joined me after the hurrahs singing: "A shame on her, my girl's not here", and so on [11:663].

The composer's speech for the sculptress is also attested to in a note that Frederikke Møller later dictated:

'On 21 June of this year, I was invited, along with Carl Nielsen's American niece and several others, to dinner at Frederiksholms Kanal. Carl Nielsen first welcomed the American guests in his usual way; then he sat quietly for a little while, tapped his glass, and now spoke in a very different, stronger tone, and with a very beautiful expression, about how much he had missed his wife – whose birthday we were celebrating that day – during the time she had been abroad, how much she meant in the home, how much he had felt what she meant to him with her bright personality, and how much he looked forward to having her home again. 

After dinner, he took all of the guests down into her atelier and, with enthusiasm and explanations, showed us every one of her creations. – Unfortunately I do not remember any more details, but it is a strong and beautiful memory.' [11:661] 

Then the son-in-law Emil Telmányi spoke in his immigrant Danish about the artist, and the day after, which happened to be Emil Telmányi's own birthday, Søs tells her mother in a letter: 'Later Emil stood up and made a lovely speech about you, my own dear Mother. It was so right what Emil said, and I was so happy to hear with what loving, dear, warm eyes he regards you, dear Mother – Then we went around and saw the ateliers. Emil had unfastened the latch in the little ateliers, and now we've locked the door on the other side with the small key and refastened the latch. They were both very impressed with your Uffe. – Yes, it was strange to go there and look at all your work while you yourself were away. Just think, up in that big window, that little plant that crept in, you know, is blooming with all of these little fluffy flowers.

Today your sweet letter came to Emil on his birthday. It was sweet of you to remember him so nicely!' [11:666] 

The Death

Days of ill health and considerable pain and occasional days of improvement keep alternating with each other. The longing for death, never been a stranger to him, is often present. Even though it was often said, before the letters were available, that Carl Nielsen denied to the end how ill he was feeling, he wrote bluntly, for example, to Lisa Mannheimer, his friend in Gothenburg:

'I have – just between us – not been feeling very well. A few days before I went to Tibirke, I had a fever and then the other pains became so severe because blood and pulse speed up during a fever.

I wish so often that I could just die immediately, but then things improve again and I want to live and carry on working on my art and striving toward a goal that can never be reached.' [11:680] 

Considered from the perspective of how bad he was actually feeling, more than a little of what he does during the final months takes on the character of a farewell: the visit to Vilhelm Andersen in Fredensborg, for example, and the subsequent letter, which we know only in part because Vilhelm Andersen published a fragment in facsimile for a commemorative article on the day Carl Nielsen was buried (11:881). Svend Godske-Nielsen, too, felt that Carl Nielsen's last visit was a final farewell (Cf. Svend Godske-Nielsen: Nogle Erindringer om Carl Nielsen, Tilskueren, June 1935, p. 429. There is a contradiction in Godske-Nielsen's recollection, however, as Carl Nielsen's visits to Vilhelm Andersen and Holger Begtrup that he speaks of took place at the beginning of July, while the private performance of Commotio Peter Thomsen mentioned had taken place already on 24 April 1931). 

Thorvald Nielsen wrote the following note in his diary for Monday, 21 September 1931, a week and a half before Carl Nielsen died and two days after the manager of The Royal Theatre wanted to programme a new opera by Carl Nielsen: 

