Chamber Works

Unheard Voices

By Thomas Husted Kirkegaard

In 1980, the Museum of Music History and the Carl Claudius Collection (today known as the Danish Music Museum) opened an exhibition titled Kvinder komponerer (Women Compose). The museum presented the results of an extensive research project, including a catalogue of no fewer than 339 Danish women composers. The exhibition featured recordings of contemporary women composers — but not of the historical figures, whose music remained unrecorded.

Now, 45 years later, some progress has been made. Music by Hilda Sehested and Nancy Dalberg has since been recorded, though only a fraction of their work has reached the public ear. As for Tekla Griebel Wandall, not a single note of her music had ever been recorded – until now.

With this album, Ensemble MidtVest breathes life into three of the most significant voices from the modern breakthrough of women in Danish music. Sehested, Dalberg and Griebel Wandall each succeeded in gaining public recognition as composers during a time of intense debate over the role of women in society. They were far from the first Danish female composers, but they were among the first to practise their artistic work so publicly — which also made them the subject of considerable public criticism and prejudice.

Despite sharing this fate, these three composers are strikingly different. A century later, we finally have the opportunity to get to know them more fully.

Hilda Sehested (1858–1936) grew up on the Broholm estate in southern Funen. In this affluent family, there was both the means and the support for her to develop musically, and at the age of 15 she moved to Copenhagen to study privately with C.F.E. Horneman. Several years later, in 1886, she began studying music theory and composition with the conservatory teacher Orla Rosenhoff, and gradually composition became her full-time occupation – interrupted only by a three-year pause after the death of her fiancé, archaeologist and museum curator Henry Petersen, in 1896, just a month before their wedding. Sehested’s entrance into public musical life was largely self-initiated and self-funded: throughout her life, she organized and paid for concerts featuring her own compositions.

This album features four of Sehested’s chamber works, showcasing her remarkable stylistic range. The first, Fantasy Pieces for Cello and Piano (1907), is dedicated to cellist Ernst ­Høeberg and was premiered at a matinée arranged by Sehested herself in the Knights Hall of the Odd Fellow ­Palace in 1907. It is characteristic of her late-Romantic style, with lyrical melodies offset by rhythmic vitality, counter­point, and surprising modulations.

The second work, Four Fantasy Pieces for Flute and Piano from 1927, is one of her last compositions and represents a radical departure. Sehested combines free atonality with archaic modality and impressionistic passages devoid of tonal tension – a modern and daring piece that critics of the time found difficult to embrace. The newspaper Berlingske Tidende called it “self-consciously modern” and “more constructed than inspired”.

This was not the first time Sehested encountered such criticism. Her Intermezzi for Violin, Cello and Piano was composed in 1893 and published at Nordisk Musikforlag. The exact date of publication is not known, but it is registered at the Royal Danish Library as 1903 – presumably because the legal deposit programme was introduced in 1902. The same applies to Four Fantasy Pieces for Violin and Piano. While her compositions did receive praise – her teacher Rosenhoff described the trio’s theme as “Beethovenian”, and composer Victor Bendix praised especially the third movement and her technical skill – critics often found her harmonic language and tonal fluidity too challenging. They complained of losing their bearings, of her use of “small lines that hinder the overall view”, and even described the music as “lacking inner logic”.

Indeed, there is something sprawling and imaginative about Sehested’s chamber music – perhaps explaining why she favoured titles like Fantasies and Intermezzi – but everything suggests that Sehested was highly conscious of what she was doing and what she wanted. She was certainly not afraid to disagree with her mentor Rosenhoff when he offered similar critiques. Today, there is every reason to take Sehested seriously and to rediscover her as an essential voice in Danish musical history at the crossroads of Romanticism and Modernism.

