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Friday 13 November 2020

Carl Nielsen - Symphonies Nos. 2 & 6


"Nielsen was one of life's people watchers. From the time of his rustic upbringing on the island of Funen he was a talented mimic (a gift he seems to have inherited from his father), and he became known as a marvellous conversationalist and raconteur. His compulsive interest in all that was robust and healthy in human nature, no matter if that meant rough edges or strongly differing views from his own, also inspired him to some of his finest music.

"No single work exemplifies Nielsen's gift for musical empathy morte thrillingly than his 'Second Symphony'. It dates from 1902-02, a time when he was earning his living mainly as a somewhat frustrated second violinist in the orchestra of the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. The origins of the work, as he explained in a programme note near the end of his life, were in an allegorical picture he came across in a country inn, illustrating the Four Temperaments - the moods determined by the mixture of fluids in the body, at least according to medical theory with roots in the Ancient Greeks and Romans and still commonly believed up to the early 1800s. Imbalance between these fluids could supposedly create a disposition towards anger (choler), apathy (phlegm), sadness (melancholy) or carefree abandon (sanguinity). The comically exaggerated visual images of those characteristics apparently stayed with Nielsen and he soon saw their potential to map on the four movements of the traditional symphony.

"In the painting the Choleric temperament was apparently shown as a swash-buckling horse-rider: 'his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, so distorted with rage and diabolical hatred that I could not help bursting out laughing'. Nielsen's symphonic equivalent is no laughing matter, however. A fiery Berliozian 'allegro', marked from the outset by slashing off-beat accents and rushing scale passages, its lyrical contrasts are like episodes in which the main character regrets his wildness without being able to prevent its return. Something close to this scenario would serve Nielsen again a quarter of a century later as the basis for his Clarinet Concerto.

"In complete contrast, the second movement, the Phlegmatic, is so easy-paced that it nearly falls asleep: 'I visualized a young fellow whose real inclination was to lie where the birds sing, where the fish glide noiselessly through the water, where the sun warms and the wind strokes mildly round one's curls.' Anyone who knows Nielsen's genial autobiography, 'My Childhood on Funen', will realise how close such an image was to his own nature, or at least to one part of it. In this movement, especially in the lazy undulating triads of the middle section, is contained the seed for the kind of inertia that would eventually take on a very different aspect: as a life-threatening - indeed life-on-earth-threatening - force in Nielsen's later symphonies.

"Next comes the Melancholic temperament, which like the Phlegmatic has little by way of contrast in its personality, other than a gravely beautiful, resigned episode in the middle. Again like its Phlegmatic counterpart, the movement becomes increasingly static, until, in the composer's words 'the parts intertwine like the threads of a net'. Even so, Nielsen was incapable of drawing anything other than a rounded character-portrait, and he give his 'heavy, melancholy man' a mitigating quality of stoical nobility from the outset. Eventually the music find its way to a calm and touching self-knowledge.

"Psychological progress of some such kind also underpins the Sanguine finale. This begins as the sketch of a man who 'storms thoughtlessly on in the belief that the whole world belongs to him, and that roast pigeons will fly into his mouth without work or bother'. However, 'Just once it seems that he has encountered something really serious; at least he meditates over something that is alien to his own nature, and it seems to affect him, so that while the final march may be happy and bright, it is still more dignified and not as silly and smug as some his previous bursts of activity.' In musical terms this is where Nielsen's famous 'progressive tonality' kicks in, as the movement - and indeed the entire symphony - ends in a brighter key than the one in which it began, as if to symbolise that adventure and self-transformation may be even higher values than empathy.

"In the post-Great War era, Nielsen's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies brought him the greatest measure of professional recognition he ever enjoyed in his lifetime. Critics in Scandinavia who had been troubled by what they saw as a veil of wilful experimentation in his earlier works were now, paradoxically, bowled over by these far more challenging masterpieces. Perhaps they got the point - and perhaps Nielsen himself made it easier for them to get the point - that what they had been bothered about was actually a deliberate negative polarity in an abstract human drama, rather than any kind of weakness or 'Schadenfreude'. Music of tough-minded, recalcitrant, even rebarbative kind was simply Nielsen's way of enshrining the struggles he perceived to be at the core of existence. Given what the First World War had done for the moral climate in Europe, that message was no hard to mistake.

"However, for the composer himself, the edge was taken off his creative triumphs by the realisation that he was not making the international headway he felt he deserved. He found little to admire in the European musical scene in the 1920s, with its extremes of hedonism and self-abnegation. And to make matters worse, his health was being undermined by heart problems that first manifested themselves seriously after his intense work on the Fifth Symphony. In any case, his abiding instinct for adventure dictated that his next symphony would have to move to a different arena. But where to, precisely, given that he had so recently scaled such mighty peaks?

"His first thought was, in effect, to take his cue from the work he had been doing for more than a decade in the area of folk-popular song. Accordingly, as he wrote to one of his daughters in August 1924, he envisaged a work that would be 'quite idyllic in character, beyond all time-bound taste and fashion... like the old 'a cappella' musicians'. But Nielsen was never one for planning out the precise route in advance, and this time his journey took him to regions far removed from the opening bars, with their tinkling glockenspiel, genial woodwind scales and childlike violins over tick-tock oboes and bassoons.

"In an intervew published two days before the first performance on 11th December 1925, he was asked about the title of the symphony. 'I've named it 'Sinfonia semplice',' he replied, 'because the main character is in a lighter vein than my other symphonies - there are merry things in it.' The interviewer pressed him further, no doubt because the composer had been in the news that year: at the time of the national celebrations for his 60th birthday, he had made unexpectedly cynical pronouncements on the career of a composer. Nielsen was adamant: 'The symphony has nothing whatsoever to do with my states of mind. What I experience in life never directly affects my music.' But he went on to give what may be an important clue to the tone of the symphony: 'It's natural for us to long for what we don't have.' In other words, the 'Sinfonia semplice' is not so much a simple symphony - far from it - but rather one that longs for a state of simplicity, more particularly for a return to the state of its opening bars.

"The symphony's final movement is, in fact, one of Nielsen's most tragic and full-worked out musical dramas, for all that it is expressed in a twelve-minute time-span and in highly economical texture. Each of its half-dozen main ideas is beguilingly innocent on initial presentation, but each is brutalised in the central phase of the movement, culminating in a full-scale panic attack and an agonisingly prolonged dissonance on horns and woodwin. This is, in effect, as anti-heroic a symphonic movement as anything in Shostakovich - who was composing his First Symphony at precisely the same time, but who almost certainly did not know Nielsen's music until much later in life.

"If this first movement is disturbing, what follows is even more so. A self-styled Humoresque, the second movement's prevailing tone is sardonic, yet not so obviously so that Nielsen felt it could speak for itself. In one and the same interview, two days before the premier in December 1925, he stressed that the symphony protrayed 'purely musical problems', yet then immediately contradicted himself, describing the percussion waking up the other instrumnts, which proceed to play 'modern music', arousing their distaste and later the contempt of the trombone, which plays yawning glissandi, as if to say 'Baa, baby food!', before the all fall peacefully asleep again. What is alarming about this satirical picture is a sense that the composer's own voice is virtually absent, having been so integral to the drama of the first movement.

"Then it seems that the slow movement may redress the balance. Nielsen's 'serious proposition' is an intense Bartókian fugue in the strings - the opening repeated notes harking right back to the first bar of the symphony. This is the sort of writing he had deployed so inspiringly in the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, to absorb negativity and to prepare the ground for a final burst of life-affirmation. This time, however, everything collapses and the music becomes entangled in a mesh of its own fevered anxiety - like the Melancholic Temperament but at a higher, existential level. The best it can hope for is a pale reconciliation to the status quo, blearily expressed in the closing bars.

"Before composing the finale Nielsen declared it would be a 'a variations work, a cosmic chasos, who atoms [...] clarify and unite to form a globe'. Yet again, however, the concept darkened as he worked on it. The variations are certainly there, and in the middle of the movement something very much like cosmic chaos indeed comes across the music. But the envisaged gathering into wholeness encounters obstacles that for once in his symphonic career prove insuperable. As the composer confided to a friend, the bizarre variation with tuba and percussion represents 'death knocking at the door', and the concluding fanfares therefore cannot be other than a death-defying gesture. Finally the two bassoons are left honking out their lowest note with all their might. Thus the greatest life-affirmer in the 20th-century symphonic tradition ends his last symphony by symbolically giving death the finger." (David Fanning, 2014. From the liner notes.) 

Performers: Kungliga Filharmonikerna, Sakari Oramo

1. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': I. Allegro Colleric
2. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': II. Allegro Comodo E Flemmatico
3. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': III. Andante Malincolico
4. Symphony No. 2, Op. 16, FS 29 'De Fire Temperamenter': IV. Allegro Sanguineo
5. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': I. Tempo Giusto
6. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': II. Humoresque. Allegretto
7. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': III. Proposta Seria. Adagio
8. Symphony No. 6, FS 116 'Sinfonia Semplice': IV. Theme And Variations. Allegro

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