Carl Nielsen's fifth symphony

These last days I have tried to write some little pieces about some of the music tracks that meant something to me in high school (called gymnasium) and college (which must mean my time at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen) all in all about 10 years in span. But some years earlier I was very fascinated with a whole other piece of music - the fifth symphony of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen.

Carl Nielsen was born in the provincial town, Odense, in 1865. He came from a poor family and his childhood, which he wrote about in his beautiful memoire, My Funen Childhood, only let him into the musical world through some free violin education and a job as child horn player in the army.

Much later he was an acclaimed composer in Copenhagen. The year was 1920 when he commenced his fifth symphony and the tragedy of the first world war was present in all European minds. Two years later he had finished this strange, organic work, a symphony in only two movements, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is the destruction of the old European world that is the theme of the concert.

I found the record in my parents LP collection. It was the Bernstein version, a record that was present in many Danish collections. First I only listened to the first movement. The erratic and aggressive snare drum reminded me of Shostakovich's seventh symphony (called Leningrad), that had been used in some children's program about the Russian revolution. But the train like theme of the Shostakovich symphony's first movement in all its military allusion was much more tangible and structured than the 18 year older work by Nielsen.

The first movement was a mystery to me and I listened many, many times to it. At first there are only pulses - then slowly some beautiful but fragile melodies seems to rise from the ground like fog, (if nothing else Nielsen was good at melodies, they pop up effortless everywhere in his work). And then this really aggressive snare drum is introduced. It plays with the lyrical melodies and against them at the same time, until it at the end of the movement it simply lets go and plays in a completely other rhythm.

Only when I knew the first movement by heart did I go on to turn the record over.

The second movement is easier to understand. It is a modernist and vitalist hymn. Much easier to grasp and maybe a little too easy an answer to the troubled first movement. But it is a beautiful and evocative piece of music. So evocative that it has been used a lot of times in Danish film and television productions.

I hope some of you might try to get into this work that fascinated me so much when I was around 14-15. I think it has a lot of interesting things going on, especially if you know the seventh "Leningrad" Symphony of Shostakovitch which I feel is related very much to Nielsen's fifth. They both use the snare drum in the first movement to allude to war and chaos. They have this classical lyricism and they both fight it. I am not sure Shostakovitch even knew about Carl Nielsen, but to me there is a connection between these two works.

I wrote another post about one of Carl Nielsen's smaller pieces here: Katharsisdrill recommends - Carl Nielsen - the mist disperses