'At Carl Nielsen's. He called around 7 o'clock saying he was all alone; wondered if I wanted to come over and have a chat. Spoke about his illness. Has minor attacks daily. Described his mood by saying he wished he were six feet under – such an air of depression fell over him. I told him I have a fear of death. He had too in his youth, but it receded – now he didn't have it. As so often before, we got to talking about eternity and the possibility of life after death. Carl Nielsen: "It is not impossible that there are spirits here around us, who perhaps smile at us because we can't understand these things. When we die, perhaps senses that have been bound by our physical life are freed up. What is a thought? Something absolutely intangible, but nevertheless the greatest reality." Then we got into Plato's theory of forms. Incidentally, he had been greatly cheered by the rehearsals for Masquerade during this time under the excellent Italian conductor Egisto Tango. He had been approached by The Royal Library to donate the manuscript of this opera: "I have looked for it and found only the pencil score and some torn notes, but they would like to have these most of all – they're a funny lot, these library people." Later Mrs Carl-Nielsen came home. Had dinner. But Carl Nielsen only had an apple: "For now I want to be thin". Played a rubber of bridge together with a young doctor whose name I have forgotten. After this, Carl Nielsen and I retired to his study. He took out the piano reduction of Masquerade: "There's one thing I want to ask you. Don't you think we can allow Jonna Neiiendam to sing this section an octave lower to make it easier for her – I would so much like to have her sing this part – I think she's so good." Comp. [11:787].

As we stood together at the grand piano, I felt suddenly moved, aware that this was probably the last time we would be together. I then said, perhaps somewhat awkwardly: " – I love your music so much". He said nothing, barely smiled, but put his arm around me and looked into my eyes with this strange, burning gaze – the same radiant eyes that I remember from our first meeting.' Thorvald Nielsen: Nogle personlige erindringer. Carl Nielsen i hundredåret for hans fødsel (ed., Jürgen Balzer), Copenhagen 1965, p. 17.

On Friday 25 September there is a dress rehearsal for the revival of Masquerade at The Royal Theatre. Naturally, the composer is in attendance, all of the participants are there in costumes and are masked, the photographers are present (The Royal Theatre's journal for 25 September 1931: 'Rehearsal for Masquerade (full costumes and masks) with orchestra and photographers on the old stage.' – No further remarks, no sign of anything unusual having taken place), and the number of stagehands at the time was probably more than 30. And here comes the story that has followed the composer's death ever since; the oldest recorded version in the 1948 biography reads: 

When Carl Nielsen 'stood on the stage with Tango, there appeared to be something wrong with the ropes on a high pole behind the stage. An engineer did not have the strength to climb up and put it right, but Carl Nielsen disregarded his heart condition. "I can do it", he declared and, using his arms alone, he climbed to the top. Afterwards, Tango accompanied him home for lunch, and with much laughter the two told Mrs Anne Marie what had happened.' MS II pp. 334-335. 

The source of the story is almost certainly Irmelin, who may have heard the story from her father in the final days of his life, but more likely had it from her mother, who was told it at lunch immediately after it happened by the merry pranksters. Søs repeated the story in her 1965 memoirs of her childhood home, as does Emil Telmányi in his 1978 memoirs. It is a typical family anecdote that gets embellished with distance! Cf. AMT p. 177 and Telmányi p. 191.

It could have been a good 21 metres up and down, if it did happen, and if there was in fact a rope to climb. Independent experts  with knowledge and experience of the mechanics of the old stage believe it is unlikely there would have been a rope to fit the story and that, if there had been, he would never have been allowed to climb; he would have been prevented from doing anything so rash. If the climbing did take place, the only reasonable explanation would be that it was a suicide attempt. And the explanation of his action: 'His arrogance, overconfidence and wilful disregard for his illness' (MS II p. 335), that was given, also with a number of variations in connection with this story, would have been interpreted as the relatives' attempts to obfuscate or repress, and, moreover, provide a very superficial view of the man whom we know quite well through 11 volumes of letters. As an exuberant man, yes, but not a thoughtless and irresponsible one; on the other hand, a man who, throughout his life, expressed a longing for death, not least when he could not get started on new, significant work as had now been the case for six months since he completed Commotio on 1 March 1931. 

We are forced to seriously consider whether Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who must be the sole purveyor of the story, perhaps as a result of the events of the following days misunderstood Carl Nielsen's and Egisto Tango's playful banter about the composer's illness and what may have been an insignificant episode at the theatre: 'Look, there's nothing wrong with me!' Carl Nielsen's death a week later needs no special explanation, a sudden overexertion; the progression of his condition, as shown in this last volume of the letters, is sufficient explanation. 

