Nielsen: Symphony No. 4 ("The Inextinguishable")
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 on February 11th, 2020 at the Athenaeum Theatre.
Carl Nielsen (1865 – 1931)
Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, FS 76
Several times in my life I have come across an ideology or theory presented via the medium of art that fundamentally changed how I view the world. One such work is Doris Lessing’s (1919 – 2013) novel Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (1971). The story follows the inner adventures of Charles Watkins, who is found wandering outdoors aimlessly in a catatonic state. Taken to a mental hospital, Charles is medicated with ever-increasing quantities of antipsychotics in an attempt to bring him back into the real world. Meanwhile, Charles experiences an incredible cognitive unveiling inside his head, full of past memories and devised landscapes that provide a totally new way of viewing reality. Discouraged by their patient’s progress, the hospital staff perform electroshock therapy on Charles, which recalls him to his old self and permanently kills off his new enlightened state of being forever.
Lessing’s novel is written in a stream-of-consciousness form, intentionally blurring what is real and what is entirely imagined inside the human brain. This examination of the glimpsed territory of the inner self is an exciting voyage into the marvelous and terrifying scenery of reality. Ultimately, Lessing asserts that reality – whatever that actually is – is fluid and varies on how you experience and perceive life. This philosophy is not a novel idea, but it reinforces the notion that there is indeed something fundamentally human about assigning a reality based on our life experience.
Symphonies are the musical equivalent to a literary novel; they are the result of a composer’s attempt to describe some form of reality based on a life experience. Gustav Mahler once quipped, “The symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything!” Indeed, symphonic works can possess the narrative, drama, and musical variety to embrace everything – again, whatever “everything” actually is. Symphonies are veritable philosophical tracts, spiritual musings, and contemplations on the great unanswerable questions – questions regarding the purpose of life and death, the nature of the universe, of love, of God, of redemption, of grief, of resignation, and of existence. These sorts of questions and contemplations are found deep within the music of Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony. In fact, I assert that a composer’s fourth symphony is usually (but not always) the most philosophically complex, of that composer’s first four symphonies – even when it is direct in nature.
From my experience, the following ideological messages are presented in the following fourth symphonies: Beethoven (said while ranting about the establishment) – “Listen, we must try very hard to forge a path out of this archaic society!” Tchaikovsky (said after drinking an expensive bottle of imported Champagne) – “Life has no objective meaning, so just try your best to enjoy the ride.” Brahms (said while looking up from reading Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’) – “It doesn’t matter what I say anyway because you’ll just layer your personal interpretation over it.” Bruckner (said after careful contemplation and reflection) – “Only through an understanding of the universal structure of the Divine Being can one truly appreciate the beauty of the natural world.” Shostakovich (said after a few shots of vodka) – “F--- the State and f--- Stalin!” So, what does Nielsen say?
During the backdrop of the First World War, Nielsen wrote to his wife, Ann Marie, saying, “I have an idea for a new composition, which has no program but will express what we understand by the spirit of life or manifestations of life, that is: everything that moves, that wants to live ... just life and motion, though varied – very varied – yet connected, and as if constantly on the move, in one big movement or stream. I must have a word or a short title to express this; that will be enough. I cannot quite explain what I want, but what I want is good.” The difficulty of coping with what Nielsen – and most of Europe – faced at the time cannot be understated. Nielsen’s experience of learning of the efficient and calculated methods of death and destruction via warfare truly shocked him – and much of the world. Trench warfare utilized the machine gun, an amazingly modern and economical way to kill a lot of people very quickly. Widespread chemical warfare, only made possible by a developed and advanced society, streamlined agony and death in the most sadistic of ways. This level of unleashed destruction is something the world had never seen before until that moment.
What Nielsen set out to create was a work wholly different from his previous three symphonies. This fourth, out of a total of six, addresses death and destruction head on. Written with movements that flow one after another with no pauses, the work contemplates the philosophical ideology of vitalism within the context of mass destruction. Vitalism is the belief that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate objects. Further, living things experience reality differently from non-living things. To be clear, non-living things do experience a reality – they experience a physical reality. The sun, the moon, and the planets all experience a reality. The Laniakea Supercluster (a collection of a quintillion stars, one of which is our sun) is just one of 10 million superclusters in the observable universe. It experiences a physical reality because it is dynamic and moves and evolves in relation to the other superclusters. So then, though, what does Nielsen say about reality for living things?
The symphony commences with an initial outburst of sound that sets the stage for our journey. It is clear that the music is distraught. After this initial proclamation of torment, the music quickly dies down and we are presented with a clear but timid tune in the clarinets. This melody is used in a cyclical way, being brought back later in the movement as a closing theme, but also brought back at the end of the symphony as a whole. This little clarinet tune, which is quite innocuous when we first hear it, becomes the life force that seals the entire symphony and holds the whole structure together.
After the fairly tame, perhaps innocent music of the second movement, the third movement presents the polar opposite of extreme emotionality, and we plunge into complete despair. At times the music is violent, angry, pleading, weeping, and screaming with descending lines, harsh dissonances, and sudden dynamic contrasts. Shreds of hope appear here of there for an occasional instant above the heavy masses of tone, only to be jumped upon and stamped down into the very thick of the orchestral fray.
This dark and pessimistic tone eventually gives way to the finale, a dramatic and aggressive movement featuring the military style participation from dueling timpanists, placed at opposite sides of the orchestra, who are instructed by Nielsen to play “from here to the end, maintaining a certain threatening character even when they play quietly.” Part of the threatening character comes from the timpani playing tritones, a dissonant interval which can only be described as unnerving in this context. The music continues in a frenzy, but suddenly it is derailed by horns and winds quoting from the life force theme of the clarinets from the first movement. Surging passages swirl into the atmosphere, alternating with quiet reflections. Just as all seems serene, the timpanists reignite the dueling contest of destruction and chaos. This critical moment occurs when the harmonic tension and the intensity of the movement is driven further into dissonance. Because we are in the 20th century, musical tonality is not guaranteed. We genuinely have no idea whether we will arrive at a heroic ending or whether the whole symphony is going to disintegrate (not unlike Mahler’s Sixth Symphony). As if alarmed, the orchestra reenters into a furious passage: strings race, and brass intone grand ideas over the entire orchestral backdrop, reiterating the idea of a life force. It is here that vitalism saves us. Just as we feel the music is splintering before our eyes and heading to a collapse into discord, the music suddenly coalesces back to structure and the inextinguishable force of the living triumphs in an enormous affirmation of life over destruction.
What Nielsen sets out to do with this work is to describe the reality of living things under enormous pressure. This reality is encoded in an underlying understanding that life will always prevail. There is a reality of a force of life that is totally and completely inextinguishable, no matter what. Later in his life, Nielsen described his Fourth Symphony and its title as follows: “The title The Inextinguishable … is meant to express the appearance of the most elementary forces among human beings, animals, and even plants. We can say: in case all the world was to be devastated by fire, flood, volcanoes, etc., and all things were destroyed and dead, then nature would still begin to breed new life again… Soon the plants would begin to multiply, the breeding and screaming of birds would be seen and heard, the aspiration and yearning of human beings would be felt. These forces, which are ‘inextinguishable,’ are what I have tried to present.”
Program Notes by Luke Smith.
Lakeview Orchestra will perform Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 on February 11th, 2020. Make It a Date >>>