Daniel Grimley's new study of the music of Carl Nielsen offers three photographic images of the composer (not counting the one on the jacket cover): two juxtaposed on the same page at the beginning of the book, and another by itself at the end. Opposite page 1 we see, on one side of the page, Nielsen as a young teenager around 1880 (he was born in 1865), dressed awkwardly in a military uniform that does not really fit, with a cornet in one hand and a slide trumpet in the other – clearly a child of the provinces. On the other side we see him as a dapper, self-assured composer in 1908, basking in his fame after the stunning success of his second opera, Maskarade, in Copenhagen two years earlier. And at the end of the book we see a photo of the Carl Nielsen Memorial – a massive, imposing equestrian sculpture by the composer's wife, Anne-Marie Carl-Nielsen, unveiled in Copenhagen eight years after his death, in 1939, in the centre of the old city. Here what captures our attention is the muscular naked torso of the composer as a young man, presumably at about the time he met Anne-Marie, and thus in his twenties – a commanding figure of extraordinary strength and energy. The story told by the three images is simple enough: the farm boy from the distant island of Funen conquers the capital city, on his way to becoming the national composer of Denmark (a position that he holds to this day), as well as that country's best-known composer internationally, both then and now.

The photos are emblematic of two of Grimley's central themes: Nielsen as provincial nationalist, and Nielsen as urbane modernist. At first blush, and before reading Grimley, we might have thought that the composer is obviously a nationalist, but obviously not a modernist. Why a nationalist? Because he worked on the periphery of Europe; because he wrote simple, tonal, Danish popular songs, many of which have in effect become folksongs still sung today; and because he invoked his native Danish landscape and language in much of his work. And why not a modernist? Because his music is essentially tonal, despite some intensely dissonant passages in his later works; because he did not initiate, or incorporate in any thoroughgoing way, the kinds of technical innovations that earned Stravinsky and the composers of the Second Viennese School their stripes as modernists of the first order; and indeed, simply because he worked at the edge of Europe, not the centre, and was thus easy to marginalize.

Grimley needs both concepts to tell his story, for he locates the essence of Nielsen's music precisely in the conflict between the two – between ‘the twin ideas of Danishness and modernism’ (1). Or, more pointedly, between an image that takes us ‘back towards the nineteenth-century world of provincial Denmark’, and one that pushes ‘forwards toward a confident, modernist, European artistic future’ (1). In so doing, he cautions us against interpreting nationalism and modernism too literally, or too narrowly. Of course Nielsen was a nationalist composer: to deny his Danishness – the influence of the parochial musical culture in which he grew up; or of the more sophisticated musical culture of Copenhagen, where he came of age; or his need to please Danish audiences – would be to deny a critical aspect of his musical persona. But merely to label him as a nationalist without recognizing, as Grimley does, that nationalism is far from a tidy, transparent concept with respect to the Denmark of the period in question, or without acknowledging his intense involvement in European musical culture at large, would hardly do justice to his hard-earned international stature and to his ambition to attain that stature. Not for naught did he travel across Europe listening to the most advanced music; not for naught did he incorporate some of the innovative elements that he heard into his work; and not for naught did he seek out meetings with, and in some cases even correspond with, contemporaries such as Brahms, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, Busoni, Schoenberg, Ravel, Milhaud, and Honegger. Conversely, though, to identify him as a thoroughgoing, hard-core modernist would utterly misrepresent him and his music, and would ignore his quite significant accomplishments within a purely Danish context, insular and conservative though they may appear to us now.

Nielsen takes an honoured place in a revisionist history of early twentieth-century music that has gained a significant following in recent years – a history that rethinks musical modernism and nationalism. Conventional music history gives us the oft-told tale in which the modernist styles of Stravinsky and Schoenberg arise slowly but inevitably out of the musical Babel of the later nineteenth century, such that they constitute a new progressive centre, relegating everyone else to the dustbin of peripheral, nationalist, and latter-day tonal composers. Against this teleology we have significantly different but compatible re-readings of modernism and nationalism by Richard Taruskin and James Hepokoski. Taruskin argues that the great German line that purportedly connects Bach to Haydn and Mozart, and so on through Wagner to the Second Viennese School, is no more ‘natural’ or ‘universal’ than anyone else's, is no less culturally constructed than anyone else's, and is in fact just as nationalist, self-perpetuating, and self-anointing as anyone else's, whenever and wherever. Nor, for him, is the progressive wing's equating of aesthetic value with radical stylistic innovation natural or (contra Schoenberg) inevitable. He derisively dubs this rapid acceleration of technical means as maximalism, which he sees not as something entirely new but rather as a sudden, rabid intensification of the sort of expanding musical language characteristic of the New German School in the second half of the nineteenth century. That such ever-evolving maximalism was long seen as the central engine of the music history of the past two hundred years or so is, in his view, simply a matter of the winners writing the histories: for many decades the winners in the field of music history were German – since indeed, as we all know, the founders of music history were German.Footnote ¹ As to how nationalism fits into the modernist story, Taruskin makes it clear that what is required for a composer to be successful as a nationalist is not just acceptance in his own country: whatever his reception in his homeland he must still seek and gain at least some degree of international acclaim, to validate his work in the eyes and ears of his countrymen, to afford them patriotic pride in seeing one of their own ‘make it’ on the international stage. The initial and dramatic first example here is Glinka, but from Glinka's time well into the twentieth century there have been many more, quite familiar examples: Smetana, Dvořák, Chaikovsky, Grieg, Elgar, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and – most important for us, of course – Nielsen.

