Carl August Nielsen was born at Sortelung near Nørre-Lyndelse, Fyn, Denmark, on June 9, 1865, and died in Copenhagen on October 3, 1931. He wrote the Sinfonia espansiva in 1910-11 and conducted its first performance on February 28, 1912, in Copenhagen. With his son-in-law Emil Telmányi as soloist, Nielsen introduced his Violin Concerto at the same concert. The first San Francisco Symphony performances were given under the direction of Andrew Davis in May 1984. Osmo Vänskä conducted the most recent performances here in November 2002. The score calls for soprano and baritone soloists, three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets, three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings. The FS number refers to the chronological catalogue of Nielsen’s work by Dan Fog and Torben Schousboe.

More than any one other work, the Sinfonia espansiva represents the Great Leap Forward in Nielsen’s writing. It is impressive how much imagination, technical assurance, and distinctive personality we find in his first two symphonies (and from the First to the Second is a giant step, too), but with the Espansiva, his Third, we are dealing with fully arrived Nielsen.

He was by then in his mid-forties. He had begun his life as a musical explorer when he was three and found out that logs in the woodpile yielded different pitches according to their thickness and length. Home provided real instruments as well. His father, a house painter, played the fiddle and cornet to earn the odd extra penny; his mother sang, and so did most of his eleven brothers and sisters. Carl was six and making progress on his father’s three-quarter-size violin when he encountered a piano for the first time. The great engine enchanted him. On the violin you had to look for the notes; the piano laid them “in long shining rows before my very eyes. I could not only hear but see them, and I made one big discovery after another.”

At fourteen, after a boyhood spent herding geese, he became a bandsman in the 16th Battalion of the Royal Danish Army, acquiring new instrumental skills. A kindly older musician showed him the central classics of European music—Mozart, Beethoven, and eventually Bach. With these models before him he began to compose, and in 1884, after examination by Niels W. Gade, the elder statesman of Danish music, he was admitted to the Copenhagen Conservatory as a scholarship student in violin and piano. After two years there he continued theory studies privately, also getting a general education. In a biographical essay appended to Robert Simpson’s Carl Nielsen: Symphonist, Torben Meyer lists Nordic and Greek mythology, Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Ludvig Holberg as Nielsen’s favorite reading. Meanwhile he supported himself by playing violin in the orchestra at the Tivoli Gardens, joining the Royal Orchestra in 1889. For many years yet, he would depend financially on his playing and conducting, in Copenhagen at the Royal Theater and with the Music Society Orchestra, and later in Gothenburg, Sweden, with that city’s orchestra (now the Gothenburg Symphony).

He composed his Symphony No. 1 in 1892, completed the Second just ten years later and the Third almost ten years after that. What about its title? As for physical scale, the Espansiva is no more expansive than the other Nielsen symphonies; all six, in fact, come in at very nearly the same timing, something like thirty-six minutes. Robert Simpson, whose enthusiasm and insight have contributed so much to the worldwide recognition of Nielsen as one of the great symphonists, writes in his book on the composer that “espansiva means the outward growth of the mind’s scope and the expansion of life that comes from it.” In the program note he wrote for the San Francisco Symphony’s performances in 1984, he suggested that the work reflects Nielsen’s “sense of human energy and enjoyment of life,” adding that “the title indicates not opulence but exhilaration.”

Optimism, energy, a talent for enjoyment and exhilaration are powerful components of Nielsen’s personality. Those sides of him find full and glorious expression above all in what has become the most popular of his symphonies, The Inextinguishable of 1914-16, an achievement in confidence and idealism that is the more amazing when one looks at the date of composition. Another manifestation of his “expansive” side was the good citizenship that caused him to add the directorship of the Copenhagen Conservatory to an already crowded life and that gave rise to occasional compositions like cantatas for the centenary of the Merchants’ Committee, the fiftieth anniversary of the Danish Cremation Union, and the opening of the Copenhagen Municipal Swimming Pool, and, in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic, a wind band paraphrase of “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

