About this volume (6)
In 1918 World War I is still in progress. There is only minimal movement in trench positions, backwards and forwards. The Spanish flu, however, has spread even to countries not at war, leading to death and the periodic shut-down of recreational activities and public gatherings. In the private life of the Nielsens', marital crisis has become part of daily life. There has been little change in the situation since the spring of 1916 when Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen ended up declaring aloud and sharing with their friends and acquaintances her decision to seek a divorce. Now, two years later, she is still hesitating to take the final step. Carl Nielsen, on the other hand, knows what he wants. Even though he was the one who was unfaithful, a divorce is not what he wanted or wants. He constantly hopes for a reconciliation, working towards that end and declaring it again and again in letters to Anne Marie. He is not allowed to live at home, but nor does he make any move towards solving the problem of where to live. Rather than breaking off links, he maintains his homelessness, travelling from place to place, living out of a suitcase and retaining a pretext to make regular calls at Frederiksholms Kanal to fetch his things and holding on to the possibility of loosening the gridlock.
The children's situation develops, on the other hand, as expected. Søs and Emil Telmányi have resumed their old relationship, and Carl Nielsen and Emil Telmányi, who had once clashed in a real power struggle [5:241] [5:405], have found each other not simply as father-in-law and son-in-law but as father and son. In a lengthy letter [6:15] to his father-in-law-to-be, Telmányi gives an account of his relations to his father, who had died young, and of how it feels finally to see his dream become a reality, to be part of a family and a home that lives and breathes for art. 'Lieber Vater [Dear Father]', he begins and reveals that, in doing so, he is using a word that he has neither written nor spoken for 18 years, and at the end of the letter he concludes: 'Admit me as your faithful son, who wishes to do his best and who asks to be allowed access to your innermost being.'
The homeless father takes this new undertaking upon himself as a gift, and from now, when writing to Emil, signs himself 'Father'. Telmányi's future role as Carl Nielsen's colleague and later as executor of his artistic legacy deserves also to be seen from this deeper psychological perspective. In the autumn of 1917, when Søs resumed her relations with Telmányi, she had yet again encountered her father's opposition. In her memoirs of her childhood home, Søs writes: 'We met briefly in Malmö and sometime after he telegraphed to me asking if I would be his wife. Then he came to Copenhagen at Christmas. To start with, my father would hear nothing of it, I remember him going off to bed, but Elisabeth Dons, the singer, came down and dragged him up, and I can say that Father and Mother both came to love Emil Telmányi.' AMT p. 115.
On 6 February 1918, about a week after Emil Telmányi's 'Father' letter, the couple were married. Carl Nielsen managed to finish his orchestral piece Pan and Syrinx [CNW 38] that same day, and the work became the couple's wedding present. Pan and Syrinx [CNW 38] is the story taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses of the cloven-hoofed woodland god Pan who pursues the nymph Syrinx with his dance and his braying song of praise. Syrinx, however, is frightened by her capering suitor and flees to a lake in the forest where, at the last moment, she is transformed by the pitying gods into a reed in Pan's embrace (Cf. Carl Nielsen's programme note, Samtid, n0. 57]. The work was given its first performance by Carl Nielsen at his composition concert a few days later on 11 February. By then, the virtuoso violinist and his new bride had once again left Copenhagen to continue his interrupted concert tour.
The marriage between Anne Marie and Emil Telmányi was dissolved after the death of Carl Nielsen in the 1930s. In his memoirs, which appeared in 1978, Telmányi writes: 'Many years later the thought struck me that there was something symbolic about "Pan and Syrinx" being dedicated to us as a wedding present. Could Carl Nielsen have imagined that I was the "cloven-hoofed" Pan and Anne Marie the Syrinx in flight and that he himself played the role of the gods who transformed Syrinx into a reed to save her from my persecution??' Telmányi p. 92. – It was, however, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen who had encouraged her (rejected) husband to find inspiration in this episode in Ovid, and there is surely more than one candidate for that 'cloven-hoofed' god. In the same way, it is debatable whether the piece, seeming, as it does, to give an objective portrayal of the power of nature, is more a warning, a sublimation or a release of a (homeless) libido. Carl Nielsen regularly included the work in his subsequent programmes, but in the October of that year he sits in Gothenburg missing his wife and writing to her asking her to tell him 'that Metamorphosis of Ovid you suggested to me last year' [6:138] as he now wants to begin to think about the work. Since there is no doubting the date of the letter, it is not difficult to conclude that Carl Nielsen has forgotten, or repressed, the fact that the work, the wedding present, had already been composed and given its first performance.
The same year, the other daughter, Irmelin, became engaged to Eggert Møller, who had been introduced through his sister Titte and had been part of the daughters' circle since at least 1912. Carl Nielsen receives the news in September and replies to his daughter in some relief, since he has always feared that she, as the firstborn, 'might be condemned to being less light-hearted in nature because you were the oldest and even when you were quite small felt a duty to look after the others.' While Emil Telmányi had been told about and involved in the dispute between the parents of his future wife, he now writes to Irmelin: 'You must not show Eggert my letters; I couldn't cope with that yet. What would he think of me and how will I bear it.' [6:116]
Even the intellectually backward Hans Børge, who since January 1916 has lived with J. Holm, the agricultural inspector, at the Keller Institutions for the Mentally Ill in Brejning, is found a more permanent home in 1918. In October 1918, Christiane Bendixen Kragh, housekeeper at Damgaard since 1911, marries Johannes Østergaard, owner of Bavnhøjgaard, Snoghøj near Fredericia, only a few kilometres from Damgaard. Soon afterwards, Christiane and Johannes Østergaard become foster-parents for Hans Børge, an arrangement that continues until the death of Christiane in the autumn of 1955, a year or so before Hans Børge's death. Over the years, the whole family stay in contact with Hans Børge, not least his father, at Damgaard, which increasingly becomes the husband's second home and the composer's sanctuary and preferred place of work (In 1912, Christiane Bendixen Krag had given birth to a son outside marriage. Since there have been persistent rumours ever since that Carl Nielsen was the father, and since the son has also been cited as his son at exhibitions at The Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense, it should be made clear here that contacts established through the publication of The Carl Nielsen Letters have permitted a gene test showing that this child is not Carl Nielsen's).