Saturday was the premiere of the new production of Masquerade. The sick composer was again in the theatre. A little article about Masquerade, which he had probably written a few days before, was included in the printed programme (Cf. Samtid no. 197). The statement in the old biography that he had to leave his seat in the middle of the performance to go home (MS II p. 335) is probably not correct either. Another version, which has him staying in the theatre until the performance was over, must be based on reviewers' firsthand observations and is found in several newspapers: 

'When he attended the performance of Masquerade at The Royal Theatre, he was already a man marked for death. He sat in the dress circle with his head resting wearily on his hand and his gaze blurred by fever. When the curtain came down, he staggered out, supported by his wife and son-in-law, but while he was putting on his coat, the theatre resounded with a storm of applause, and a friend lead him into the theatre hall. He only reached one of the columns in the orchestra pit, however; from there he nodded to the audience, but they could not see him. At this point, his strength was exhausted, and he staggered out to a waiting car.' Aarhus Stiftstidende 03.10.1931. This version is also supported by Dolleris, p. 347.

This version also agrees more with Anna Ancher's wording in her letter of condolence: 'It was really very serious that evening when he was tired and did not want to go up to receive his deserved tribute.' [11:804]. On Sunday 27 September, Olfert Jespersen, who presumably also witnessed the composer in the theatre the night before, writes: 'You too are on a bed of pain?' [11:797]

Two days later, Tuesday evening the 29th, Carl Nielsen calls Gudmund Hatt. He comes, they play bridge, and Hatt reports this in a letter to Emilie that same evening: '... and tonight I played bridge at Carl Nielsen's house. He is truly unwell and has had some bad attacks of his angina pectoris. Nonetheless, he had a great time and in one game got 12 undertricks, doubled. But he looks disturbingly weak.' [11:798]

On Thursday 1 October 1931, Carl Nielsen writes his last letter one hour before he finally allows himself to be admitted to hospital. The letter [11:801] to Gereon Brodin accompanies the programme article about The Four Temperaments [CNW 27], which he must have written in the previous days, and which he now apologises for not having time to revise. 

In the evening, the 'starling box' is inaugurated as a radio studio, and the first live concert is broadcast from there. Carl Nielsen was to have conducted the second half of the concert: the violin concerto [CNW 41] with Peder Møller and the Aladdin suite [CNW 17] but has cancelled and will be replaced by Emil Reesen. He wants to hear the concert in the hospital and has a crystal apparatus set up by his bed, but he cannot stand the bad sound and rips the headphones off his ears.

Over the next 24 hours, he gets worse and worse. The family gathers around his bed. He sleeps a lot but when he wakes, he is fully conscious. On 2 October around 10 p.m. he awakens for the last time, looks up at those gathered around him and says: 'You're standing as though in a waiting room, you are waiting...' AMT p. 177 and MS II p. 335.

Ten minutes past midnight, on 3 October 1931, his death is confirmed.

For the next several days, the country's newspapers are filled with Carl Nielsen; already on the same day one can read about his death in the New York Times [11:808], and the many letters of condolence that conclude The Carl Nielsen Correspondence begin to stream in to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen – poignant reading with new flashes of memory and often new knowledge about the letter writers' relationship to the key figure.

The Story in Brief

Let us review:

Carl Nielsen was born into a poor family of farm workers, who also made their living as village musicians, in 1865, the year after Denmark had lost a quarter of its territory in the war against Prussia and Austria. Carl Nielsen's father took part in the war, which allowed the family to receive public assistance.

The Funen village musicians, however, aspired toward something greater: culturally. They founded a music society, Braga, and met at various inns on Funen to perform overtures and movements of classical, not least Viennese Classical, music with a small orchestra, not for an audience, but because they wanted to familiarise themselves with great music and not just play at parties. This is where the boy Carl received his musical and cultural initiation.

He was drawn to military music in Odense, the capital of Funen, as a means of making a career but was also given the beginnings of an education by a local cantor, who as a young man had been educated in Leipzig. This, with the help of private patrons, lead him to The Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen on a free place. From there, he joined The Royal Danish Orchestra as a second violinist from 1889 to 1905. In 1908, he became second kapellmeister with ambitions to renew opera, but left the theatre in 1914 after conflicts and defeats.