Hepokoski's revisionist history of musical modernism turns on precisely the same negotiation between the national and the international. For him, even though the radical modernist group, centred on Stravinsky and Schoenberg, quickly and rightly laid claim to avant-garde status in the early twentieth century, their contemporaries, some German (Strauss and Mahler), and some from the periphery (Elgar, Sibelius, Nielsen, and Vaughan Williams), were modernists as well, but modernists of a different stripe – a senior generation of modernists, whose music remained tonal but achieved its originality in its treatment of tonal harmony, orchestration, form, and strategies of musical narrative. The task for the small-nation composers of this group, seeking acceptance on the larger stage, was to toggle successfully between their local, national musical language and what Hepokoski calls the ‘legitimating matrix’ of the prestige culture – the Austro-German tradition embodied on the one hand in the canon established by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and on the other in the late nineteenth-century symphony.Footnote ² The vigorous strand of recent scholarship that elaborates this revisionist perspective includes J. P. E. Harper-Scott's Edward Elgar: Modernist,Footnote ³ Hepokoski's ‘Modalities of National Identity: Sibelius Builds a First Symphony’, and, needless to say, Grimley's Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism. These scholars do not necessarily share Taruskin's scorn for the Germanic tradition, whether in music or in historical scholarship, but they do foreground, as does he, the issue of negotiation between national style and international language, between success on the periphery and success in the prestige culture. In so doing, they perform a welcome service for us all, in that they validate and open up for close examination music that is alive and in demand in today's concert repertoire but that has lagged far behind the music of the German ‘centre’, both ‘Classical’ and late nineteenth century, as well as the music of hard-line modernists, in scholarly inquiry.

Grimley's broad project has focused on the music of the most prominent composers of Scandinavia and England – the composers from those countries best represented in the repertoire – from the years roughly from 1870 to 1930. His clear intent is to bring to this nationalist/modernist music the same level of historical scholarship, analytical insight, and hermeneutic interpretation that has been afforded to music heretofore considered canonic. Three of the four Scandinavian countries have produced composers who successfully negotiated the national/international divide in this period: Norway (Grieg), Finland (Sibelius), and Denmark (Nielsen). Grimley has published substantially on all three. He has written a widely praised book on Grieg, which brings together Norwegian folklorism, landscape, national musical style, the politics of identity, and modernism into a cogent and insightful perspective. He also organized the Bard College Conference on Sibelius in 2011, publishing his own essay on the composer in the book that he edited resulting from the conference. To these, and also to his earlier dissertation on Nielsen, we can add separate essays on all these composers, and on Vaughan Williams as well, and now the new monograph on Nielsen under review here. Finally, he has written extensively about Elgar, about whom he has co-edited a collection of essays with Julian Rushton.Footnote ⁴ Stepping back to view this scholarly project as a whole, we should note at the outset, and for the record, that to do this work Grimley has had to learn Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Danish, as well as the German and French which virtually all scholars of Western art music must learn. And, of course, he has had to familiarize himself with many dozens of musical scores. The payoff is impressive: his numerous studies of the music of the various countries and composers complement one another nicely, since for each there are issues of nationalism, folklore, landscape, and modernism, along with tensions between countryside and city, and between national and international. Although, to be sure, the issues and conflicts are not literally transferable from one country and composer to another, they are similar, and each contextualizes and enhances the others.

