Carl Nielsen

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

Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, The Inextinguishable

• Composed: 1914–16 
  
• Premiere: February 1, 1916 in Copenhagen
  
• Instrumentation: 3 flutes (incl. piccolo), 3 oboes, 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (incl. contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, 2 timpani, strings
• CSO notable performances: First: October 1965, Max Rudolf conducting. Most Recent: January 2017, John Storgårds conducting. Recording: Nielsen: Symphony No. 4 “Inextinguishable.” 1966, Max Rudolf conducting.
• Duration: approx. 36 minutes

“In every man or woman there is something we would wish to know, something which, in spite of all defects and imperfections, we will like once we look into it; and the mere fact that when in reading about a person’s life we often have to say ‘Yes, I too would have done that!’ or ‘He ought not to have done that!’ is valuable because it is life-giving and fructifying.” Life-giving and fructifying: the essential elements of Carl Nielsen’s philosophy and the driving forces of his art, as he expressed them in the opening lines of his little autobiographical book called My Childhood. Throughout his life, Nielsen believed in the basic goodness of life and the ability of music to express that goodness and to confirm and enrich it. “Music is Life and, like it, inextinguishable,” he inscribed at the head of the score of the Fourth Symphony, and continued, “Under this title—‘The Inextinguishable’—the composer has endeavored to indicate in one word what the music alone is capable of expressing to the full: The elemental Will of Life.”

Optimism is never completely unalloyed. In the years of Nielsen’s maturity, the years of his six symphonies, written between 1891 and 1925, it was especially difficult for a sensitive, thinking person in Europe to hold an excess of hope. The decades surrounding the First World War witnessed the collapse of continental Europe’s ruling houses, the unleashing of hitherto undreamed dark regions of human experience through Freud’s psychoanalysis, the political and social upheaval of ghastly combat and the seeming end of a cultural era. Mahler recorded his doubts and fears in his magnificent, wrenching, panoramic symphonies and died in 1911 convinced that he would be the last musician to write such works. Sibelius retreated into a splendid but socially irrelevant musical abstraction, and, by 1927, he gave up composing completely—three full decades before his death. Carl Nielsen never allowed his faith in man to be shaken, and he continued to produce works that voiced his belief. In the words of Wilfrid Mellers, “The victory Nielsen’s symphonies achieve is a triumph of humanism won, not in the interests of self, but of civilization.”

It is significant and indicative of Nielsen’s attitudes toward life and music that he produced a symphony about mankind’s “inextinguishable” essence during the dark years from 1914 to 1916. He said that there was no specific “program” or “message” behind the Fourth Symphony, other than telling a friend that the violent kettledrum episode in the finale meant “something about the War.” This stunning passage and the inspiring apotheosis that follows it distill the conflicts of this Symphony—anarchy and violence against compassion and hope—which Nielsen sought musically to reconcile, or at least to adjudicate, in favor of hope and optimism. In this he was like Beethoven, who also unquestioningly chose the life force, most memorably in the grand major-tonality finales of the predominantly minor-key fifth and ninth symphonies. To create a meaningful final “victory” for his symphonic musical/philosophical essays, Nielsen, like Beethoven, had to create large, integrated structures whose emotional progression would be clear, yet which would not slip into Pollyanna-ish bathos in their closing pages. His music is testimony that he succeeded.

In his excellent book on The Lives of the Great Composers, the distinguished writer and critic emeritus of The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg, summarized Nielsen’s style. “Nielsen was more adventurous than many composers of his day,” wrote Schonberg, “but basically he was a traditionalist who accepted the Classic forms, sometimes surrounding them with more biting harmonies than conventional ears could stand. But even in the Fifth Symphony, with its polytonal clashes, there is never any doubt about the underlying tonality.... But the thing that most impresses about Nielsen’s music is its breadth. The man thought big. His rhythms are energetic, his melodies are long-breathed, his orchestration generous. There is a great deal of individuality to his writing. In the 1930s, music lovers were hearing a great deal about the ‘bardic’ qualities of Sibelius. It is ironic to realize that Nielsen, then all but unknown outside Denmark, had just as much sweep, even more power and a more universal message.”

Nielsen’s universal message—that life is inextinguishable—is embodied in the content and musical structure of his superb Fourth Symphony. The Symphony comprises four distinct movements played without pause. Rather than simply a quirk of formal thinking, this plan is essential to the impact of the work, just as the direct connection of the scherzo and finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony clarifies the emotional progression of that score. The dynamic motivation driving Nielsen’s Inextinguishable Symphony is the contention of opposing forces represented by contrasting types of music—one fearsome, demonic and threatening; the other, life-affirming, hopeful and inspiring. The single large span of music, divided into four movements, allows for the symbolic struggle between them and the eventual triumph of “good.” The victory is only as sweet and convincing as the struggle was difficult, and Nielsen built this Symphony to a luminous, transcendent climax.

The warring forces are set in place early in the first movement. The Symphony opens as if in mid-thought with a violent outburst from the full orchestra, characterized by its churning rhythm, biting dissonances and unsettled tonality. These opening gestures, if lifted out of context, would show Nielsen to be a harsh modernist. Taken as the first sentence in an expansive essay, however, their aggressive character is seen to be a necessary foil to the soothing quality of the contrasting theme that follows. The second theme, presented tenderly in close harmony by the clarinets after a brief, chattering episode from the woodwinds, is lyrical, hymnal and long-limbed. It gathers authority to reach a magnificent climax led by the trombones and spread across the full orchestra. The central development section begins quietly with choppy figurations from the solo flute and violins punctuated by a curious, hammering motive on a single pitch in the violas. The two themes of the exposition engage in close combat as the development unfolds, most dramatically in several abrupt exclamations of the first theme that attempt to silence the sweet intervals of the lyrical melody. The two achieve an uneasy truce (first theme triplets in the strings as accompaniment to the second theme in the winds) that is shattered by the ferocity of the recapitulation of the main theme in compressed form. The second theme is given in response, but not with enough conviction to carry the day.

Quiet strokes on the timpani lead without pause to the second movement, a pleasant respite from the rigors of the preceding struggle. The movement is built on a charming country-dance tune announced pertly by the woodwinds. (Nielsen was engaged at the time of the Fourth Symphony in setting much Danish folk poetry to music.) Pizzicato strings accompany long melodic phrases for solo instruments—oboe, clarinet, bassoon, cello—in the movement’s ethereal central section. A shortened recall of the country-dance tune ends the movement and serves as the bridge to the following Adagio.

The struggle of the first movement is rejoined in the Adagio, though the venue is different. A broad melody, intense and lyrical, is initiated by the violins before being taken over by the violas and cellos. Opposing this wide-ranging theme is the movement’s central portion, dominated by a massive crescendo built on a powerful, uneven rhythmic figure. Briefly at the close of the movement, the lyrical mood of the opening is recalled by a few bold entries in the strings that quickly die away. A sudden, whirlwind passage in the strings leads to the finale.

The final scene of Nielsen’s titanic musical battle begins with a silence—the lull before the storm. Through several episodes of contrasting character, it becomes clear that the timpani (scored for two players) represents one pole in the argument, broad lyricism the other. The climactic sequence of the Symphony directly opposes the two forces: a violent, pounding timpani assault of terrifying intensity—the most elemental expression of brute power in the entire work—is finally and heroically overcome by a transcendent proclamation from the full orchestra of the hymnal melody from the first movement. The absolute triumph and life-affirming joy of the closing pages of Nielsen’s Inextinguishable Symphony are matched by few other works of the 20th century.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda