! Funen Dreams

O!" #$ %&" '"()''*!+ %'#,"- in Nielsen reception, both at home and abroad, is his association with the Danish landscape. Repeatedly

presented as a true and faithful son of the soil, Nielsen is held to have cap-tured some elemental quality of the Danish landscape in sound, just as the landscape seems somehow to have determined the texture and grain of much of his musical work. .e pastoral cantata, Fynsk Foraar (‘Springtime on Funen’), is emblematic in this respect. It is here that Nielsen’s evocation of the Danish countryside, and the island of Funen where he was born, appears most powerful and explicit. But Nielsen’s response to the idea of landscape, and to the construction of Funen as specific place and sensibility in music, is more ambiguous than it first seems. In a brief, illuminating moment towards its closing bars, the whirling round dance with which Springtime on Funen concludes unexpectedly gives way to a hushed cadenza for tremolo violins, solo voices, horns, and bassoons. Marked molto adagio, the seven-bar pas-sage is canonic: the soprano’s ornamental melodic arabesque is imitated first by the tenor and then by the baritone (doubled by the woodwind), beneath a shimmering inverted pedal in the upper strings (Ex. /.0). Texturally, dynami-cally, and harmonically, the cadenza is an exceptional and striking event: its Ab minor orientation is a sharp diversion from the round dance’s final tonal goal, a radiant E major (the transition pivots on the enharmonic transforma-tion Eb/D#), and the sudden drop in dynamic level and textural weight is in sharp contrast to the finale’s prevailing fortissimo tutti. .e cadenza marks an abrupt change of direction that seemingly brings the whole work momen-tarily to a stop at the line: ‘Se, Æbleblomster drysser over vejen’ (‘Look, apple blossom scatters down upon the road’). .e three soloists repeat the words hypnotically, as though held in rapt attention as they watch the white petals slowly falling to the ground, until the chorus re-enter in the final bar, whis-pering ‘Natten er vor egen, Æbleblomster drysser’ (‘.e night is ours, apple blossom scatters down’). As the words slip silently away, the round dance returns, swiftly cranking up speed and volume once again so that the poign-ant memory of the spring night, and its associations of vernal love, are breez-ily blown away as the cantata spirals towards its celebratory final cadence. On closer inspection, the cadenza might be heard simply as a moment of modest reflection, the brief calm before the uplifting storm of the cantata’s energetic final pages. It can also be understood generically as a closing cur-tain call for the three soloists who appear, partly in character, earlier in the work, alongside a children’s choir and an adult chorus. Springtime on Funen opens with a gentle sunrise heralding the turning of the season. .e soft con-tours of the landscape are feminised, the spring blossom flowering upon ‘the

Funen Dreams !""

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Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!"#

gnarled apple tree/behind hills as rounded as young girl’s knees’ [det knort-ede Æbletræ/bag Bakker, der rundes som Pigeknæ]. $e soprano solo enters as a spring goddess – Demeter or Persephone, or perhaps a local Nordic deity (Freya) – followed by the tenor, a young sap-filled hero, who greets ‘the gen-tle day, so mild and long/and full of sun and birdsong’ (‘den milde Dag [så] lys og lang/og fuld af Sol og Fuglesang’). $e baritone appears twice: first as the earthy voice of experience, an ‘old bachelor’ whose dark lower register grounds the passage in the rich tilth of the Funen fields, and then later as the melancholy blind musician, ‘Blind Anders’ in Nielsen’s autobiographical account of his childhood, whose mournful clarinet solo provides the can-tata’s greatest moment of pathos: ‘small hands seek my old hand/it is as if I touched the spirit of spring (små Hænder søger min gamle Hånd/ det er, som rørte jeg Vårens Ånd’). In contrast, the cadenza has the feeling of withdrawal and abstraction, a liquefaction or draining away of meaning, as though the characters who enter elsewhere in the work suddenly lose their individual identity and drift from view. $e cadenza’s haziness thus assumes the qual-ity of a dream sequence, a hallucinatory episode that seems in some ways emblematic of the act of remembrance itself: the sudden unexpected light-ing upon a forgotten image that is simultaneously familiar and strange. $e shimmering string tremolo suggests the acute tingling of nerve endings, of a state of heightened awareness, the soprano arabesque appearing almost imperceptibly and then reproducing itself canonically as each stage in the process of recollection generates a further image in turn. $e falling apple

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Funen Dreams !"#

blossom hence becomes a Proustian key that momentarily unlocks a privi-leged domain of sensory experience and temporal projection backwards, or rather inwards, towards a hitherto inaccessible level of imagination. And, as swiftly as it emerged, the vision vanishes once more, swept aside by the inevitable return of the closing Dansevise. Memory, the cadenza reveals, is as much about letting go as about recollection; landscape here is more con-cerned with erasure than with recording the permanent mark of dwelling and occupation. Nielsen’s springtime is a festival of celebration and rebirth, but it is also merely a seasonal stage in a larger cycle of growth and decay, of flowering and dissolution – it is the trace of landscape’s mutability and con-stant capacity for change and renewal. $is fluctuating sense of Springtime on Funen as a seasonal cycle points towards Nielsen’s relationship with a much broader tradition of Danish land-scape representation. Nielsen composed Springtime on Funen in summer !%&!, as he was working on the Fifth Symphony: his contemporary correspondence suggests that the symphony had reached a creative block, so work on the can-tata, which he christened a ‘lyrical humoresque’, became a form of musical therapy or release.! $e text, by Funen doctor and poet Aage Berntsen (!''#–!%#&, son of the politician Klaus Berntsen, who had been one of the prime movers in Nielsen’s early career as a musician and had sponsored his studies at the Royal Danish Conservatoire), had been the winning entry in a competi-tion run by the Dansk Korforening (Danish Choral Society) for a choral work to celebrate Danish history or landscape.& $e competition judges included Einar Christiansen, director of the Royal $eatre and formerly the librettist of Nielsen’s first opera, the biblical epic Saul og David, Viggo Bierring (chair of the Korforening), and the Funen-born poet Sophus Michaëlis, with whom Nielsen later collaborated on another Funen commission, the H. C. Andersen festival play Amor og Digteren. Nielsen delegated the orchestration (with extensive instructions for completion) to his pupil Nancy Dalberg – a pattern

( In a letter to his wife, dated " September !%&!, Nielsen wrote: ‘My new choral work has become a really big piece ()& sides in piano score) and is now delivered punctually. But then I have indeed been working hard and with a certain easiness. Although it’s called “Springtime on Funen” by the poet, I’ve given it an additional subtitle, namely “lyrical humoresque”, which indicates that the style is easy and lively. I spent a couple of days on Funen after I finished. … Now I will continue with my interrupted symphony.’ [Mit nye Korværk er blevet et helt stort Arbejde ()& sider i Klaver Udtog) og er nu virkelig rettidigt afleveret. Men jeg har ogsaa arbejdet meget og med vis Lethed. Det hedder jo fra digterens haand: Fynsk Foraar men jeg giver det en Undertitel tillige, nemlig ‘lyrisk Humoreske’ der antyder at Stilen er let og livfuld. Jeg har været et Par Dage paa Fyn efter at jeg blev færdig … Nu skal jeg til at fortsætte paa min afbrudte Symfoni.] Dagbøger, ))*.

+ Information on the genesis and reception of Springtime on Funen is taken from the commentary in the critical edition, ed. Niels Krabbe, CNU series ":! (Copenhagen, &,,&), xxvii–xxxiv.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!"#

of work which he had already partly initiated with his incidental music for Adam Oehlenschläger’s fairy-tale play Aladdin, composed a few years previ-ously (!$!%–!&), which similarly fed into his thoughts on the symphony." 'e first performance of Springtime on Funen, appropriately, took place on & July !$(( at the !die Landssangstævne (third national song meeting or eisteddfod) in a large-scale production conducted by Georg Høeberg in the agricultural surroundings of the Odense Kvæghal (Cattle Hall, rechristened ‘'e Market Hall’ for the festival) and attended by members of the Danish royal family. 'e programme also included Peter Lange-Müller’s fairy-tale cantata Agnete og Havmanden (‘Agnete and the Merman’) and a Palestrina motet, Sicut cer-vus, performed, according to tastes of the time, by massed chorus with full orchestra. Despite the obvious shortcomings in the premiere – Nielsen had conceived the piece as essentially a chamber work for small forces, suitable for realisation in provincial venues where larger resources might not be avail-able, rather than a full-scale pageant – the local press were enthusiastic. 'e review in Fyens Stiftstidende, for example, acclaimed ‘rarely have a poet and composer had such success in finding the appropriate expression for the unique mood and emotional life of a Danish region’, praising the work’s abil-ity to capture the authentic tone of the Funen character:

'e residents of Funen utterly lack the capacity to take themselves too seriously. As genuine sons of Funen descent, Berntsen and Carl Nielsen have therefore made Springtime on Funen into a humoresque; but no less uniquely the humoresque carries the stamp of lyricism, for Funen residents are and remain the Danes who abandon themselves most eas-ily to the shifting play of the moods.)

When Nielsen himself conducted the first metropolitan performance in Copenhagen, on (! November !$((, the national papers were no less compli-mentary about the music. Axel Kjerulf, for example, described the piece as ‘enchantingly formed, so easy and light, so full and rich, so simple and intimate. Carl Nielsen’s Danish tone can be recognised in every strophe, but here more * On some of the the correspondences between Aladdin and the Fifth Symphony,

see David Fanning, Nielsen: Symphony no. " (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, !$$%), ((–" and (+–%. In the context of the present discussion, it is significant that both works open with the evocation of enchanted musical nature realms.

, ‘Sjældent har en Digter og en Komponist haft saa meget Held for at finde det fuldgyldige Udtryk for en dansk Landsdels ejendommelige Stemnings- og Følelsesliv. Fyenboerne savner absolut Evnen til at tage sig selv med stor Højtidelighed. Som ægte Sønner af fyenske Slægter har Berntsen og Carl Nielsen derfor gjort “Fyensk Foraar” til en Humoreske; men ikke mindre ejendommeligt er det at Humoresken bærer Lyrikens Præg, for Fyenboerne er og bliver de danskere, der lettest hengiver sig til Stemningernes vekslende Spil.’ Unsigned review in Fyens Stiftstidende, !- July !$((; quoted in the editorial commentary, Springtime on Funen (CNU ":!), xxxii.

Funen Dreams !"#

sweetly and truly than before. He is on personal terms with everything … and we others approach this often so inaccessible man as closely as possible – and become fond of him’.$ Springtime on Funen thus became a means of valoris-ing Nielsen’s critical status as national composer, his attention to local detail, and perceived faithfulness to his regional roots, o%ered further evidence to contemporary critics of the veracity and depth of his music’s characteristi-cally ‘Danish tone’. In Nielsen’s cantata, province, nation, landscape and song were symbolically united in a lyrical celebration of Danish musical identity and national character.

! "e Songs of the RyeAs its cadenza reveals, however, the idea of landscape to which Springtime on Funen appeals is more complex than these early reviews suggest. &e align-ment of landscape and song is contingent upon a rich local network of asso-ciations, traditions, and representations. In his critical study of the historical emergence and formation of this Danish landscape tradition, cultural geogra-pher Kenneth Olwig has argued that, for many artists and writers, the physi-cal character and terrain of the landscape itself suggests a sense of fluidity and change. &e interlocking lines of land, water and sky created by Denmark’s intricate post-glacial coastline and prevailing low topography often results in a feeling of impermanence and transparency. Geologically, as Olwig notes, Denmark is already in some senses already a memory or an after-thought of a larger event, the morainic trace of retreating glaciers resulting in a com-plex, flat or gently undulating chain of islands, peninsulas, inlets, shallow 'ords, lakes, and drumlins. Only the desolate infertile heathland of west and central Jutland, now mostly given over to conifer plantations and improved arable farmland, and the granite cli%s of Bornholm in the Baltic to the east, suggest a di%erent kind of scenery, both of which were ultimately sub-sumed within a broader Danish landscape sensibility: the interplay of coast and farm, land and sea.( As Patricia G. Berman has suggested, the frequent proximity of water not only intensifies the sense of liminality, of dwelling on

) ‘Bedaarende er der formet, saa let og lyst, saa fuldt og frodigt, saa enkelt og inderligt. Man kender i hver Strofe Carl Nielsens danske Tone, her blot sødere og sandere end før. Han er dus med det hele … og vi andre kommer denne ofte saa utilnærmelige Mand paa allernærmeste Hold – og kommer til at holde af ham.’ Quoted in editorial commentary, Springtime on Funen, xxxiii.

* Kenneth Olwig, Nature’s Ideological Landscape (London: Allen & Unwin, !+,-), and ‘Danish Landscapes’, in Nordic Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe, ed. Michael Jones and Kenneth Olwig (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .//,), "–!!. As Olwig’s !+,- study shows, the cultivation of the Jutland heaths was a deeply politicised project that prompted the emergence of a new landscape sensibility in Danish art and literature – and which also led to the formation of the first environmental movement in Danish political life.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!",

the edge, but also fostered the characteristic quality of the light captured by early nineteenth- century Golden Age painters such as Christoph Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke, Dankvart Dreyer, and Johan &omas Lundbye, whose work created a canon of visual imagery through which the idea of the Danish landscape was subsequently reflected, analysed and imagined.# Lundbye’s landscapes in particular are often concerned with a sense of edgi-ness: the preference for long, flat horizons, gentle hills, fields, hedges, and sea-scapes an attempt to render the Danish landscape scenically within a broader romantic tradition of prospect and melancholic contemplation. Landskab ved Arresø (!,"(; Fig. $.!), for example, is prototypical in its sense of an almost timeless space created by the low layered planes of foreground, water, and dunes beyond, under a vast westering sky: only the figures scenically but unobtrusively placed in the centre middleground serve to provide any sense

0 Patricia G. Berman, In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century (London: &ames & Hudson, .//#), !/(–!+.

