Niels Gade (1817 – 1890): Symphony no 5 in D Minor
Once regarded as the doyen of Danish music, Niels Gade was a man who always seemed to know how to make the best of himself and his circumstances. Reliable, hard-working, even-tempered and adaptable, he was popular with almost everyone who knew him – “the clever, good-natured Niels Gade” as the German composer Ferdinand Hiller once described him.
His numerous friendships ranged from close associations with Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann in his youth (both of whom adored him), to many of the leading Nordic composers of the late nineteenth century and beyond, including Edvard Grieg, Carl Nielsen, Otto Malling, and Elfrida Andrée: in this way, he would provide something of a personal link between early and late romanticism in Scandinavia. And while for the most part stylistically conservative, he was nonetheless one of the very first European composers to incorporate nationalistic elements into his music.
Gade’s natural disposition towards pragmatism, and for never taking anything for granted, may have been a result of his somewhat impoverished childhood. His father made a not-so-lucrative living from building and repairing old musical instruments, particularly guitars. Niels was originally intended for the family trade, but after his parents had noticed his ability to make beautiful sounds on the various instruments scattered around his father’s workshop, they began to have second thoughts.
Niels was duly encouraged to pursue his musical talent instead, and he was more fortunate still that neither of his parents were the pushy type, as they allowed him to develop at his own pace. One contemporary observer later suggested that “happily for himself, the boy had no precocity, and was never either forced forward or crushed back, but left to the wholesome discipline of a good education.” Quoting George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the writer suggested that Gade’s genius (such as it was) showed “at first only in a great capacity for receiving discipline.”
The Gades lacked the money to send Niels to a music academy and he would receive almost no formal training before the age of fifteen. But having started private violin lessons, he was then accepted as a junior member of the Royal Danish Orchestra a year later. At the same time, he began to study theory and composition with Andreas Peter Berggreen, a composer and pedagogue with a particular interest in Danish folk song. Berggreen would publish several collections of the latter, before later being appointed “song inspector” (overseeing the song education in schools) by the Danish authorities. He was undoubtedly an important influence on the young Gade, installing in him a lifelong love of Danish folklore and literature.
In all, this combination of orchestral playing and private tuition served as an almost ideal finishing school for the young man, installing in him both theoretical and practical knowledge. And in time, he would start composing pieces for the orchestra, eventually submitting one of these to a competition organized by the Copenhagen Musical Society in 1840. The piece in question, his overture Efterklange af Ossian (Echoes From Ossian), duly bagged him first prize, but in truth the music was worth much more than that. Given his still relative lack of experience and education, the overture represents nothing less than a stunning debut for its 23-year-old creator.
The starting point for the overture (no doubt inspired by Berggreen) is the ancient, mythical bard Ossian (an invention of the Scottish poet James Macpherson in the late eighteenth century), a mysterious, visionary figure who was to have a sizeable impact on European romanticism. Although Gade’s overture has no explicit programme, it nonetheless aims to evoke a world of windswept landscapes and magical folklore. The work is constructed around two motifs – an Aeolian melody based on the Danish folksong, Ramund var sig en bedre mand, and a secondary, more upbeat theme that seems to grow organically from the first. But rather than developing his two themes in the approved Germanic way, Gade leaves them largely intact: instead it is the orchestral harmonies and textures that are varied, providing an ever-shifting background for the melodic material. In doing it this way around, Ossian‘s creator demonstrates a compositional approach that was still far from common in 1840.
With its romantic, atmospheric colours (the gorgeous low string chords which open the overture, the Celtic-sounding harp accompaniments, the often modal harmonies), the very concept of Ossian is in many ways ground-breaking, paving the way for the folklorist elements so central to later Scandinavian composers such as Grieg and Nielsen. It also anticipates the whole Romantic Nationalism movement that was rife across Europe (including Denmark) in the mid nineteenth century.
The work was an immediate hit after its first performance and duly encouraged, Gade set his sights on something a little more ambitious, turning out his First Symphony (in C Minor) across the next two years. It’s a work that naturally builds on Ossian, with the folk element still very much present. Its subtitle “På Sjølunds Fagre Sletter” (on Sjølund’s Fair Plains), alludes to the folksong-like melody underpinning the entire work (especially the first movement), a melody composed by Gade himself five years earlier, for use in one of Berggreen’s song collections. In all, Gade imbues the symphony with a terrific feral energy, a bracing Nordic wind seeming to blow through the pages of its score.
It was probably the latter quality that caused the Copenhagen orchestral establishment to back off in fright when first presented with the work – to them, it was like no Danish symphony they had ever come across before. Taking something of a punt, Gade decided to send the score to Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig – Mendelssohn was one of his musical heroes, with the latter’s Hebrides Overture and Scottish Symphony having already been something of an early inspiration on his own music.