In the subsequent years, he was the conductor for The Music Society in Copenhagen, which was in financial difficulties and had a board so fearful of the bourgeoisie that he was not allowed to perform Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. He also became a member of the board of the conservatory and died as its director, in the most prestigious post in Danish musical life, while the wider European music scene was embroiled in the midst of its worst crisis, struggling to define its own content and its relation to social developments.

In Denmark, Carl Nielsen stood for posterity as the healthy Danish man with both feet on the ground, who wrote melodies that children could sing; in truth, his life was conflicted on many levels, not least in relation to The Royal Theatre, his publisher and his marriage, which lay in ruins for decades. When he died, that at least was healed, and his wife could say by his graveside: 'I thank God for his nature.' – A nature explored as fully as possible by The Carl Nielsen Correspondence. Surprising in its fullness! 

From the beginning, his music was noticed by elements in the musical world and by cultural personalities from other disciplines. His enemies soon spoke of his coterie, his 'bodyguards', who said 'Mozart, Beethoven and Nielsen' or even 'Nielsen, Beethoven and Mozart'! However, his works were only played when wealthy citizens sponsored his concerts, or he did so himself, and during World War I he speculated on the stock market to finance his own concerts. This ended in a tax case 10 years later, and a bankruptcy that was only averted because the Danish Parliament granted him – now the national composer – the largest artist allowance ever under the Finance Act. At the end of his life, he stood uncontested as the top figure in Danish musical life, but the new works he wrote were only published slowly and in many cases long after his death, and not by his actual publisher. He is now the first Danish composer to have a complete edition of his music and probably the largest edition of letters in Danish history based on a single individual.

One does not have to hear many bars of his music to recognise Nielsen. To place him within music history is a more difficult matter. One can hear glimmers of him when listening to Hindemith, Honegger, Bartók or Shostakovich. It is typically the slightly younger composers with whom comparisons are natural, and yet he did not want to be modern at all but expressed doubts about whether it was still possible to compose valuable music at the advanced stage of history in which he lived. He sought early on to acquaint himself with all periods of music history with an emphasis on music from the Renaissance to the Viennese Classical period. In the Romantic 19th century, it was almost exclusively the classically-oriented Brahms that he took to heart. He met Brahms in Vienna in 1894, and the meeting was so animated that Nielsen fell over backwards in Brahms' rocking chair.

In addition to his music, Carl Nielsen left behind his childhood memoirs, sporadic diaries and a large number of articles and interviews, which, republished together, fill three volumes. On top of that, he left a correspondence with many musical and cultural personalities at home and abroad, and Danes from all walks of life – in short, the basis for The Carl Nielsen Correspondence, which, with its 7,000 pages in 12 volumes, will be completed at the start of his 150th anniversary in 2015. People interested in music at home and abroad have barely begun to get acquainted this material, which also has implications for other subjects in the humanities, and which perhaps, with an experience of music in mind, can contribute a little to a broader understanding of our great history.

We now know that the Danish composer and his music originally had more interaction with European musical life than music literature in Denmark has so far revealed. Foreign music literature did not exist; the Danish language does not make things any easier for Nielsen. The initial breakthrough of his music in the 1960s was not a completely new phenomenon but more of a restart after the 1930s and the World War's shutdown of cultural exchange and development.

In Nielsen's own time, for example, the Austrian conductor Siegmund von Hausegger, the first to play Bruckner in original editions, promoted several Nielsen works in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. Artur Schnabel, who was also a composer, was a real admirer of Nielsen. He could not sell Nielsen's difficult piano music at his concerts, but in Copenhagen he played it at private parties. He did the same for a whole evening in the company of Schoenberg, which resulted in Schoenberg trying, in vain, to seek out and find Nielsen, after which Nielsen made a return visit and they did meet up. The two were equally childish and connected with each other on a personal level. Schoenberg wrote a wind quintet after Nielsen, which does not resemble Nielsen's, of course, while Nielsen in the end did not like Schoenberg's music, of course, but actually found it old-fashioned! He also became friends with Joseph Hauer in Vienna, and he had associations with Busoni from his youth until Busoni's death. As Schoenberg basically responded to the crisis of musical life (and our civilization) at the beginning of the 20th century, so did Carl Nielsen, though without theorising and in a particular intuitive-intellectual way and with a greater sense of the connection between the top and bottom of culture.