Fig. !." Johan #omas Lundbye, Landskab ved Arresø, "$%&

Funen Dreams !"+

of contemporary human presence, but they are overshadowed by the barrow placed more prominently in the foreground to the left, which evokes a vivid sense of Denmark’s distant archaeological past. Købke’s paintings are marked by their tendency towards abstraction, the desire to reduce landscapes to a geometrical play of lines, colour planes, and textures. Collectively, their work provided a framework, and a set of symbolic contents, for later nineteenth-century artists and writers concerned with interpreting the Danish landscape. As Olwig notes, the emergence of this particular Danish landscape tradition was intimately linked with a wider national romantic project. In his seminal !,/" lectures on geology and national culture at Copenhagen University, nat-ural philosopher Henrik Ste%ens elided the idea of landscape within a broader modernist narrative of flux and self-determination:

&rough this interaction of the whole upon the individual, and the indi-vidual upon the whole, is generated an identical picture-history, which presupposes the entirety of nature as the foundation for all existence, and all of humanity as the expression of this interaction itself. &e expression of the coexistence of all these individuals’ interactions in history and nature is space – eternity’s continually recumbent picture. But the whole is only an eternal chain of changing events. Yes it is this constant alternating exchange, this eternal succession of transforma-tions itself. &e constant type of these changes is time – eternity’s con-stant moving, flowing, and changing picture.,

Ste%ens’s model proved influential not only for the Golden Age painters, but also for a generation of Romantic writers, including Adam Oehlenschläger and Steen Steensen Blicher, whose work similarly strove to capture the essence of the Danish landscape as a symbolic system of representation and as a mode of dwelling or perception. Landscape was thus defined not simply as a series of physical characteristics alone, through its topography, geology, or horizon, but also as a dynamic site of cultural memory, as a zone of trans-formation or social space shaped by its own history of laws, practices, and customs.+ Nielsen was evidently strongly attracted to this richer, transformative idea of landscape as cultural memory. In the opening paragraph of his !+/+ essay ‘Words, Music, and Programme Music’, later reprinted in the collec-tion Levende Musik (‘Living Music’, !+.$), he approached Ste%ens’s sense of the Danish landscape as a symbolic process of self-realisation and sensory perception:

1 Henrich Ste%ens, Indledning til Philosophiske Forelæsninger i København, (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, !+/$), +!, quoted in Kenneth Olwig, ‘&e Jutland Cipher: Unlocking the Meaning and Power of a Contested Landscape’, in Nordic Landscapes, !.–-+, at ..–".

2 Olwig, ‘&e Jutland Cipher’, "!.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!-/

A farmer walks one morning across his freshly harrowed field. He bends down, picks up an unusually formed stone from the earth, turns it in his hand, weighs it and examines it from all sides. He then pro-ceeds with his find, which he intends to place with the other unu-sual stones in his garden. – As long as the man is not too imagina-tive and sees in the stone a dog, cat, bird, or other creation, here we have the original sense for plastic art, which is promising, and upon which all sculptural understanding depends. In that simple condi-tion, whereby an object needn’t mean or represent anything at all and yet still awakens our interest and surprise simply through the honest organic play of forms and lines, lie the primeval formations in what we call our spiritual life, like chalk, moraines, and soil in geology. It is from these layers that Art will grow and become personal and unique.!/

For Nielsen, landscape becomes a form of archaeology or agriculture. Echoing the Romantic poet Oehlenschläger, for whom the Danish soil held treasured remnants of its lost historical past as a form of popular cultural imagination,!! Nielsen argues for a mode of creative landscape perception that is excavated or unearthed from the worked soil, and which results in the farmer’s sense of the abstract ‘organic play of lines and forms’. Landscape is here concerned both with shape and colour, and also with texture, mood or grain. It is this feeling for surface, as well as space, which underpins Nielsen’s coupling of music and sculpture as complementary forms of plastic imagina-tion. But it is only through a process of spiritual growth, Nielsen believes, that these forms can flower or evolve and realise their true potential. &e organic forms and lines themselves are little more than a geological foundation, a

34 ‘Landmanden gaar en Morgenstund over sin friskharvede Pløjemark. Han bøjer sig, tager en ejendommelig formet Natursten op fra Jorden, drejer den i sin Haand, føler paa paa den og betragter den nøje fra alle Sider. Saa gaar han videre og medbringende sit Fund, som han har i Sinde at lægge hen til de andre mærkelige Sten i sin Have. – I Fald Manden ikke er alt for fantasirig og ikke i den fundne Sten ser en Hund, en Kat, en Fugl eller en anden Skabning, saa har vi her den oprindelige Sans for Plastik, som er saa lovende, og hvorpaa i Virkeligheden al plastisk Forstaaelse beror. Dette enkle Forhold, at Tingen ikke skal betyde eller forestille noget som helst, men alligevel vækker vor Opmærksomhed og Forundring blot ved det sanddru, organiske Spil af Former og Linier, det er Urdannelser i det, vi kalder vort Sjæleliv, som Kridt, Moræneler og Muldjord er det i Geologien. Det er fra disse lag, Kunsten skal vokse op og blive personlig og særegen.’ Samtid !, !.$–"(, at !.$.

33 In his famous poem ‘Guldhornene’ ("e Golden Horns), Oehlenschläger narrated the story of one of Denmark’s greatest archaeological treasures, the discovery of two Bronze Age horn goblets, which were subsequently stolen from the National Museum and lost. For Oehlenschläger, the theft served as a poignant metaphor for the perceived weakening of Denmark’s cultural and political spirit, and as a symbol for its urgent regeneration.

Funen Dreams !-!

basis for growth that demands cultivation. &e landscape’s physical form is ultimately subordinate to the practice of dwelling or work that shapes such objects into art. Landscape, according to Nielsen, is properly ground that is occupied and worked: the grooves created by the path of the plough through the soil throws up the raw materials for art, which in turn awakens the farm-er’s plastic creative impulse and prompts his spiritual development, yet that also marks his presence upon the land. Ploughing e%ectively becomes a form of writing or inscription, of tracing a line through the earth. But this mark is one that can readily be erased or reploughed. Hence, the sense of presence itself becomes highly contingent, as fleeting and unstable as the creative spirit that animates such artistic imagination. &e flint which the farmer picks up and carries to his garden, in Nielsen’s essay, doubly serves as an object of curiosity and also as a mindesmærke or memorial (literally, a ‘memory marker’). Its attractiveness lies not only in its strangeness – the fact that it doesn’t really resemble anything at all – but also, paradoxically, in its familiarity, in its uncanny ability to suggest or evoke images from the recent or distant past. It is this sense of strange recognition, according to Michael Jones and Kenneth Olwig, which defines our feeling for a particular landscape as a place, rather than merely a bounded or enclosed space, ‘with the sense of familiarity and a perception that the place one is attached to is di%erent from other places’,!. and which in turn becomes a source of collective memory and reimagination. Runestones!" and other archaeological sites, such as the barrow mound illustrated in Lundbye’s paint-ing, conventionally marked boundaries and ownership: they identified a loca-tion not through its physical characteristics but rather through its dominion or governance, with the social acts of gathering and inhabitation. As Olwig and Jones suggest, the landscape was defined not as ‘a monolithic unity of environment and culture determined by nature, but rather the place of a pol-ity constituted through human law and custom’.!- Runestones, for example, strongly lent themselves in the early nineteenth-century imagination to the idea of a shared national heritage or common cultural property. But they also literally set in stone the act of inscription itself, the process by which the earth was scratched or grooved. &e feeling for place hence becomes tactile – the organic trace, as Nielsen suggests, of forms, lines, and shapes marked upon

35 Michael Jones and Kenneth Olwig, ‘&inking Landscape and Regional Belonging on the Northern Edge of Europe’, Nordic Landscapes, ed. Jones and Olwig, ix–xxix, at x.

36 &e most important runestones in Danish archaeological history are the pair at Jelling, near Vejle in eastern Jutland. For an introduction to discussion of the Jelling Stones, see Ejnar Dyggve, Mindesmærke i Jelling: Form og Tydning (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, !+(-); and Klaus Ebbesen, Jelling: historie og arkæologi (Copenhagen: Fremad, !++/).

37 Jones and Olwig, ‘&inking Landscape’, xii.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!-.

the surface of the landscape. But the runestones are also concerned with the faded memory of past events, with customs and laws that are forgotten or only half-remembered. &eir original meaning remains shrouded or obscure, the full significance of the strokes upon the rock’s face only partly recoverable. In that sense, runestones and barrows, like Nielsen’s flint, remain stubbornly abstract, their oblique non-referential quality simultaneously evocative and incomplete. An equally striking evocation of the Danish landscape as a site of cultural memory, however, is presented in Emilie Demant Hatt’s remarkable account of her teenage romance with Nielsen during his student years at the Royal Danish Conservatoire in the late !,,/s, Foraarsbølger (‘Spring Waves’). Demant Hatt’s memoir, written in the !+-/s but only recently rediscovered by John Fellow in the Royal Library, is important partly as an authentic record of Nielsen’s early encounter with the intellectual circle surrounding Georg Brandes’s lectures on Nietzsche and contemporary European literature and his interest in the work of symbolist writers such as Jens Peter Jacobsen. But her narrative is also punctuated by evocative descriptions of the Danish land-scape. Describing a summer sailing trip on the Lim'ord in northern Jutland, for example, Denmant Hatt experiences a nature epiphany, a moment of ecstatic stillness upon the water that liquidates any fixed sense of time or space:

&ere was abundant time to enjoy the surroundings – floating silently upon the broad blue 'ord. We were in a heaven of beauty. To the left lay the island of Fur with its dark, undulating heather knolls, and the high clay slopes down towards the water. Behind us Salling’s fertile land with churches, farms and green fields – topped by burial mounds. To the right was brooding Himmerland, where ‘the Sun always shines upon Bjørnholm’s white gables’. &us we sang in my childhood. It was, in spite of the white stepped gables, a gloomy farm, the venerable abbey of White Friars – as it was known in the middle ages. Right beside the beach, beneath the old farm, shone the great Ertebølle cli% and not much farther on lay the kitchen midden from ancient times. Much far-ther out Hanherred was faintly visible like a thin stripe of blue land. Slowly – infinitely slowly – we rowed right past Livø where there then still stood a remnant of the wood from the beginning of time. Mighty oaks raised themselves like dark monuments up above wild, scrubby undergrowth. Yes, land and 'ord were unchanged from their grey past, when Vikings and simple fisherman sailed upon the 'ord. &eir eyes saw the same as we saw. Water and land with islands and coasts lay now as then in a warm flickering haze. Viewed from a certain distance, noth-ing had changed up there on the Lim'ord in a thousand years. As an

Funen Dreams !-"

area, my childhood world had slid slowly and evenly from the past into the present. Now everything has been changed.!$

Demant Hatt’s description is characterised partly by its careful attention to local detail: familiar landmarks are ordered and identified according to their relative positions, and described with an almost anthropological preci-sion – Demant Hatt’s later career as a painter and ethnologist clearly sensi-tised her eye to such fluid, fluctuating patterns of land usage and environ-mental change. But more compelling is the apparent suspension of temporal perception. Various historical periods are conflated and superimposed so that the landscape becomes a palimpsest: bronze-age middens and burial mounds seemingly coexist alongside Viking ski%s upon the 'ord, medieval churches and religious houses, and ageless woods that suggest a primeval geological past. On the one hand, the passage of time seems immeasurable: the vari-ous landmarks and historical events float past ‘slowly – infinitely slowly’, as Demant Hatt suggests. On the other hand, time seems to dissolve into the waters of the 'ord itself. &is sudden sense of temporal fluidity becomes fully apparent only in the last two sentences, as the world of her childhood slides ‘slowly and evenly from the past into the present’, and now ‘everything is changed’. Demant Hatt’s vision can be interpreted as a nostalgic refram-ing of the mid-nineteenth-century Golden Age pictorial idea of the Danish landscape as imagined by painters &omas Lundbye and Dankvart Dreyer. It shares their concern for topographic accuracy and regional knowledge, and supports Olwig’s definition of the Danish landscape as a site of social practice, shaped by its history of occupation, gathering, and dwelling – the remains of burial mounds, farms and churches representing di%erent but interlocking stages and cycles of community. But it also strikes a strangely modernist note: the final sentence is a jarringly disorientating device, which o%sets the local

3) ‘Det var rigelig Tid til at nyde Omgivelserne – stille glidende i den brede blaa Fjord. Vi var i en Himmel af Skønhed. Til venstre laa Fur med de mørke, svungne Lyngbakker, og de høje Lerskrænter ned mod Vandet. Bag os Sallings frodige Land med Kirker, Gaarde og grønne Marker – toppet af Gravhøje. Tilhøjre det tunge Himmerland, hvor ‘Solen altid skinner paa Bjørnholms hvide Gavle’. Saadan sagde vi i min Barndom. Det var, trods de hvide Trappegavle, en dyster Gaard, det ærværdige Vitskøl Kloster – som det hed i Middelalderen. Helt nede ved Stranden, under den gamle Gaard, lyste den store Ertebølle Klint, og ikke langt borte laa Køkkenmøddingen fra den 'erne Oldtid. Langt forude skimtedes Hanherred som en small Stribe blaat Land. Langsomt – uendelig langsomt – drev vi tæt forbi Livø, hvor der, dengang, endnu stod Rester af Skov fra Tidernes Begyndelse. Kæmpemæssige Ege rejste sig som mørke Monumenter op over vildsom, kratagtig Underskov. ¶ Ja, Land og Fjord og Himmel var uforandret fra hine graa Tider, da Vikinger og jævne Fiskere færdedes paa Fjorden. Deres Øjne har set det samme som vi saa. Vand og Land med Øer og Kyster laa nu som dengang i varm flimrende Soldis. Tusind Aar havde – set paa nogen Afstand – intet forandret oppe ved Lim'orden. Min Barndomsegn var gledet jævnt fra Oldtid til Nutid. Nu er alt forandret.’ Demant Hatt, Foraarsbølger, ed. Fellow, $!.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!--

detail of the preceding paragraph and profoundly unsettles the reader. Here is a di%erent response to the idea of landscape. &e sense of fairy-tale idyll or Arcadia, and its apparent abundance of perceptual time and space, is sud-denly shattered. If the landscape of the Lim'ord, in Demant Hatt’s account, is a dreamworld, a half-imaginary space of remembrance and invention, the final line is an abrupt awakening, a moment of rupture that violently tears the curtain aside. Emilie Demant Hatt’s powerfully evocative account of the landscape of the Lim'ord reflects a wider shift in early twentieth-century Danish art and liter-ature. Representations of the Danish landscape gained new impetus from the work of the so-called Lim#ord digtere (Lim'ord poets), an informal group of Jutland writers including &øger Larsen, Johannes V. Jensen, and Jeppe Aakjær, who vigorously promoted their own sense of regionality in opposition to the narrow metropolitan elite that they believed dominated the Copenhagen cul-tural scene.!( In poem entitled simply ‘Landskab’ (‘Landscape’), published in the journal Atlantis in !+.", for example, &øger Larsen eulogised the Danish landscape in terms that again evoked an earlier nineteenth-century pictorial tradition (Denmark as the land of coast and farm, of sea, 'ord, and gentle hills), yet which also unfolded a more modernist vision of Danish nature as a spiritual life-force, animating the land:

Det suser svalt over Muld og Strandi Danmark, Bakkers og Bølgers Landog Hvisk i Træerne, nær og 'ærn,og Kvad, der mumler i Møllens Kværnog Brus for Brisen mod Søens Bred,og Aandepustet fra Blomsterbed –er Danmarks Stemme, der moderømBetror dig en blid og bundløs Drøm.

