Two Danish composers contemporaneous with George Enescu (1881-1955) – Carl
Nielsen (1865-1931) and Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996) – are widely recognized as notable
symphonists of the twentieth century. Similar to Enescu, they are considered ‘national’
composers, whose output reflects their national heritage and mentality. Yet there are
obvious similarities in their approach to the symphonic genre: without neglecting the
symphonic sound or leaving the realm of tonality, they renewd the symphonic language by
giving priority to the melodic lines and by using modes from pre-classical music or derived
from folk music idioms. Some features of Enescu’s First Symphony are in fact very much
like Nielsen’s. The description by Noel Malcolm of Enescu’s ‘Romanian’ works might fit
Nielsen quite well, too: “Of the most common scales… others have ’mobile’ thirds, sixths
or sevenths, creating a shifting major/ minor atmosphere which Enescu described as one of
the characteristics of the Romanian music.” (Noel Malcolm, George Enescu. His Life and
Music, Toccata Press 1990, p. 65).
One reason might be that Nielsen, after finishing his training in the German
tradition, received important impulses from France during the 1890s, a course parallel to
that of Enescu. Though 16 years older, due to Enescu’s early musical development,
Nielsen’s visits to Paris occurred at almost the same time as Enescu stayed there, at a time,
when recognition of older music at the Schola Cantorum went hand in hand with new
works by Debussy, Fauré and Ravel, for instance. Even though Nielsen later came to knowborn violinist Emil Telmányi, had access to first-hand knowledge of folk music of the
Balkans, this was hardly a direct inspiration to Nielsen.
However, this was a major inspiration for Vagn Holmboe, whose formative years in
the late 1920s and early 1930s were the time when post-expressionist aesthetics inspired by
Neue Sachlichkeit merged with a keen reception of Bartók. In this view, renewal out of the
spirit of folk music was considered genuine contemporary music. Holmboe, trained as a
composer but working as well as an ethnomusicologist with specific interests in the folk
music of the Balkans and Arabia, was the most prominent composer of this trend.
Furthermore, he had a strong affiliation to Romania. During an ethno-musicological field
trip in 1933-34, aiming at reaching Northern Africa, he fell ill in Romania, where he
married the Romanian pianist Meta May Graf, who he had met in Berlin in 1930. Although
compositions directly influenced by folk music were rare, Holmboe’s “Romanian Suite”
(1937) remains an important exception. Like in Enescu’s music, the most important feature
gained from the spirit of folk music was to be found in the preoccupation with melodic
lines and a harmonic language derived from the melody rather than the other way around.
This is a characteristic feature of Holmboe’s symphonies and string quartets, especially
those from the 1940s and 1950s.
Béla Bartók and appreciated his music and that he, due to his son-in-law, the Hungarian