Over the years, Carl Nielsen became a rallying point for Nordic composers. Centred in Gothenburg and with Wilhelm Stenhammar, Ture Rangström and the musicologist Julius Rabe as the main actors, a dialogue based on Nielsen's music emerged in the years after World War I. Rangström's first article as a music critic in Stockholm was about Carl Nielsen's mission as a 'de-Romanticiser' of music. After Stenhammar's performance in 1918 of Carl Nielsen's Symphony no. 1[CNW 25] (from 1894), Julius Rabe formulated what appears to be a common musical creed: 

'We must learn it anew, open our eyes to the fact that the greats whom we admire were not poor, sentimentalists like us, but that they experienced form... and whoever experiences form in the artistic sense always experiences a burning act of will... The quietism and absence of will that characterise yesterday's art is what brought us the misery of a world war, and means that in the generation now at the helm, no one seems to have the strength to untangle the threads. We must become cultural activists, must develop a will to act and to act on a grand scale. A form-oriented art can help us to this end, and in his music, Carl Nielsen is almost the only one who can bring us closer to this attitude toward life in the future.' GHT, 15.03.1918.

Carl Nielsen liked to speak about modes of feeling when he had to characterise the music of others, such as Wagner's, which he had already left behind in the 1890s. His own mode of feeling was expressed not least in counterpoint and polyphony, which he cultivated to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries.

'Whereas Wagner was the great tonal sea on which the individual voices floated, Modern music strives to separate the waters as if we could imagine a choir on stage that suddenly became individualised,' he said in the 1920s, and continued: 'I began by composing for piano, which I later transcribed for orchestra. The next stage was that I wrote my score directly for the instruments. Now I think from within the instruments themselves – as if crawling into their souls... the clarinet, for example, can be at once warm-hearted and downright hysterical, both gentle as balm and screeching like a streetcar on poorly lubricated rails.' Cf. Samtid, no. 111. 

In the clarinet concerto, Nielsen frees up the clarinet, for example, adding yet another layer to the musical polyphony, a character polyphony based on the quality and personality of the instruments and the musicians. 

Margrete Rosenberg, Carl Nielsen's eternal shadow ever since he proposed to her as a young man and was turned down, living and working at Damgaard and making a living as a music teacher in Fredericia, also understood him fundamentally. For example, after listening to one of the commemorative radio broadcasts about Carl Nielsen, she wrote to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen:

'Anyone who is going to talk about Carl Nielsen's music and its significance for the cultural life of the future must not be a child of his time to the extent A.B. [Kai Aage Bruun] is. He must be able to look prophetically into the future so that he is able to make clear what a turning point has occurred here in the history of music.' [11:869]

Perhaps, as a result of the 150th anniversary in 2015, Nielsen's music will be played more often and more broadly throughout the world – in the niche of the world's musical life called classical music at any rate. The fact that some of Carl Nielsen's music makes a breakthrough in a niche does not necessarily mean that his mode of feeling, the consciousness and understanding that he strived for in his music, will also make a breakthrough. Nor would such a breakthrough occur in a musical life with the cultural implications he dreamt of and which extends from top to bottom and constitutes a unifying force in cultural development. Niche music needs a linguistic articulation and for its consciousness to break out of the niche.

The editorial material of The Carl Nielsen Correspondence comprises more than 13,000 letters by, about, or related to the main character. Together, the 11 volumes of text reproduce 5,960 letters and 1,912 diary entries and calendar notes.

The editing process has actually been 13 years of tidying up and sorting and an attempt to bring coherence to the source material, which tells us most of what we can know today about the composer Carl Nielsen, his social circle, and the circumstances of his life from when he steps out of his childhood on Funen to his death in Copenhagen on 3 October 1931. Major and minor features of the existing literature can now be revised and corrected, and most of what was written before The Carl Nielsen Correspondence should be reassessed in relation to the information in the mass of letters. 