&at which sighs gently over soil and shoreIn Denmark, the land of dunes and wavesAnd whispers in the trees, near and far,And sings of what murmurs in the millstonesAnd hums in the breeze from across the lake,And that breath from the flowerbed –Is Denmark’s voice, which with motherly a%ectionConfides in you a gentle and unfathomable dream.!#

3* Ingwersen, ‘&e Modern Breakthrough’, esp. "/!–!(. 30 &øger Larsen, ‘Landskab’, Atlantis !/- (April !+."). &e opening lines were

later carved on a memorial stone for Larsen by Aakjær and Johannes V. Jensen. See Ellen Damgaard, ‘&øger Larsens Mindesten’, in Du danske Sommer: Fynbomalerne og de Jyske Forfattere i Samklang, ed. Malene Linell Ipsen

Funen Dreams !-$

Like the members of the so-called Funen school (or Fynbomalerne) – paint-ers Peter Hansen, Fritz Syberg, and Johannes Larsen – based in Faaborg on the southern coast of Funen and at Kerteminde in the north-east, the Lim#ord digtere celebrated their provincial roots, not as a narrow form of insularity or exclusivity, but rather as an assertion of aesthetic di%erence. &e regional became a source of renewal: a decisively modern, anti-decadent turn that sought to re-energise and invigorate Danish art and literature from within, rather than perpetuating what they believed was merely the pale anachronis-tic imitation of an outmoded European late Romanticism. Hence, according to Johannes V. Jensen, self-appointed spokesman of the Jyske bevægelse (Jutland movement), regionality became a source of authenticity and truth, and hence universal. What had seemed peripheral was, in fact, central. In characteris-tically combative mood, he summarised the aesthetic lines of debate in his diary:

It can now already be seen that the Funen school, who began as out-siders in a double sense, partly because they belonged to a remote, not a priori classical but rather peripheral part of the country, and partly because in terms of technique and taste they had long since set them-selves in opposition to the once general prevailing Salonkunst so that they were dismissed as ‘Farm painters’, a term of abuse, when one con-siders the di%erence now, it is already apparent that the Funen school constitute a central continuation of Danish art’s finest traditions, that which is otherwise connected to Zealand and Copenhagen; only at a certain point one came to realise that, this time, the renewal came from the ‘provinces’, from Funen.!,

Jensen thus explicitly invoked the idea of extraterritoriality, of belonging on the outside or edge, as a sign of artistic integrity, both for the Funen school and the Lim#ord digtere, and also (by extension) for Danish art as a whole: by appealing to its true peripheralised nature, Jensen believed, Danish art could recover a proper sense of identity, liberated from the anonymous cosmo-politanism of Salonkunst, and hence it could regain its true sense of focus or

(Kerteminde and Kongens Lyngby: Johannes Larsen Museet and Sophienholm, .//,), ,"–+..

31 ‘Det kan allerede nu ses, at Fynboerne, der begyndte som outsiders i en dobbelt Forstand, dels som tilhørende en 'ern, ikke paa Forhaand klassisk men periferisk Del af Landet, dels i Teknik og Smag længe gjorde sig saa bemærket i Modsætning til en en Overgang gældende Salonkunst, at de blev skældt ud for ‘Bondemalere’, et Hædersnavn, naar man ser Forskellen nu, det er allerede øjensynligt, at Fynboerne betyder den central Fortsættelse af dansk Kunsts bedste Traditioner, den der ellers er knyttet til Sjælland og København; kun skulde der en vis Tid til at se, at Fornyelsen denne Gang udgik fra ‘Provinsen’, fra Fyn.’ Johannes V. Jensen,

‘Fyn og Fynboerne’, Aarbog $%$& (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, !+!#), !$+–#"; quoted in Du danske Sommer, ed. Linell Ipsen, !$"–- at !$".

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!-(

centre.!+ To a certain degree, this strategy paralleled trends in early twentieth-century Danish politics. Reform of the voting system to allow wider popular representation in !+/! had coincided with the election of the agrarian Venstre block into government, marking a broader process of social and geographical decentralisation in the Danish political landscape. &is shift in turn reflected the changing nature of Danish Realpolitik in the years following the !,(- Jutland war, when Denmark lost approximately -/ per cent of its territory in southern Jutland to Prussia: the defeat prompted a sense of inwardness and national self-reflection, resulting in the emergence of a nostalgic patriotism and the determination that, as a small nation, ‘hvad udad tabes, skal indad vindes’ (‘what was lost from without shall be won from within’)../ It is partly for this reason that the landscape of the Lim'ord described by Emilie Demant Hatt in her memoir and hymned by the Lim#ord digtere came to seem so intensely precious, and, moreover, so quintessentially Danish. Like the world of the Funen painters, this idealised vision of the Danish landscape became valuable precisely because it was now perceived to be territorially vulner-able and marginalised. &e sense of nostalgia underpinning Demant Hatt’s account and pervading &øger Larsen’s poem, the melancholic-modernist dream of ‘Danmark, Bakkers og Bølgers Land’, reflected a very real experi-ence, and fear, of separation and loss. And the uncovered layers of cultural memory served, at least in part, to demonstrate and assert collective owner-ship, a sense of belonging and of groundedness that could as easily slip ‘slowly and evenly’ away even as it was recovered. &e Jyske bevægelse was thus motivated by a profound desire for aesthetic change. &e need for a decisive shift of style and idea was energetically argued in the daily newspaper Politiken in !+/#. In a series of exchanges known as the Bondemalerstrid (‘Farm Painter controversy’), the symbolist painter Harald Slott-Møller and art critic Karl Madsen (an energetic patron and supporter of the Funen school) clashed over the future direction for contemporary Danish

32 In an article entitled ‘Dansk Natur’ (‘Danish Nature’), for a special Christmas number of the nationalist newspaper Riget, !+!/, Jensen wrote: ‘By the way, it is not at all through a deliberately local tone that the so-called Funen school have assumed the lead in Danish visual art, but by proceeding strongly as Danish in general; the same is true to a certain extent of the Jutland authors.’ [Det er i øvrigt slet ikke ved en gennemført Lokaltone den saakaldt fynske Skole har taget Têten i dansk Malerkunst men ved at gaa kraftigt frem som dansk i Almindelighed; det samme gælder til dels de jyske Forfattere.] Quoted in Per Dahl and Aage Jørgensen, ‘Johannes V. Jensen og Fynbomalerne’, Du danske Sommer, $"–(#, at $(.

54 Erland Porsmose, ‘Danmarks Stemme’, in Du danske Sommer, !$–"$, at !(. &e quotation ‘Hvad udadtil tabes, skal indadtil vindes’ is usually attributed to Enrico Mylius Dalgas (!,.,–+-), who was one of the leaders behind agricultural reform in nineteenth-century Denmark, and energetically promoted the cultivation of the Jutland heaths. But in fact the phrase was coined by Hans Peter Holst (!,!!–+"), in an !,#. lecture. I am indebted to Svend Ravnkilde for this information.

Funen Dreams !-#

art..! For Slott-Møller, symbolism still represented the search for an inner psychological truth, but for Madsen, symbolism had become overly associ-ated with elitism, obscurity, and decadence: he argued instead for a healthy return to the Danish countryside, a vivid democratisation of art. Writing in !+!(, Johannes V. Jensen similarly hailed Jeppe Aakjær as the agent of a new cultural threshold in Danish literature, ‘a man who breaks through the soil and renews the material itself … &e popular, inner, primitive strength has forced its way through him as poet.’ .. Aakjær had achieved this popu-lar breakthrough ten years earlier in his collection Rugens Sange (‘Songs of the Rye’, !+/(), a volume of poetry which enjoyed considerable popularity and critical success in early twentieth-century Denmark. &e Danish landscape plays a central role in Rugens Sange, not simply as a picturesque backdrop or scenic frame, but also as a site of action, of domestic routine, and of hard physical labour. Rugens Sange is designed partly around the seasonal cycle of the agricultural year – the festivals and routines of springtime, harvest, and midwinter – but it is also concerned with the evocation of a sense of place. In his foreword to the !+.( edition, Aakjær described how the collection had been inspired by a journey home in !+/$ from Copenhagen to the remote north-west corner of the Jutland peninsula: though the sounds and sights of his native landscape had powerfully stirred his creative imagination, it was not until he returned to Copenhagen and then travelled out to Jutland again in New Year !+/( that he was able to find the appropriate form for his poetic vision. Rugens Sange was thus conceived partly as the expression of a pro-found separation anxiety and feeling of alienation: the tension between urban Copenhagen and rural idyll remains sharply implied throughout. Many of the poems are motivated by a spirit of hiraeth or Heimweh (the nostalgic long-ing for home) that is paradoxically groundless and unstable, the a%ection-ate rediscovery of familiar sites juxtaposed against the remembrance of past events and lost family and friends – Emilie Demant Hatt’s sense that ‘every-thing has been changed’. Aakjær’s collection opens with a ‘Forspil’ (‘Prelude’), whose overtly musical reference points towards a recurring vitalist concern throughout with the materiality of sound: memory and poetic imagina-tion are explicitly associated with auditory perception, and the waving rye becomes a metaphor for nervous agitation:

Jeg lægger mig i Læet her ved Storrugens Rod,Jeg lytter og jeg lytter, til det synger i mit Blod;

53 Kurt Risskov Sørensen, ‘Bondemalerstriden’, in Du danske Sommer, "+–-(. 55 ‘… en Mand [der] bryder op af Mulden og fornyer Sto%et selv. … Den folkelige,

indre, primitive Kraft har brudt sig Vej gennem ham som Digter.’ Politiken, !/ September, !+!(; quoted in Dahl and Jørgensen, ‘Johannes V. Jensen og Fynbomalerne’, $"–(#, at $(.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!-,

Den hvide Rug, den blide Rug, som mod min Tinding slaar – det er som tusind Fingre smaa paa Sølvtangenter gaar.

I lay down in the shelter of the tall rye’s roots,I listen and listen, until it sings in my blood;&e white rye, the gentle rye, which beats against my temples – it is as though a thousand small fingers moved upon silver keys.

Other poems, such as ‘Høst’ (‘Harvest’), similarly invoke the image of a dream landscape illuminated by the glow of a vitalist sun. In ‘Vor Barndoms Bæk’ (‘Our childhood brook’), the water becomes a stream of consciousness

– not in the Joycean sense, but rather as a tracing curve that drains individ-ual and collective memory and hummed (‘nynnet’) in the popular imagina-tion (‘Folkedrøm’). Poems such as ‘Den Jyske Lyng’ (‘&e Jutland Ling’) and ‘Hedelandet’ (‘&e Heathland’) are concerned with the poetic elevation of the Jutland landscape, and in particular with the austere beauty and strangeness of the heath, an environment whose scenic appeal had conventionally been underplayed in relation to its poor economic value yet which had appealed to painters such as Lundbye and writers such as Steen Steensen Blicher as emblematic of the romantic Danish temperament.." Aakjær later prepared a modern edition of Blicher’s work and revived his midsummer Himmelbjerg festivals, a ritual gathering dedicated to the performance of traditional poetry, music, and folk dance..- Poems such as ‘Jylland’ (‘Jutland’) and ‘Jeg er født paa Jyllands Sletter’ (‘I was born on Jutland’s Plains’) explicitly align Jutland with a patriotic sense of Danish identity, and the centre of the volume is occupied by a series of poems in Jysk dialect. But other poems respond more sensitively to the image of Denmark as ploughed, harvested land. ‘Sædemand’ (‘&e Sower’), the third poem in the book, concludes in praise of the Danish farmer as the solemn agent and progenitor of national renewal: ‘Tak, Bonde, med din Sædekurv!’ (‘&anks, farmer, with your sowing basket!). In ‘Paa Hedens Høje’ (‘Upon the Heath’) and ‘Her vendte Far sin Plov’ (‘Here Father turned his plough’), the ploughed earth becomes once more a source of memory and remembrance. In the latter text in particular, one of the shortest in the whole collection, the ploughed land becomes a symbol of agricultural routine and of the rural lifecycle, the poem’s pervasive grey hue both a sign of austerity and economic hardship and of passing life:

Her vendte Far sin Plov, aa, saa mangen, mangen Gang,Naar Graalærken højt over Sandmarken sang.Her gik min stille Mor i sin grove graa KjolOg saa med tynget Blik mod den synkende Sol.

56 &e Jutland heath also plays an important role in Johannes V. Jensen’s novel Kongens Fald (!+//), a text to which I return below.

57 Olwig, Nature’s Ideological Landscape, .-.

Funen Dreams !-+

&i satte Eders Søn denne liden graa StenTil Minde om en Færd, der som Duggen var ren.

Here Father turned his plough, ah, so many, many times,When the meadow lark sang high above the sandy field.Here my mother walked in her coarse grey coat,And watched with heavy glance the setting sun.&erefore your son set this little grey stoneTo the memory of a journey, as pure as the dew.

Aakjær’s mindesmærke or memorial, like Nielsen’s flint, quietly elides per-sonal memory with collective conscience, just as the rhythm of seasonal change and the passage of the sun across the fields merges with the sense of belonging, of ‘hjemstavnsfølelse’ or rootedness in the soil. But is also a dream sequence, like Emilie Demant Hatt’s description of the Lim'ord, a grey mist in which presence and absence, or memory and perception, seemingly blur together and become part of a continually shifting cycle of growth and decay, work and erasure. &ough he did not contribute directly to the Bondemalerstrid in Politiken, Nielsen was no less creatively engaged in debates about the idea and nature of the Danish landscape. For him, the conjunction of landscape and memory could seem similarly ecstatic and apocalyptic. At times of national crisis or celebration, for example, Nielsen was readily drawn, like Johannes V. Jensen, to patriotic images of the Danish countryside. In a letter to his wife dated !" February !+./, following the crucial referendum to determine Danish sover-eignty in northern Slesvig (German: Schleswig), Nielsen wrote: ‘I think of you when I read about the vote in southern Jutland; I know how much it has been upon your mind, and I can understand that your heart beats when you think of your childhood, the whole area and countryside where you grew up and became big and “strong” (as you said).’ .$ &e result of the referendum, to reu-nite territory lost following the !,(- Danish-Prussian war with the rest of the Danish kingdom, had been announced the previous day (!. February), and prompted a widespread upsurge in nationalist feeling. Nielsen later composed music for Helge Rode’s patriotic play, Moderen ("e Mother), first performed at the Royal &eatre on "/ January !+.!, including several numbers inspired by ideas of the Danish landscape, such as the poetic miniature for flute and harp, Taagen letter (‘&e Mist is Rising’)..( Here, the mistiness suggested by the movement’s title is evoked principally by modal mixture: the instability

5) ‘Jeg tænker paa Dig ved at læse om Afstemningen i Sønderjylland; jeg ved hvor meget det har ligget Dig paa Sinde og jeg kan forstaa at Dit Hjerte banker naar Du tænker paa Din Ungdom, hele Egnen og Landet hvor Du er vokset op og bliven stor og “stærk” (som Du sagde).’ Dagbøger, -.+.

5* &e genesis and composition of Nielsen’s music for Moderen, including details of his collaboration with Rode and the Royal &eatre, is described in Kirsten

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!$/

of the major third (E§/Eb) results in the modulation towards Ab minor at the end of the middle section. &ough the tonic is swiftly regained (b. .#), ele-ments of instability remain until the coda, where the Eb is gently resolved via chromatic alteration (Ex. $..). Even here, however, the sense of contingency remains strong – the final bar might easily turn back towards the minor once more, the whole number replaying itself in a seemingly infinite cycle of ten-sion and release: the mist lifts only to fall once more. Despite such hints of chromatic darkening, the prevailing mood in Taagen letter is idyllic, a rep-resentation of the Danish landscape as symbolic pastoral Arcadia similar to that projected in the outer movements of Springtime on Funen. In corre-spondence with his wife during to a trip to Funen in July !+./, as he was work-ing on the music for Moderen, Nielsen wrote: ‘Funen bulges with corn and the splendid countryside overflows with the richness of the fields. Everywhere flags for the reunion!’ .# Yet this trip is also marked by a powerful sense of loss and alienation, similar to that expressed at the end of Emilie Demant Hatt’s description of the sailing voyage on the Lim'ord: ‘Mother’s grave was nicely kept and I now have everything organised for the gravesite in future. &en I was out in my home country and talked with one my school friends who

Flensborg Petersen’s editorial preface to the critical edition, CNU !:+, Incidental Music . (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen, .//#), xi–xxviii.

50 ‘Fyn bugner af Korn og det herlige Land strømmer over af Rigdom paa Markerne[.] Overalt Flag for Genforeningen!’ Letter to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen dated + July !+./; Dagbøger, -"-.

27a tempo

31 rall.

&

&? mp

&pp

U

&pp

? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!

u

‰ œ> œ> œ> œ> œ> œœœœ œœœ> œ> œ> œœœœœœœ œ œ- œ œ œ œœœ œœ

œœœ œb œb œ œn œn œ œœœ œœœ œœ œb œ œœ œœœ

œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœ œ œœ œ œœœ

œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œb œ œ œn œ œœ œ œ œ œU.

œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œœœœU....

œœ œ œœœ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œ œœœ œœœ œœœU...

Ex. !.' Nielsen, 'Taagen Letter' (Moderen), bb. '(–end

Funen Dreams !$!

has a farm there and also owns the field where the house lay. It was melan-choly. &e region has become well-cultivated and the corn stood ripe, but the brickworks and houses are gone and even the hedges are di%erent.’ ., For Nielsen, the mutability of the landscape – its capacity for cyclic change and transformation – is projected onto his own biography, the remembrance of close family and friends as well as the places themselves. Yet while elements of continuity remain and seemingly collapse the sense of passing time, the overriding impression is as much of di%erence and separation, as of reunion, the mark upon the ground that traces a lost memory.

! ‘Det er saamænd Jens Vejmand’&e simultaneously painful and ecstatic sense of landscape, memory, and loss expressed by Nielsen in his diary entries and letters is captured most forci-bly in his Erindringsbog, Min fynske Barndom (‘My Childhood on Funen’)..+ &e book itself originated as a convalescence project, sketched while Nielsen was recovering from a particularly intense series of heart attacks and at a time when thoughts of his own mortality must have seemed particularly close. Clearly, his mind had already turned to memories of his childhood. In a diary entry dated .! January !+.(, he noted: ‘(Moods from Childhood) &en I would go out onto the wild heath in a thunderstorm and ask God in Heaven to strike me down with his lightening.’ "/ A week later he wrote again with similar thoughts of return and oblivion: ‘My home soil pulls me back more and more like a long sucking kiss. Is it ordained that I shall finally return to rest in the Funen earth? &en it must be in the very same place that I was born: Sortelung, Frydenlunds field. &under and lightening in the night. (Memories).’ "! Landscape and memory here become a site of existen-tial angst, the return to origins more a process of dissolution than rebirth. Yet My Childhood on Funen starts in a more neutral mode, with a sense of opening out, deepening, and expansion similar to that unfolded by Aakjær in Rugens Sange. It serves as much as a threshold rather than simply, as the diary

51 ‘Moders grav var nydelig holdt og nu har jeg det i Orden med Gravstedet for Fremtiden. Saa var jeg ude paa min Fødemark og talte med en af mine Skolekamerater der har en Gaard der og ejer ogsaa den Mark hvor Huset laa. Det var vemodigt. Egnen selv er bleven veldyrket og Kornet stod frodigt men Teglværk og Huse er borte og selv Hegnene er anderledes.’ Letter to Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen dated !# July !+./; Dagbøger, -"$.

52 Carl Nielsen, Min fynske Barndom (Copenhagen: Martins Forlag, !+.#). 64 ‘(Stemninger fra Barndommen) Saa vilde jeg gaa ud paa den vilde Hede i

Tordenvejr og bede Gud i Himmelen slaa mig ned med sit Lyn.’ Dagbøger, -+/. 63 ‘Min Hjemstavn drager mig mere og mere som et langt sugende Kys. Er det

Meninger jeg tilslut skal vende tilbage og hvile i den fynske Jord? Da maatte det være paa selvsamme Sted, jeg blev født: Sortelung, Frydenlunds Mark. Tordenvejr og Lyn om Natten. (Erindringer).’ Entry dated .+/!/.(; Dagbøger, -+/.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!$.

entries suggest above, a vanishing point. In a characteristic gesture, Nielsen’s account of his own arrival is as much spatially as temporally conceived – pre-cise details of his birth, narrated in the opening paragraph, are subordinate to the sense of belonging to a particular location, and of being bounded to a specific dwelling place (the farmer’s cottage or bondehus in Nørre Lyndelse, where he was born). &is is a recurring narrative strategy throughout the book. Idealised descriptions of the landscape, and of significant emotional events in Nielsen’s childhood, repeatedly give way to more prosaic details of a certain place, or highly physicalised discussion of people’s occupations and working practices upon the land. &e landscape does not become a passive framework or backdrop, so much as a sphere of activity or site of action. &is quality, for example, characterises Nielsen’s early description of their first home: two rooms of a shared house plus a kitchen, occupied by a family of twelve children. In contrast with Nielsen’s father, who is defined initially by his frequent absence from the house, the head of the family next door is pow-erfully attached to the seasonal cycle of the worked land:

In summer the man was a peat-cutter; he was a hard worker and had formidable strength. At four or five o’clock every morning at this time of year he walked with his lunchbox on his back and a rod in his hand with heavy, bearlike steps the mile or so to the moor. It was strange to watch him work; usually completely alone in the peat diggings. First he cleared the turf away, then he marked a square hole down in the pit, threw the peat into it, splashed water upon it and leapt into the pit and worked everything with his bare feet. &e trousers were rolled up to his thighs, and he sweated and lurched, as though it were a great passion within him.".

&e passage is notable not only as an extended description of hard physical labour, but also for the way that it inscribes a pattern of work upon the ground. &e landscape is defined here not only in terms of its particular geological character (the peat bog emblematic of a specific land type in Denmark, like the Jutland heath, that was already under considerable environmental pres-sure at the close of the nineteenth century),"" but also in terms of the human

65 ‘Om Sommeren var Manden Tørveskærer; han var en Slider af Rang og havde voldsomme Kræfter. Paa denne Aarstid gik han hver Morgen ved fire-fem Tiden med sin Madkasse paa Ryggen og en Kæp i Haanden med tunge, bamseagtige Skridt en halv eller hel Fjerdingvej til Mosen. Det var mærkeligt at se ham arbejde; som oftest ganske alene i Tørvegraven. Først skar han Græstørven bort, saa indrammede han et firkantet Hul nede i Graven, kastede Tørvejorden deri, øste Vand paa og sprang saa ned i Graven og æltede det hele med sine bare Fødder. Bukserne var smøget op til Laarene, og han svedte og tumlede, som om det var en stor Lidenskab hos ham.’ Min Fynske Barndom, !,–!+.

66 On attitudes to the management of heathland and lowland peat bogs, and shifting ideas of nationalism in Denmark, see Olwig, Nature’s Ideological Landscape.

Funen Dreams !$"

activity of the local population. &e peat digger’s temperament becomes an extension, or outflowing, of his manual labour – the sweat and energy with which he digs the ground. And it is this intensive engagement with the work-ing ground that shapes the tone and character of the landscape and which colours much of the description in My Childhood on Funen. Writing itself becomes a form of digging, of excavation from the soil. And, like the stone which the farmer picks up in his ploughed field, it is the rhythm and rou-tine of work that first awakens the senses and stimulates the inner spiritual growth necessary for the creation of Art. &is sensitivity to physical labour, and the sense of rural hardship that undercuts attempts to idealise and mystify the landscape, is a prominent quality of Aakjær’s Rugens Sange. Aakjær’s work is particularly concerned with issues of social justice, welfare, and economic inequality, and especially with the plight of the elderly. Many of his poems reveal a keen insight into the austerity and routine of Danish rural life. In ‘Stensamlersken’ (‘&e Stone Collector’), for example, the ‘poor shadow’ of old Ane Malén gathering stones upon the ground is contrasted sharply with the richness of the rye fields: ‘Derhjemme græder for Brød de Smaa, / Her sanker du Sten!’ (&e children cry for bread at home, / Here you collect stones!’). A similar example of landscape as worked ground emerges from Nielsen’s account of the brickworks close to his birthplace in Min fynske Barndom. At one level, the description can be understood as a simple record of the industrialisation in a provincial Danish region, mapped onto an older historical network of land usage and ownership:

My birthplace thus lay in the middle of a field. &ere was an ancient hay meadow, which had seldom been ploughed and which continually lay out to grass. &ere was no road to the house, but there were two footpaths, the first went east towards Dømmesrenden, where there was a bridge and a road, which led to a brickworks a few hundred yards away. &e second path went west, towards Frydenlund farm, which belonged to the Bramstrup estate. Frydenlund similarly lay a couple of minutes from our house, and Bramstrup a half mile further towards the west along the road between Odense and Faaborg. &ese four places: our home, the brickworks, Frydenlund and Bramstrup held the world together in which my brothers and sisters and I first grew up. Such a wealth of memories! Where shall I begin, and how will I ever be able to finish?"-

67 ‘Mit Fødehus laa altsaa midt paa en Mark. Det var en mangeaarig Græsmark, som sjældent blev pløjet op og isaafald kun for atter at bliver lagt ud i Græs. Til Huset var ingen Kørevej, men det var to Gangstier, den ene gik mod Øst over Dømmesrenden (Dæmningsreden), hvor der var en Bro og en Vej, der førte til et Teglværk nogle faa hundred Alen borte. Den anden Sti gik mod Vest, hen til Gaarden Frydenlund, der hørte under Herregaarden Bramstrup. Frydenlund laa ligeledes kun et Par minutters Vej fra vort Hus, og Bramstrup omtrent en

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!$-

On reading this passage, it would be easy to echo Raymond Williams’s famous dictum, in "e Country and the City, that ‘a working country is hardly ever a landscape’."$ For Williams and other Marxist critics, this notion of work-ing country conceals or veils a process of modernisation and social change, the seemingly inevitable incursion of urban modes of manufacturing and consumption into an essentially rural context. Such signs of technological progress bring with them particular categories of class and socio-economic order. &e encroachment of the brickworks upon the ancient pattern of estate, farm, and ancient hay meadow has more than a merely visual impact upon the landscape – it fundamentally alters not only the scenic prospect but also its social-economic fabric. (Nielsen’s book responds to this idea of social mobility: his account of the harvest coincides with the migration of work-ers from Detmold in northern Germany.) Nielsen’s poignant later narrative of Samson the Jutland horse, employed at the works to pull the brick trolleys until he breaks down with a fractured leg, supports this reading of the coun-try as worked land: Samson serves as a symbol of the exploitative relationship between industry, people, and nature, and also as a tragic monument to the passing of an older agrarian regime. But Samson is equally significant for his purely aesthetic presence: the horse is described with exquisite attention to the plastic detail of his bodily form. (Nielsen’s sympathy for horses was read-ily apparent from his early days in Copenhagen, but his eyes for equine form had surely been opened wider by his wife’s imposing figure of King Christian IX on horseback for the courtyard of Christiansborg Slot in Copenhagen – we shall return to the image of the seated rider in the Conclusion.) Samson is thus a monument in multiple senses: a figure in the landscape, an agent of socio-economic change (and, more touchingly, the sign of a passing mode of production), and an aestheticised object, the focus for artistic contemplation and patriotic appeal. But Samson also stands as a symbol for one of Nielsen’s most potent and emblematic responses to the Danish landscape: his setting of Aakjær’s poem ‘Jens Vejmand’ (‘Jens the Roadmender’) from Rugens Sange. According to his diary, Nielsen composed the melody on .( June !+/# – the following day he was photographed rambling in Dyrehaven (the Deer Park) north of Copenhagen with the poets L. C. Nielsen, Ludvig Holstein, and Johannes V. Jensen, the leading protagonist in the Jyske bevægelse."( Aakjær himself wrote to Nielsen more than a year later, dedicating one of the other poems

halv Fjerdingvej længere mod Vest ved Landevejen mellem Odense og Faaborg. Disse fire Steder: vort Hjem, Teglværket, Frydenlund og Bramstrup holdt den Verden sammmen, hvori mine Søskendes og mit første Barndomsliv udfoldede sig. Hvilken Rigdom af Minder! Hvor skal jeg begynde, og hvordan skal jeg nogensinde kunne blive færdig?’ Nielsen, Min fynske Barndom, .+.