Margrete Rosenberg, a childhood friend of both Carl and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen and the first woman Carl Nielsen proposed to, (Cf. Vil Herren, pp. 45-48 and 61-62) is a music teacher in Fredericia but lives at Damgaard in her own little house by the beach. She helps Miss Thygesen (Charlotte Trap de Thygeson) with the upkeep of the place, not least with the nut plantation, and in winter she travels south with her as her companion. Margrete also takes care of Hans Børge's mental and practical development and upbringing. She is his music teacher, studies languages with him, teaches him practical ways to cultivate the fruits of the earth and reports back to his mother with her assessment of his opportunities for development.
Margrete Rosenberg also took it upon herself to look after the well-being of the servants at Damgaard to the point that Miss Thygesen complains in a letter to Irmelin: '... There was an evening when it was very cold and I rang to have something put on the wood burner; finally the milkmaid, who had been over milking, came and said the girls were downstairs learning to sing with Miss Rosenberg – but I think she could at least have told me about it. Those labourers of mine who had learnt to speak English and smoke cigars down there were not much good to me on the farm. And nor is there any sense in me sitting alone up here.' [6:295]
Kapellmeister Carl Nielsen's departure from The Royal Theatre came into effect from 30 June 1914. The following day, the actor Johannes Nielsen had taken up his appointment as the theatre manager. Carl Nielsen and Johannes Nielsen were old friends, but the new manager's role in the lead-up to the kapellmeister's departure had opened up cracks in their friendship, cracks that both of them worked hard to repair.
In January 1918, Johannes Nielsen and the theatre were preparing a revival of Masquerade [CNW 2], which had not been performed since 8 April 1911. After a piano rehearsal led by the composer, there was clearly disagreement about who would be conducting the performance, and this brought all the old conflicts to the surface again [6:16], with the result that the first performance was delayed until 17 May. Carl Nielsen ended up conducting this and two other performances in the spring. He had taken the opportunity both to revise and to reduce the length of the opera and in so doing once more managed to complicate attempts by posterity to establish a final version – while at the same time disappointing enthusiastic fans, who now found some of the music was missing [6:43]. When Masquerade was performed again in December, it was conducted by Georg Høeberg, who also conducted the remaining four performances in the 1918-19 season.
The spring of 1918 also saw Carl Nielsen's relations to Gothenburg develop in earnest. In the correspondence between Carl Nielsen and his Swedish colleague Bror Beckman in the 90s, it is hard to sense much respect for the young composer Wilhelm Stenhammar who in 1907 had been appointed by the municipal government to be conductor of the orchestral society founded two years earlier. Since then, Carl Nielsen had not only appreciated his appearances in Copenhagen as a pianist, chamber musician and conductor, but had followed his artistic development and had even taken a significant role in it, in that his Symphony no. 1 in G minor [CNW 25] had come to play a part in Stenhammar's development as an artist and in the latter's own G minor Symphony in the years 1910-15 (Cf. Wallner 1991, III, Chap. 6). On 16 November 1910, Stenhammar performed Nielsen's symphony in Gothenburg, and the correspondence between the two composers on that occasion shows clearly that, despite their formerly very different points of departure, they are now coming close to a shared understanding of the direction in which music should go [3:934] [3:938].
Over the years that followed, Nielsen and Stenhammar met on a number of occasions, and even brief meetings clearly take on great significance. After Carl Nielsen's concert at the opera in Stockholm on 31 October 1913, which included the Violin Concerto [CNW 41] and Sinfonia Espansiva [CNW 27] on the programme, Stenhammar wrote home to Gothenburg some days later that 'our time together was very brief but wonderfully rewarding. He is so rounded and strong, and I feel I get so much from him in those few short moments when we spoke, just the two of us.' (Wallner 1991, III p. 178). In February the following year, Nielsen was invited to Gothenburg to repeat the programme. On 19 January 1916, Stenhammar himself conducted Espansiva in Gothenburg. And now, in the spring of 1918, on 13 March, he includes on the programme his own first crucial Nielsen experience, the Symphony no. 1 in G minor, and follows it on 26 February 1919 with The Inextinguishable [CNW 28].
Not long before, in 1918, Julius Rabe had become music reviewer on Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, which, under its new chief editor Torgny Segerstedt, appointed in 1917, was in the process of developing into one of the most prominent cultural newspapers in the Nordic countries. In 1927, Rabe became the 'national head of programming' with Sweden's Radio and one of the pioneers of music education activities on the radio. Furthermore, he was a pupil of Carl Nielsen's friend Bror Beckman, who since 1910 had been director of the music conservatory in Stockholm. Rabe had doubtless heard something of Carl Nielsen and his music from Beckman, and Beckman had introduced him to Nielsen in 1913 [4:585]. Stenhammar's repeat performance of Nielsen's Symphony no. 1 was to be Rabe's first encounter with Nielsen's music as music reviewer, and the piece he wrote in the newspaper and sent to Carl Nielsen has been described as a musical credo (Wallner 1991, III p. 282).
Rabe maintains that in Nielsen's Symphony no. 1 every orchestral part is alive, and it is never a question of counterpoint as in Wagner and Richard Strauss, who simply demands movement in all parts to improve the overall sound – in other words, they employ a counterpoint that aims for purely sensual musical effects. With Carl Nielsen, on the other hand, every detail plays its part in supporting a constructive idea and contributes not to the sensual effect but to the architectural tension, the logic of development and form. 'We have to learn this again, have to open our eyes and realise that the great composers that we admire were not also, like us, poor people at the mercy of mood, but that they experienced form... And anyone who experiences form artistically, always experiences a burning act of will. ... The quietism and absence of will that found expression in the art of yesteryear is what has brought upon us the misery of a world war and has meant that none of the generation now in control appears to have the power to solve the mess. We need to educate ourselves to be spiritual activists, need to create the will to create form, and to create great form. This is something that art with an emphasis on form can help us to do, and in his music Carl Nielsen is virtually alone in being able to bring us closer to this approach to the life of the future.' (Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning 15.03.1918 and Wallner 1991, III pp. 281-282).
