Carl Nielsen

Born: June 9, 1865, Odense, Denmark
Died: October 3, 1931, Copenhagen

Symphony No. 3, Sinfonia Espansiva

• Composed: 1910–11
• Premiere: February 28, 1912, Copenhagen, Nielsen conducting
• Duration: approx. 29 minutes

After graduating in 1886 from the Copenhagen Conservatory, where he majored in violin and also studied composition, theory, piano and music history, Carl Nielsen supported himself as a freelance violinist in Copenhagen by performing in chamber concerts and with the orchestra at Tivoli Gardens. He turned seriously to composition after finishing school — two of his pieces for string orchestra were given at Tivoli in 1887, and a string quartet was played by a local chamber music society the following year. His first real success came with the premiere of the Little Suite for Strings by the Tivoli Orchestra on September 8, 1888; the score was published the following year as his Op. 1. In September 1889, Nielsen joined the second violin section of the Royal Danish Orchestra, a post he held for the next 16 years while continuing to foster his reputation as a leading figure in Danish music. He received a leave of absence during the 1890–91 season to study Wagnerian music drama in Germany under a government grant, and he made a swing through Paris in the spring to immerse himself in the artistic riches of that city. Paris worked its charms on him, and so did a young Danish sculptress, Anne Marie Brodersen, who was studying there that year — they were married just a month after they first met and honeymooned in Italy to indulge their shared interest in art. When they returned to Copenhagen in the summer of 1891, Nielsen was inspired to compose his First Symphony, which he dedicated to Anne Marie.

Nielsen’s reputation grew with his works of the ensuing decade, most notably the Second Symphony and the opera Saul and David, and a regular income provided him by a contract he signed with the prestigious publishing firm of Wilhelm Hansen in 1905 allowed him to quit his orchestral job to devote himself to composition. The first important work he completed during his newly earned freedom was Maskarade, an ambitious opera based on a comedy by Ludwig Holberg that evokes the life and manners of 18th-century Danish society, which was premiered at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen in November 1906 (where Nielsen had played in the pit for years). In August 1908, Nielsen, fulfilling a long-held ambition, was appointed assistant conductor of the Royal Opera, where he hoped to encourage other Scandinavian composers to join him in building a national operatic repertory. His own recent successes were complemented by Anne Marie winning a government commission for an equestrian monument to the late King Christian IX, an extraordinary honor for a female sculptor at that time.

The symphony that Nielsen undertook during the summer of 1910 — Sinfonia Espansiva he titled it — was not only an affirmation of his ascendancy in Danish musical life but also a challenge for the country’s art to assume a more powerful and far-reaching character. “I wanted to protest against the typical Danish soft smoothing over,” he declared. “I want stronger rhythms, more advanced harmony.” Robert Simpson, in his seminal study of Nielsen’s music, extrapolated from this statement that “espansiva means the outward growth of the mind’s scope and the expansion of life that comes from it.” Nielsen finished the first two movements that summer at a favorite retreat near Kolding in Jutland, Denmark’s largest, westernmost land mass (though the opening movement’s main theme had occurred to him in a tram-car in Copenhagen; he scribbled it down on his shirt cuff); the third movement [not performed on this concert] was written that fall and the finale completed by the following April. He conducted the Royal Orchestra in the premiere in Copenhagen on February 28, 1912, on a concert that also featured the first performance of his Violin Concerto. For the first time in Nielsen’s career, public and critics alike unanimously praised his work, and local demand required that he repeat the performance two months later at the Royal Theater; he conducted the Sinfonia Espansiva again at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw on April 28 and in Stuttgart the following January. It was the work that secured his international reputation.

“This Symphony is Nielsen’s most optimistic and perhaps therefore his most characteristic,” wrote Jack Lawson in his biography of the composer. “It radiates an intense and joyous exuberance, and is expansive both in gesture and thematic growth.” The first movement (Allegro espansivo) is a brilliant melding of traditional symphonic form with expanded 20th-century harmonic resources, in which the shape, proportions, thematic development and dynamic thrust of sonata form are preserved — a bold, heroic main theme balanced by a gentle, lyrical second subject that are worked out across a clearly defined exposition, development and recapitulation — and given new expressive weight through the use of bracing close-range chromaticism and adventuresome long-range tonal planes. Like Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony of a century earlier, the Sinfonia Espansiva showed how the great symphonic tradition could be simultaneously observed and renewed. The powerful, massive tensions of the opening movement are countered by the pastoral Andante, an evocation of Nielsen’s boyhood home on the rural island of Funen. The movement begins with a serene melody in the unison strings suggesting the memory of a folksong, and becomes more agitated in its central episode before returning to the calm of the opening theme, above which are floated the wordless voices of soprano and baritone soloists (which will be played by instruments for this performance). The Andante was among the musical tributes heard at Nielsen’s funeral, in Copenhagen’s Free Church on October 9, 1931. In a program note prepared for a performance in Copenhagen in 1927, Nielsen wrote about the finale, saying it “is straightforward: a hymn to work and the healthy enjoyment of daily life. Not a pathetic celebration of life but a sort of general joy in being able to participate in the business of everyday living and to see activity and skill unfold all around us.”

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda