Carl Nielsen’s Dreamscapes

Abstract

In an interview in the Danish newspaper Politiken in 1917, Carl Nielsen described the legendary Icelandic figure, Gunnar of Hlidrande, the subject of his 1908 tone poem Saga-Drøm, as ‘that marvellous character from Njál’s Saga, who plundered and slaughtered, but who was nevertheless made of finer stuff and was ahead of his time.’ In his score, the composer explained, he had sought to capture the ‘curious thoughts’ (‘sære Tanker’) in Gunnar’s dream, ‘like four streams of thought, which each go their own way—differently and randomly in every performance—until they gather in a single point of rest, as though flowing into a sluice and commingling there.’

Much attention has been paid to the importance of dreams in early twentieth-century thought, not least in the wake of Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking 1900 volume Traumdeutung (‘The Interpretation of Dreams’) and its concern with the unconscious. But Carl Nielsen is unlikely to have read Freud before 1916, and understanding the phenomenon principally through a Freudian lens fails to capture his earlier interest in dream and its impact on his creative work. This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on the role of dreams in two key works, Søvnen and Saga-Drøm, which suggest fresh ways of approaching sound and dream in Carl Nielsen’s music.