"The F minor quartet is from 1890, when the young, still unmarried composer was able to enjoy a regular salary again, now as a violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra, something he had not done since stopping as a regimental musician in Odense to go to the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. There had also been another stroke of luck: applying for the second time, he had been awarded the biggest grant in Danish cultural life, 'Det Ancherske Legat', worth DKr 1800 – by comparison his annual salary as an orchestra musician was DKr 1200.
"With leave of absence from the Royal Theatre, Nielsen was able to set his course for Germany on 3rd September 1890. In his trunk he had a letter of recommendation from the composer Niels W. Gade, whose name was at least as famous in Germany as in Denmark, as well as the manuscript of the F minor quartet. He had begun work on it that spring, and had in fact meant to finish it before his departure. He had even worked on it in his summer holidays with his parents in the Funen village of Nørre Lyndelse. Nevertheless only the first movement was really finished.
"The remainder of the work was written amidst a tumult of new impressions, for on this first journey outside the borders of his native country the 25-year old composer was hungry for all kind of artistic impulses, and received them in Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin in turn. In Dresden, for example, he was at the 'Gemäldegalerie' on 5th September, where according to his diary he was greatly taken with Rembrandt's 'The Gold Weigher' and Juspe de Ribera's 'Diogenes with His Lantern'. And in the rough draft of the fourth movement of the quartet we find a handwritten remark that clearly documents that he himself felt there was a connection between the two arts: 'The 2nd time the secondary subject does not come; a snatch of the coda in the first part appears as such, but with many odd harmonies. Remember 'odd', little Carl. Think of Ribèra!!' The inspiration could also be of a more outward kind; after an elevated soirée on 26th September at the 'Böhmischer Bahnhof' Nielsen went home and composed an expansion of the first subject of the last movement, which had occured to him on the way.
"More or less finished with the quartet, and armed with Gade's introduction, Nielsen now looked up one of the leading musical personalities of the day in Berlin, the conducter and composer Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). He had known Gade since their youth and promised to listen to and comment on the new work. So after five rehearsals, an ad-hoc ensemble (Nielsen himself, Fini Henriques, Frederik Schnedler-Petersen and the American cellist Paul Henry Morgan) gave the work its informal christening on 18th December at the 'Hochschule für Ausübende Tonkunst', where Joachim was a highly esteemed teacher.
"'It is extremely difficult to play well, since there are so many modulations and often enharmonic affairs that have to be played so purely that the half of it would have been enough. If you add to this the fear of playing for Joachim, you can imagine that it did not go all that well,' Nielsen wrote back afterwards to his old theory teacher from the academy years, Orla Rosenhoff. In other words Nielsen knew very well what made - and still makes - his quartets difficult to play.
"The old master responded with both praise and criticism; he recognized both imagination and talent in the music, but on the whole it was too radical for him, and he wanted to suggest some changes. Nielsen replied that he was afraid the work would lose its character, and the good-natured Joachim seems to have retreated: 'Well, my dear Mr. Nielsen, perhaps I am after all an old philistine. Write as you will, just as long as that is how you feel it.'
"The young Nielsen stood his ground. The Danish newspaper reviewers, who otherwise often scolded him, were nevertheless surprisingly positive when the quartet was given its first public performance in Copenhagen on 8th April 1892. Most unreserved was 'Politiken's Charles Kjerulf: 'Carl Nielsen is clearly a considerable talent; none of his works has shown him as assured as this quartet, which besides the most youthful dauntlessness exhibits a will and skill matched by very few of the works of our other very young composers.
"The F mionor quartet was printed by the publisher Wilhelm Hansen in 1892 and could now be performed by ensembles who did not first have to borrow the manuscipt music from the composer. In October 1894 when Nielsen, in the company of the music publisher Alfred Wilhelm Hansen, ran into the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) in the railway station in Leipzig after hearing him play earlier that evening in the Gewandhaus, the latter immediately declared that Nielsen was not wholly unknown to him - he had recently heard the F minor quartet performed at Nice, had liked it and had procured the music. As proof he hummed the beginning of the first movement! Ysaÿe may have later done more than simply hum: the four string players in one of the top ensembles of the day, the 'Quatuor de Bruxelles', had a shared point of departure in master classes with Ysaÿe, and a few years later they put the F minor quartet on their repertoire. They first played it at a concert in Copenhagen on 13th February 1909, then later the same year they presented it in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Thus it also became the only one of the four string quartets ever to cross the Atlantic during the composer's lifetime.
