Carl Nielsen

Born in 1865 in a humble cottage in rural Denmark, Carl Nielsen was the seventh of 12 children. Carl’s father, an amateur fiddle-player and trumpeter, encouraged his young son’s violin-playing talent, and Nielsen also played bugle and alto trombone in the local army band. He entered Copenhagen’s Royal Academy as a violin student, and afterwards played for several years in the violin section of the Royal Danish Orchestra. Disliking the late Romanticism of Wagner and Richard Strauss, Nielsen preferred Brahms, Dvořák, Beethoven and Mozart. His Little Suite Op. 1 for strings, premiered at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens in 1888, successfully blended his classical training with the unpretentious manner of the traditional music he grew up with. In Paris on a travelling scholarship, Nielsen met Danish sculptor, Anne Marie Broderson; they married in Florence, and set up home together in Copenhagen. Besides teaching and conducting, Nielsen produced a sizeable output, including six symphonies and other orchestral works, a concerto each for violin, flute and clarinet, choral music and songs (many of which are part of the Danish educational system), and four string quartets. His two greatest symphonies, Nos 4 (The Inextinguishable, 1916) and 5 (1922), show exceptional power and mastery; and his comic opera Maskarade (Masquerade, 1906) is a much-loved Danish national classic. The last music Nielsen completed before his death from a heart attack in 1931 was Commotio, a large-scale work for organ.