6) Raymond Williams, "e Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, !+,$). 6* CNB ", !(+.

Funen Dreams !$$

from the collection, ‘To mørke høje’ (‘Two dark hills’) to the composer, and beginning:

I owe you my warmest thanks for the incomparable melody which you with such gentle hands have wrapped around my ‘Jens the Roadmender’. I could not have wished for one more beautiful, more soulfully touch-ing. Here, word and melody have found each other in a kiss – as it should be!"#

‘To mørke høje’, which immediately follows ‘Her vendte Far sin Plov’ in Aakjær’s volume, outlines a painful vitalist process of birth and communion with the Danish landscape. Its sense of place is apocalyptic rather than pro-saic, the mood reminiscent of the opening movement of the Sinfonia espan-siva, or of the ‘Inextinguishable’, rather than of Nielsen’s popular songs:

Imellem to mørke HøjeJeg vogted som Barn min Faders Faar,Og Mulden gav mig sin Møje,Og Solen flammed mit Haar.Men Verden tindred i Dis og Drøm,Og Barnelængslerne vimredSom Siv i den dybe Strøm.

Between two dark hillsI watched my father’s sheep as a child,And the earth gave me its pains,And the sun made my hair shine.While the world shimmered in haze and dreamAnd childhood longings quiveredLike reeds in the deep stream.

Here, as in ‘Vor Barndoms Bæk’, Aakjær invokes a stream of conscious-ness, a landscape animated by its sense of vibrancy and psychological move-ment: the sense of transience and contingency captured by the cadenza from Springtime on Funen. &e tone and subject of ‘Jens Vejmand’ are vividly dif-ferent. Like the description of Samson in Min fynske Barndom, ‘Jens Vejmand’ is concerned less with an idealised notion of landscape as the source of angst and existential crisis, and rather with social injustice and inequality, the life of hardship endured by the roadmender ultimately rendered valueless in the cruel irony of the final lines:

60 ‘Jeg skylder Dem min varmeste Tak for den uforlignelige Melodi, De med saa nænsom Haand har svøbt om min “Jens Vejmand”. Jeg kunde ikke ønske mig en skjønnere, en mere sjælfuldt rørende. Ord og Melodi har her fundet hinanden i et Kys, – saadan skal det være!’ Letter dated !# January !+/+, CNB ", ",(.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!$(

Det er saamænd Jens Vejmand.Hans Liv var fuldt af Sten,Men paa hans Grav, i Døden,Man gav ham aldrig én.

It is surely Jens the Roadmender.His life was full of stones,But on his grave, in death,&ey spared him not a single one.

Nielsen’s setting, from the Strofiske Sange, op. .!, is strikingly diatonic. &e clear phrase structure (four four-bar units) and carefully graded melodic profile (ascending in gentle steps up towards the registral peak at the mid-point of the verse, and then falling again to the lower tonic) is exemplary in its hymn-like character (Ex. $."). Anne-Marie Reynolds has commented on the didactic quality of many of Nielsen’s popular tunes: the melody is designed so that it can be easily learnt and sung as it proceeds, a strategy that posi-tively invites communal participation. &ere is thus a strongly democratis-ing impulse underlying Nielsen’s setting, a marked turn away from the idea of landscape as an inner psychological domain towards an open, outward-looking world of human character and physical labour, a sung celebration (through tragedy) of the idea of a social community. Even the final lines become potentially more optimistic in Nielsen’s setting. &e irony of the roadmender’s unmarked grave is no less crushing – indeed, it becomes all the more powerful for the sense of collective ownership invoked by the song. But the strophic structure means that his fate is inevitably gathered up within a broader cyclic sense of change. Like the image of the turning plough, invoked elsewhere in Rugens Sange by Aakjær, the repetitive rhythmic sound of the roadmender’s hammer upon the ground (‘paany, paany, paany’ [anew, anew, anew] as the second stanza declaims) becomes a metaphor for wider forms of production and creativity, the mark upon the ground that is simultaneously a sign of presence and erasure. Nielsen’s song similarly recycles itself, the melody’s circularity a8rming its own powerfully regenerative force, direct-ing our attention outwards even as it records the roadmender’s fate. Death, in Nielsen’s song, becomes merely another stage in a continually evolving life cycle. Just as ‘Jens Vejmand’s’ circularity ultimately leads outwards, the sense of landscape in Nielsen’s description of the brickworks in Min fynske Barndom is spatially conceived. &e paths that lead from Nielsen’s birthplace follow the cardinal points of the compass, with relative distances between particular locations carefully identified so that the children’s world around their cottage is neatly circumscribed. But the description is also concerned with a sense of breakthrough beyond the landscape’s apparent boundaries – the road that leads between Odense and Faaborg after Bramstrup later becomes the

Funen Dreams !$#

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first stage of Nielsen’s route to Copenhagen and beyond, the gateway to his professional career, and the threshold that links Funen with the wider musi-cal world. &e landscape thus articulates a psychological, as well as physi-cal, process of growth and evolution: its spatial ordering involves a temporal mapping that begins to grow outwards, from the four points that enclose the children’s environment and whose orientation points towards a wider infi-nitely expanding domain of memories and experiences, an epiphanic moment of self-realisation and of being-in-the-world. As Nielsen writes of crossing the channel between Funen and Zealand, en route to the Danish capital at the end of My Childhood on Funen to begin his studies at the Conservatoire, ‘when I was out upon the Storebælt, it was as though everything opened within me; the whole world seemed like a great curved arch from North to

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!$,

South’.", As in ‘Jens Vejmand’, what had initially seemed so highly localised and specific assumes more universal, cosmic dimensions: the chain of mem-ory unlocked by the sense of a particular place becomes a continually repeat-ing cycle of recollection and perception. Nielsen’s idea of landscape in My Childhood on Funen hence serves multiple purposes. It locates the account of his early years within a specifically Danish scenic tradition, one which owes its origins as much to earlier nineteenth-century painting as to the idealised decryptions of Nielsen’s great countryman H. C. Andersen, for whom travel literature and autobiography became central literary genres. But the book can also be read as an eloquent record of social change and technological progress, the first incursion of modern industrial economy into a provincial backwater. In that sense, My Childhood on Funen is simultaneously retrospective and prospective: it looks both backwards nos-talgically towards familiar old-fashioned modes of work and agricultural rou-tine, and forwards towards new domains of experience and communication. But Nielsen’s book is also concerned with the texture and grain of the coun-tryside. It is this preoccupation with surface and material, with the fold and weave of the landscape’s physical and social fabric, which provides the most powerful contexts for reimagining his childhood, and which crucially frames his earliest musical encounters. As I argued in the Introduction, music’s land-scape, for Nielsen, is powerfully associated with this sense of community

– the music society or glee club, Braga, in which he first performs with his father, is a specific form of gathering, whose diverse and spatially dispersed membership is reflected in its eclectic repertoire of dance tunes, popular songs, operatic overtures and easy numbers from classical symphonies."+ &e group’s activities have a profound influence on Nielsen’s compositional devel-opment and on his idea of music as a form of conversation or dialogue. But his sense of an animated, musical landscape is a recurring trope throughout his writings on music. In !+.$, four years after the composition of Springtime on Funen, Nielsen wrote in the essay ‘&e Song of Funen’, published in Living Music, of an imaginary soundscape:

On Funen everything is di%erent from the rest of the world, as those who take time to listen will surely learn. &e bees sing in their own way with a special Funen sound, and when the horse neighs and the red cows bellow, everyone can then hear that it’s entirely di%erent from anywhere else in the country. A singing Fynsk is what the thrush flutes and what the blackbird laughs as it skims under the lilac bushes is but an imitation of the starling’s fantasies, which in turn are influenced by the enchanting chuckle of the Funen lasses as they cheer and laugh in

61 ‘Da jeg kom ud paa Storebælt, var det, som alting udvidede sig i mig; hele Verden var som en stor spændt Bue fra Nord til Syd.’ Nielsen, Min fynske Barndom, .!..

62 Ibid., (+–#/.

Funen Dreams !$+

the gardens behind the clipped hedges. &e bells chime and the cocks crow in Fynsk, and a truly symphonic joy rises from all bird’s nests every time the mother feeds her young. &e silence sings in the same tone too, and even the trees dream and talk in their sleep with the Funen dialect.-/

Nielsen’s panegyric seemingly unfolds an enchanted Mahlerian realm of magical bird calls, distant bells, and nature sounds. In that sense it falls within a well-trodden nineteenth-century convention, a Wunderhorn vision of nature as an Arcadian escape from the turbulence and instability of modern life. &e emphasis on Funen’s essential di%erence or otherness reinforces this sense of spatial and temporal retreat or withdrawal. Landscape here seems passively immersive rather than actively worked or vitalistic. But Nielsen’s description is framed in a fundamentally di%erent way to Mahler’s: despite its fairy-tale tone and childlike playfulness, there is little sense in Nielsen’s sketch of an ironic distance, of an Arcadia that immanently reveals its own impossibil-ity or brokenness. Rather, Nielsen’s landscape might be read more positively as a form of acoustic ecology, a vivid assertion of being-in-place conceived in terms of a particular sonic character or resonance. Nielsen hence o%ers a more playfully animistic view of the world, one in which Funen emerges as a site of heightened auditory awareness and perception, or the locus of a par-ticular dialect or tone of musical voice. A similar acoustic vision animates a diary entry dated .$ May !+.,:

Between grass and corn. Conversations between the plants. &e weeds are surprised and form a league. (I have lain and heard what they talk about, something everyone can do daily in the summer. In the winter they sleep. One of them falls asleep and the other falls silent after autumn. &e evergreens keep watch.) &e quaking grass talked so excitedly, that I could not understand what it said.-!

74 ‘I Fyn er alting anderledes end i den øvrige Verden, og hvem, der giver sig Tid til at lytte, skal nok erfare det. Bierne synger paa en egen Maade med an særlig fynsk Klang, og naar Hestene vrinsker og de røde Køer brøle, maa da enhver høre, at det er paa en helt anden Maade end i det øvrige Land. Det er syngende Fynsk, hvad Droslen fløjter, og Solsortens Latter, naar den smutter ind under Syrenbuskene, er ikke andet end en Efterligning af Stærens Indfald, som igen er paavirket af de fynske Pigers henrivende Klukken, naar de baade jubler og ler i averne bag de klippede Hække. Klokkerne kimer, og Hanerne galer paa Fynsk, og op fra alle Fuglerederne staar der en helt symfonisk Jubel, hver Gang Moderen gi’r Ungerne Mad. ¶ Ogsaa Stilheden synger i den samme Tone, og selv Træerne drømmer og taler i Søvne det fynske maal.’ Samtid !, "-$–(, at "-(.

73 ‘Mellem Græs og Korn, Samtaler mellem Planterne. Ukrudtsplanterne er forundrede og danner Sammenslutning. (Har ligget og hørt hvad de talte om, noget enhver kan gøre dagligt om Sommeren. Om Vinteren sover de. Den ene sover ind og den ander tier henad Efteraaret. De eviggrønne holder Vagt.) Hjertegræs talte saa forvirret, at jeg ikke [kunne] forstaa, hvad det sagde.’ Dagbøger, $-$.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!(/

Here, landscape is not concerned with the elaboration of a national Romantic project, nor with the archaeological excavation and uncovering of layers of cultural memory, but becomes instead a form of listening, a means of cap-turing and embodying an intensified level of auditory imagination and per-ception, grounded in the seasonal cycle of growth and decay. Such complex nature voices play a special role in Nielsen’s music, in the cadenza passage from Springtime in Funen, or at similar moments in his tone poem Saga-drøm and in the Sixth Symphony.-. Most often they are characterised by a sense of temporal suspension, the use of extended ostinato figures or arabesque melodic lines over static pedal points: familiar devices in much early twen-tieth-century music but here employed with a characteristic sense of modal inflection that clouds (or mists) the music’s otherwise strikingly triadic sur-face so that it assumes the character of a dream episode. Such momentary cessations of regular time highlight the act of speaking (or, rather, singing) as a privileged category of musical behaviour. Landscape, in that sense, is inher-ently performative, its presence or character marked either by a particular grain or tone of voice or by the evocation of a privileged musical space – the intensified domain of auditory perception.

! Funen Dreams&is multi-layered vision of the Danish landscape constructed in My Childhood on Funen, as both a site of intensified auditory awareness and as laboured, working country, is musically exemplified by two vividly contrast-ing movements from Nielsen’s &ird Symphony. If the first movement, as the previous chapter has argued, can be heard as the energetic realisation of dynamic musical wave forms, the electrifying projection of the music’s lin-ear kinetic energies through space, the second and fourth movements corre-spond more closely to the ideas of landscape elaborated by Aakjær, Johannes V. Jensen, and Emilie Demant Hatt. Nielsen himself explained the exceptional nature of the second movement, the Andante pastorale, in a letter to Bror Beckman, .+ October !+!/, as he reported on progress with the composition: ‘I am working at the moment on a symphony and I think I shall soon be fin-ished with the two final movements; I have just finished the second move-ment, a broad, landscape Andante, which is somewhat di%erent from my earlier works.’ -" For Henrik Knudsen, writing in his !+!" programme note for

75 &e unmensurated cadenza for solo woodwind and strings in Saga-Drøm, which is intended to depict the events in Njal’s dream as he lies asleep, is one of the most remarkable passages in Nielsen’s work, and deserves more extended discussion than is possible here. I return to the Sixth Symphony in Chapter # below.

76 ‘Jeg arbejder for Tiden paa en Symfoni og jeg tænker jeg skal snart blive færdig med de to sidste Satser; jeg har lige fuldendt .den Sats, en bred, landskabelig Andante, som er noget forskjellig fra mine tidligere Arbejder.’ CNB ", $$$.

Funen Dreams !(!

the work, the Andante’s musical landscape served a specifically restorative function:

&e second movement of the symphony is predominantly characterised by passive nature moods. With its beautiful, calmly gliding melodic stream, which appears to flow directly from nature, and with its full instrumentation, which never speculates with empty timbral e%ects, it functions after the stormy motion of the first movement like a rest in nature. Carefree and dispassionate, we feel how life passes us by in its beauty, and we give ourselves over entirely to the complete calm, that from which the soul gathers new strength.--

&e Andante pastorale hence promotes Knudsen’s vitalist reading of the sym-phony: it becomes a space for rejuvenation after the energy expended by the preceding Allegro, an immersive regathering and renewal of creative force. &e landscape here is ultimately less concerned with aesthetic contemplation or memory than with the physical sense of being-in-place: a merging with the environment that is both dissolution and a new beginning or point of physical and psychological growth. &e music traces a process of awakening or rebirth of musical consciousness, rising from the soporific calm of the opening bars to an idyllic union or conjoining with the landscape itself, symbolised by the appearance of two vocal soloists (baritone and soprano) within the orches-tra. According to Knudsen’s analysis, this process of awakening consists of three stages, corresponding to the individual sections of the movement: the slow unfolding of the landscape in the opening paragraph; the sound of voices in nature; and the representation of human feeling or emotion within nature. ‘In diverse combinations’, Knudsen notes, ‘these phases form larger groups, finally merge completely with one another, and bring forth a wonderful atmosphere at the close of the movement’.-$ Nielsen himself had suggested a similar reading in his unsigned programme note (with short music examples) for the Concertgebouw performance of the symphony in Amsterdam in !+!.:

&e Andante Pastoral describes, as the title suggests, peace and tran-quillity in Nature, which is broken only by the voice of a few birds, or

77 ‘Der zweite Satz der Sinfonie zeigt hauptsächlich das Gepräge passiver Naturstimmungen. Mit seinem schönen, ruhig dahergleitenden melodischen Strom, der direct aus der Natur zu flie9en scheint und mit mit seiner satten Instrumentation, die niemals mit hohlen Klangwirkungen spekuliert, wirkt er nach der stürmischen Bewegtheit des ersten Satzes wie ein Ausruhen in der Natur. Sorglos und leidenschaftslos fühlen wir das schöne Dasein an uns vorübergleiten, und wir geben uns ganz der wohligen Ruhe hin, die die Seele neue Kraft sammeln lä9t.’ Knudsen, ‘Carl Nielsen: Sinfonia Espansiva’, !".

7) ‘In verschiedenen Verbindungen bilden diese Phasen grö9ere Gruppen, um schlie9lich vollständig miteinander zu verschmelzen und zum Schlu9 des Satzes eine wunderbare Stimmung hervorzuführen.’ Ibid., !".

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!(.

what have you. &e composer’s intention behind the movement as a whole is the following tripartite division:

Landscape …Nature voices …and man’s intense feelings as the result …

Towards the conclusion, the landscape’s tranquillity and calm seem to condense (Eb major), and one hears, from a distance, human voices, first a man’s and then a woman’s voice, which then disappear and the movement finishes in complete apathetic stillness (trance).-(

A simple formal chart of the movement (Table $.!) supports this basic divi-sion: the movement consists of an extended prelude (bb. !–".), based on C, followed by a passage alternating a chain of woodwind cadenzas suggesting bird calls (Knudsen’s ‘Vogelstimme’)-# or nature sounds (Nielsen’s ‘nature voices’) with a series of impassioned string chorales (bb. ".–,-); the prel-ude returns in more energised form in bb. ,-–+#, framing the second half of the movement, a prolonged postlude or harmonically static plane of sound that revolves around a single Eb major sonority or Klang. &is final section is briefly interrupted only by a short brass chorale (bb. !.(–"$), which sacralises the landscape, bestowing a ritualistic feeling of solemnity upon proceedings, before finishing, as Nielsen’s note suggests, in a state of idyllic transcendental quiet. As Knudsen’s account suggests, the design of the Andante di%ers markedly from the customary formal pattern.-, &e movement begins in C, but ends in Eb, the progressive tonal model serving both a structural and associative purpose, lending the Andante a sense of openness and the final bars a feeling of growth or evolutionary flowering even as it regains a state of rest. A voice leading chart of the movement (Ex. $.-) illustrates this associative harmonic process in more detail. &e opening prelude (bb. !–".) begins with a sense of drift, the musical surface animated purely through slow melodic motion and motivic diminution. &is seemingly inert, formative C major creates a feeling

7* ‘Andante pastorale skildrer, som Titelen antyder, Fred og Ro i Naturen, der kun afbrydes ved Stemmen af enkelte Fugle, eller hvad man vil. Komponistens Ide med den hele Sats er følgende Tredeling: ¶ Landskabet … ¶ Naturstemmer … ¶ og Menneskets stærke Følelse derved … ¶ Henimod Slutningen bliver den landskabelige Ro og Dybe ligesom mere fortættet (Es Dur) og man hører, langt borte fra, Menneskestemmer, først en Mands og siden en Kvindestemme, der atter forsvinder og Satsen slutter i fuldkommen apatisk Ro (Trance).’ Unsigned programme note for performance of Sinfonia espansiva at Concertgebouw, ., April !+!. [from undated letter (according to John Fellow, written c. ( April !+!.)]. Reproduced in Samtid !, !(.–-, at !(".

70 Knudsen, ‘Carl Nielsen: Sinfonia Espansiva’, !-. 71 ‘Die Form des Satzes weicht stark von der allgemein üblichen ab.’ Ibid., !".

Funen Dreams !("

Table $.! Symphony no. ", second movement: formal chartBar "ematic zone Character Key

:;<= >> Prelude Expansive, arcane C?@ Woodwind cadenza > bleak, austere V/a minorA? String chorale > Intense, serious rovingBC Woodwind cadenza @ bleak, austere V/c minorCB String chorale @ con fuoco roving – V/Eb (unstable)DE Woodwind cadenza ? agitated V/g minor

:;<= @EA introduction/transition powerful, animando V/Eb (stable)FD Dream sequence molto tranquillo Eb

>@C Brass chorale solemn db minor – V/Eb>?B Coda Adagio, tranquillo Eb

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Deep middleground schematic

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Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!(-

of emptiness, of nature as open space or blank void. &e pianissimo horn calls with which the Andante begins suggest distant Lurs (the four horns play together, creating a hushed chorus e%ect), evoking the image of a time-less Nordic Arcadia, the sense of distance and temporal suspension intensi-fied by the gentle neighbour note oscillation.-+ &e entry of the strings with what Knudsen calls ‘eine landschafliche &ema’ $/ in b. $ heightens the sense of emergent calm, their melodic contour rising and falling slowly through triadic space as though tracing the gentle lines of the Danish topography in sound. &e early emphasis on the modally flattened seventh degree (Bb) both reinforces the pastoral mood and points towards the movement’s ultimate tonal destination (Eb). &is structural tonal motion towards Eb is deflected by the first woodwind cadenza, which shifts weight away from the C major plane of the opening introduction towards an unstable second inversion chord on A minor, the change of mode introducing a temporary darkening of mood. Texturally, the passage resembles the cadenza in Springtime on Funen: a curling melodic descent (stylised bird call or nature voice) imitated canonically by the lower woodwind, creating a weaving curtain of sound over the timpani/bass pedal. &e Bb from the introduction remains prominent as an ornamental chromatic diminution (b. "(), stripped of its earlier modal context. It is not until the impassioned entry of the string chorale in b. -., however, that the Andante is able to articulate any functional harmonic bass movement. &e upward striv-ing sequential motion of the chorale briefly touches Ab (b. $!): an important staging post towards the movement’s later tonal destination (Eb), although the approach is once again deflected by the return of the woodwind cadenza (b. $(). Locally reinterpreted as an augmented sixth, the Ab chord here merely prefaces V/C minor at the start of the next cadenza, and Ab is not regained until bb. (-–$, where the strings re-enter once more as part of the antipho-nal woodwind-string dialogue. &roughout this exchange, the string chorales not only signal a change of musical behaviour, they also suggest a di%erent kind of musical presence or subjectivity, in opposition to the sense of empty void evoked by the opening prelude and the woodwind cadenzas. &e strings’ relative dynamic intensity (marked fortississimo con fuoco in the second cho-rale, at b. (+) implies a state of a%ective restlessness or emotional dissonance, as though residues of earlier chromatic energy (from the opening Allegro, perhaps) re-emerge to destabilise the harmonic balance. Initially, it seems, Nielsen’s immersion in nature, the physical sense of being-in-place, is hardly pain-free or untroubled, but rather marked by a feeling of struggle and hard

72 Nielsen did indeed write a prelude for Lurs, in the opening number of his incidental music for Oehlenschläger’s Viking play Hagbarth og Signe, performed at the Frilufts &eater (Open-air &eatre) in Dyrehavn in !+!", the year after the premiere of the symphony.

)4 Knudsen, ‘Carl Nielsen: Sinfonia Espansiva’, !-.

Funen Dreams !($

chromatic graft. For Knudsen, the string writing is deeply a%ective: ‘through its healthy melodic content and masterly voice leading, it interprets with inti-macy and power the feeling that seizes humanity itself in the face of Nature, and the enchanting e%ect of Nature upon the soul.’ $! &e tensest passage in this second chorale nevertheless achieves a significant harmonic goal: the attainment of the dominant of Eb in b. #., and, though definitive arrival on Eb is postponed by the third woodwind cadenza (b. #,), the movement finally succeeds in gaining a sense of long-range harmonic direction. &e second half of the movement, the long radiant plane of Eb major, returns to the melodic material of the opening prelude (bb. $%) superimposed with a variation of the canonic figure from the woodwind cadenzas in the vio-lins, now a soft muted arabesque. But it is simultaneously a moment of trans-figuration, the quiet a8rmation of new, richer, emergent musical domain. &e blank space or void unfolded in the opening prelude is here completely filled out by a resonant tapestry of sound created from the cumulative layering of ostinato figures: a characteristically modernist soundsheet or Klangfläche, comparable with the opening of contemporary works such as Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, music likewise motivated by the vision of an imaginary Danish landscape. Knudsen describes how ‘one suddenly then hears in the distance a human voice, a baritone, which is swiftly joined by a soprano. Both proceed in tender melodic lines, they sing without text, only upon the vocalise “ah”, and it is as though Nature itself sings.’ $. As David Fanning has observed, Nielsen originally sketched a text for the vocal lines, which o%ers an insight into their expressive role: ‘Ah! All thoughts gone[,] I lie beneath the sky.’ $" Nielsen’s deci-sion to omit the words may have been prompted by various practical or artis-tic considerations – not least the desire to treat the vocal lines as part of the orchestral texture rather than as independent soloists in a concertante sense. But it also reinforces the sense of dissolution, of merging with the background. &e passage can certainly be heard as a blissful union, an ecstatic vision of the Danish landscape as eroticised paradise. Nielsen himself later referred

)3 ‘Mit Innigkeit und Kraft verdolmetscht sie durch ihren gesunden melodischen Inhalt und uhre meisterliche Stimmführung das Gefühl, das sich des Menschen angesichts der Natur bemächtigt, und die berückende Wirkung der Natur auf die Seele.’ Ibid.

)5 ‘Da hört man plötzlich aus der Ferne eine menschliche Stimme, einen Bariton, zu dem sich bald ein Sopran gestellt. Beide ergehen sich in weichen melodischen Linien, sie singen ohne Text, nur auf dem Vokal a, und es ist, als sänge die Natur selbst.’ Ibid., !$.

)6 ‘Alle Tanker svundne. Ah – ! Jeg ligger under Himlen.’ David Fanning, ‘Nielsen’, in A Guide to the Symphony, ed. Robert Layton (London: Oxford University Press, !++$), "$,. &e relevant pages of the manuscript are reproduced in Birgit Bjørnum and Klaus Møllerhøj (eds), Carl Nielsens Samling: Katalog over komponistens musikhåndskrifter i Det Kongeliger Bibliotek (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Bibliotek Museum Tusculanums Forlag, !++.), .,( (plate vii).

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!((

to the movement as a representation of ‘Paradise before the Fall of our first ancestors, Adam and Eve.’ $- And, as Gertrud Hvidberg-Hansen and Gertrud Oelsner have observed, the image of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was a topic that frequently appealed to symbolist Danish artists such as Viggo Pedersen (I den sene Skumringstime. To mennesker, Adam og Eva [In the late twilight. Two People, Adam and Eve], !,+")$$ and Harald Slott-Møller (Adam og Eva, !,+!)$(, as well as to Nielsen’s wife, sculptor and illustrator Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, not least in her cover illustration for the score of Nielsen’s cantata Hymnus Amoris (!,+(). ‘As the first humans’, Hvidberg-Hansen and Oelsner write, ‘[Adam and Eve] became symbols of the beginning of a new culture, and the motif hence mirrored the period’s own outlook.’ $# In Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s illustration, the two figures (modelled on the composer and the artist herself) raise their arms towards the sky in a gesture of salu-tation, surrounded by the stylised representation of a flowering landscape; as Anders Ehlers Dam suggests, ‘the sun and life-force are both above them and within them: apart from humanity, something metaphysical, and yet also something that is within humanity.’ &e closing chorus of Nielsen’s work is a radiant hymn of praise to the fire and warmth of the sun which illuminates the garden below. Both Hymnus Amoris and the symphony might therefore be heard as part of Nielsen’s wider Hellenist notion of landscape as a realm of enchanted classical myth. According to Ehlers Dam, ‘the sun is praised here as a vital force, which approaches the divine, but yet which is nothing other than a part of the cosmos. &is representation, where the sun is both a con-crete physical globe and symbol for the élan vital, the life-force, is found in various places in art and literature in the vitalist stream, which began around the year !+//.’ $, Yet, if the presence of the children’s chorus in the closing pages of the Hymnus Amoris elevates the music to a cosmic universal level, the final bars of the symphony’s Andante pastorale sound distinctively earthy. &e music seemingly falls asleep once again, the coda slowly unwinding via a trio of post-coital flutes in their lowest register (bb. !-.–-) that circle drowsily around the tonic, suggesting a lingering erotic sunset.

