About this volume (2)
While a music festival planned in Mulhouse, where Carl Nielsen was to have performed several of his works, came to nothing, in February 1898, the composer succeeded in giving a composition concert in Copenhagen exclusively with his own works.
The running and the future fate of Thygesminde, the farm near Kolding where Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen had been born, is a subject of discussion throughout the year. A manager is appointed, and for a period the idea is mooted that Anne Marie and Lucie’s brother, Paul, might take on the farm, but it is not until the summer of 1899 that a solution to the problem is arrived at with the sale of the farm.
While Anne Marie’s sister hesitates to get married, friction begins to appear among the married couples. J.F. Willumsen is in the process of leaving his wife, Juliette, and their two children, and the problem occupies the Nielsen couple, who get particularly involved on Juliette’s side.
Carl Nielsen’s friendship with his senior composer colleague Victor Bendix has developed into a regular collaboration. Carl Nielsen writes the instrumentation, for example, for four choral songs [CNW B 3] by Bendix to texts by Karin Michaëlis, a work that receives its first performance at The Music Society in February 1900, while Carl Nielsen and his wife are away in Rome. The programme and the reviews reveal nothing about his part in the work, but Carl Nielsen’s handwritten score, which was used at the performance, is still to be found in Victor Bendix’s Collection.
At the same time the composer is mulling over his own plans for an opera. These result in a number of vain attempts, among them an opera based on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, for which Sophus Michaëlis worked on a libretto that also came to nothing. The Nielsen and Michaëlis families had both planned a stay in Italy to pursue this project, but the Nielsen family do not get away until a few years later, when the title of the opera has become Saul and David [CNW 1] and the librettist Einar Christiansen.
Before work starts on Saul and David, however, the String Quartet in E-flat major, op. 14 [CNW 57] is completed. This is given its first performance on 1 May 1899, but no mention of this is made in either the letters or the diaries, nor of the story, related by Carl Nielsen in Nationaltidende in 1925, of the disappearance of the manuscript, which had to be reconstructed from sketches and fragments (Samtid, pp. 335-338).
After the sale of Thygesminde in the summer of 1899, Anne Marie’s father becomes increasingly ill and in the summer he dies after an operation in Copenhagen, while the sister, Lucie, finally gets married around the same time to Niels Petersen and moves into his doctor’s accommodation in Skærbæk near Ribe. Skærbæk forms part of southern Jutland that was German from 1864 until 1920, and, as a result, in the coming years the Nielsen family will be in close contact with this lost territory.
That summer, the sculptress stays at Sønder Elkær manor in Vendsyssel to model the bull Sultan, which would become the model for the two bulls that would the entrance to the Danish agricultural exhibition at the Paris Exposition the following year. In the autumn, she models a stallion on Lolland. As regards the time the artist couple spend apart, the year 1899 is not much different from any other.
Husband and wife are, however, together in Rome from the end of December 1899 until the end of June 1900. While Anne Marie studies with the French sculptor Victor Ségoffin, Carl Nielsen is working on Saul and David. Other Danes are also in Rome at the time, among them the art historian Vilhelm Wanscher, the painter Hans Nikolaj Hansen and the reformer of church song Thomas Laub. The limited knowledge we have so far about this stay in Rome has been extended by the selection of Laub’s 'circular letters' sent home to friends and family. We learn here, for example, that on those rainy February evenings, Laub and Nielsen perform almost every one of Mozart’s sonatas for violin and piano for the Danish circle in Rome.
The parents’ correspondence with their children, who have been left in the care of a teaching couple in Jægerspris, tells its own story, not least of the children’s precarious situation during their parents’ prolonged absence. Through Danish newspapers and letters from friends at home, the Danes in Rome follow the fractiousness playing out in Copenhagen’s musical life where camps were being formed for and against Carl Nielsen even during his absence.
In 1901, Carl Nielsen completes the opera Saul and David, and it is accepted for performance at The Royal Theatre. The premiere is at the end of November the following year. Before then, he had composed his Symphony no. 2, The Four Temperaments [CNW 26], which he premiered three days after the first performance of the opera.
