Centre
for
Nordic Studies
Northern Lights
24 February—6 March 2013
http://www.nordic-studies.group.shef.ac.uk
Photograph by Jana Bilek
a festival of ideas & music
‘Northern Lights, a festival of ideas and music’ celebrates the
establishment of the Centre for Nordic Studies at the University
of Sheffield. With it, we offer 200th birthday greetings to the
Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard.
The festival has a varied programme of lectures and concerts,
and has been made possible by the generous sponsorship of
Alan and Hely Sokolowski, to whom we are very grateful.
The Centre for Nordic Studies aspires to support the understanding,
use and enjoyment of Nordic languages and culture
—and we welcome your ideas on how we can achieve it!
Please write to us with your ideas at [email protected]
Northern Lights is promoted and presented for the Centre for Nordic Studies
by Artserve, Sheffield, who would like to thank
Lone Kristensen, Cliff Alcock, Deborah Tilbrook, Matthew Holman,
Louise Sørensen, Roddy Flint and Fiona Drew for their invaluable help.
Northern Lights festival programme
Sunday 24 February 2013, Firth Hall
Rönsy (http://www.ronsy.net), a Finnish folk group
Workshop for young and old, 3pm, Concert, 7.30pm
Tuesday 26 February, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Professor Hugh Pyper
‘The Joy of Kierkegaard: a bicentenary appraisal’
Friday 1 March, St Mark's Church, Broomhill, 1pm
Organ recital by Professor Andrew Linn
The programme is built upon the theme of 'Migration Music', and includes music and images to
mark the mass emigration from Scandinavia to the USA in the 19th century. The programme
includes music by Grieg, Sibelius, Mendelssohn and Vaughan-Williams.
Saturday 2 March, Firth Hall, 7.30pm
A Celebration of Song
A varied programme featuring Chloe Saywell, Rosie Williamson and Matthew Palmer,
accompanied by the composer, George Nicholson.
The concert includes the first performance of a newly commissioned piece by Jonathan Kirwan.
Monday 4 March, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Professor Robert Stern
‘Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”’: Kierkegaard as a divine command theorist
Tuesday 5 March, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Dr Oliver Johnson
‘Physical Fairytale: Finland's Jukola Relay’
Wednesday 6 March, Firth Hall, 7.30pm
A choral and orchestral concert
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni overture and extracts
Carl Nielsen: Suite Opus 1
Jean Sibelius: 2nd Symphony
The Festival Orchestra, soloists
Conducted by David Ross
Sunday 24 February, Firth Hall, 3pm and 7.30pm
Rönsy
Helmi Camus – double bass, harmonium, voice
Maija Kauhanen – kanteles, saxophone, harmonium, voice
Kaisa Ristiluoma – accordions, voice
Seamless ensemble playing, unbelievable solos, deep emotions, strong friendship. This is what the
music of Rönsy is made of. The music leads you from refined chamber-folk to dance rhythms that
knock the shoes off your feet.
Rönsy is at home when relishing shades of minimalism as well as when diving into the
depths of a virtuosic and rootsy beat. Spontaneity, subtlety and their no-bars attitude join hands in
their masterfully structured arrangements.
All the members of Rönsy studied at the prestigious Sibelius Academy Folk Music
Department. The trio has toured extensively in Finland over the years and has also performed
abroad.
The group’s internationally acclaimed debut album was released in Summer 2010, and it
received the ‘Kantele album of the year 2010’ award of the Finnish Kantele Association.
http://www.ronsy.net
Lecture programme
Tuesday 26 February, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Professor Hugh Pyper
‘The Joy of Kierkegaard: a bicentenary appraisal’
Hugh Pyper’s book, ‘The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a
Biblical Reader’, was published by Equinox in October 2011.
Monday 4 March, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Professor Robert Stern
‘Oh, God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”’:
Kierkegaard as a divine command theorist
Robert Stern’s book, ‘Understanding Moral Obligation: Kant, Hegel,
Kierkegaard’, was published by Cambridge University Press in
December 2011
This talk focuses on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, and consider in what way it might be read
as adopting a divine command view of ethics: namely, that what is right for us to do is made right
by God commanding us to do it. Kierkegaard's provocative account of the binding of Isaac by
Abraham provides the context for this discussion.
Tuesday 5 March, Humanities Research Institute, 7pm
Lecture by Dr Oliver Johnson
‘Physical Fairytale: Finland's Jukola Relay’
Oli Johnson’s lecture considers the Jukola relay, and the sport of
orienteering more broadly, as a visual and physical representation of
traditional Nordic cultural values. How does the Jukola Relay engage with
Kivi’s description of the civilising power of nature, and can the cartographic
and competitive visualisation of the wilderness provide a modern substitute
for this experience?
