Stasis and Energy. Danish Paradox or European Issue?

Abstract

In examining Carl Nielsen’s expressive intentions and formal strategies in an interdisciplinary and historical context, this article shows how closely Nielsen’s aspirations and practice parallel those of his European contemporaries. One strand of this interrelationship between art and its social context is manifest in the recognition by philosophers, Kierkegaard perhaps the first amongst them, of the value and significance of right-brained thought, the experience of life, as a legitimate object for consideration and understanding, where previously only leftbrained, objective thought had been considered worthy of the philosopher’s attention. Tracing Nielsen’s developing interest in the embodiment of experience and feeling in the form and substance of his art, not just in its narrative content, it is argued that traditional linear analysis is inadequate to describe Nielsen’s symphonic writing, and that a ‘three-dimensional’ model that can also account for the expressive meaning and value of relative levels of activity, ‘stasis and energy’, is required. By contrast with Nielsen’s success in developing musical forms that embody these ‘concerns of the time’, Danish ballet, one of the great achievements of the Golden Age, faded from sight during the same period. The article asserts Nielsen’s place within the broad range of European cultural life by contrasting it with the uniquely Danish survival of a form whose particular expressive character led to its disappearance or transformation nearly everywhere else.