In 1901, the constant stream of applications to The Ministry of Church and Education for support is also replaced first by an annual three-year grant of 800 Danish kroner and later by what was called an 'annuity' of, initially, the same amount. At the same time, Anne Marie is awarded the commission of the reliefs to go on the new bronze doors of Ribe Cathedral. This is also the year when Karen Marie Hansen, the mother of Carl Nielsen’s son from before his marriage and now owner of a little fashion shop on the shopping mall in Bogense, thanks Anne Marie for 100 kroner towards a new violin for her son and in doing so reveals to us that there is a link between the two families. At the end of the year she emigrates with her son, Carl August, and an apprentice tailor to the United States and we only hear about him again 10 years later.
The letters also provide new information about, for example, the first performance of a minor work, the choral song 'Come, glistering sun' [CNW 374]. The text proves not to have been written by Laurids L. Thura, as had previously been thought, but by Albert Thura.
That summer, correspondence passes to and from between Nymindegab, where the composer is staying, and Vendsyssel, where the sculptress is in the process of modelling 'a large and lovely sorrel foal', which means that 1901, too, is not without its problems of separation.
Carl Nielsen takes part in the foundation of The Danish Concert Society and at its first concert in January 1902 conducts the work composed by Lange-Müller for the occasion. There are indications, however, that there were disagreements among the society from the start, and Carl Nielsen quickly withdraws again. Before doing so, under the auspices of the concert society, he manages to give his Hymnus Amoris [CNW 100] its second performance, this time, as originally intended, with a children’s choir – an element that had been replaced in the premiere in 1897 by women's voices. The Danish Concert Society also hosts the first performance of The Four Temperaments three days after the premiere of Saul and David.
During these years, as Carl Nielsen is making a name for himself in Danish musical life and finding himself involved in its conflicts and intrigues, his childhood and the past make themselves felt in a new way. Twenty-four years after he had emigrated to Australia in 1878, there is a sign of life from his oldest brother, Peter, in the form of a letter from his 14-year-old daughter, while, from the United States, his younger sister Julie writes of her grief and despair. Anton Petersen, the grocer, also emigrated from Funen, who had been her employer and whose shop their parents had managed for a time, had been pursuing her for years. She has avoided him, has travelled abroad but is found and finally cedes to his promises, whereupon he deceives her and returns to his wife and children, leaving Julie on the brink of suicide with no one to confide in but her older brother on the other side of the Atlantic. Julie’s letters must have awoken memories in him of the existential crisis of his own youth in 1889.
The music for Holger Drachmann’s melodrama Snefrid [CNW 4], which was finally performed onstage in 1899, also exists in Carl Nielsen’s handwriting in a version for piano quintet. Letters from 1902 provide an explanation for this unexpected reworking. During the summer, Carl Nielsen is on a tour of the provinces with musicians and actors from The Royal Theatre, and the occasion leads to the performance being given in this version both in Svendborg and Odense.
After the premiere of the opera and the first performance of the new symphony at the close of the year, the couple are ready for the next major sojourn abroad. For the first half of 1903, both Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen and Carl Nielsen are in Greece, based most of the time in Athens. They also travel to Crete and, accompanied by the lecturer Ove Jørgensen, who becomes a lifelong friend of them both, Carl Nielsen is also in Turkey. In Athens, he composes his Helios Overture [CNW 34], while the choral work Sleep [CNW 101] is already beginning to stir in his consciousness as a nocturnal companion to the clear sunlight of Helios. He presses the stage director Julius Lehmann in Copenhagen to send him a text and tries to write one himself, but it is only in the autumn, once they have returned home, that the poet Johannes Jørgensen manages after several attempts to create a text to which Carl Nielsen himself puts the finishing touches. The work celebrating night does not come into being as easily as its companion piece about the day.
