Nielsen: Symphony No. 5

Download or read book Nielsen: Symphony No. 5 written by David Fanning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-06-05 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the death of Mahler in 1911 the great Austro-German symphonic line was carried on mainly in England, America, Scandinavia and Russia. The Fifth Symphony of Carl Nielsen, a Danish composer, was composed in 1921. David Fanning discusses its place within the symphonic tradition since Beethoven, revealing the personal background to the work and taking account of the extensive Danish commentaries, including the composer's own. In an analysis of the music he lays bare the origins of its images of inertia, anxiety and collapse in Nielsen's tone poems and incidental music for the theatre. Insights are offered into the symphony's progressive tonality and its relationship to traditional structural models.