Carl Nielsen Unmasked. Art and Popular Musical Styles in Maskarade

Abstract

Although Carl Nielsen’s international reputation rests on his symphonies, in Denmark he is equally beloved for his songs. Over the course of his life, the former increased in complexity as the latter grew more folk-like, so that Nielsen developed into a Janus-faced composer, a master of both art and popular styles. These genres typically have been studied in isolation so that, though many scholars note that Nielsen’s music is full of contrast, few show that this depends on the opposition of two specific styles. Nor has a parallel been drawn between this musical tension and the conflicts Nielsen faced in his personal life, not the least of which was the insidious Law of Jante (“Thou shalt not believe thou art something”) that has plagued many a nationalist artist. Nowhere is Nielsen’s opposition of art and popular styles more effective than in Maskarade (1904-1906), arguably the Danes’s favorite among his compositions, in which the two styles represent conflicting dramatic themes and serve to distinguish between the characters. Ludvig Holberg’s eighteenth-century comedy provided Nielsen with a particularly apt and surprisingly current dramatic framework in which to play out the musical and personal tensions he experienced midway through his career. Nielsen’s opera is an interdependent literary-musical statement in which he underscored the dramatic themes and characterized the main roles with appropriate musical styles drawn from the entire range of his compositional personae. The masked ball’s utopian blurring of class distinctions is modeled musically in the symmetrical key scheme that fuses this musico-dramatic continuum.