Carl Nielsen

At fourteen Carl Nielsen was playing bugle and alto trombone in a military band at Odense, having learned his first music from his father, a village fiddler and house painter on Funen. The Copenhagen Conservatory followed, then a desk in the second violins of the Royal Danish Orchestra, and eventually the conductor's position at the Royal Theatre. His six symphonies include the Fourth, The Inextinguishable, written during the First World War, and the Fifth, in which a side drum disrupts the orchestral music. He also wrote concertos for violin, flute and clarinet. Two operas stand beside the symphonies — Saul og David and the comedy Maskarade, still a national piece in Denmark — with the Wind Quintet, the chamber music, and several hundred songs. His memoir, My Childhood on Funen, appeared in 1927. He was at the Royal Danish Academy from 1884 to 1886 and brought out his Suite for Strings, the first of his opus numbers, in 1888; the sixteen years in the second violins began the following year under Johan Svendsen and took in the Danish premieres of Verdi's Falstaff and Otello. The Wind Quintet of 1922 was written for the Copenhagen Wind Quintet after he had heard them in Mozart, its closing variations drawing the five players in turn, and he meant to give each of them a concerto, completing the flute one for Holger Gilbert-Jespersen and the clarinet in 1928. He joined the academy in 1916 and remained on its governing body until his death in Copenhagen in October 1931.