For the major supporting character in The Carl Nielsen Correspondence, the sculptress Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, the relationship is a little different in that the literature about her has been virtually non-existent. As a result of the correspondence, she has for the first time appeared as a three-dimensional figure, in all her artistic greatness and human and unbending obduracy in the midst of difficult circumstances. The art historian Anne Christiansen has already sifted through The Carl Nielsen Correspondence and much other material, and delivered the first major monograph. (Anne Christiansen: Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, født Brodersen, Odense 2013, 424 pp.) The Carl Nielsen Correspondence bows humbly, proudly and gratefully! 

We do not claim that there might not be material and subject areas that The Carl Nielsen Correspondence cannot shed light on, nor that, many years from now, a new letter may still appear every now and then, or that more material could be found in an overlooked archive, but we dare to think that The Carl Nielsen Correspondence has the vast majority of what has not perished, and that it has so much that, for the time being, there is enough to acknowledge and formulate for a nation and musical circles that for decades were perhaps too used to believing that they knew their greatest composer, and then for decades saw it as their duty to promote music to satisfy the conditions of our time and of a classical niche; conditions that have their origins in the extensive musical, cultural and civilisational crisis that began in Carl Nielsen's time and burst forth for everyone to see in the final years of his life.

What remains is the task of dealing with the history and message of the music and the crisis. We are now at a place where the fragments of the statue, of the history, are so numerous that, with sympathetic understanding, it can be recreated  in its main features and basic outlines, if not with a wealth of detail needed for a truly popular mammoth series, preferably not created by people who are too much children of the times!

We have erred through a failure to understand the interconnectedness of history and its meaning  – to such an extent that everything had to be reassessed. What is needed is to recover history, its past and its possible future within the context of the development of our culture and society as a whole. For there was more at stake than music when Nielsen and his music was present at the birth of modern societies.

Editorial note

After 13 years of tidying up, it would be strange if in the end you were not left with, if not a pile of leftovers, then at least some letters that could not be placed in sequence or that were not included in time. That is why The Carl Nielsen Correspondence ends with two small appendices:

Appendix 1: Undated letters that are arranged alphabetically by recipient.

Though quite a lot of the letters have been dated for the first time and perhaps just as many have been dated anew because the context has made it necessary, and because the composer's increasing fame, as we worked our way through his life, made it possible to verify events and dates in newspapers, journals and other contemporaneous material, there are still some remaining which could not be dated and which therefore comprise Appendix 1.

Appendix 2: Arranged chronologically.

Due to misdating (or misreading), other letters were placed incorrectly within the chronological correspondence, which was the starting point for the editing of the individual volumes. They have therefore only turned up after the volume in which they should have been placed had already been published. A smaller number of letters have come to our notice, or been submitted to or purchased by The Royal Library too late in the publishing process with the same result. Hence, an Appendix 2 for these 'delayed' letters.

THANK YOU!

In addition to the many people who have contributed to making The Carl Nielsen Correspondence possible in the initial phase, when most of the compilation took place, and who were thanked in the introduction to the first volume, we also extend a warm thank you to those who have made their contributions since that time:

The Archive of The Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, Professor Emeritus Peter Brask, Organist Jens E. Christensen, Art Historian Anne Christiansen, Inger Enquist, The Music Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Music Historian Finn Gravesen, Cardiologist Finn Gustafsson, Stage Engineer Bent Johannsen, Elsebet Riisager, Niels Peder Jørgensen, The Royal Theatre Archive, Theatre Historian Alette Scavenius, Music Historian Inger Sørensen, Edition Wilhelm Hansen AS, Copenhagen, Managing Director Loui Törnqvist, Clara Vedsted.