Gade could not in his wildest dreams have expected such a stunning response from the Leipzig maestro. “Sir, we yesterday rehearsed for the first time your symphony in C minor”, Mendelssohn wrote to him in January 1843,
and though personally a stranger, yet I cannot resist the wish to address you, in order to say what excessive pleasure you have caused me by your admirable work, and how truly grateful I am for the great enjoyment you have conferred on me. It is long since any work has made a more lively and favourable impression on me, and as my surprise increased at every bar, yet every moment I felt more at home… It makes me want to become acquainted with your earlier and future compositions; but as I hear you are still so young, it is the thoughts of those to come in which I particularly rejoice and your present fine work causes me to anticipate these with the brightest hopes. I once more thank you for it and the enjoyment I had yesterday.
For good measure, Mendelssohn added that he would “never cease to regard your works with love and sympathy.”
We can only imagine what Gade must have felt after reading all of this. And when the symphony was premiered in Leipzig two months later, Mendelssohn eagerly reported back “the lively, undivided joy of the whole audience, which broke into the loudest applause after each of the four movements… the real excitement among the audience after the scherzo; the shouting and clapping of the hands interminable; after the adagio the same; after the last and after the first; in short, after all!”
When the Danish government got to hear of Gade’s European triumph, they immediately awarded him a travelling fellowship, allowing him to go and live in Leipzig for six months. Gade would reward their investment handsomely, quickly finding gainful employment in the German city, largely thanks to his new musical champion. Mendelssohn firstly installed Gade as one of the teachers at his newly opened conservatory, before appointing him his conducting deputy of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra. With Mendelssohn’s health declining, Gade would find himself more and more often pressed into action, and he would win many plaudits for his calm efficiency at the podium. He would later have the considerable honour of conducting the premiere of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in 1845. After Mendelssohn’s untimely death two years later, he was appointed his successor at the Gewandhaus.
By contrast, Robert Schumann, then also living in Leipzig, did not immediately know what to make of Gade and his music. He was even a bit critical, finding parts of his Symphony “tiresome” and “strange”. But it had also piqued his curiousity, and in a subsequent article for his music magazine, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann expanded on his initial impressions. The first thing to note was the youthful figure of Gade himself. “In a French newspaper, one recently read: ‘A young Danish composer is now causing a stir in Germany; his name is Gade… and looks like Mozart in the flesh’”, Schumann reported. “If the accident of a name had predestined him for music, as with Bach, it should be noted that the four letters of his name are those of the open strings of a violin [G-D-A-E]. Let no one dismiss this modest symbol of providential favour…”
As for the symphony, Schumann found it contained “reminiscences of Schubert. But an utterly original melodic idiom asserts itself throughout, with national characteristics never before encountered in the higher categories of instrumental music. The symphony is in every way superior to the [Ossian] overture, in natural resources as well as in technical master.”
Schumann would also come to appreciate the symphony’s “unique Nordic character”, later saying he could detect in it “the lovely beechwoods of Denmark.” As a more general point, he added, “it looks as if the nations bordering on Germany have wanted to emancipate themselves from the dominance of German music; a Germanist might perhaps regret this, but to the deeper thinker and connoisseur of human nature it will seem only natural and gratifying.”
By way of conclusion, Schumann hoped that Gade’s nationalism would not narrow his focus too much, and that he would not ultimately devise a musical language that spoke only to his fellow countrymen.
When later getting to know Gade personally, Schumann found him delightful, eventually admitting him into his “Davidsbündler” circle and saying of him, “I have seldom met anyone with whom I feel in such harmony.” The two men would dedicate works towards one another, while Gade would make a special trip to Germany to attend the premiere of Schumann’s only opera Genoveva in 1850. Schuman would even once describe Gade as a “genius master.”
Gade would probably have remained happily in Germany for many more years had war not broken out between Germany and Denmark in 1848 (over the disputed border area of Schleswig-Holstein) and forced him back to his home country.
Yet he returned a very different figure to the callow young man who had left five years earlier – a now international musician who had enjoyed the endorsement of some of Europe’s finest. For the next four decades he would devote himself to his country, not just as a composer, but also as a conductor, violinist, church organist, teacher and administrator.
Reflecting upon his new status (as well as his growing economic stability), Gade decided to find himself a wife – surprising everyone in the process as he had never previously expressed much interest in women. In 1851 he became engaged to Emma Sophie Amalie Hartmann, the daughter of his great contemporary, JPE Hartmann. To mark their union, he immediately wrote her a cantata for voices, piano and orchestra which he entitled Foraarsfantasi (Spring Fantasy). As a wedding gift, he composed for her his Symphony no 5 in D Minor, having managed to write the piece in complete secrecy during the months leading up to their marriage.