"The E-flat major quartet (composed in 1897-98) is associated with a tragicomic episode that meant that the birth of the work was drawn out longer than anticipated. The composer himself was given an account of it, but only far later, in a retrospective article marking his sixtieth birthday in 1925:
"'I had composed a string quartet. The first two movements had already been copied by the music copyist; I had tried them out with my comrades, and we agreed that it was a work with which I had made a great effort. Now I also had the last two movements finished, so I packed it all into a large roll, took my bike and set off along Gothersgade towards Nørrevold, where the music copyist lived. When I got to Rosenborg Brøndanstalt [a mineral water factory], I saw a vehicle with two horses, one of which had fallen over and lay floundering with its legs over the pavement. The driver looked very helpless, as the horse had ended up lying in a strange lopsided position. Since as a young man I had worked with horses and had often myself been a driver, I jumped off my bike, put it up against the Brøndanstalt, shoved my music roll into the hands of a boy who was standing in the crowd, and asked him to hold it for a moment. It was only the work of a couple of minutes to cut one of the traces to the cart over, get a horse blanket under the forelegs of the horse and get it up on its legs; but when I got back the boy had vanished, probably into the Vognmagergade area, with my great work. I rode home in despair and told my wife about my loss. The she got the idea that we should go up into the neighbourhood and arouse some attention about the matter among the young people of the streets, and in time we succeeded in gathering a very large crowd to whom we announced that whoever could find the boy with the roll of music would get a large reward [...] However, I never got my work back, but had to reconstruct it laboriously from various notes and sketches and from memory.
"The episode must have taken place in the autumn of 1898, but cannot be directly documented by contemporary sources. They only mention the preceeding work: 'Finished the work on the first movement of a quartet in E-flat major in December '97. Am work on the andante at present,' the composer had noted in his diary on 6th January 1898. Nevertheless a good part of the year evidently passed before he was ready to saddle up his bicycle with the finished score. He had met his wife Anne Marie, who was a sculptress, in 1891 in Paris, during the above-mentioned study trip. Now in this very year, in the summer of 1898, they had one of their periods of friction, for reasons that are not hard to understand. He spent his holiday from the Royal Theatre on her family's farm in Jutland, where he tried at one and the same time to keep the farm going and to write a string quartet, while she stated at home in Copenhagen to take care of her sculptural work - she was modelling a red stallion - and their three small children. 'Can't you see and get you final movement done and I'll be busy with my horse and we'll never again spend a summer like this year's, will we, my own dearest?' she had written to him on 2nd August in a clear attempt at reconciliation.
"We do not know exactly how long it took Nielsen to reconstruct the last two movements of the quartet, for it is unlikely to have been true when he described the work as in the process of publication in an application for a ministerial composer subsidy dated 7th November 1898. He did not hand in the score to Wilhelm Hansen until the early summer of 1899, and the printed edition was not available until December 1900. On the title page the work was then dedicated to his older colleague Edvard Grieg, who was among the family's circle of friends.
"By then the quartet had already seen a semi-private first performance on 1st May 1899 in the relatively newly-founded 'Vor Forening'. The public one was given by the newly-formed Høeberg Quartet on 4th October 1901, also in Copenhagen. The latter elicited a very clear-sighted review in 'Illustreret Tidende', written by the almost ten-years-older Hother Ploug, who alongside a career in the central administration also worked as a music write and composer:
"'A strange work, like everything that has come from his hand, but more a work for connoisseurs than for the general public. In particular, the energetic first allegro with its enclosed structure and the highly convoluted contrapuntal work proved caviare to the general... Here we meet a young Danish composer with a sense of form and the sculptural not strongly evident in many others at present than perhaps Johan Svendsen and people are repelled by it. In a way this is explicable enough: when one is bottle-fed day in and day out with 'romances' and romance-like music, in the end one forfeits the feeling for stronger fare.'
"Caviare to the general or not - during the composer's lifetime the E-flat major quartet remained the most critically acclaimed, but also the least performed of the works!" (Knud Ketting, 2008. From the liner notes.)
Performers: The Young Danish String Quartet
1. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: I. Allegro Non Troppo Ma Energico
2. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: II. Un Poco Adagio
3. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: III. Allegretto Scherzando
4. String Quartet In F Minor, Op. 5: IV. Allegro Appassionato
5. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: I. Allegro Con Brio
6. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: II Andante Sostenuto
7. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: III Allegretto Pastorale - Presto - Allegretto Pastorale
8. String Quartet In E-Flat Major, Op. 14: IV Allegro Coraggioso
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