Carl Nielsen's sojourns in Gothenburg during these years were about more than a composer running away from a crisis in his private life or looking for new pastures away from the trivial intrigues of the music circles in Copenhagen, which had landed him in so much trouble. They were also about something else. Against the background of widespread European, political, military and social disintegration, a fruitful artistic and musical environment was emerging far from the fields of battle in Sweden's second largest city. Here, there was money and patronage – in the visual arts from the Fürstenberg family, and in music from the banking family of the Mannheimers. Here, there was a municipal administration with an interest and a will to cooperate, led by the mayor Peter Lamberg. Here, there was an uncorrupted, interested and inquisitive audience which, before the days of radio and gramophone, seemed keen to devote equal attention to their weekly cultivation of the classics and to being introduced to the music of the new century, both from Central Europe and from the most important composer of the Nordic countries, whether it was played by Nordic musicians or by guests from southern climes.
Here, institutions had not been fossilised, there were no irrelevant hidden agendas or artistic intrigues. Here, everything from major decisions to the least question about programmes seemed to be negotiated and solved through daily communication between conductors, members on the board, the director of the bank (and maybe his wife) and the mayor, who initially not only found the funding for many years but also provided offices and writing paper for most purposes. In the midst of it all stood the composer Wilhelm Stenhammar as the city's permanent – and Sweden's best – conductor, in addition to being one of the most important pianists and chamber musicians of the time and, not least, Sweden's most important living composer. His was a creative talent characterised by an unusual ethical curiosity and talent, which in the course of the first decades of the century developed his music from its roots in late Romanticism into an individual modern musical idiom that allowed itself to be both influenced and challenged by the encounter with the two Nordic giants who were six years his senior, Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, his geographical base in Gothenburg being midway between the pair of them.
It was this situation and the offer to replace Stenhammar periodically as a stand-in conductor that attracted Carl Nielsen to Gothenburg. From the autumn of 1918 to the spring of 1922, he conducted a total of 44 concerts in Gothenburg. He became a popular conductor for audiences, and his performances both of his own music and of older music were valued and rated highly by a qualified reviewer. Here, at last, he could make up for the tribulations of Copenhagen and at The Royal Theatre. When he was in Gothenburg, he was soon staying in the flat owned by Henriette Magnus, the mother-in-law of the bank manager Hermann Mannheimer, who had been widowed and who was the link between the Mannheimer and the Fürstenberg families. The bank manager and his wife, Lisa Mannheimer, also had an apartment in the building, and soon Carl Nielsen came to feel at home in both apartments.
Most important, perhaps, were his daily association with Wilhelm Stenhammar when he, too, was in town. It is clear from the letters that they conducted lively conversations about artistic and musical topics, even though, of course, their actual conversations have unfortunately not been registered in writing. Their mutual respect is best seen, perhaps, in the fact that they not only listened to and studied each other's music – Carl Nielsen formulates the principle that each of them should know the other's work in its entirety – but also on many occasions performed it. As far as it was possible for him, Carl Nielsen also reciprocated in Copenhagen and on a number of occasions included music by Stenhammar and other Swedish composers in the programme at The Music Society.
The Music Society's concert on 25 November 1919 was, for example, devoted entirely to Stenhammar conducting his own works, and as Carl Nielsen wrote to his friend: 'Our august, distinguished Music Society has never before honoured a living composer with works for a whole evening.' [6:298] The main item was the first Danish performance of Stenhammar's G minor Symphony, op. 34. The concert concluded with his Piano Concerto no. 2 with Carl Nielsen conducting and the composer as the soloist. The closeness that had arisen between the two, not only as composers but as friends, can perhaps best be seen from the conclusion of a letter from Nielsen to Stenhammar:
'Now, dear friend, all the best until we see each other again, which I will look forward to in what is, in truth, this very dark existence of mine; can you understand that?
Only you know what I am, and I know that you will not judge me on this earth.' [6:288]
His private distress and the conditions under which he was living were not common knowledge in Gothenburg.
Once again, in the spring of 1918, attempts may have been made to reconcile the couple. They certainly celebrated Easter together at Brøndums Hotel in Skagen, and Elisabeth Dons and Johanne Feilberg, the spinster pair who lived together and had formerly accompanied the couple when they were in crisis situations, See, for example [5:343] og [5:344], were staying there, too. To outward appearances, everything was it should be. On the evening of Easter Sunday, the Nielsen family paid a visit to Michael and Anna Ancher with the royal family and, according to Irmelin who wrote about it in German to her sister [6:29], the king was much taken by her father who, being the man he was, was very convivial towards everyone, played music and so on. When they left the next day, the king and the queen even turned up on the platform to bid farewell to the Nielsen family.
A month later, Carl Nielsen buys a summerhouse in Skagen, known as 'Finis Terræ', which from now until the end of our journey will be yet another important location [6:49]. He makes no secret in his letters to his wife of his ulterior motives in buying the house. For a time, he even neglects to tell her that the purchase has already been made in the hope that he can get her to come and give her opinion about it [6:61]. When the summer is almost over and the unfortunate husband has still not managed to persuade his wife to visit the summerhouse, he writes:
'The house I bought in Skagen was bought solely because I had hoped that you would come up there and spend some time with Irmelin and me; you probably realise that, too. I have been so disappointed that this pretty little house will not help me as I had thought it might. Just a little bit! I'm leaving now for Gothenburg and I can tell you that it is solely for your sake – well, that may sound a bit rich, but I could say instead that it is also for my own sake in the sense that I hope that when I am distanced from you both in time and space, you may at some point come to think of all the good things that we two have experienced together in this life.' [6:125]
He may at least have succeeded in getting Anne Marie yet again to delay sending in the application for separation, which he now says he would refuse to sign even though he recognises that he has no right. At any rate, it is not submitted until 1919. A few days before writing this letter, he has asked Irmelin to find him a hotel room when he comes to Copenhagen on his way to Gothenburg. However, since the Spanish flu has now also reached Gothenburg and since the authorities there, too, are rushing to close down theatres, concert halls and places of public entertainment to avoid the spread of the disease, Carl Nielsen has to postpone his debut as substitute conductor for Stenhammar until November 1918.