Nancy Dalberg's (1881–1949) music is situated at a similar crossroads. Like Sehested, she grew up in an affluent family on a manor in southern Funen – Mulle­rup, not far from Broholm. She married army engineer Erik ­Dalberg, an amateur portrait painter who supported her musical aspirations. Her teachers included Ove Christiansen, Johan Svendsen, Fini Henriques, and from 1913, Carl Nielsen, with whom she developed a close professional relationship, even assisting with orchestrations for Aladdin and Fynsk Forår (Springtime on Funen). After some private performances of her works, she made her public debut as a composer with a self-financed concert in 1915. Like Sehested, Dalberg arranged and funded several composition concerts during her career, using her own means to establish her reputation.

Dalberg’s chamber works on this album offer a clear contrast to Sehested’s. While still grounded in the late-Romantic tradition, Dalberg’s music is marked by a distinctive tonal language and a consistent interest in motivic development. In Andante Serioso, two rhythmic motifs in the piano accompaniment alternately support and conflict with the slow, solemn cello theme – a tension that only resolves in the final bars, as the cello resigns itself to the piano’s opening rhythm.

Her Fantasy for Cello and Piano (1911) is one of her earlier works and was premiered alongside the Andante Serioso in 1915. Berlingske Tidende praised the Andante, while Politi­ken called the Fantasy “quite well done” – yet many reviews focused more on the composer’s gender than on the music. Social-Demokraten wrote: “Music history has yet to show a woman composer of significance”, though it conceded that Dalberg’s concert was “quite interesting”. Newspaper København noted approvingly: “The good thing about Mrs. Dalberg is that she is not overly sentimental or feminine in her music”.

In the Two Fantasy Pieces for Violin and Piano, premiered in 1922 at her third composition concert, Dalberg’s modern voice truly emerges. The opening motif twists and turns in both instruments; it shifts intervals, moves chromatically, and often builds to impressionistic, melodic passages. The second fantasy piece was later published as an independent work titled Scherzo Grazioso, dedicated to violinist Emil Telmányi.

Stemning (Mood) brings us back to Dalberg’s very first known compositions. The short piece appears in a notebook she likely used while studying with Johan Svendsen around 1909–10. With this recording, we are brought into those early, private lessons – and hear a composer already capable of creating intimate and evocative music.

Tekla Griebel Wandall (1866–1940) has never before been recorded. Although she gained significant recognition in the 1890s, she faded into obscurity during her own lifetime – far more so than Sehested and Dalberg. Her background was very different from theirs; born into a poor family, her German father worked as a music teacher and barroom musician, first in Randers and later in Copenhagen. Without money or connections, Griebel Wandall had to build her career from the ground up. She first trained as a fashion illustrator before being admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where she was among the few offered a state-funded scholarship.

The three works featured on this album were composed during her studies at the conservatory, between 1889 and 1891. These are among her earliest compositions – and some of the very few chamber works she ever wrote. After completing her education, she gained recognition primarily for her songs, ballets, and operas. She was commissioned to compose music for the grand ballet I Rosentiden (In the Time of Roses), performed at the 1895 Women’s Exhibition, and she became known as Denmark’s first female opera composer when her opera Skøn Karen premiered in Breslau in 1895 and later at the Royal Danish Theatre in 1899.

The three early works on this album offer a glimpse into Griebel Wandall’s distinctive musical voice: the melodies are clear and refined, almost iconic in their expressiveness and narrative power, revealing a rich poetic sensibility. The album’s final piece is especially notable, since it is in fact a fragment from a larger, five-movement cello and piano sonata in G minor. Only the cello part has survived, except for this Notturno, originally the fourth movement. When we hear its melancholic melody, we are also hearing a reminder of a musical history lost before it was ever heard.

This recording is the result of a major project in which the music of Sehested, Dalberg and Griebel Wandall has been published for the first time in scholarly, performance-ready editions through the Danish Classical Music series at Edition·S. Thanks to Ensemble MidtVest’s interpretations, we can now listen to a part of Danish music history that has long remained hidden in the archives. This is music not just rediscovered – but reborn, as living art and resonant musical historiography.

Thomas Husted Kirkegaard holds a PhD and postdoctoral position in musicology. His research focuses on historical Danish female composers; he is the author of the first book on Tekla Griebel Wandall and editor-in-chief of the series Danish Classical Music.