Piano and Chamber Works

The Refined Master of Moderation

By Henrik Friis

‘No, my talents are simply not great enough for that’, Tage Nielsen responded in his customary modest style when asked by music historian Erling Kullberg in a 1989 interview if he had ever wished for a full-time life as a composer. The answer was friendly yet firm and precise, much like his music. No, he did not consider himself a true composer.

Listening to Tage Nielsen’s incisive and captivating chamber music today, his humble statement comes across as almost false modesty. Yet Nielsen always had an understated quality about him, reflected in his music too. Born in 1929 and passing away in 2003, throughout his approximately 50 active years as a composer, he was infinitely respected and admired by his colleagues, whether composers or performing musicians. And although he did little to promote his own works, his music continues to be frequently performed around the world.

Tage Nielsen © Edition·S

The fact is, Tage Nielsen devoted much of his energy elsewhere than at the piano and manuscript paper. After graduating with a music degree from university, he embarked on a promising career in music broadcasting at DR, and from 1963 spent 20 years as the beloved president of the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. To everyone’s delight – except perhaps his list of compositions.

It was not until 1983 when he became director of the Danish Academy in Rome, and then retired six years later, that works began to truly flow from his pen. He composed just under half of his total output of around 60 works during his retirement.

Perhaps precisely because of the limited time Nielsen had available, there is a refreshingly precise and thoughtful quality to his music. There is an idea behind the music, and there do not appear to be any superfluous moments. The forms are short and consise, with only a single extensive work among them: the truly successful chamber opera Laughter in the Dark written between 1986-91 to a libretto by Vladimir Nabokov. It premiered at the Helsingør Theatre (The Old Town, Aarhus) in May 1995, performed by the Danish National Opera. Later, it was staged in Berlin with a tour stop in Denmark.

This album presents music from all five decades of Tage Nielsen’s career – from the impassioned piano sonata, only his third work completed in 1950, to the maturely balanced horn trio Trio semplice and the little sonatina for clarinet and piano written in the late 1990s. We hear the two modernist nocturnes from 1960, a watershed year in Danish musical life, the deeply fascinating character pieces for piano that bring the many styles of the 1970s in Denmark into play, and the impressionistic reveries of Improvisation and Fugue from the 1980s. With the three songs to Shakespeare fragments, we get a small, hyper-concentrated insight into Nielsen’s fascinating abilities as an opera composer. Altogether highly varied music that curiously breaks with the currents of its time yet remains condensed, precise and clear in thought and expression.

On one hand, Tage Nielsen was a composer who took on the colouring of his era – or perhaps even shaped it himself – trying new paths for himself. On the other hand, he remained true to his sober self throughout his life. And from this came truly listenable music. ‘Moderation’ is the virtue he ascribed to himself and Danish musical life in an early analysis of his time published in the Danish Music Journal in 1962: Not deviating too much when trying something new. Tage Nielsen knew his limits early on.

The piano work Three Character Pieces and an Epilogue from 1972–74 beautifully illustrates how Nielsen managed both to maintain an ingenious musical thought and create captivating music. According to his publisher, the work is among the most frequently performed Danish piano pieces. Taking just a quarter of an hour in total, it consists of three short character pieces – ‘Mattinale’, ‘Tour de force’ and ‘Kinderszene’ – forming one half that each displays their own delicate sound world, followed by the epilogue as the other half.

The first character piece opens a small, bright world. A two-note signal sounds again and again as a harbinger of the second piece, which develops into music of increasing fullness as it formulates itself in complex, composite phrases that run towards and away from each other – almost like handfuls of notes being tied together in mild anger. The third character piece then takes on a 1970s hippy-ish character with trilling notes that flow together into shimmering tone clusters, lifting themselves into the sonic landscape with shimmering overtones that grate against each other.

The epilogue gathers the ideas together. Both the utterly simple, the brisk and complex, and the merging, insistent sonorities unite into a music that simultaneously comes across as assured and searching, challenging and accessible. With a repose that manages to accommodate the three musical poles in the small field of thought Nielsen has constructed. It is dramatic music that is easy to slide into and sink down into – without any single climax or main point allowing itself to be singled out.

