Carl Nielsen and the Nationalist Trap, or, what, Exactly, is 'Inextinguishable'?

Abstract

Nationalist music evokes such elements as a mythologized landscape and a virtuous people who ‘belong’ to that landscape, presented, through narrative or tone, with either nostalgia or a sense of aspiration (or both). More fundamentally, however, beginning early in the nineteenth century, musical nationalism has depended on the belief that a composer’s music can and should speak, authentically and powerfully, for a collective. This essay first describes how this belief took hold, initially through Beethoven reception and the influence of German Idealism, and then presents a nationalist reading of Nielsen’s Inextinguishable in order to demonstrate the gravitational pull of nationalism on symphonic works and their reception.