You may also be interested in Colin Roth’s article, ‘Carl Nielsen’s Cultural Self-Education: his early engagement with fine
art and ideas, and the path towards Hymnus Amoris’, published in Carl Nielsen Studies 5 by the Royal Library,
Copenhagen, in October 2012, which demonstrates the link, through Georg Brandes, between Nielsen’s and
Kierkegaard’s aesthetics. The dynamic interaction between Danish and French creative artists during the ‘long
nineteenth century’ forms the second, neo-Platonic and neo-classical, strand in ‘Romanticism’s Double Helix’, now the
basis for a developing research project in the Centre for Nordic Studies in collaboration with White Rose partners.
Friday 1 March, St Mark's Church, Broomhill, 1pm
Organ recital
Andrew Linn
Scandinavia
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Intrada, op. 111a
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, op. 65
Oskar Lindberg (1887-1955)
Gammal Fäbodpsalm från Dalarna
via England
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Sonata 3 in A, op. 65
1. Con moto maestoso 2. Andante tranquillo
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Prelude on Rhosymedre
Noel Rawsthorne (b. 1929)
Hornpipe Humoresque
Percy Whitlock (1903-1946)
Toccata from Plymouth Suite
to America
Francis Linley (1771-1800)
Voluntary
Charles Zeuner (1795-1857)
Fuga
Joe Utterback
Were you There?
Norwegian America
Knut Nystedt (b.1915)
Bryllupsmarsj
In the year 1825 the population of Norway was
just over one million. In the same year a sailing
boat called the Restauration left the port of
Stavanger with 52 religious dissenters on board
bound for a new life in America. Three months
later they arrived in New York in the company of
an extra passenger, born during the long Atlantic
crossing. This was the first of thousands of such
sailings from the ports of Scandinavia, Atlantic
crossings which would continue for a century, by
which time one million Norwegians had departed
in search of a new life. Some didn’t survive the
journey. For others the challenge of establishing
a new life was too great. Others prospered and
news of their prosperity fuelled the ambition of
those back at home in the valleys and the fjords,
dreaming of a better life. Some returned, but for
many it was a one-way ticket away from family
and the familiar and into the unknown. Every
emigrant had a different story, a personal drama.
At Sheffield University, hosted by the Centre for
Nordic Studies and the School of English, there is
currently a project which is reconstructing this
extraordinary journey using Virtual World
technology. The Ola Nordmann Goes West project
brings to life the journey from rural Norway in the
1880s down to the coast at the port of Bergen. It
follows ‘Ola’ as he travels, like so many hundreds
of thousands, across the North Sea to Hull and
then by train to Liverpool. By the 1880s the
Scandinavian Church in Liverpool was dealing
with 50,000 emigrants per year, many of whom
would end up, like the character in our virtual
world, in New York. The serious point of creating
the virtual world is to find out whether this sort of
technology allows us to bring historical
information and those with an interest in that
history together in new and interesting ways. The
project is directed by Andrew Linn in
collaboration with Dr Louise Sørensen and Dr
Mike Meredith. Do visit our website, take the
journey with a million Norwegian emigrants and
contribute your thoughts and comments and
recollections to Ola Nordmann’s world:
www.olanordmann.co.uk.
This concert is the musical accompaniment to
that emigration, providing music to illuminate the
journey from Scandinavia via Britain to America.
In the nineteenth century there were two faces to
Scandinavia. Denmark and Sweden were
established European powers, wealthy and highly
cultivated. Norway and Finland, much younger as
nations, were fuelled by National Romantic art
and could boast of a distinctive and urbane city
culture. The concert opens with a piece which
reflects this metropolitan culture, the Intrada
written by Sibelius for the visit to Helsinki by the
King and Queen of Sweden in 1925, just a short
time after Finnish independence. It is a very
solemn work, interspersed by flashes of colour,
as if the young nation is flexing its muscles in the
face of an earlier colonial power. Edvard Grieg
was Norway’s greatest cultural export in the
nineteenth century, although he made his home,
Troldhaugen (Troll Hill), outside Bergen and
developed a musical style suffused with
Norwegian folk idioms. Wedding Day at
Troldhaugen was originally one of his Lyric Pieces
for piano and is a fine example of the National
Romantic propensity for bringing traditional forms
into the bourgeois salon. The ‘other’ Scandinavia
beyond the bourgeois salon, the harsh
Scandinavia from which so many were fleeing is
hard to recapture in so-called ‘art’ music, but
there is something of it in the traditional melody
heard by Oskar Lindberg in 1936 and rendered
with striking simplicity as the Gammal
Fäbodpsalm från Dalarna.
Migration has always characterised the life of
artists in search of new professional
opportunities and new sources of inspiration. The
German composer, Felix Mendelssohn, made ten
visits to Britain during his lifetime. He met Queen
Victoria, a great admirer of his music, and he
found inspiration in the landscape of Scotland,
most famously realised in his Hebrides Overture.
In 1844 the London publishers Coventry and
Hollier commissioned a set of organ voluntaries
from Mendelssohn, and these were subsequently
grouped by key to form sonatas. This change of
plan by the publisher explains why the third
sonata, which is played today, unusually has only
two movements. The 1845 advertisement for the
Grand Sonatas writes of Mendelssohn’s own
‘masterly performance’ on the organ of
Birmingham Town Hall, though it is unlikely that
any of the Scandinavian migrants in that year
would have been in a position to hear ‘the highly
gifted Musical Genius’ perform.
One of the leading English composers of the first
half of the twentieth century was Ralph Vaughan
Williams, but his Prelude on Rhosymedre takes
us to Wales, the tune being named after the
eponymous village in North-East Wales. There is
no evidence that our travellers from Hull to
Liverpool took a southerly detour into North
Wales, but today is St David’s Day, and we
Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, New York, USA
couldn’t let the concert pass without a Welsh
reference. Noel Rawsthorne is however
synonymous with Liverpool, working for 25 years
as Director of Music at Liverpool Cathedral. His
Hornpipe Humoresque has a distinctly nautical
feel to it, and the Atlantic beckons. This piece
will, I hope, make some of the audience smile,
but I fear the musical snobs will sneer, though
they can feel clever by spotting all the references
to other composers! Percy Whitlock’s Plymouth
Suite is another work with the sea breeze in its
every bar. Whitlock was civic organist in
Bournemouth, and the Toccata is dedicated to H.
G. Moreton, the borough organist of Plymouth.
Some music survives from the pens of organists
who emigrated to America in search of new
opportunity. The music from the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century tends to be robust
and positive but makes few demands on its
audience. The blind organist Francis Linley came
from Doncaster and, following a series of
financial difficulties, sought new opportunities in
America, returning to Doncaster a year before his
death at the age of 29. This Voluntary is a slight
work but is at least the tangible outcome of a
colourful personal drama. Charles Zeuner was
born in Eisleben in Saxony but worked principally
in Boston and Philadelphia before eventually
taking his own life. The Fuga is more of a TwoPart Invention but is breezy and upbeat music,
reflecting the pioneering spirit of these immigrant
composers. While Linley and Zeuner were
immigrants from Europe, bringing European
musical styles with them, the inspiration for Joe
Utterback’s organ music is a mixture of
immigrant music of a wholly different sort, the
African-American spirituals, and the most homegrown of American idioms, jazz.
There are five million US citizens today who claim
Norwegian ancestry. While the descendants of
the pioneers are now all American, fascination
and enthusiasm for the old country and in
particular for genealogy remain strong. Traffic
between Norway and the USA is regular and it is
productive, with the influence now being much
more from West to East than from East to West. A
musical beneficiary of this flow of influence
between Scandinavia and the US is the now 97year-old Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt who
studied with Aaron Copland and who has had
musical successes on both sides of the Atlantic.
His 20th-century take on the traditional
Norwegian wedding march brings the process of
Scandinavian migration full circle.
Andrew Linn
Andrew Linn is Professor of the History of
Linguistics and Director of Research in the
Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Sheffield
University. He studied the organ with Roger
Fisher at Chester Cathedral and with David
Sanger and Peter Hurford while an organ
scholar at Cambridge University. Andrew
has diplomas in organ playing from the
Royal College of Music and the Royal
College of Organists. He has twice worked
as an organist in Norway and he has a
strong commitment to the performance of
Nordic music as well as to the music of J.S.
Bach.