That may have been no mean feat as the symphony, for all the light-hearted circumstances leading up to its creation, is no lightweight work. For one thing it comprises, for the first time in the history of symphonies, an obbligato part for the piano throughout – further testimony to the quietly innovative mind of its creator. But nor is the work a concerto in disguise, as the soloist’s role is always to enhance rather than dominate the music, even as it offers up its own interesting, acoustical perspectives.
The other striking, one might say slightly misleading thing about the symphony is its minor key tonality, suggesting that we are in for something dark or even tragic – whereas in reality the piece is often exuberant and upbeat.
The first movement (allegro con fuoco) is in a standard sonata form, with two contrasting themes, the first played predominantly in the lower registers of the violins (and sounding a little like a lost Brahms Hungarian Dance) while the latter (in the relative major of F) is largely reserved for the piano. The second movement (andante sostenuto), transporting us to the distant key of F Sharp Major and a quite different emotional plain, commences with a heartfelt theme in a lusciously scored passage for strings. A middle section (in F Sharp Minor) brings in the piano and a little more emotional turbulence, before soloist and orchestra unite with a reprise of the serene opening melody.
After a glittering scherzo (allegro molto vivace), with the piano and orchestra working in virtuosic co-operation to great effect, the ebullient final movement (allegro vivace), now firmly anchored around a triumphant-sounding D Major, shows the composer at his most jaunty: a finale which would have made an effective concert piece (perhaps an overture?) in its own right. But nor does Gade allow the major key buoyancy to ever become bland, as it is constantly intercut with interesting, tonally ambivalent sidetracks. With the symphony concluding in a blaze of high spirits, we can well imagine the new Mrs Gade being thoroughly pleased with her husband’s efforts.
In all, Gade appeared to thrive on his newfound married life. “My music is getting on well – Apollo and Cupid are not strangers to each other”, he breezily told a friend. Indeed, these were to be his peak years as a creative artist, as aside from the Symphony he also turned out his choral ballad Elverskud (regarded as one of his most culturally significant works) and the ballet Et Folkesagn (A Folk Tale) which he co-wrote with his father-in-law, JPE Hartmann. With their liberal use of folksong idioms (if not always actual folksongs), both works develop the ideas of Romantic Nationalism through their idolized depictions of Denmark’s old rural population, now considered by the bourgeoisie to represent the real Danish nation.
But just as everything appeared to be set fair for Gade, he then suffered one of the worst setbacks of his life, as his beloved wife Emma died in childbirth in 1855. Gade went into mourning for a year or so, before eventually deciding to remarry, this time to one of his musical colleagues, Mathilde Stæger. For their wedding he composed a short cantata entitled, Foraars-Budskab (Spring’s Message), dedicating the work to both Mathilde and Emma.
Despite his busy schedule, Gade also tried to keep a good work-life balance in his second marriage. Much of his correspondence with Mathilde survives, not least when he was away on concert tours. From Hamburg en route to a Beethoven festival, he wrote to her, “whenever I see in a window a photograph of a little girl or of a little boy, I naturally think of my little ones, so that I do not care the deuce for my trip and for the Beethoven Festival.” In another letter from Amsterdam: “Following rehearsal today I went home, thanked God, brought out your picture and kissed it fervently. I shall always carry it with me, together with pictures of the children.”
Aside from overcoming the heartache of his first marriage, the last forty years of Gade’s life would be mostly untroubled. In Copenhagen he became a kind of benign, all-seeing supremo, involving himself in all aspects of the city’s musical life and doing much to shape it in the years ahead. Within the context of an increasingly freelance age for professional musicians, Gade’s outstanding public service was now a relative rarity among composers. Over the course of his own century, he stands comparison with Johann Wilms in Amsterdam, Mendelssohn in Leipzig, and Hummel and Liszt in Weimar – but there are not many other examples. Like Mendelssohn and Liszt, he would have had the means to enjoy an easier life confined to composing and conducting, but he never wanted to limit himself in that way.
Among his various endeavours, he took charge of the Danish Musical Society from 1850, overseeing the peak of the Society’s activity and organizing the first Danish performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. He founded his own orchestra and choir, and for over three decades was organist at the Church of Holmen in central Copenhagen (where he is now buried).
Ever mindful to the need of promoting young or struggling Danish composers, he helped set up the Society for the Publication of Danish Music in 1871. He also taught at the Copenhagen Conservatory and later became a co-director of the new Copenhagen Academy of Music, teaching composition and music history.
As a professor of composition, Gade was mostly well-liked by his students, many of whom would go on to enjoy successful careers of their own. Over time, his pupils would include the likes of Edvard Grieg and Carl Nielsen, as well as lesser-known figures such as Louis Glass, Elfrida Andrée, Otto Malling, August Winding and Asger Hamerik.