Even though Finis Terræ has not managed to achieve the desired effect, in the little building behind the house, Carl Nielsen has found himself a new bolt-hole in which to compose, and, following Johannes Nielsen's invitation in June to write the music to Johannes Poulsen's showpiece two-evening production of Oehlenschläger's Aladdin [CNW 17] [6:48], during the course of the summer he composes the greater part of this work. It is as though, time and again, the Theatre is looking for opportunities to try to heal old wounds, while Carl Nielsen, knowing full well that this cannot be done and that new problems will arise, resists as long as possible but nevertheless in the end gives in and throws himself into the work only to end up lashing out at his old enemy.
By December, the time to start rehearsals of Aladdin at The Royal Theatre is approaching. Carl Nielsen is in Gothenburg and from there writes to Johannes Nielsen telling him he wants the issue of the kapellmeister to be resolved before he hands over his music to the theatre. Georg Høeberg has the right, as first kapellmeister, to conduct the music. However, if he does not wish to do so, which may well be the case, since this is (merely) stage music, Carl Nielsen wants the conductor to be Salomon Levysohn, who has the necessary abilities and literary background and who is already writing out parts for him. Ferdinand Hemme, the Theatre's chorus master since 1914 and from 1918-1922 the second kapellmeister, is, according to Carl Nielsen 'totally unsuited for true artistic activity' [6:160].
It appears from Carl Nielsen's next letter three days later [6:163] that Johannes Nielsen has told him that Levysohn has given the wrong beat in a performance and that members of the orchestra are refusing to play under him. This triggers a real fit of fury in Carl Nielsen, and in a lengthy morning letter he makes no bones about it. At last, he has an opportunity to get many years pent up wrath off his chest:
'For even if the composer were far inferior to me, and even if he had not conducted Europe's finest orchestras, as the composer of "Aladdin" has, (Stuttgart (Royal Symphony), Berlin (Philharmonic), Amsterdam (Concertgebouw), Stockholm (Royal Orchestra), Helsinki, Kristiania and last but not least Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, which is better than The Royal Orchestra in Copenhagen, all things considered), who therefore must be said to have some experience of orchestras and questions of conducting, it would still be utterly absurd if the demands of one or more members of the orchestra were to be upheld if, for completely inconsequential reasons, they did not wish to play under the conductor whom the composer not only approved but actually preferred.
There is a stench of deceit, spite, pettiness and bias coming out of The Royal Theatre which is anything but attractive, but I will not get involved with the patients in this ward for sufferers of diseased vanities and overblown ambitions.' [6:163]
After his day's work, he writes yet another letter, even longer and even more direct. Under no circumstances is Johannes Nielsen to think that his pen ran away with him that morning and that he has regrets. Now 'I am sitting quietly and thinking things over', thinking about this 'accursed institution where they now want to stick their knives into a man who has always done his modest duty and been there when they needed him! I find this scandalous, and I will resist the gentlemen at the orchestra with all my musical authority, even though one half or even a quarter of it should in this instance be more than sufficient.'
In the name of humanity, he asks Johannes Nielsen not to let Levysohn know that there are musicians in the orchestra talking about him disparagingly. 'For God's sake spare him that ignominy. The Theatre owes it to him!' [6:164]
Four days later he has presumably discussed the whole matter with Stenhammar. At any rate, he furiously scratches out, leaving inkblots on Stenhammar's printed notepaper, yet another brief message to the manager of The Royal Theatre: If you tell Levysohn that members of the orchestra have been maligning him, 'Mark my words, I will withdraw my music for "Aladdin".' And he even adds elsewhere on the paper 'And will probably regardless' [6:166].
The premiere is delayed, the first performance being set for 15 February 1919, the second for 22 February, while the score is not completed until 11 February 1919. At rehearsals at the Theatre on 12 February, Carl Nielsen criticises the treatment of the music which, due to the orchestra pit being incorporated in the staging, is to be played with a reduced orchestra behind the scenes, and the following day he writes to the theatre director repeating what he has already told the manager, Johannes Nielsen, that he is most inclined to withdraw the music but, since he understands that he would in doing so cause the Theatre major embarrassment, he proposes that his name is withdrawn from programmes and posters and that he presents before the public the text with his complaints that he attaches to the letter [6:179]. That same day, however, he writes to a friend that the only reason he is not withdrawing the music is that 'the lawyers are saying that the royal bailiff will probably demand a deposit of around 100,000 kroner and that is more than I can manage. So I'll have to renounce all responsibility through Ritzau on Saturday, where they will be able to see my reasons in the papers.' [6:180]
Over the following days, therefore, alongside reviews of the first part of Johannes Poulsen's mammoth production of Oehlenschläger's Aladdin, readers of the Copenhagen newspapers could find a press release under the heading: 'The composer Carl Nielsen protests!' The text was a much abbreviated version of the attachment sent in with his letter to the theatre director but was probably sufficient to ensure that the public and staff at the theatre had something to talk about. This unusual situation may also have contributed to the influx of people wanting to see this sensational production. The fact is that tickets were sold at twice the usual price and were offered on the black market for even higher prices. Nevertheless, there were only 15 performances in all and, reading the rather mixed reviews, the picture emerges of a somewhat qualified success. According to Robert Neiiendam, 'many people felt that all the quantity of oriental colour sucked the life out of Oehlenschläger's poetry.' (Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd ed.)
