Carl Nielsen

Carl Nielsen was born in 1865 on the island of Funen in Denmark, the seventh of twelve children of a poor house painter. His father also played the violin and the cornet at village dances. According to his own memoirs, when he was about six he had measles and had to stay at home for weeks, so his mother gave him a small violin to pass the time. He taught himself tunes on it. His father never told him how to play; he just listened, and soon he was taking the boy along to play at village dances with him. At 14 he joined the military band in the nearby city of Odense, playing the bugle and the trombone. At 18 he went to Copenhagen with his violin and played for Niels Gade, 48 years older, the most famous musician in Denmark, who had been a friend of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Gade gave him a place at the Conservatory.

For sixteen years he earned his living as a second violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra, playing other people's music under other conductors and writing his own at night. In 1891, at 25, he met the sculptor Anne Marie Brodersen in Paris, and they married within two months. She became one of Denmark's leading sculptors. Her huge statue of King Christian IX on horseback stands in front of the parliament in Copenhagen, and it took her twenty years. His opera Maskarade (1906) is a comedy in which a young man falls in love with a girl at a masked ball, and then finds out that she is the very girl his father has chosen for him. It became Denmark's national opera. From 1908 to 1914 he conducted at the Royal Theatre. The marriage went through a long crisis in the 1910s, but they came back together in 1922.

He wrote six symphonies. The best known is the Fourth, The Inextinguishable (1916), written during the First World War. But in Denmark Nielsen is loved just as much for about three hundred simple songs. He wanted melodies that ordinary people could sing and remember. In 1907 he set a poem about an old road worker who breaks stones in the cold all his life and dies poor. The song, Jens Vejmand, was sung all over the country. In 1922 he helped to edit the songbook of the Danish folk high schools, and to this day Danes sing his songs at school and whenever they gather. And I Will Depart from Southern Flowers is one of these simple songs, written in 1914.

Nielsen was cheerful, energetic and direct, a farm boy who never quite settled in the capital. He wrote in 1928 that he had never loved living in Copenhagen. The Finnish composer Sibelius was born in the same year, and the two met several times. In 1909 Nielsen wrote to him that he was an enormous admirer of the strange and unique power of his Second Symphony. Sibelius wrote many years later that Nielsen had had "both head and heart in the highest degree." From his late fifties Nielsen's heart was weak, but he kept working, and in 1931 he became director of the Conservatory. He died in Copenhagen in October 1931, at 66. His funeral had to be moved to the cathedral because so many people wanted to come, and as the coffin was lowered, five players played a hymn tune from his own Wind Quintet. Outside Denmark his music was little known until Leonard Bernstein recorded his Fifth Symphony in 1962. Since then his symphonies have been played all over the world.