Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)
Complete Piano Music Volume 2 Festival
Prelude Suite, Op. 45
Three Piano Pieces, Op. 59
Piano Music for Young and Old, Op. 53
"It is a fact," Nielsen wrote
in his young days, "that the artist who is handy with his fists will secure
for himself the most lasting reputation: Beethoven... Bach, Berlioz... and
similar men have all given their contemporaries a black eye!" However, in
1906 he wrote that a composer who shows a little independence is wrongly
described as a revolutionary because of the continuity which cannot be killed
or stifled in the spiritual-artistic life. Nielsen's progressive tendencies and
his discipline to preserve musical principles are polar opposites which call
for the discovery of a thread between the piano works, otherwise so diverse, on
this disc.
As is well-known, Nielsen was born in the
rural surroundings of Fyn in 1865, the seventh of twelve children in a modest
farm-labourer's cottage. At the age of about six, he was handed a
three-quarter-size violin which belonged to his father, "Painter
Niels", who was also a village musician, and the boy began to pick out
tunes sung in the weak but sweet voice of his mother. In the celebrated book My
Childhood Nielsen recounts his winning a place in the military band at
Odense, the capital of Fyn, and his promotion at the age of sixteen to the rank
of corporal - "My constant aim was to get a piano, no matter how poor,
provided it would play so that I could find the chords... I had heard there was
a little old piano for sale at a watchmaker's in Overgade, and having brought
my fortune up to 20 kroner I went and had a look at it... That same day it
stood in my room, and from then on I spent all my spare time at the
piano."
In a basement tavern Nielsen became
friends with an elderly pianist who had fallen from better things and who
taught him about some of the great music. In these premises, a casual meeting
with a popular conductor and composer of light music named Olfert Jespersen led
Nielsen to believe that he could have a career in music if only he could be
admitted to the Copenhagen Conservatory of Music. In May 1883 he travelled
across the Storebrelt (Great Belt; the sea between Fyn and Zealand) and gained
admittance. Although he did not study composition in his curriculum, he
advanced his piano abilities under J. Gottfred Mathison-Hansen (1832-1909)
although never accomplishing the skill to become a concert performer of his
piano works. As discussed in Volume 1, a misconception which needs to be
dispelled is that Nielsen was really a symphonist who trained as a violinist
and wrote awkwardly for the piano. The description "unpianistic" is
used to mean unplayable (evidently the shortcomings of many performers who
leave the music before grasping it) or sounding untypical of the genre. Apart
from Denmark, in which his songs are best known, it is his symphonies which
typecast Nielsen, yet Robert Simpson, the English authority on these orchestral
works, identified a pianist, the Dane, Arne Skjold Rasmussen, as "by far
the greatest interpreter of Nielsen in any medium."
France Ellegaard, a pianist born in Paris
but whose parents were Danish, saw Nielsen's detachment from piano virtuosity
as a great liberation which permitted his imagination to treat the instrument
with innovation. In a programme note of 1953, she wrote, "His mind was
never tied to what his own hands could do... Like Beethoven, Nielsen writes
exactly the sound he imagines; Beethoven knew nothing of the conventional
nineteenth-century techniques which were to dominate his successors. Nielsen
cuts a path clean through the whole Romantic school, straight to Beethoven
himself, objective and direct."
Nielsen's pianistic path clearly falls
into three chronological clusters or phases of key works. The first period of
his mature works stretches from the Five Piano Pieces of 1890, Op. 3
until the Humoreske-Bagateller of 1894-97. These pieces began where
Grieg ended, a piano music which was light and accessible. In between the two
extremes of the first period is the Symphonic Suite of 1894, which the
Italian-German composer Busoni called "positively unpianistic" and
Nielsen himself described as orchestral. From then, however, Nielsen maintained
distinct aims and methods for each genre in which he wrote. Nielsen's second
pianistic phase is represented in this disc by the Suite, Op 45 of
1919-20 initially called Den Luciferiske. The major works from the third
and final period are Tre Klaverstykker (Three Piano Pieces), Op 59
of 1928 and Klavermusikfor Smaa og Store (Piano Music for Young and Old,
literally, Small and Large), Op 53 of 1930.
The Festival Prelude (FS24) is a
short piano piece written in 1900 to commemorate the new century. Originally
scored for string and wind instruments, it briefly recalls some of the Symphonic
Suite's orchestral qualities. In 1901 it was first printed in the Danish
newspaper Politiken and by Edition W. Hansen, and performed by Dagmar
Borup.