But Nielsen was anything other than a sort of Little Mary Sunshine. His works from the 1920s can be full of rage (the gun battle of the timpani in The Inextinguishable is an anticipation of this), and their intent is often to be profoundly disturbing: Try, for example, his last large-scale composition, the visionary and altogether astounding Commotio for organ. I am reminded at this point of Simpson’s statement that “Nielsen is one of those rare individuals who know the shortest route to the truth.” His prose writings, too, fascinatingly inject an alarming measure of resentment and anger into the folksy friendliness. He really ought to have written at least a Sinfonia irritabile, though something of this affect is present in the Third Symphony along with Nielsen’s sweeping and generous espansivitá.

The Sinfonia espansiva gets off to an amazing start with a series of violent and accelerating explosions, twenty-six of them, all on A. Usually the effect of such a reiteration is to get us to hear the note as a dominant preparing the arrival of the tonic, and that is exactly what happens here. The last of the A’s is the upbeat to a broad melody in D minor, the opening of a paragraph of immense sweep and energy, which, at the subsidence finally of more than a hundred measures of fortissimo, puts us down on a long-sustained chord of E-flat. As the movement progresses, we hear some fugal writing and also a characteristically wry Nielsen waltz.

Whether the music is driving or relaxed, the surge of energy is colossal, and it drives the movement across vast harmonic ranges. Most astounding in this respect is the ending, which is suddenly pushed assertively into A major. It is almost as though Nielsen, this late in the game, had decided to raise the possibility that those explosive initial A’s were the tonic after all and not a dominant. In any event, this dramatic outcome sounds not quite convincing, certainly not quite final, but there is reason for that. For one thing, this is not the end of the symphony, and Nielsen likes to plan his harmonic strategies always to encompass the entire span of a work.

The second movement, which Nielsen marks Andante pastorale, begins in magical stillness. Again, the first paragraph is long, and Nielsen rouses us from its calm with a startling though quiet rumble from the timpani and basses. This sets in motion some ruminative woodwind melodies, which lead in turn to a full-throated melody. These elements provide the material for the movement, one in which we experience further startling shifts of perspective initiated by timpani rolls. Two wordless human voices, a soprano and a baritone, join the texture, and to lovely effect—once we become reconciled to the idea that they are really not going to say anything beyond “Ah.” The close, with low flutes, is enchanting and surprisingly French.

The third movement is a quasi-scherzo, fairly leisurely in gait but with a busy surface. Harmonically, it explores new territory. Like the first movement, it begins with a series of purely preparatory gestures, different, though, in that this time the harmonies actually define the tonic; like the second movement, it begins with French horns. Nielsen enjoyed connections like that. The bassoon accompaniment makes the harmonic orientation unmistakably clear; the oboe melody, however, is a witty example of the Nielsen twist. Characteristically, too, the climax is placed at a harmonically remote point. The whole movement is delightfully varied, and its quiet close is perhaps in its un-selfconscious way even more touchingly beautiful than the vocalises of the Andante.

The finale opens with a theme that marches along in what is all too easy to think of as British war movie style of the 1940s or 50s, though if we listen carefully we hear that the details of the harmony tend to be slightly out of step. Nielsen revisits many features of the symphony, including some of its previous harmonic strategies, his bold use of timpani as directional signal, and his light-footed fugues. Gradually and inexorably, the tide carries us away from the initial D major. Where to? Once again, as in the first movement, up to A major. This maneuver does not pass without some irascibility on both sides of the argument, something to which the contentious trombones, abetted by all the woodwinds, make particularly prominent contributions at the end, but enough bloody-minded insistence on A, with the timpani as powerful ally, carries the day. And with the conclusion now firm and incontrovertible, we see why Nielsen had deliberately made the close of the first movement not quite convincing.

—Michael Steinberg

Via San Francisco Symphony