Symphony No. 4

While Nielsen’s native Denmark remained neutral during the First World War, he himself was intensely aware of the mutual slaughter taking place between the armies of the European nations and empires involved. As well as a personal response to the conflict in musical terms, Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 (1914-16) was an expression of his deepest artistic beliefs. He gave the work the subtitle “Det Uudslukkelige”, usually translated into English as “The Inextinguishable” (a more accurate rendering of the Danish would be “The Un-overcomeable”). And in his preface to the score he stated: “Music is life and, like it, inextinguishable.” The Fourth Symphony deploys Nielsen’s method of “progressive tonality”: the work is constructed around an epic struggle between the keys of D minor and E major, representing the forces of destruction and an answering life energy. In the first of four continuous movements, the turbulent D minor opening is countered by a serene melody in E major, introduced by the orchestral clarinets. The second movement is a gentle interlude, mostly for the orchestral woodwinds; the slow third movement grows from a long and intense melody for the violins toward a powerful, but not decisively affirmative, finish. The battle between the conflicting tonalities then reaches its climax in the finale, where two antiphonally placed pairs of timpani, tuned in D minor, try furiously to disrupt the orchestra’s insistence on E major. The orchestra finally triumphs, with the first movement’s clarinet tune now transformed into a magnificent closing peroration.