)7 ‘Paradiset inden Syndefaldet af vores første Forældre, Adam og Eva.’ Undated programme note, !+"!; Samtid ., $+$.

)) Held at the Oslo City Museum. Reproduced in Wivel, Den Store Stil, $/. )* Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Wivel, Drømmetid, +,. )0 Hvidberg-Hansen and Oelsner, ‘Livets triumf’, .$. )1 ‘Solen og livskraften er på én gang over dem og i dem: adskilt fra menneskene,

noget metafysisk og noget, der er inden i menneskene. Solen hyldes her som en vital kraft, der nærmer sig det gudommelige, men som dog ikke er andet end en del af det kosmiske alt. Denne forestilling, hvor solen både er den konkrete fysiske sol og et symbol for l’élan vital, livskraften, findes adskillige steder i kunsten og litteraturen i den vitalistiske strømning, der tog sin begyndelse omkring år !+//.’ Anders Ehlers Dam, ‘“Musik er Liv”: Carl Nielsens vitalistiske musikfilosofi’, in Livslyst, ed. Hvidberg-Hansen and Oelsner, .#(–,$ at .##.

Funen Dreams !(#

&e Andante thus traces a broad expressive arc, not unlike the trajectory of the Helios Overture, beginning in a state of cold emptiness, and growing in textural warmth, strength, and colour until it reaches saturation point in the coda, melting away again into a haze in the final bars. &is also accounts for the Andante’s harmonic structure, the bare C major opening gradually giving way to the richer sonority of the Eb music with which the movement concludes, the melodic liquidation in the coda suggesting that the process of growth could perhaps begin again once more from a fresh tonal starting point. In that sense, the movement is relatively self-contained, framed and sealed o% from the rest of the symphony. Yet the meaning of the Andante is character-istically unclear, just like the cadenza in Springtime on Funen. While the two singers suggest an erotic union, the final bars might also be heard as a slow death, the merging with the landscape as much a passing away as a coming together. A similar sense of landscape’s ambivalence is captured in a famous passage from Johannes V. Jensen’s epic novel Kongens Fald (‘&e Fall of the King’, !+//), retelling the decline of the Kalmar Union under Christian II in the early sixteenth-century, at the moment when one of the book’s principal characters, the royal knight Axel, dies:

And he flew in an upright position through the luminous night and descended on board the Ship of Joy. &ey sailed upon the ocean beneath the light of the moon and stars. And when they had sailed lightly and at length, they came to the Land of Joy. &at low-lying land, which has the wonderful summer. With your eyes closed you recognise the sweet scent of the greensward that covers the earth, the land is soft and green like a fresh bed upon the sea, a bed of birth, a deathbed. &e sky arches with a%ection overhead, the clouds stand still above it, the waves draw in and pat the shining strand. Two blue seas woo the coasts, where the sand is fine, and where the meagre grass is littered with nothing but round, multicoloured pebbles. In the country lies a 'ord, which never forgets; there stand the pillars of the sun. &e country’s coastline and islands reveal themselves with a marvellous grace amid the sea. &e 'ords sing, and the straits are like a gateway to the land of plenty. Here everything is deeply coloured, the earth is green, green, and the sky meets the sea in a blue mist. It is the land of the great summer, the land of death.$+

)2 ‘Og han fløj i oprejst Stilling i den lyse Nat og dalede ombord paa Lykkens Skib. De sejlede paa Havet under Maanens og Stjærnernes Lys. Og da de havde sejlet let og længe, kom de til Lykkens Land. Det lave Land, der har den forunderlige Sommer. Du mærker med lukkede Øjne den søde Lugt af Jordens Grønsvær, Landet er blødt og grønt som en frisk Seng i Havet, Fødeseng, Dødeseng. Himlen hvælver sig med Forkjærlighed over det, Skyerne staar stille over det, Bølgerne rækker ind og klapper den lyse Strand. To blaa Have bejler til Kysterne, hvor Sandet er fint, og hvor den magre Græsbund er prikket med lutter runde, brogede

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!(,

For Jensen, Axel’s death becomes a hallucinatory dream sequence, a mythi-cal journey towards the land of the great summer which is, in turn, an epiph-anic idealisation of a north Jutland landscape, close to the location near Salling described by Emilie Demant Hatt in her sailing trip upon the Lim'ord. Art historian Henrik Wivel has recently invoked the passage from Kongens Fald to explain the mood of Laurits Anders Ring’s enigmatic landscape painting, Sommerdag. Roskilde Fjord, Frederiksværk (!+//). Ring’s painting of a fishing boat at dawn, its nets raised, seemingly motionless upon the still waters of the sound becomes, for Wivel, a hollow or empty metaphor for a state of sus-pended consciousness or of drift, both melancholic and expectant: a quintes-sentially modernist vision of the landscape as both presence and absence, the mirrored reflection of blue sky upon the water the expression of an infinite depth of memory and forgetfulness on the cusp of the new century.(/ But the conjunction of Jensen’s text and Ring’s image is even more powerful when placed alongside the closing bars of Nielsen’s Andante. As Knudsen suggests, the two wordless voices in the second half of the movement merge with the landscape to become the sound of Nature itself – the quiet music of Jensen’s singing 'ords. And the sturdy brass chords that momentarily interrupt the Eb major idyll at fig. !! (bb. !.(–"-) become the sun pillars, guarding the gateway to Slara'enland (the land of Cockaigne) in the final bars. Just as the sight of falling apple blossom in the cadenza from Springtime on Funen is as much a symbol of loss and remembrance as of youthful new hope, the broad land-scape mood of Nielsen’s Andante becomes a sonic realisation of Jensen’s great summer, an ecstasy, and the land of death. &e Danish landscape is no less powerfully evoked in the symphony’s fourth movement. Yet the finale is radically di%erent to the Andante’s ambiv-alent or ultimately melancholic notion of landscape as a site of cultural mem-ory and loss, and one which is closer to the idea of working country evoked by Aakjær in Rugens Sange. &e second movement can be heard as a tem-poral sink that drains the sense of regular passing time and human experi-ence. &e finale, meanwhile, is concerned with the birth of a new, invigorat-ing modernity, unfolded in the confident striding theme of the exposition. In his !+!. Concertgebouw programme note, Nielsen confidently described the fourth movement as ‘&e apotheosis of work! &e composer has attempted to show the healthy morals that lie within work’s blessing. &e whole proceeds

Sten. I landet er en Fjord, der aldrig glemmer, dér staar Solens Støtter. Landets Kyster og Øer viser sig med vidunderlig Ynde i Havet. Fjordene synger, og Sundene er som Porte ind til Overflødighedens land. Her er alting dybt farvet, Jorden er grøn, grøn, og Himlen mødes med Havet i blaa Stemning. Det er den store Sommers Land, Dødens Land.’ Quoted in Henrik Wivel, ‘Heaven and Hell: Dualistic Metaphysics of Nature in the Landscapes of L. A. Ring’, in L. A. Ring: On the Edge of the World, ed. Peter Nørgaard Larsen (Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, .//(), !(,–,#, at !,(. I have retranslated the passage from the Danish.

*4 Ibid., !,"–$.

Funen Dreams !(+

straight towards its goal.’ (! &is sense of purpose had been apparent even dur-ing the movement’s composition. In a letter to his wife dated .. February !+!!, Nielsen pointedly invoked the craftsmanlike figure of Bach (rather than the more aesthetically problematic Beethoven) as his true musical precursor:

&e final movement in a symphony is somehow more di8cult to write these days, I think, because once upon a time the Ancients had decided that it should be a piece of lighter content, so this idea eventually became a sort of routine habit and the content su%ered, owing to the fact that one was primed already, in a manner of speaking. In the mean-time I have found a way out for my symphony’s concluding movement. I think the theme is good. It is sustained in a broad, advancing, cel-ebratory mood, throughout which forces operate similar to those that ultimately enchant within a Bach fugue, even if he often begins with a theme that can initially seem dry and schematic (but nevertheless always healthy, like a meagre cooking apple can seem in appearance).(.

Nielsen thus presented his finale almost as a form of dietary sustenance, a nutritious source of strength and musical discipline. Knudsen, in his !+!" analytical guide, similarly described the movement as ‘a single, broad unity’. Indeed, for Knudsen the music was animated throughout by a sense of moral purpose and natural order, qualities readily associated with Bachian counter-point: ‘all health and strength, the movement streams like a great wide river’, he claimed, so that ‘all over, the same healthy joy of life and work reigns’.(" &ese qualities appealed even beyond Nielsen’s native Denmark. Czech music critic Max Brod, who had previously written an article on Nielsen’s music in the Viennese periodical Der Merker (!+!/),(- wrote enthusiastically to the composer on !# May !+!":

*3 ‘Finalen er Arbejdets Apotheose! Komponisten har villet vise den sunde Moral der ligger i Arbejdets Velsignelse. Det hele gaar jevnt frem mod Maalet.’ Samtid !, !(-.

*5 ‘Den sidste Sats i en Symfoni er, synes jeg i den nyere Tid ligesom bleven vanskeligere at skrive og jeg tror det ligger i, at de gamle havde nu engang slaaet fast at det skulde være et Stykke af lettere Indhold og saa blev denne Ide tilsidst til en Art Vaneforestilling og gik nu ud over Indholdet, naar man paa Forhaand ligesom var præpareret. Nu har jeg imidlertid funden en Udvej for min Symfonis Slutningssats. Jeg tror mit Tema er godt. Det er holdt i en bred, fremadskridende, festlig Stemning hvori der hele Tiden arbejdes af Kræfter der paa en Maade ligner det der i en Fuga af Bach tilsidst betager, selv om han mange Gange begynder med et Tema der strax kan forekomme En helt tørt og skematisk (dog altid sundt som et kedeligt Madæble kan være det af Udseende).’ CNB -, $!.

*6 ‘Dieser Satz [der vierte] ist eine gro9e breite Einheit. … Voller Gesundheit und Stärke strömt der Satz dahin wie ein gro9er breiter Flu9. … Überall herrscht hier die gleiche gesunde Lebens- und Arbeitsfreude.’ Knudsen, ‘Carl Nielsen: Sinfonia Espansiva’, ./.

*7 Brod, article on Nielsen appeared in Der Merker ./! (October !+!/). As John Fellow notes, Brod’s interest had been awakened by the second movement of the

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!#/

How can I ever thank you for your Sinfonia espansiva? I can only say that this work, particularly the final movement (which I have already played four times over with my brother), has morally elevated and fortified me. In it, I hear you intone a song about a work-rich and yet Arcadian-innocent future for humanity. &at indeed awakens hope anew! One believes in the human race! – &at is how it has moved me, and I am now searching for a worthy means of express-ing it publicly. Once again many thanks! You have delighted my entire soul.($

For Brod, Nielsen’s music literally embodied (in its physicality and moral strength) the vision of a new kind of modern musical expression. Just like the polemical exchanges of the Bondemalerstrid, Brod was keen to promote such qualities in response to the perceived degeneracy of late Romanticism. Hence, he had no qualms in invoking notions of force, race, and national character in his review of Nielsen’s music: they were terms of general cultural currency in early twentieth-century European art and literature. Indeed, in Nielsen’s work, Brod believed he had found the musical expression of a par-ticularly vigorous Nordic aesthetic (an idea which equally appealed to other German authors such as &omas Mann). In a polemical essay entitled ‘On the Beauty of Hateful Pictures: a Manual for Romantics of our Time’, Brod explicitly compared Nielsen’s music with the writing of Norwegian modern-ist Knut Hamsun whose work, likewise motivated by a sense of invigorating Nordic nature, had been published in fin-de-siècle Danish journals such as Tilskueren. Brod reserved particular praise for Nielsen’s use of ‘legitimate counterpoint’ (‘legitimem Kontrapunkt’) and his ‘honest and pure voice-leading’ (‘ehrliche und reinen Stimmführung’), dwelling on precisely those elements of compositional craftsmanship promoted by Nielsen himself and

Symphonic Suite, which was published in another Viennese periodical, Kunstwart, earlier in the year. At the end of November, Nielsen wrote to Brod: ‘I must tell you the remarkable coincidence that the very day I received your letter and article I finished the second movement of a new symphony after a certain agony in my work. I believe the rest will go more briskly, and I thank you once again for your kindness’. [Jeg maa fortælle Dem det mærkelige Træf at jeg netop den Dag jeg modtog Deres Brev og Artikel efter en Del Kval i mit Arbejde sluttede .den Sats af en ny Symfoni. Jeg tror Resten vil gaa mere strygende og jeg takker Dem endnu engang for Deres Godhed.] CNB ", $$+.

*) ‘Wie soll ich Ihnen für Ihre ‘Espansiva’ danken? ¶ Ich kann Ihnen nur sagen, dass mich dieses Werk, namentlich der letzte Sats (den ich mit meinem Bruder schon - mal gespielt habe) förmlich moralisch erhoben und befestigt hat. Sie scheinen mir da ein Lied anzustimmen von einer glücklichen, arbeitsreichen und doch arkadisch-unschuldigen Zukunft der Menschheit. Da erwacht wieder die Ho%nung! Man glaubt an das Menschengeschlecht! – So ist es mir ergangen und ich suche jetzt eine würdige Form, um dies ö%entlich zu sagen. ¶ Nochmals vielen Dank! Sie haben meine tiefste Seele erfreut.’ CNB -, -"+.

