Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

2. Studies.

Nielsen studied at the Copenhagen Conservatory from the beginning of 1884 until December 1886. He was not an outstanding student and he composed relatively little in these years. He did make steady progress as a violinist under Valdemar Tofte, however, and he received a solid grounding in theory from J.P.E. Hartmann and, most importantly, Orla Rosenhoff, whose exercises in harmony and counterpoint he carried out with some diligence. Rosenhoff was to remain a valued adviser in Nielsen's early years as a professional composer. In the 1880s the conservatory was headed by Denmark's best-known composer, Gade. However, Nielsen gained less from Gade's rather informal tuition in music history than from contact with the older man's generous personality, and from his negative example of a kind of smoothed-over-Germanic composing style that he was determined not to emulate. Equally important to Nielsen in these years were his contacts with fellow students and cultured families in Copenhagen, some of which would blossom into lifelong friendships. His background as a patchily educated country boy had left him with an insatiable curiosity for the arts, philosophy and aesthetics, as well as a highly personal, common man's point of view on those subjects.

Nielsen, Carl

3. Career to 1914.

Nielsen had progressed sufficiently as a violinist to be able to gain a place in the Royal Chapel, the orchestra of the Royal Theatre, in September 1889, three years after his graduation. This post in the second violins was to be a source of considerable frustration to him, but it provided his basic income for some 16 years. In the period between graduation and gaining this post, he made a modest living as a freelance violinist and teacher and enjoyed continued support from his patrons. Some of his string chamber works from this time were performed, including a Quartet in F which he took to mark his official public début as a composer on 25 January 1888, although he had previously had an Andante tranquillo and Scherzo for strings performed at Tivoli Hall (17 September 1887). It was his subsequent Suite for Strings which made the biggest impression at its performance at Tivoli on 8 September 1888 and which he was to designate his op.1, with a dedication to Rosenhoff.

Nielsen had higher career aspirations than rank-and-file violinist. He was eager to travel and to sample cultural life in the great cities of Europe, and less than a year after gaining his post in the Royal Chapel he was awarded an Ancker scholarship of 1800 kroner, enabling him to spend a number of months in Europe. He left on 3 September 1890 and, to mark the occasion, began a diary, a crucial source for understanding Nielsen's developing sense of identity. In the course of many formative encounters during his nine-month tour he fell in and out of love with Wagner's music dramas, sharpened his views on music and the visual arts, and gained numerous impressions of the most famous performers and orchestras of the day. He revered Bach and Mozart, but was ambivalent towards much 19th-century music, judging it according to such criteria as manliness, healthiness and absence of self-pity, and so echoing contemporary debates over the relative merits of Brahms and Wagner and of Classicism and Romanticism.

In Paris he met and fell in love with the Danish sculptress Anne Marie Brodersen, also travelling on a scholarship. The couple toured Italy, marrying in Florence on 10 May 1891, before returning to Denmark at the end of June to pacify their somewhat startled parents and establish their professional and family life in Copenhagen. Nielsen then completed the First Symphony he had begun to sketch in Berlin. As well as being a love-match, the marriage was a meeting of minds. Anne Marie was a gifted artist, especially skilled in modelling animals in motion. She was also a strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career, which she did with considerable success, receiving several important commissions and gradually winning a national reputation. During the 1890s and 1900s she frequently spent long periods at work on location, leaving Nielsen to cope with their three young children at the same time as fitting his composing around his duties in the opera orchestra. His anger and frustration at this state of affairs, which even led him to suggest divorce in March 1905, was sublimated in a number of works, notably those from around 1897–1904, sometimes referred to as his ‘psychological period’. At this time his interest in the driving forces behind human personality crystallized in the opera Saul og David and the Second Symphony (‘De fire temperamenter’) and the cantatas Hymnus amoris and Søvnen.

As Nielsen's reputation grew through the 1890s, he found himself in demand for incidental music for the theatre and for occasional cantatas, which provided a welcome source of extra income. A reciprocal relationship grew up between his programmatic and symphonic works; sometimes he would find stageworthy ideas in his supposedly pure orchestral music; sometimes a text or scenario forced him to invent vivid musical imagery which he could later turn to more abstract use.

From 1901 he received a modest state pension of 800 kroner per annum (which rose over the years to 7500 kroner by 1927) to top up his violinist's salary and obviate the need to take private pupils. From 1903 he also had an annual retainer from Wilhelm Hansen Edition, his principal publishers until 1924.

Nielsen and his wife travelled together again in 1904 to Greece, this time on the strength of her Ancker scholarship. Here Nielsen had the chance to develop what was already a consuming interest in the culture of ancient Greece, and to feed his characteristically Scandinavian intense reaction to the South (see Alfvén's Second Symphony and Stenhammar's Serenade). The overture Helios, depicting the rise and fall of the sun over the Aegean Sea, was composed during this trip.

Nielsen's first assignment as a conductor was at the Odense Music Society on 16 October 1888 when he conducted his Suite for Strings (he repeated it the following May in Tivoli). After sporadic appearances in the 1890s, from 1905 he was occasionally invited to stand in for the Royal Chapel's two main conductors, Johan Svendsen and Frederik Rung, and in 1908 he succeeded Svendsen as second kapelmester. This was the beginning of his most financially comfortable but professionally stressful period.

From his early days as a composer Nielsen had been, as he acknowledged in 1908, ‘a bone of contention … because I wanted to protest against the typical Danish soft smoothing over. I wanted stronger rhythms and more advanced harmony.’ He attracted a loyal and vociferous following in musical and intellectual circles, but sceptical voices were raised in the press. An enormous boost to his reputation came in 1906–7 with the comic opera Maskarade. It was at this time too that his most influential essays started to appear, on Mozart (1906) and on ‘Words, Music and Programme Music’ (1909), later to be collected in the volume Levende Musik (‘Living Music’). Abroad he rarely achieved more than a succès d'estime for his compositions in his lifetime, although isolated pockets of enthusiasm were established, and he made a big impression, both as conductor and composer, in Sweden. His cause was energetically furthered by musician-friends such as Johan Julius Rabe in Sweden, Knud Harder in Munich, Julius Röntgen (i) in the Netherlands and Emil Holm in Stuttgart.

The polarization of opinion was sharpened when it came to his conducting activities. His performances were praised for their energy and spirit, but he could also be an absent-minded and accident-prone conductor, and he was certainly no great technician, as reviewers were not slow to point out. Nevertheless, he was at the height of his physical powers in these years, and his creative self-confidence peaked with the Third Symphony and the Violin Concerto in 1911, which won over previously dissenting critics and enhanced his reputation as conductor. At the same time his Strofiske sange, deliberately aimed at renewing the national song tradition, were beginning to sweep the country.

When Rung died in January 1914, Nielsen was offended at not being offered the post of first kapelmester. After a series of difficult negotiations he resigned and left the Royal Theatre at the end of June, embarking on the career of a freelance musician for the first time in 25 years.

Nielsen and his family moved several times within Copenhagen before finally settling in 1915 in a state-owned house previously occupied by the sculptor Christian Gottlieb Vilhelm Bissen. This provided Anne Marie with a roomy, though damp and draughty studio and Nielsen himself with a study. But before they could enjoy stability there a crisis intervened.

Nielsen, Carl