In an introduction to Tage Nielsen’s music, the musicologist Jens Brincker has suggested that the three character pieces express the composer’s commentary on three different stylistic trends among Danish composers amid the stylistic confusion of the 1970s: In the first movement, the Danish ‘New Simplicity’ – formulated as the little two-note motif with rocking perfect fifths as a Danish hallmark; in the second, the brutal European modernism that Nielsen instructs in the score is to be played ‘convulsively’; and finally, the third movement pointing ahead towards the rising American minimalism. It could well be accurate.

Writing music that is both engaging and interesting – while also displaying an intellectual glint in the eye – would fit well with the impression one is left with after listening through this album.

The two works from the 1990s resound with a romantic wistfulness. The mere 12 minutes that the horn trio Trio semplice from 1997 lasts, offers a glimpse back towards the First Viennese School with three instruments in mutual balance. The mood is serene and calm, with discreetly searching music in the first movement where horn, violin and piano each unfold their role – like a small chamber play. The violin is restless and hunted, the horn has a soft, melancholic melody, and the piano lays out spicy tone clusters one after another at a walking pace. Halfway through, they swap roles, all while the overall sonic image grows increasingly dense. The second movement too is searching, but here the world is yearning and somewhat hazy, where the instruments can meet with their distinct characteristics and form a beautiful, simple, communicating musical world – not unlike a small group of people walking around and talking together about what matters to them.

A Winter’s Tale is a more modestly conceived little piece for clarinet and piano written over a couple of winter months in 1994. Almost a bagatelle built from a simple, scurrying figure that the clarinet plays again and again, making variations on it while the piano lays out calm wintry sonorities underneath – when it is not accompanying the dancing woodwinds, that is. Music with simple yet fully realised ideas.

Tage Nielsen could truly achieve a great deal with limited means. Three Shakespeare Fragments for soprano, oboe, cello and piano from 1978 last barely 10 minutes in total yet manage to build up immense dramatic tension in the sonic landscape. The first fragment, ‘How All the Other Passions Fleet to Air’, sets some of the beautiful Portia’s lines from The Merchant of Venice about love, fear and green-eyed jealousy – in under four minutes. The next fragment, ‘Love Is Merely a Madness’ from the comedy As You Like It, is utterly different – light and merry in its gentle observation of love’s nature. The final fragment, ‘Whither Should I Fly’, returns to tragedy in Macbeth, where Lady Macduff powerlessly has to conclude that she lives in a world where evil is rewarded and good is merely a stupid mistake. So why lament that she has done no harm? Chillingly staged by Tage Nielsen with very limited means.

Improvisation and Fugue for clarinet, cello, and piano from 1983 takes yet another new path. Despite the title, it is a fully notated work that is simply supposed to sound improvised. In the first part, the three instruments are searching, out of sync and melodically rambling – just like three improvising musicians without regard for joining up their entries. In stark contrast, it then becomes a fugue – with slightly Baroque undertones – in the second part, where the melodic lines in a tighter composition comment on each other as in the 1700s and allow themselves to be embellished with trills and blurring grace notes like remnants of a bygone era.

The two early piano works on the album, both the Piano Sonata, Op. 3 from Nielsen’s pure youth and the Two Nocturnes from 1960-61, recount with refined pianism a story of Nielsen as a composer for the instrument. He was himself accomplished at the piano – already at 15 years old he performed a movement from one of Beethoven’s piano concertos in a competition – and one can easily sense that this is music that lies well under the fingers. Whereas the piano sonata sounds somewhat like the impassioned neo-classicism of Bartók or that of Denmark’s leading piano professor of the time, Herman D. Koppel, in the Two Nocturnes one detects the storm of European modernism. If one is familiar with the famous scores of a notorious serialist like Stockhausen, one will nod in recognition at the sight of Tage Nielsen’s five minutes of music. Tempo, dynamics and rhythms shift almost by the second, resulting in the music becoming points on a surface more than coherent music. Yet there remains something almost friendly and non-modernist about the small, chattering notation figures. And then we know that, in Nielsen’s own words, we find ourselves in a musical world where a certain self-imposed moderation prevails.