Funen Dreams !#!

which we will consider in more detail in the following chapter.(( &e idea of landscape as working country, promulgated by Aakjær, has here been trans-formed into fresh ground or cultivated earth, the ploughed soil expectantly awaiting its new growth and rich harvest. As Table $.. suggests, the formal structure of the finale corresponds broadly to that of the first movement of the symphony. Both movements sug-gest rounded binary structures with a strong sense of thematic return, but closure is associated more with a sense of openness and liberation than with symmetrical tonal balance. Just as the first movement modulates from a weak, structurally unsupported D minor towards a radiant A major close, the finale shifts its sense of tonal gravity from the rich D major of the opening theme towards an A major apotheosis, reinforcing the pattern of the opening Allegro. Both movements exhibit a strong sense of goal direction. Whereas the first begins in a state of dynamic flux, however, energised from its very opening bars by a process of linear chromatic displacement, the finale opens with an overwhelming sense of stability and groundedness, a tonally closed twenty-eight-bar phrase divided into seven regular four-bar units – as Nielsen sug-gested, it is ‘straight down the line’ (‘lige ud paa Landvejen’). D major here symbolises not simply a diatonic key centre, but also a state of mind, its asso-ciation with other canonic symphonic finales (pre-eminently Beethoven’s Ninth) responsible for the sense of home-coming or familiar generic territory. Indeed, the first subject might be heard as an early twentieth-century Danish Freudengesang (‘Ode to Joy’), a broad singing tune whose key and melodic contour, as Rudolph Simonsen first noted in !+.(, strongly recall Nielsen’s setting of Aakjær’s ‘Jens Vejmand’.(# Here, then, is the elevation of the com-mon Danish man as symphonic hero, Nielsen’s breezy hymn to the apothe-osis of work mapped onto Aakjær’s figure of the Jutland labourer in search of social justice, the finale’s stirring a8rmation of Danishness simultaneously marking its engagement with a wider European symphonic tradition. Knudsen similarly draws attention to the movement’s sense of underlying animating motion from one tonal pole (D) to another (A), praising the music’s strong sense of ‘organic coherence’ (‘organischen Zusammenhang’), the con-tinual inner relationship (‘innige Verwandshaft’) of rhythmic motifs gener-ating a foreground diversity of material that serves to enhance the formal clarity of the finale’s large-scale structure. ‘Only once, over a long pianissimo pedal, does rest seemingly appear’, Knudsen notes, drawing attention to the anomalous passage in the reprise beginning at b. ..( – ostensibly the start of a reverse recapitulation – ‘but this is only an illusion’, he explains, o%ering

** Max Brod, Über die Schönheit hässlicher Bilder, ein Vademecum für Romantiker unserer Zeit (Leipzig, !+!"), !+/–!; quoted in CNB -, --+. Nielsen wrote to Brod on !! June !+!", expressing particular delight in the phrase ‘legitimate counterpoint’.

*0 Rudolph Simonsen, ‘Carl Nielsen som Symphoniker’, DMT ./! (October !+.(), #–!!, at +.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!#.

instead a strikingly modernist reading of the passage, in which ‘the given motives are still being vigorously further developed, albeit only fragments of the motives, as though in a kind of unconsciousness. One could almost com-pare this work with the unconscious activity of the soul,’ Knudsen continues, ‘to the work that the soul accomplishes during rest or dream, and which is the precondition of every viable, incontestable achievement.’ (, &e significance of this episode only becomes fully apparent in the context of the symphony as a whole. Structurally, it belongs to the finale’s second subject space, albeit motivically transformed. Further support for the motivic significance of Bb can be found in the first subject group – though the opening bars unfold a single sustained theme, motivically the tune can be broken down into at least five separate motivic units (Ex. $.$): a head motif (labelled s), a continuation and cadential tag (t and u, which generate much of the ostinato work in the

*1 ‘Nur an einer Stelle, auf einem langen Pianissimo-Orgelpunkt, scheint Ruhe einzutreten, aber es scheint auch nur so; denn auch hier wird mit den gegebenen Motiven rüstig weiter gearbeitet, allerdings nur mit Bruchstücken der Motive, wie in einer Art von Unterbewu9tsein. Fast könnte man diese Arbeit mit der unbewu9ten Tätigkeit der Seele vergleichen, mit der Arbeit, die die in der Ruhe oder im Traume vollbringt, und die eine Vorbedingung für jede lebenskräftige, sonnenklare Tat ist.’ Knudsen, ‘Carl Nielsen: Sinfonia Espansiva’, ./.

Table $.. Symphony no. ", fourth movement: formal chartBar Section "eme Key centre Character/Texture

=GH;IJKJ;< (EET)> P s, t, u, v, w D forte, linear@F TR va, x, xa V/D–V/Bb fortissimo, fugatoC@ S y, ya, xb, wa,z bbC/A–F# (MC: EEC) piano espressivo>LA C (TR) va V/F#–V/E interruptive!

M=N=O;HP=<K>>A TR (P) va, vc, sa, ta, u E imitative/sequential

– apotheosis @LC C (TR) vc e–V/Bb fugato, decrescendo

Q=HQJI= (R-Zone)!!" S u, vc, y, ya, s, t Bb#/Eb pianissimo, circular@E> TR v, va, za, xb V/g–V/A mezzo forte, fugato?@? P s, t, u, v, y, ya! A fortissimo, interrupted!

R;MS?BL P u, v A (PAC: ESC) fortissimo, circular

PT=TPrimary &eme; TRT=TTransition; ST=TSecond Subject; CT=TCoda; EECT=TEssential Expositional Closure; ESCT=TEssential Structural Closure; MCT=TMedial Caesura; PACT=TPerfect Authentic Cadence

Funen Dreams !#"

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œ> œn œ œb œ>n œn œb œn œ>b œn œn œ œb œn œ œb

œ> œ. œ> œ> œ- œ> œ> œ> œ> œ œ œ> œ> œ> œ- œ> œ> œ- œ> œ> œ- œ> œ> œ> œ> œ> œ>

œ œn œ> œ> œ> œb œ œ> œ> œ> œ œn œ> œ> œ> œb œ œ> œ> œ>wb œ œ# œb œ œ-b œ- ˙b œn wn œ

œn œb œ- œ œn œ œ-b œ- ˙n . œn œb œ- œ œn œ œ-b œ- ˙n .

œ>b œ œ# œ œ> œ œ œ# œ> œ œ-œ œ œ- œ- œ- œ œ œ˙. œ-# œ- ˙. œ- œ- ˙ œ. œJ ˙.

œ. œ> œ œ. œ. >̇. œ. œ œ œ. œ.

œ.J ‰ œ.J ‰ œ.J ‰ œ.J ‰ œ. œ. œ.J ‰ œ œJ ‰ œ- œ-n ˙

œ>n œ> œ> œ> œ> œ œ ˙b œn œ>n œ> œ> œ>

va

ya

xa

xb

wa

va

vb

vb+ya

Ex. !.! Nielsen, Symphony no. %, fourth movement: thematic table

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!#-

developmental space), a counterstatement (v, which inverted, va, becomes the countersubject proper in the bridge or transition), and a sequential tail (w), which introduces Bb as the first significant chromatic element in the move-ment and treats it locally as a melodicised Neapolitan approach to the domi-nant at the return of the opening phrase. &is Bb emerges once again as part of the accented quaver figuration at fig. " (b. -(, part of the countersubject’s development), before becoming more fully tonicised towards the approach to the second subject itself at fig. - (b. (., which Knudsen erroneously hears in C minor). Enharmonically transformed, bb a# it becomes the raised third at the end of the second subject space (over F# major), reinforcing the expo-sition’s pattern of tertiary tonal movement. &ough Bb does not re-emerge again until b. ..#, the passage’s strongly flatside orientation, hovering around Bb0 and Eb but decisively settling on neither key centre, points both to parallel flatside second subject spaces in the first movement (on Ab and Eb), and also, more significantly, to the tonal domain of the second half of the second move-ment (Eb). It is therefore marked, by association, as landscape music, a reading reinforced by the presence of familiar pastoral topics – the episode’s extended pedal, dynamic level, and repetitive rhythmic figuration. For Knudsen, the passage almost assumes the character of a Freudian dream sequence, an unconscious return of the repressed, or perhaps a regression to the dusky womb-like space of the eroticised close of the Andante. But the passage is also a creative flux: fragments of first and second subject groups float hazily by, as though in haze of enchanted nature sounds. It becomes, in e%ect, a cadenza, like the drifting apple-blossom in the final movement of Springtime on Funen, a momentary sense of suspension and weightlessness, a compelling vision of the Danish landscape as a crucible of memory and loss. As in the cantata, however, it is the sense of regeneration and renewal that ultimately holds sway. &e final bars of the symphony regather their contrapuntal strength, the fugal writing indicating a fresh start in which previous flat-side tenden-cies are vigorously worked through and resolved. Significantly, the delayed return of the first subject group substitutes the opening of the second subject for the previously problematic fifth phrase or tail (compare bb. ""+–-. with !#–./): a thematic synthesis that reinforces the sense of closure and balance. Consequently, no elements of the flatside complex remain to be resolved, and the symphony concludes, as Knudsen describes, ‘with eight tough timpani strokes that proceed in crotchets over two bars, accompanied by a crescendo on the note A by the whole orchestra, and once again confirm the character of this continually upright work, which is typical of the finale.’ (+ As Knudsen suggests, even in these final bars there is a sense of continuity, the reiterative

*2 ‘Dann schlie9t die Sinfonie – glücklicherweise nicht mit einem brillierenden, nach au9en gewandten leeren, wenn auch glanzvollen Orchestere%ekt, sondern mit acht zähen Paukenschlägen, die zwei Takte lang in Vierteln aufeinander folgen, und von einem Crescendo des ganzen Orchesters auf dem Ton a

Funen Dreams !#$

statements of the theme and the earthy strokes of the timpani serving to drive the symphony continually forwards. Closure becomes, as in Aakjær’s poem, merely the start of a new cycle. But Nielsen’s finale is perhaps closest to another iconic representation of the Danish landscape. One of the canonic images in early twentieth-century Danish art is Peter Hansen’s Pløjemanden Vender (‘&e Ploughman turns’, !+//–.; Fig. $..). &e most recognised work of the Funen school, Hansen’s picture has long been admired, both for its vivid sense of colour – the earth brown of the soil and the horses juxtaposed against the ploughman’s blue coat and the red rosehips on the hedge – and also for its unusual sense of perspec-tive, the high skyline creating a vertiginous sense of the slope rising towards the top of the frame, accentuating the angle of the plough and furrowed con-tour of the soil. &e subject matter is equally striking: the ploughman and his

begleitet werden, und den Charakter stetiger gediegener Arbeit, der dem Finale eigentümlich ist, nochmals bekräftigen.’ Ibid., .-.

Fig. !.' Peter Hansen, Pløjemanden Vender, "*++–'

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism!#(

team are elevated by the scale of the painting, so that they assume heroic pro-portions. Yet there is also a feeling of intimacy about the picture, the apparent lack of stylisation emphasising the sense of hard domestic routine. Hansen’s picture has invited a range of symbolic interpretations. For Gertrud Oelsner, for example, the portrait becomes a spiralling vitalist construction in which ‘the newly ploughed earth vibrates with life and movement. &e painting’s compositional design knits the course of the seasonal cycle together with the farmer’s swinging shift of direction in an organic, rhythmic movement, in which even the autumnal thorn trees take part.’ #/ Yet, as this chapter has argued, the painting can also be placed alongside Nielsen’s symphony and Aakjær’s poetry within a complex tradition of Danish landscape representa-tion. In part, this tradition is concerned with celebrating its sense of nation-hood – the mythic image of Denmark, the land of farm and sea, dunes and waves, as imagined by romantic generations ever since Henrik Ste%ens’s formative lectures on Danish geology in the !,//s. It is also concerned with the Nordic sense of place as a site of occupation and domestic routine, a mode of inhabiting and moving within the land which is independent, as Kenneth Olwig notes, from the familiar scenic traditions of European landscape paint-ing (yet to which the Funen school also, in part, belongs). Landscape becomes, for Nielsen and Aakjær, and also for Emilie Demant Hatt, bound up with a sense of self – the ambivalent return to images, characters and places from childhood which is also a process of self-realisation: landscape here is always two-sided, a process of remembrance and forgetfulness, as the cadenza in Springtime on Funen reveals. But the landscape can also be a8rmative: Hansen’s ploughman, like the final bars of Nielsen’s symphony, could sym-bolise the triumph of the democratic will, a platform for the breakthrough in Danish politics in which the figure and voice of the common Danish man are elevated and ennobled. It also serves as an aesthetic credo, the promotion of a more practically oriented artistic language as craft in opposition to the notion of art as arcane symbolist ritual or institutionalised convention. In a diary entry from !+.(, Nielsen noted: ‘Memories. &e farmer’s horizon. &e wholesomeness which lies between the dunghill on his farm and the solem-nity of the church on Sunday’,#! grounding the domestic routine of rural life in the fertile earth of the Danish fields. But it is the patterned mark upon the earth that is the most powerful image, the idea of landscape as a form of 04 ‘… den nypløjede jord vibrerer af liv og bevægelse. Maleriets kompositoriske

træk knytter årstidernes cykliske forløb sammen med bondens svingende retningsskifte i en organisk, rytmisk bevægelse og sammenhæng, som selv de efterårsklædte tjørntræer passer sig ind efter.’ Oelsner, ‘Den sunde Natur’, !(-. It should be noted that there are two slightly di%erent versions of the painting, and that it is not clear whether the season depicted is autumn or early spring.

03 ‘Erindringer. Bondens Horisont. Det sunde der ligger mellen Møddingen ved hans Gaard og Kirkens Højtidelighed om Søndagen.’ Diary entry, .$ May !+.(; Dagbøger, -+#.

Funen Dreams !##

writing or inscription and creative imagination. It is this impulse that under-pins the symphony’s sense of life-force, a vitalist resonance and vibration that is also part of a larger cycle, constantly pushing forwards even as it rotates back upon itself in a constant process of reflection and renewal. Here lies the proper authority and power of the creative artist, Nielsen suggests, in his capacity for regeneration, in his attention to small things, and to the sounds of everyday life. In the musical landscape of Nielsen’s symphony, in the work’s final bars, the ploughman turns once more.