The only actual letter surviving of the many there must have been from Carl Nielsen to Thomas Laub stems from Athens and is written immediately after the completion of the Helios Overture. The letter from Laub that he is responding to is almost five months old, which means that Carl Nielsen must have brought it with him from home to answer it and has only done so after the completion of a new composition.
Laub and Nielsen share the sense of their own time as one of transition, as one of the major epochal changes in cultural history. They are both looking for a different emotional register than that of the Romantics. However, while Laub regards Carl Nielsen as 'someone who is working his way out of a thicket of thorns' and who is not capable of distinguishing good from bad, which in his music 'have coalesced into one whole,' Nielsen compares this regeneration to 'a powerful sucker pushing up through the compost, nourished by it, whipped by nettles in the wind, guarding itself from all the rubbish around it and nevertheless drawing up the same substances from the earth, taught and enriched by the weeds that it could not be without, becoming in the end a good and capable tree – in no way a new or peculiar one – that might finally give a little fruit and feel itself happy if it manages to take root.'
In Greece, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen is seeking regeneration and development almost by renouncing her own creativity, through the art of antiquity that she copies, and she mixes with a broad circle of international archaeologists working in the area. The many-headed limestone figure at the Acropolis known as the Typhon becomes her obsession; not only does she copy it, but she convincingly assembles fragments of it in a new way, colouring them as she believed it originally had been. The Typhon would become her main preoccupation over the next couple of years, and in 1904 she returns to Athens to complete the work. The first really serious marital crisis is linked with the Typhon and the long periods when Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen is away from home.
Vilhelm Herold, who sang David in Saul and David, makes a major international breakthrough, and this also contributes to making it difficult for The Royal Theatre, which has no acceptable replacement for Herold as David, to restage Carl Nielsen’s opera. In 1904, for example, Herold has engagements in London where he is working with the conductor Hans Richter, and Carl Nielsen has plans to come to London as a correspondent for Politiken and to study musical life in England. However, as Johan Svendsen has fallen ill and Frederik Rung is on leave, The Royal Theatre is short of a conductor and, instead of travelling to London, Carl Nielsen agrees to stand in. By making himself available as conductor, he is released from duties in the orchestra but retains his stipend as violinist.
That summer, he visits Bodil and Viggo Neergaard at Fuglsang on Lolland for the first time and meets the Dutch composer Julius Röntgen, which is the start of a friendship lasting many years and provides access for Carl Nielsen and his music to the musical life of Amsterdam.
The year 1904 also sees the arrival of Maren Hansen in the Carl Nielsen family, where she will stay as housekeeper until her death in 1945. Maren was born in Ellinge on Funen, and Carl Nielsen has known her from his childhood days on the island. In the summer, Anne Marie’s mother dies, and the inheritance she leaves makes it possible for Anne Marie to travel to Athens to continue her studies in the art of Greek antiquity and to complete her copying of the Typhon amongst other things. She travels at the beginning of November. The composer is now left behind in Copenhagen with three children, the housekeeper Maren and the nanny Marie Møller, who is also living in the house. Another permanent occupant of the household on Toldbodvej during this period is Birtha, daughter of Carl Nielsen’s sister Mathilde Sophie. In addition, the pianist Henrik Knudsen, who is living with Suzette Holten and her husband, is a regular visitor to the house as the composer’s colleague and copyist.
After the completion of the choral work Sleep, Carl Nielsen finds himself in a crisis and has difficulty starting work on the planned opera Masquerade [CNW 2]. In December, he conducts two performances of Saul and David that the theatre has finally put on its programme again. Herold is back in the country but earns more money for the theatre by singing Pagliacci, and since the newspaper critics are not exactly enthusiastic about Carl Nielsen’s opera, performances are limited to two. The women around the composer – the unmarried Marie Møller, Suzette Holten, whose marriage at the age of 31 to the 23-year-old Hans Nicolai Holten is posing problems, and Juliette Willumsen, who had been abandoned by a major artist – do what they can to retain Herold in the role as David, creating a gilded laurel wreath for him with quotes of praise from the opera's text, sending it to him from anonymous admirers, and they are tickled pink when he takes it with him to the theatre, showing it off and then driving down Strøget with it in an open carriage.
