2 Songs

Sommersang Op.10 No.3 (1894)

Genrebillede Op.6 No.1 (1891)

Nielsen is known in this country almost exclusively for his orchestral and chamber music. In Denmark, however, he is celebrated also for his more than 200 songs, above all those in the popular style he developed from about 1905 onwards: Jens Vejmand (Jens the Roadmender) from the Strofiske Sange Op.21 is a national treasure. It is as though he was deliberately compensating for his ever more progressive symphonies by writing ever more folk-like songs.

Nielsen’s first three sets of songs, on the other hand – Op.4 and Op.6 to words by Jens Peter Jacobsen and Op.10 to words by Ludvig Holstein – are no less sophisticated than the instrumental music he was writing at the same time. Sommersang, with its enagingly spontaneous piano part, is a beautifully written example, not least in its apparently schematic and yet poetically convincing application of one kind of melodic material to the odd-numbered stanzas and another to the even-numbered. The kinship between the early songs and the early symphonies is clearly illustrated by the fact that Genrebillede is quoted in the third movement of the First Symphony. A delightful inspiration, it is so vividely scored for voice and piano – its harmonies aptly coloured by the “horn fifths” in the accompaniment in the opening and closing bars, its vocal line coiled into a complex melisma as the aspiring poet in the tower looks in vain for a rhyme for “roses” – is scarcely less effective in the original version than the orchestral arrangement written seventeen years later.