Carl Nielsen briefly expressed his opinion in the letter quoted above: 'Nor is there much left of Oehlenschläger's Aladdin; but we do get to see a gigantic external and, at times, magnificent contrivance; something along the lines of a circus film in a top class arena.' In his attempt to renew – and re-theatricalise – the theatre in line with the new Max Reinhard theatrical trend of the time, Johannes Poulsen had pushed the technical and staffing capacity of the old Royal Theatre to its limits. In November 1916, when Johannes Poulsen had presented the project at a meeting with Carl Nielsen with a view to getting him involved, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen and Søs had been enthusiastic [4:437], but now Carl Nielsen could assert: 'Maybe this circus film can show us once and for all the inadequacy of mechanics. If so, it may have had a purpose after all. How the actors talk and act is completely irrelevant; those poor people!' [6:178]
To supplement the critique Carl Nielsen attached to his letter to the theatre director, it should be said that, in her book about Johannes Poulsen as producer, Kirsten Jacobsen lists a number of points where the producer and the composer differed in their interpretation of Oehlenschläger's text (Kirsten Jacobsen: Johannes Poulsen som iscenesætter, Copenhagen 1990, pp. 82-83). The conflict was not simply the climax of longstanding theatrical shenanigans but was an expression of incompatible artistic views. Even though, in 1925, Carl Nielsen organised a complete concert performance of the Aladdin music [CNW 17] his largest score in sheer size, and even though over the past 20 years there have been a couple of concert performances in Copenhagen of the complete Aladdin music, it is no exaggeration to say that for Nielsen this work remains a major sore point. While advances in theatre and film technique since 1919 would make it a simple matter to put on an Aladdin production that would do justice to the great score – and to Oehlenschläger's text – either in the theatre or on film, the stage regimes and scenography of our time would seem to present even greater obstacles when it comes to the classical texts.
When Carl Nielsen writes to Wilhelm Stenhammar a few days after the premiere, Aladdin is only mentioned in passing. There were more pressing matters, such as the coming Nordic Music Festival that was being planned in Copenhagen for 13-20 June that year. This was an event that had not yet come to the ears of the public! The idea of such a festival had arisen in a narrow circle and at the last moment. The initiative originated, in fact, in Finland, which had achieved independence as a result of the conclusion of World War I, which meant it had a particular interest in marking its association with the rest of Scandinavia in as many ways as possible.
The idea had been suggested by the Finnish conductor Robert Kajanus to the director of the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, Frederik Schnedler-Petersen, who in his youth had conducted in Åbo and had close connections with Finnish musical life. Kajanus was fully aware that Helsinki and Finland would not be capable of managing such an event given the turmoil of the time but hoped that Copenhagen would take it on. Schnedler-Petersen pursued the idea with Carl Nielsen and Georg Høeberg, after which we can follow in the ensuing correspondence the role played by Carl Nielsen both as a contact to the Swedish composers and as fundraiser of both public and private finance to carry out the project.
The first Nordic Music Festival had taken place in Copenhagen in June 1888 as part of the Nordic exhibition of art and industry. This was the year after Carl Nielsen's debut as conductor at Tivoli with his Andante Tranquillo e Scherzo [CNW 31] for string orchestra and the year in which he had his girlfriend Emilie over on a visit from Selde and had taken her to Tivoli to hear the 'Pastoral Symphony' and the wedding march from A Midsummer Night's Dream (EDH s. 76). His Suite, op. 1 [CNW 32] was also performed in Tivoli that September.
At the second Nordic Music Festival in Stockholm in 1897, Carl Nielsen himself featured with his String Quartet in F minor [CNW 56]. What was more, he was the only new composer represented with a major work. The first two Nordic Music Festivals were both organised primarily as showpieces for music from the golden age, with the participation of as many musicians, singers and, not least, choristers as possible, the programmes primarily consisting of established works.
With the third Nordic Music Festival in 1919, the basic concept was renewed. Now, for the first time, it was about presenting the new, and already middle-aged, generation of composers; this time, only music of living composers would be played. Two exceptions were made, in that there were performances of a piano trio by the young Finnish composer Toivo Kuula, who had sadly lost his life during the unrest in Finland, and of a violin sonata by the Swedish composer Harald Fryklöf, Bror Beckman's friend, who had died of the Spanish flu in Stockholm on 11 March that year at the age of 36 [6:187].
There was no place for opera and choral works. Nor was there anything by Gade and only a few songs and an overture by Lange-Müller, who was still living. Finally, to signal that there nevertheless was a link back in time, the whole festival was introduced by Kuhlau's overture to Elves' Hill (Elverhøj). The absence of choral works could be explained and excused as being a result of the shortage of time for preparation and the resulting lack of participation of the countries' various musical institutions and societies, but it could also be seen as marking an insistence by the close-knit and self-appointed committee of the festival that the focus should be maintained on the younger generations of composers and their music, not on the number of participants.
Seen in a wider perspective, the Nordic Music Festival of 1919 was the first decisive step towards what would later be the recurring Nordic Music DaysNanna: Nordic Music Days is an ongoing annual festival for contemporary Nordic music organised in turn by the composers themselves on behalf of the Council of Nordic Composers. for new music. In 1919, the music festival also stood on its own for the first time and was no longer an addition to a larger exhibition of art and industry. Paradoxically enough, public awareness about it was limited because hasty planning had failed to take into account that it coincided with a Nordic Convention of Military Musicians and a Nordic Convention of Student Singers also taking place in Copenhagen. The Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén was even the principal figure at two of these conventions, as he also took part in the Convention for Student Singers as conductor of Uppsala's society for student singers 'Orphei Drängar'. This meant that Wilhelm Stenhammar, whose services were already in demand as conductor, chamber musician and composer, had to step in and, in addition to everything else, direct the initial rehearsals of Alfvén's Symphony no. 3, which the composer only just had time to conduct at the first orchestral concert on 13 June.
Press coverage in the other Nordic countries was in short supply, again due to the lack of planning, but the music festival was avidly followed by the Copenhagen newspapers with portraits and interviews of participants as they arrived in the city and with reports and reviews of the individual concerts. Reading it all, we are left in no doubt that the dominant composers were Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Wilhelm Stenhammar, Ture Rangström and Christian Sinding. The latter could not be there in person due to illness, and Ture Rangström only arrived at the last minute after Stenhammar, Kajanus and Nielsen sent him a telegram saying that The Nordic Music Festival 'requires the presence of you and your wife by Monday at the latest. All expenses paid.' Wallner 1991, III p. 320.
In the eyes of many, the music festival culminated with Sibelius' Symphony no. 2, which the composer himself conducted as the conclusion to the penultimate orchestral concert on 18 June. But the final orchestral concert two days later, which concluded with Carl Nielsen conducting The Inextinguishable, also generated huge enthusiasm. Both symphonies were already familiar to audiences in Copenhagen and had been played several times, Sibelius' for the first time by the young visiting Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Stenhammar in 1909 [3:639]. The Inextinguishable had had its premiere three years earlier [5:305], but had been played so many times in such rapid succession over the following years as surely to be unmatched by any other Danish symphony before or since. Most recently, Schnedler-Petersen had celebrated the 500th Palace ConcertNanna: Palækoncerterne ('The Palace Concerts') took place at Koncertpalæet ('The Concert Palace'), now known as the Odd Fellow Palace, in Copenhagen. They were founded in 1896 by the publisher Alfred Wilhelm Hansen and the conductor Joachim Andersen. on 16 February 1919 (repeated on 23 February) by conducting The Inextinguishable alongside a shortened version of Mahler's Symphony no. 3. On that occasion, the day after the premiere of the problematic Aladdin, the composer allowed himself to be feted as he had after various other performances over the previous three years. Neither Sibelius' nor Nielsen's symphony had previously been played by such a well-manned and richly melodious orchestra as the 100 players assembled for the occasion of the music festival from The Royal Danish Orchestra and Schnedler's Tivoli Orchestra. The music festival also came, therefore, to demonstrate that the largest city in the Nordic countries was still lacking a permanent institution for symphonic music.
After The Inextinguishable 'there was a total repetition of the enthusiastic Sibelius ovations the other day' and at the very end Carl Nielsen passed on 'this praise in handsome words to the orchestra as thanks for the excellent work they had done.' Wilhelm Stenhammar presented Carl Nielsen with a laurel wreath accompanied by a fanfare from the orchestra, and the concert's three other conductors, Johan Halvorsen, Robert Kajanus and Wilhelm Stenhammar, 'appeared by the conductor's podium, bowing low before Carl Nielsen, as the audience shouted their Hurrahs.' Politiken and Berlingske Tidende, 21.06.1919 and Musik 01.07.1919.
In the evening, a dinner was held to mark the end of the festival at The Langelinie Pavilion for participants, officials, ministers and invited guests. Speeches were made. Carl Nielsen spoke of the four-leafed clover that had sprung up thanks to the addition of Finland to the other three Nordic countries and emphasised the role of Robert Kajanus as the father of the music festival (Berlingske Tidende 21.06.1919). However, most interesting of all may be Stenhammar's speech of which a fragment has been preserved in Julius Rabe's record:
'We are moving away from bourgeois Romanticism and are approaching "The Inextinguishable", not Carl Nielsen's symphony but the idea, the idea of music as the expression of life itself, of its own burning pulse and its trembling in fear and joy. Faced with everything that opens up when confronted with this new programme, 'The Inextinguishable', we can see clearly how moribund the old descriptive programme music is. We can see how it only needed one slight shift in the overall stratum of ideas for it to be drained completely of the colour of life through its concretising and materialising "programme". And we become aware of the bourgeois banality of music that fails to strive for the noblest in human life.' Reproduced by Julius Rabe in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfarts-Tidning, 23.06.1919 and Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning, 2. 1920, vol 1, p. 34.
The following day, the eight conductors of the music festival appear at an extra final concert in Tivoli Gardens; each of them conducts a piece of their own. After drawing lots, Carl Nielsen starts off with 'The Dance of the Cockerel' from Masquerade, and Sibelius concludes the session with his trademark Finlandia. This is followed by yet another late-night party for the principal figures in Carl Nielsen's home (!) on Frederiksholms Kanal. In the early hours, talk falls on the Åland Islands; the Swedes and the Finns almost come to blows, and Carl finds himself caught between the two nations. Sibelius loses his temper, and Anne Marie is forced to sit beside him and calm him down, according to her own account in a letter to Irmelin [6:219].
The same day has seen Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's 56th birthday. It has begun with a birthday lunch for eight of the women attached to the music festival's men! In the house on Skagen, where Irmelin is staying, Carl August Hansen, Carl Nielsen's illegitimate son born in 1888, turns up with flowers for his father's wife, and the following day Irmelin lets her mother know this by letter – and thereby provides us with proof that the Nielsen family's relations to Carl August Hansen have been normalised by this stage and that the daughters also are aware that they have a half-brother.
Since December 1914, when he abandoned the music conservatory prematurely, Carl August Hansen has been travelling around with his own trio, playing for guests at Danish hotels from Bornholm to Skagen. For this very year, 1919, the programme brochure for the Carl August Hansen trio, taken from Clausen's Hotel in Skagen, has been preserved with its total of 896 musical titles (Cf. Vil Herren pp. 118-120). When, on 15 November 1918, Carl Nielsen tells Schnedler-Petersen which musicians he needs for the Music Society concert on 26 November 1918, he mentions that he has promised a violinist by the name of Carl Hansen that he can join them and earn a little in so doing [6:148]. Carl Hansen can hardly be said to be an unusual Danish name but, since we have found no other violinist of that name, it is not impossible to conclude that Carl Nielsen may have let his son Carl play under his baton on this, and possibly other, occasions.
While relations with the son may have been normalised, the same can hardly be said of relations with his wife. Anne Marie appears to have had difficulty in working out whether she wants to appear at his side during the music festival. According to a newspaper account, Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was in Copenhagen on 10 June. In a break in the orchestral rehearsals, the conductors gathered for lunch at Hotel Phoenix 'with the composer Carl Nielsen and the sculptress Mrs Marie Carl Nielsen at the head of the table.' Nationaltidende, 11.06.1919. That evening, there is a party at Frederiksholms Kanal. Wilhelm Stenhammar writes two days later in a letter to his wife, Helga, at home in Gothenburg:
'The day before yesterday at dinner at Carl Nielsen's we were a small and select group, Sibelius and Kajanus with their wives and yours truly, sadly minus a wife. Sibelius was in brilliant form, genial and solid, all nervous irritation appearing to have vanished. He drank a little snaps, but amicably declined several times, despite Mrs Anne Marie's peasant insistences, also refusing the port wine and was cautious in drinking the red wine, which the rest of us knocked back like water, but from those couple of small glasses he became so full of brilliant wit and imagination that a longing kept screaming out in me that you might be with us to enjoy the gift of his spirit. After drinking coffee in the garden with nightingales and moonlight, we ended up in the early hours playing a highly entertaining Frisian boardgame, a kind of Dame Fortune with cards, and saw ourselves in our shirtsleeves as true heirs of the Vikings.' Wallner 1991, III p. 318.