A thank you to the various members of The Carl Nielsen Correspondence steering committee for their persistent efforts to see the correspondence through to completion. A special thanks to Anette Faaborg and Søren Clausen, who have divided the initial and final phases between them as leaders of the steering committee – Anette as the enthusiastic and inspiring initiator, and Søren as the experienced, problem-solving official, both with an unwavering belief in the project's importance and equal solidarity. 

Without external funding there would be no Carl Nielsen Correspondence. Thank you for all the financial contributions from the foundations, the Ministry of Culture and Herbert Blomstedt; all are listed on page 5 of individual volumes. Thanks for the encouragement, which pledges of support have also been when they arrived during this 13-year process. A very special thank you to Niels Gangsted-Rasmussen for his mediation efforts at critical moments.

Thanks not least to the publisher Multivers and Henrik Borberg, who have managed to get the many volumes out so quickly and painlessly that we have felt confident that we could take a breathing space for at least a few days every time a volume was handed over to the publisher.

Thanks no less to the first editorial staff: Henry Petersen, Hanne Hee Lange and Esther Kielberg, and to our archival roots Georg Simon, Claus Ahnfeldt-Mollerup and Adam Jon Kronegh. Due to illness, Georg, Henry and Claus have left this world during the editorial period and this gives us occasion to remember these good colleagues, committed to the service of truth and to consider once again that The Carl Nielsen Correspondence, like all true humanities projects, points beyond the individual experience. Thanks to Morten Gudmund Hansen for linguistic help, and to IT-consultant Sigfrid Lundberg for the creation of an indispensable utility programme for the letter database.

Thanks to Librarian René Thomsen, The Pamphlet Collection, and Research Librarian Claus Røllum-Larsen, The Music and Theatre Department, both of whom have eased our way to useful archives. Likewise, thanks to Librarian Christa Nettermann, The Copenhagen University Library, who with great success has solved the ever more difficult task of the global digitised library system 0f obtaining loan material in time to meet the deadline for each volume. Thanks, too, to Reproduction Photographer Helle Pedersen, The Royal Library, for completing the many images on the same terms. Thanks to Hans Mathiasen for always prompt typesetting and delivery of the note citations for the individual volumes.

A special and personal thanks to Historian Gert Posselt, who was employed as an editorial assistant from volume 6 on, and who has therefore been involved in half of The Carl Nielsen Correspondence. Thanks are due to his professional handling of the editing work on many levels, but not least for his competence in dealing with the large and amorphous mass of names, which range from kings and emperors to 117 variants of Jane Doe. Most of all, thanks are due to his presence that enabled a daily, professional dialogue that transcended those developments in the humanities conforming with the zeitgeist that The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is not a result of.

Last, but not least, a more intangible thanks must go to the remnant of the Nielsen legacy that in Denmark has survived both national distortion and pervasive national and international populist superficiality. The development in Denmark in the hundred years from Carl Nielsen's time to our own is characterised by the fact that the country has taken the step from being a small, independent nation of culture with original art that did actually have something to offer to the wider world, to an indifferent small state assimilated into the global development of oblivion.

Surrounded by the absence of an audience interested in the material and in a story that a few decades ago, in Denmark and Scandinavia, would have had popular appeal and spoken to a larger number of media, people and gatherings, the substance of the Carl Nielsen legacy has, miraculously, continued to have such immediacy and momentum that, in the 13 years the work has been going on – years characterised by a cultural and societal collapse that probably matches the collapse in the final years of Carl Nielsen's life – it has been able to pull The Carl Nielsen Correspondence intact through a major institution of cultural heritage undergoing change; it has been able to attract the necessary funds, even during the scramble for money during the tumultuous run-up to the celebration of the composer's 150th birthday in 2015; and has also been able to attract the necessary workforce, prepared for a number of years to bury, disappear and immerse themselves in a preliminary stage of the Danish nation's history, who still had the strength to concern themselves with finding an response to the dissolution of values that is barely acknowledged today. The  process of publishing The Carl Nielsen Correspondence is something in the nature of a miracle and, despite the recurring turmoil it has faced, it has been a life-affirming experience which, in the interests of the wellbeing of worlds both great and small, we hope to be able to share with one and all.

John Fellow

14 March 2014