Although generally kind with his methods, like all good pedagogues, Gade could sometimes show a propensity for issuing slightly unreasonable demands. When a young Edvard Grieg was furthering his studies in Copenhagen in the early 1860s, he recalled the moment he was first introduced to Gade. The great man scrutinized him for a moment before saying. “Have you anything to show me?”
“No sir”.
“Very well, go home and write a symphony.”
Grieg might have done a double-take at that moment – a symphony? “Easier said than done”, he grumbled to himself as he trudged back to his lodgings. However – “Gade’s advice acted as a stimulus, and I used all my energy to solve the problem he had given me.” Grieg’s efforts eventually produced a rather youthful symphony (actually the only one he ever wrote), with the work later performed in Tivoli Gardens. But when he showed Gade the work, he was taken aback by his tutor’s almost manic enthusiasm, with Gade immediately rushing the two of them to the nearest piano. Gade then proceeded with an impromptu rendition of the work, and according to Grieg, “the more he played the more enthusiastic he became” – to the point where Gade’s exertions resulted in him draining four bottles of water before he had reached the end of the piece.
Although an often approachable, encouraging presence, Gade’s pupils always knew where they stood with him, and he was not afraid of being bluntly critical too. When Grieg once showed him another work in process, an overture, Gade looked it over and simply said: “no Grieg, this will never do. Go home and write something better.”
Gade himself would continue to compose throughout his later years, although largely when he didn’t have anything else to do first – in busier times, his annual summer holiday would be his only opportunity. That his later music did not quite live up to the promise of his youth is probably in part down to this. But there was also Gade’s own serene temperament to consider: he was never really the sort who could produce the romantic, angsty music increasingly in fashion across Europe.
While he may have heeded Schumann’s warning not to allow his musical horizons to become too provincial, it’s equally true that a certain Nordic wildness was lost in his middle age. As the musical world began to move on without him, his compositions were increasingly denigrated for being unchallenging or facile. Some even regarded him as a kind of Danish Mendelssohn, an early romantic figure forever stuck in the 1840s.
Perhaps Gade’s main strength (and occasional weakness) was his ability to always be in the present, neither worrying too much about the past nor the future. He wrote music according to what he thought his audiences wanted. And with that in mind, it’s also worth remembering that this was a particularly rich time for live music in Copenhagen, much of which can be attributed to the efforts of Hans Christian Lumbye. A composer of popular mazurkas and galops (and sometimes dubbed “the Strauss of the North”), Lumbye had recently become music director and in-house composer for Tivoli Gardens. There he had organized numerous concerts and entertainments, his programmes mixing the old with the new, while also putting so-called popular and serious music side by side.
In this way, Lumbye (who had also conducted that first performance of Grieg’s symphony) would attract large and diverse audiences to his Tivoli events, and in doing so help break down some of the cultural barriers between Copenhagen’s music lovers. Gade himself was sometimes involved in these concerts and would surely have approved of what Lumbye was trying to do: he could never regard music as the preserve of a small elite. And he may well have imbibed some of Lumbye’s spirit in his own predominantly accessible and attractive later work.
Gade would carry on working – and composing – until his death at the end of 1890, aged 73. Although works like the Ossian Overture, Elverskud and Et Folkesagn have assured his place in Danish cultural history, his reputation has nonetheless waxed and waned somewhat in the century and a quarter since his death. Certain musicians – even including personal friends like Carl Nielsen – thought him hopelessly old-fashioned by the end of his life. Later on it was felt that his music had no place in a new century characterized by bold artistic experimentation and violent political upheavals.
But there also comes a time when a past composer is no longer either in fashion or out of fashion, and where his work can simply be appraised for what it is, no more no less. And there have been signs, in recent decades, of such a thing finally happening with the life and work of Niels Gade.
Suggestions for Further Listening
Although he wrote eight symphonies, Gade composed just one official concerto, and that quite late on in his career – his Violin Concerto in D Minor (1880). Although owing something to Mendelssohn’s own concerto (which Gade, as conductor, had premiered thirty-five years earlier), the solo line is well-conceived and the orchestral accompaniment lends it some symphonic substance.
Gade’s chamber music is also worth a mention, and not least his four string quartets, which he wrote at widely spaced intervals across almost five decades. Of these, his Third in E Minor (1877, revised 1889) is probably his best. Among his other works for solo string ensemble, the Octet in F Major (1849) is a stand-out.
Some of his solo piano music, such as his Akvareller (Watercolours) were genuinely popular in his lifetime. He published two volumes, in 1852 and 1881 respectively.
For the Danish public today his one really famous piece is Brudevalsen (The Bridal Waltz), written as part of Et Folkesagn. The waltz is still a firm favourite at Danish weddings today, even if, ironically enough, Gade himself never thought highly of it. The story goes that he thew it in a waste-paper bin, from where it was rescued by August Bournonville, the celebrated Danish ballet master who was choreographing the work.