A signal strength of Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism is the particularly rich Danish context in which it places the composer and his music. Grimley makes it clear from the outset that the central concepts of his book are grounded in Danish culture itself – they are not just imported from the outside. The tension in Nielsen between the national and international has been thoroughly elaborated by his Danish biographer, Jørgen I. Jensen, whose study turns on the notion of the composer as a ‘bi-personality’ or ‘double-man’ – an artist who is pulled simultaneously both inwards, to Denmark, and outwards, to all of Europe.Footnote ⁵ Grimley builds on Jensen by linking the idea of Nielsen as ‘double-man’ to the notion of breakthrough, a term coined in 1883 by the Danish critic Georg Brandes in his path-breaking collection of essays entitled Det modern Gjennembruds Maend (Men of the Modern Breakthrough).Footnote ⁶ Although breakthrough is widely known, of course, from Theodor Adorno's work on Mahler, Grimley is at pains to underscore its origins many decades earlier, in the late nineteenth century, in Denmark. Accordingly, for Grimley, Nielsen becomes the quintessential Nordic artistic figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, operating in two different spheres, exactly as described by Brandes: in the historical sphere as an individual trying to break through the old and local and constricting ways into new forms of behaviour and expression, and in the musical sphere as a composer whose entrance into modernity is not smooth and gentle, but rather characterized by rupture, violence, and a sense of crisis. Indeed, the tendency, both in life and in music, to move from one place or stage to another, or from one composition to another, or even from one musical moment to another within a given piece, via ruptures and discontinuities – in a word, via breakthroughs – rather than through slow and measured steps: all this is characteristic of Nielsen. It is such a notion of discontinuity as well that makes Nielsen's music distinctive in comparison with that of Grimley's other subjects: Grieg, Sibelius, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams. His music does have an edge – a tendency to move by fits and starts, often through sudden surges of energy – that is encountered somewhat less in the music of Sibelius, and far less in that of Grieg, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams.

Nationalism, modernism, and breakthrough function to give the book a unifying theme, making it focused, efficient, and informative. Although it is by no means a standard life-and-works study, it proceeds more or less chronologically, but with an organization dictated as much by aesthetic and musical topics as by time. After the introductory Chapter 1, ‘Carl Nielsen at the Edge’, Chapter 2 deals with compositions from the 1890s (two early songs and one early piano piece, plus the First Symphony), Chapter 3 with two from the decade 1900–10 (the Helios Overture and the opera Maskarade), Chapter 4 with a single movement from the 1910s (the Third Symphony, Sinfonia espansiva, first movement), Chapter 5 with works associated with the Danish landscape (Springtime in Funen from 1921, the early song Jens Vejmand of 1905, and the second and fourth movements of the Third Symphony), Chapter 6 with three neocontrapuntal works (Chaconne and Theme and Variations for piano, 1916–17, and Commotio for organ, 1930–31), and Chapter 7 with the Sixth Symphony of 1925. Each chapter addresses only one or a few representative works, dealing with these in considerable detail.

Chapter 2, ‘Thresholds’, invokes Brandes's notion of breakthrough in both the biographical and the musical senses. On the biographical front, it shows Nielsen, having graduated from the Royal Danish Conservatory in 1886 and remaining in Copenhagen for a few years, venturing out in 1891 on a travel grant to Berlin, Paris, and Italy, in each of which he heard concerts and met influential musicians – his first trip outside the confines of Denmark, and a trip that sealed his determination to seek recognition beyond his homeland. On the musical front, Grimley begins to differentiate Nielsen's concept of breakthrough from Mahler's. In his view, Nielsen tends to place this ‘crucial moment of destabilization’ near the beginning rather than near the end of a work or movement, as was the case with Mahler. Here and elsewhere Grimley hears the notion of breakthrough as an instability, sometimes acting over time rather than being centred on a single moment, that gives the music its dynamic energy, even what he describes as Nielsen's ‘transgressive voice’. Accordingly, he does not hear tonal relations in the symphonies as embodying a complex, logical process of tonal centres, as does Robert Simpson, his gifted and most admired music-analytical predecessor in analysing the symphonies. Rather, his tendency is to hear large-scale motions to the sharp side and flat side of the tonal spectrum as creating fields of harmonic energy, which sometimes remain dynamic and pushing forward, even at the ends of movements, with no requirement of large-scale tonal logic and resolution. For him, unlike Simpson, the triumphant arrival of C major at the end of the finale of the First Symphony is thus not an inevitable goal, prepared from the beginning by the way it already colours the G minor of the first movement, but simply a daring and emphatic rhetorical flourish.

Chapter 3, entitled ‘Hellenics’, focuses on Nielsen's vitalism – his love of classical Greece (which he and his wife visited extensively in 1903) and his turn against what he saw as the decadence of late nineteenth-century art in favour of a régime of physicality – of youth, of exercise, of strength and open air. The new spirit pervades two important works of the decade 1900–10: the Helios Overture (1903), which simply but virtuosically traces the arc of the sun in a single day; and the opera Maskarade, which in Grimley's view represents the healthy interweaving of Hellenic athleticism and the ancient Greek notion of carnival, as elaborated in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. The new, carnivalesque element in the opera is its mixing of seemingly incompatible musical languages: languages that represent the clash of young and old, progressive and conservative – often just juxtaposed, as in Bakhtin's heteroglossia, rather than logically worked out. Critical in this respect is Nielsen's triadic but daring harmonic language: ‘[At] the heart of the opera's musical language lies a powerful inversion: the transformation of the triad from a symbol of permanence and tonal security, to a symbol of the potential for disorder, instability, and harmonic freedom’ (90).