The Suite, Op 45, (FS91), arguably
Nielsen's most ambitious work for piano, was dedicated to the virtuoso Artur
Schnabel. It was composed mainly in Sweden during the 1919-20 season, when
Nielsen was engaged as conductor of Stenharnmar's Gothenberg Symphony
Orchestra, and first performed on 14th March 1921 by Johanne Stockmar. When the
work was published (by Peters in Leipzig, as the Danes would not pay well
enough) the composer dropped the title Luciferan: instead of the Greek
mythological Bringer of Light, listeners were expecting some association with
the devil. Only the sixth movement has a diabolic element, according to the
composer, "urging the player on to stronger contrasts and more violent
accents." Nielsen's foreword acknowledged the freedom of each performer to
find his or her own interpretation, but advised. "... the beginning of the
first movement rather cold and restrained in tone with a peaceful flowing
tempo... The second movement poco moderato with the most beautiful tone
and subtle use of pedals, as if one were listening. The third movement with
transcendental calm and power, and in many places... a certain brutal humour.
The fourth movement with a chilly, glass-like execution, without the slightest
trace of feeling, but with exquisite tone. The fifth movement is
self-evident."
The third and final phase of Nielsen's
piano music began with some of Nielsen's ultimate statements in modernism. He
had met, among others, Bart6k and Schoenberg, and had returned from the 1927
Music Festival in Frankfurt where the eminent German conductor Wilhelm
Furtwängler had conducted Nielsen's Fifth Symphony. Three Piano Pieces, Op. 59
(FSI31) were composed in the following year. Initially two separate impromptus
dated 15th January and 1st March were first performed by Christian Christiansen
on 14th April (in reverse order and with the titles Adagio and Impromptu).
The third piece was completed on 6th November and the collection was
posthumously published in 1937. Like the Sixth Symphony and the Flute
and Clarinet Concerti, the Three Piano Pieces not only
reflect but anticipate modernism. They reveal Nielsen's deep concerns in the
direction of the new music with its minimal and transparent textures,
disintegrating tonality, and thematic discontinuity. Thus it may be in the
piano music that Nielsen reaches out to his furthest point of musical
impressionism, with subjects containing all twelve notes of the scale (in the fugue
of the third piece) and the prominent role of the augmented fourth, the diabolus
in musica.
Three years before, Nielsen wrote,
"As far as music is concerned.., everyone may use the notes as he wishes.
The old rules can be applied or rejected, just as one pleases. There is no
longer any schoolmaster to pull our ears; strokes and lashes are abolished,
abuse and invective are heard no more... You yourself must listen, seek, think,
be silent, pick and choose, until you find of your own initiative what our
strict ancestors in the art thought could be drummed into our heads."
Nielsen's last years were filled with
official duties. The Piano Music for Young and Old, Op 53, (FSI48), was
written in response to a request from the Music Teachers' Society in December
1929 asking Danish composers to write some piano pieces for teaching purposes.
Two volumes contained 24 pieces without thumb-crossing (proceeding up by
fifths) but a 25th piece emerged (there were two in G major), each piece in a
major key is followed by its relative minor.
Along with Volume I in this series, Peter
Seivewright has thus presented Nielsen's complete piano music, i.e. all that
was published in his lifetime or posthumously, and this was the œuvre included
in Mina Miller's modern Critical Edition. In his last year Nielsen wrote a
fragmentary Piano Piece in C major which was catalogued as item FSI59 in
the list of compositions published by Fog and Schousboe. The piece in C was
printed in the magazine Dansk Musiktidsskrift in the year after the
composer's death. On the suggestion of Peter Seivewright, this piece, not
prepared for publication by the composer, has been omitted from what is, in
other respects, a complete survey of Nielsen's completed piano works.
Jack Lawson
Secretary of the Carl Nielsen Society of Great Britain
and author of the first English biography
of the composer, published in Spring 1997
Peter Seivewright
Peter Seivewright was born in Skipton in
1954. He studied music at Oxford and spent three years as a post- graduate
student at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, studying piano with
Ryszard Bekst. In addition to his performing career he is a lecturer in music
at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and from 1990 to 1993 also
held the position of University Pianist at the University of Strathclyde. Peter
Seivewright has performed extensively as recitalist and concerto soloist
throughout Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Denmark (eight
recital tours), Australia, Latvia and Vietnam. One of the few British pianists
ever to be invited to perform in the International Master of the Keyboard
series in Bruges, Belgium, his performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations and
Rachmaninov's Second Piano Sonata in 1994 were rapturously received with
a prolonged standing ovation. In Denmark he has appeared regularly in many
leading Danish concert venues, including the Aarhus Festival, the Carl Nielsen
International Piano Festival and the Royal Danish Academy of Music in
Copenhagen. As a concerto soloist he has appeared with many leading British
orchestras, including the Hall" Orchestra, the Bardford Chamber Orchestra,
the Scottish Sinfonietta, the Strathclyde Sinfonia and the Paragon Ensemble.