The following day, we know Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen travelled to Skagen to the house, Finis Terræ, that from the start she had resisted visiting [6:215], but now her husband had, again, to put it mildly, taken temporary possession of her home and her honorary residence. Irmelin is on a bicycle tour in Jutland with Eggert Møller, newly arrived, and with his two cousins. The idea is that she will continue alone to Skagen, where she expects to find her mother. When she arrives, the house is empty but there are blood stains on the floor and the table, and Irmelin is told by 'old Mrs Jensen' that her mother has had an accident with a knife and has left again [6:217]. We do not know exactly when Anne Marie arrives in Copenhagen, but it is certainly early enough for her to have joined in Carl's success at the final concert and the dinner following it in the evening at The Langelinie Pavilion, to have celebrated her birthday the following day with wifely appendages of the musical principals, to have been present for the final performance at Tivoli with the eight conductors, and to have played the role of hostess at the ensuing dinner party at Frederiksholms Kanal.
One week later, on 28 June 1919, she finally sends the application for separation to the Copenhagen Prefect's Office [6:221]. On the same day, Carl Nielsen writes from Copenhagen to his daughter Irmelin in Skagen that he 'cannot see how the future might come to look.' [6:222] Now he leaves for Skagen, and, in July, Søs, Telmányi, Hans Børge and, at the end of the month, Anne Marie are all in Skagen for a few days. At the end of August, however, the composer reports from Damgaard that he has at last started work on a piece, one of the most original he has created, the Suite for piano [CNW 88].
Discussion between man and wife resumes. After Carl rings home from Damgaard, there is yet another marital status review from Anne Marie, in which she again asks for her freedom and complains that she cannot change her name. She talks about the way he has 'parcelled' himself out among all and sundry and how he lacks 'delicacy' [6:240]. He travels to and fro between Damgaard, Copenhagen and Skagen several times, and on 20 September the couple are finally together at the Prefect's Office to arrange the separation. The written approval arrives on 26 September [6:261]. A few days later, Carl Nielsen falls down the stairs at Damgaard and bruises a rib [6:264], which bothers him for a long time, but he is nevertheless able to resume conducting in Gothenburg at the beginning of October as planned.
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's situation as an artist is not easy in this volume either. In fact, it is worse than her husband's. The equestrian statue is going nowhere, and conflicts with the committee and her own advisers take on absurd proportions. In a long introduction to a central entry in her diary, she gives an account of the entangled affair [See 6:207]. She, too, travels around more or less aimlessly. The extended illness of her sister Lucie also plays a part in her own mental state. Lucie is admitted to hospital several times, but the end only comes on 30 January 1920 [6:319]. In the midst of all this misery, Irmelin and Eggert Møller get married on 14 December. Hans Børge is very much looking forward to attending a wedding again [6:303]. The sources say nothing of how Christmas is spent.
There is no doubt that, in spite of everything, it is the composer who manages best in the new year, 1920. The collaboration with the orchestra and with Stenhammar in Gothenburg provide positive experience and artistic recognition. The same goes for the growing friendship and collaboration with his son-in-law Emil Telmányi. He also forms closer bonds during this period of homelessness with his old pupil, the businessman Carl Johan Michaelsen who studied theory with him in the first decade of the century before becoming director of the Danish Soya Cake Factory in 1912, and with Vera, his wife. In the spring of 1920, they go to Paris and London to promote the composer's works. This is one of Carl Nielsen's busiest years of travel, for travelling can free him from the burdens of speculation.
At the end of February, he is in Amsterdam where he is invited to conduct the Concertgebouw Orchestra in two concerts with Nordic music, including his own works, among them, again, The Inextinguishable [6:349]. He writes home to Søs and Emil that the press 'let me have it with both barrels as a composer but praise me as a conductor'. He himself feels that the concerts have been a great and heartening success, both with the public and the orchestra whose size and performance quality exceed anything that he has experienced before: 'The wonderful orch. played totally sublimely beautifully and was for me to an extent that I have never experienced before. Orch. is very large and consists solely of artists.' [6:350]
Accompanying him in Amsterdam are Elisabeth Dons, Johanne Feilberg and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen! It can at times appear as though the complete separation may have made it a little easier for the couple to get closer to each other again and to be together. At any rate, Carl Nielsen writes home from Amsterdam: 'Mother is so sweet and good that I feel deeply moved in my innermost soul and hope that this signals a little glimmer of light in my future.' [6:349]
She continues on through Belgium to France and Paris, reliving her youthful travels of the spring of 1889 with Agnes Lunn, before her husband appeared in her life. He does the rounds of museums and exhibitions and visits Bodil Neergaard's brother Johannes Hartmann in Ghent, before travelling home and is caught in Hamburg by the revolutionary uprising in Germany brought on by the armistice. A general strike is declared, and he can travel no further but joins up with other Danes and drives north with them in a car, crossing the border after eating lunch in Kiel, while the battleship Eckernförde bombed the town from the fjord [6:380].
Having conducted a Music Society concert on 23 February with Haydn's Creation on the programme, he makes ready to leave the city again. He travels with Bennett's Travel Bureau to Spain in a 'bunch', as he calls it. Among the group are his close friends Carl Johan and Vera Michaelsen, and the composer Nancy Dalberg and her husband Erik Dalberg. On the way, he stops off in Paris, meets Anne Marie again as well as his old friend Ferruccio Busoni. Whereas Carl is fine when, after the meeting with Anne Marie in Paris, he travels on to rejoin the group in Barcelona [6:368] [6:370], she writes to him, in a letter which only reaches him on the way home in Amsterdam after being forwarded several times: 'After you had gone it took some time before I found peace again.' [6:379]
In Malaga, he attends a bull fight, but the composer has none of the fascination felt by poets for such forms of primeval instinct; he protests immediately and leaves the bullring without further ado (AMT p. 124). To Søs and Emil, he writes: 'It was unbearably nerve-racking and horribly brutal. I will fight it with word and deed as long as I live!" [6:378]
The journey sees him criss-crossing the continent. In Amsterdam, he had been invited to celebrate Wilhelm Mengelberg's 25 years as conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra with a major Gustav Mahler Festival from 5 to 21 May. On the way home from Spain, therefore, he departs from the itinerary and arrives in Amsterdam on 13 May. Alongside the orchestral concerts with Mahler's symphonies, chamber music concerts are held and, at the fourth of these on 20 May, Carl Nielsen's Violin Sonata no. 2 [CNW 64] is on the programme. Emil Telmányi arrives from the north to play the sonata with Artur Schnabel, one of the most celebrated pianists of the time.
At a private party, moreover, his friend Julius Röntgen has taken it upon himself to accompany Emil Telmányi on the piano in Carl Nielsen's Violin Concerto [CNW 41] before other prominent guests at Mengelberg's Mahler festival, among them the conductors Hermann Abendroth and Fritz Busch and the latter's brother, the violinist Adolf Busch. According to Telmányi, however, the Concerto[CNW 41] did not go down well. The Violin Sonata [CNW 64], on the other hand, was the best piece played in Amsterdam during the entire festival according to the composer [6:406]. Among the unidentified letters in The Carl Nielsen Archive, a letter from Artur Schnabel to Carl Nielsen has turned up relating to this volume – and for the first time it provides written evidence for Schnabel's affection for Nielsen and his music [6:422].
Emil Telmányi had come to Amsterdam proposing to his father-in-law that they could continue their journey together to Budapest, where he himself was to be the soloist at a Norwegian concert performing Sinding's Violin Concerto in A major conducted by Ernst Dohnányi. There are few letters about this part of the journey [6:408], but we know that it was on this occasion that Carl Nielsen first met Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. This was a meeting that came to spawn anecdotes and myths in the (quasi-)history of Danish music, as a result of which history has not only been distorted but also, in the manner of other tall tales, has been attributed to widely differing times and places. In 1965, Knudåge Riisager even attempted to put an end to the story to spare the reputations of Bartók, Nielsen and the Danes. He did not succeed, however, and only managed to give the story yet another place of origin: Amsterdam (Dansk musiktidsskrift 1965, p. 153).
The trustworthy source is, of course, Telmányi, who was himself present – in Budapest – and writes about it in detail in his memoirs. Ernst Dohnányi sends out invitations for a musical afternoon tea in Carl Nielsen's honour and to give him the opportunity to meet leading Hungarian musicians. Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály are present, along with the Hungarian String Quartet. Dohnányi and Telmányi first play the guest's Violin Sonata no. 2 from 1912, which the pair of them have played together in public before in Budapest. After that, they play Bartók's String Quartet no. 2 from 1917, in other words a piece written five years later by the composer who was 16 years Nielsen's junior. Afterwards, at the hotel, Carl Nielsen tells his son-in-law that Bartók asked him 'whether he thought the quartet was modern enough?' Carl Nielsen thinks this a strange question for 'The music is either good or not, it's irrelevant whether it is modern.' (Telmányi, p. 139) Telmányi, reasonably enough, thinks that Bartók's question was a sign that he, as the younger, wanted to know what the older composer thought of his work – this particular piece not his music as a whole, as has been reported in the different variations of the story, which have never been concerned about which works prompted the response or when but have accepted without question the assessment of later generations that Bartók was a more modern composer than Nielsen.
In his second quartet, Bartók had not entirely freed himself of the late-Romantic style that had been his starting point, while Nielsen, who from the outset had, in his own way, been much freer from the world of Romantic feeling, had in his Violin Sonata no. 2 written what was his most advanced piece to date and so came to give Bartók a glimpse of a world that he may only just have begun to conceive.
Carl Nielsen never wrote his version of the story but, some days after his death, Hans Tørsleff published in a Norwegian newspaper some statements by Carl Nielsen that he called 'Carl Nielsen and "Modernism"'. Carl Nielsen's statements to Tørsleff, however correctly or incorrectly reproduced, would have been made around 1927, that is more than four years before their publication, and we have no other evidence for Hans Tørsleff's links to Carl Nielsen than this one article.
At a time when the chase for modernity seemed to Nielsen to have become an aim in itself, he may have dusted off the old story in order to explain that musical value lies elsewhere than in its degree of modernity. Bartók is not mentioned by Tørsleff, who goes no further than to reveal that Carl Nielsen mentioned a composer who belongs to 'those recognised as great in the musical life of Europe.' Samtid, no. 199. – Neither Bartók, Nielsen nor the Danes may need to feel embarrassed if the story is told as it really happened.
In mid-June, Nielsen and Telmányi are back in Copenhagen. For the remainder of the year, he mostly hides himself away at Damgaard or, at times, in Skagen. The return of southern Jutland to Denmark is to be celebrated with a new drama by Helge Rode, The Mother [CNW 18], at The Royal Theatre. Strangely enough, the Aladdin affair has not left the Theatre reluctant to commission music from Carl Nielsen. Nor has it prompted Carl Nielsen to refuse categorically to accept. He says yes, and then no, and then allows himself to be persuaded, even composing the music on his journey to Spain to keep to the schedule. As usual, the amount of music needed during the process expands and the day for the premiere is postponed – until January 1921, in the next volume.
In his correspondence with the Theatre, Carl Nielsen seems amenable, accommodating and a little disinterested. He may be composing primarily for the money, but for this production he ended up writing some of his best, simplest and most appealing music, such as what has become over the years one of the best known and best loved of his songs, written to a period text giving but almost universal expression of a deep and painful longing:
My heart was truly bitter,
so weary were my feet,
unhealthy was my lonely soul
the journey's end to meet.[CNW 235]
Even as he is composing the music for the nation's official festival play celebrating reunification, he is once again beginning to think of something bigger. But the man who previously could grasp a whole work as in a vision that could act as a guiding principle for the process of composition (Cf. Samtid, p. 51), cannot now see how he should progress from one bar to the next. The words he spoke as regards his private life, that he 'cannot see how the future might come to look', may now also be true for the musical course that he is attempting to follow. From bar to bar, what lies ahead is unsure. Nevertheless, towards the end of this volume, we get a sense that he is beginning to conceive the contours of yet another great work, the symphony of the century, his Symphony no. 5 [CNW 29].