Vitalism, physical strength, a culture of the body, and, with respect to music, now a more radical harmonic freedom continue in Chapter 4, which proceeds on to the decade 1910–20. Here the single example is the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Sinfonia espansiva, of 1912, and the chapter topic is ‘Energetics’. In comparison with the works preceding it, the symphony raises the bar dramatically in terms of the difficulty of its harmonic and formal language, its textural and motivic density, and, in general, its overpowering energy. Grimley's strategy in approaching the work takes its cue from one of Edward T. Cone's well-known dicta regarding musical analysis: ‘The good composition will always reveal, on close study, the methods of analysis needed for its own comprehension.’Footnote ⁷ In keeping with this principle, he lets his instinct that the symphony is somehow about musical energy – its waves and expansions, and its powerful ebb and flow – dictate his analytical and interpretative approach. And so he appropriates the work of three early twentieth-century German theorists who conceived of music, especially symphonic music, as a play of energetic forces: Ernst Kurth, August Halm, and Hans Mersmann. The result is an original and powerful analysis which, though it may not live up to contemporary music theory's standards for intersubjectivity, nevertheless creates a viable model for using the work of three theorists whose work is gradually becoming better known.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on musical topics of great interest to Nielsen: musical representation of the Danish landscape, and the counterpoint of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In Chapter 5 Grimley authoritatively situates the music of Nielsen that evokes the Danish landscape in terms of a broad Danish tradition of representing the countryside in painting, literature, and music. Again there is much to be learned about Danish culture here. Grimley has an extraordinary command of the landscape tradition and its history – another sign that a distinguishing feature of his scholarship is his immersion in and understanding of the national cultures of the composers about whom he writes, cultures that many of us, myself included, can and will learn about in detail for the first time from him. Then in Chapter 6 he turns to Nielsen's increasing interest in counterpoint and its history, beginning around 1915: ‘One of the most prominent and distinctive strands in [the] diverse constellation of musical identities in Nielsen's later music is his adoption of an archaic, contrapuntal voice’ (180). He developed that voice through extensive study of Palestrina and Bach, and he incorporated it into his own musical language not only in the Chaconne and the Theme and Variations for piano but also in his last composition, Commotio, for organ. His love of counterpoint and his mastery of it also make their presence known in other late works – especially the Flute and Clarinet Concertos, and the Sixth Symphony.

The seventh and last chapter of the book (other than a brief Conclusion) is an ambitious and analytically demanding reading of the Sixth Symphony, a work ironically subtitled Sinfonia semplice by the composer. In Denmark, since its première in 1925, the Sixth has generally been seen as an unexpected, even an embarrassing, anomaly – a caving in on the part of the composer to ill health, loss of creative imagination, and imitation of modernist elements that he did not understand. Grimley goes against the grain here, treating the symphony as an artistic triumph, the pinnacle towards which the many pieces discussed in his book have built. Breakthrough, modernism, Danishness, discontinuity, and crisis – even comedy – all play their part. Hard-core music analysis and hermeneutic interpretation both have their say in the chapter, which serves as a fitting climax to the book, just as, in Grimley's view, the Sixth Symphony functions as a climax to Nielsen's compositional career.

One closes Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism grateful for what one has learned, grateful for having made it through Chapter 7, and resonating with a striking impression that will not go away. That impression is, to put it in Grimley's terms, simply one of breakthrough. In the first half of the book, the concept works as an insightful and unifying theme that gathers history, analysis, and interpretation usefully together. But in the second half, it becomes so dominating, and so much an element of the music being discussed, that it penetrates the very language of the whole enterprise, and one is left with an extraordinary feeling of crisis, conflict, and violence. A random selection of phrases, which could be multiplied many times over, gives the idea: ‘agonistic use of counterpoint’ (181), ‘a machine that is about to spin out of control’ (214), ‘the grinding of gears’ (214), ‘the danger of […] collapse is embraced and celebrated as well as resisted’ (217), the elements of form ‘threaten to fall apart into incoherence’, ‘disorder [and] musical anarchy’ (230), counterpoint ‘directed more toward collision than accumulation’ (279), and many more. To experience this feeling is, in some inchoate way, to experience Nielsen and the idea of modernism. And it opens the door into understanding, at least in part, how the Danish Nielsen is different in kind from his kindred ‘senior’ modernists, in Finland, Norway, and England.