During the course of January, Carl Nielsen begins work on Masquerade and over the ensuing months he is almost abjectly devoted to the process of composition, which is accompanied by correspondence with his wife in Athens. She does not return home as promised and is not even able to tell him when she will arrive. The whole household, the children, Maren and Marie Møller, are deeply affected by the situation. Irmelin writes to tell her mother that she has decided to kill herself if her mother ever travels so far away again while she is still a child. In mid-March, Carl Nielsen wants a divorce, a 'telegram crisis' takes place on 30 March, the day on which Anne Marie is entertaining archaeologist colleagues to dinner, and rumour has it in Copenhagen, both among friends and in the newspapers, that Anne Marie is ill in Athens and that Carl Nielsen has travelled down there to be with her.
He has, however, only travelled to Østrupgaard on northern Funen. Anne Marie hurries back home and has no wish for a divorce. The husband and wife rediscover each other, and a fortnight afterwards she leaves again to complete her work.
This is followed, quite literally, by the second act. In less than a month, Carl Nielsen and Henrik Knudsen compose, correct and copy the entire second act of Masquerade. The rest of the household observe the composer with some concern, seeing how he isolates himself and never leaves the house, so a system is set up whereby Henrik Knudsen fetches him to go for an evening bicycle ride.
Correspondence with Anne Marie is floundering once again, and her return home is delayed. It appears from the letters that another woman has been involved, but he insists that he has not transgressed again. On the contrary, he has been overworking in order to forget and do away with certain feelings, as he puts it, and he maintains that, even if it is he who has committed the alleged transgressions, the blame rests as much with her.
On one of the last days of June, Anne Marie finally comes home to stay – for the time being. The remainder of the summer is spent on the North Sea coast, where the third act of Masquerade is begun. Carl Nielsen is now no longer employed at The Royal Theatre. While he has been absorbed in the process of composition and in marital issues, the situation at the theatre has changed. Where once there had been suggestions that he might be a future candidate for the post of kapellmeister, the idea now is to have him return to his second violin desk. Despite the financial insecurity, he feels he has no choice but to hand in his resignation, and The Department for Church and Education has 'notified' him of 'this agreeable information' with effect from the end of the season.
Carl Nielsen is, however, not entirely devoid of support. His old friend and helper, the politician Klaus Berntsen, at that time a member of the theatre commission, gathers material together and writes a long article about the composer. His student, Knud Harder, does the same with an eye to a German journal. His research even brings to light statements from an old friend from his days playing military music in Odense and from his teacher at the time, Carl Larsen – letters that remain a primary source for knowledge about that time. Harder also collects material from Orla Rosenhoff, Carl Nielsen’s teacher and friend from the conservatory and the subsequent period, borrows a selection of his many letters from Carl Nielsen and, as luck would have it, makes copies, for Rosenhoff’s originals have not been preserved while Harder’s copies fortunately have been. 'His letters are nearly always composed in a rush, but this very often gives a particularly faithful and reliable picture of him,' writes Orla Rosenhoff to Knud Harder.
In November, Carl Nielsen also succeeds in performing a private symphony concert exclusively with his own works, as friends and acquaintances, including the owner of Fuglsang, Viggo Neergaard, provide a guarantee against loss. The Helios Overture, Symphony no. 2 and Sleep, alongside excerpts from Saul and David and the new opera, introduced by the librettist Vilhelm Andersen, are on the programme. Masquerade. in scarcely completed form, has already been submitted to The Royal Theatre, and soon after comes the theatre’s response that it has been accepted for performance.
From the United States comes encouragement from the musician Thorvald Otterström, who is becoming increasingly enthusiastic about Carl Nielsen’s music the more he gets to know it. His acquaintance with Frederick Stock, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, leads to the performance of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony no. 1 [CNW 25] the following year by one of America’s leading orchestras – in the very city in which several of the composer’s siblings have settled.