Saturday 2 March, Firth Hall
A Celebration of Song
with
Rosie Williamson
Chloe Saywell
Matthew Palmer
and George Nicholson
including the first performance of a setting of Thomas Paine
by Jonathan Kirwan, specially commissioned for the festival
Peter Heise: Erotic Songs
settings of poems by Emil Aarestrup
Til en veninde—To a (girl)friend (MP)
Ved huset—By the house (CS)
Henrykkelse—Delight (CS)
Skoveensomhed—Alone together in the woods (RW)
Advarsel—Warning (MP)
Carl Nielsen: Six Songs, Opus 10
settings of poems by Ludvig Holstein
Æbleblomst—Apple blossom (RW)
Erindringens sø—The memory’s sea (MP)
Sommersang—Summer song (CS)
Sang bag ploven—Song behind the plough (MP)
I aften—This evening (RW)
Hilsen—Greeting (CS)
Edvard Grieg: Songs, Opus 48
Gruß (Heinrich Heine)—Greeting (RW)
Dereinst, Gedanke mein (Emanuel Geibel)—One day, my thought (RW)
Lauf der Welt (Ludwig Uhland)—The way of the world (RW)
Die verschwiegen Nachtigall (after Walter von der Vogelweide)—The secretive nightingale (CS)
Zur Rosenzeit (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)—The time of roses (CS)
Ein Traum (Friedrich von Bodenstedt)—A dream (CS)
Jonathan Kirwan: Words of Thomas Paine—Creed (Matthew Palmer)
Interval
Robert Schumann: Liederkreis Opus 39
settings of poems by Josef von Eichendorff
(Matthew Palmer)
1 - In der Fremde—In a foreign land
2 - Intermezzo
4 - Die Stille—Silence
5 - Mondnacht—Moonlit night
6 - Schöne Fremde—A beautiful foreign land
8 - Wehmut—Sadness
11 - Frühlingsnacht—Spring night
Reynaldo Hahn: a bouquet of songs
(Rosie Williamson)
Le Rossignol des lilas (Léopold Dauphin)—The nightingale amongst the lilacs
À Chloris (Théophile de Veau)—To Chloris
L'Enamouree (Théodore de Banville)—The lover
Quand je fus pris au pavillon (Charles d’Orléans)—When caught in my lady’s tent
Mai (François Coppée)—May
L'heure exquise (Paul Verlaine)—The exquisite hour
Si mes vers avaient des ailes (Victor Hugo)—If my verses had wings
Richard Strauss: Songs
(Chloe Saywell)
Zueignung (Hermann von Gilm)—Dedication
All mein’ Gedanken (Felix Dahn)—All my thoughts
Einerlei (Achim von Arnim)—Uniformity
Schlechtes Wetter (Heinrich Heine)—Terrible weather
Liebeshymnus (Karl Henckell)—Love’s hymn
Rosie Williamson graduated from the University of Sheffield with a BMus, first class
honours, specialising in classical vocal performance. She now works as a singing
teacher and freelance performer, based in Sheffield and continues her vocal studies
with Yvonne Kenny in London. Rosie was the Associate Soloist for Escafeld Chorale's
2011-2012 concert season, performing works by Haydn, Vivaldi and Ramirez. Find out
more about her at www.rosiewilliamson.co.uk.
Chloe Saywell was born in Lincoln, read music at Sheffield University, graduating with
first class honours in 2009; followed by a Masters in solo performance at the Royal
Northern College of Music with Sandra Dugdale. Chloe now works as a free-lance
muscian based here, in Sheffield. She is a passionate recitalist and performs regularly
with pianist Stephenie Leung across the UK. Last autumn she gave a memorable
Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust for Sheffield City Opera.
Matthew Palmer graduated from The University of Sheffield in 2011 with a First Class
degree in Music and was awarded the Mrs Stewart Blake B.Mus and Recital prizes.
Currently studying with Robert Dean, his operatic roles include Colline in La Boheme;
Antonio in The Marriage of Figaro; Marullo in Rigoletto; and Morales/Zuniga in
Carmen for Heritage Opera.
Director of Composition in the Department of Music at Sheffield since 1996, George
Nicholson’s compositions include a Flute Concerto commissioned by James Galway
and the Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra, a Cello Concerto for Moray Welsh and four string
quartets. It is his earnest belief that music should be heard as well as seen and to
that end he has always remained active as a performer, regularly appearing as solo
pianist, accompanist and conductor.
Jonathan Kirwan graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2009 with a first class
BMus. He now works full time at Birkdale School where he runs a number of creative
music projects and continues his work as a composer. ‘Words of Thomas Paine—
Creed’ was commissioned for this Northern Lights festival of ideas and music.
Wednesday 6 March, Firth Hall, 7.30pm
Orchestral concert
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni
Overture
‘Madamina’ (Matthew Palmer)
‘La ci darem la mano’ (Rosie Williamson and Matthew Palmer)
‘Vedrai, carino’ (Chloe Saywell)
Carl Nielsen: Suite, Opus 1
Interval
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No 2 in D, Opus 43
The Festival Orchestra conducted by David Ross
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Don Giovanni
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, one of three that the
composer wrote to libretti by Lorenzo da Ponte, was first
performed in Prague in 1787, then with two additional arias
in Vienna the following year. All three operas are striking for
the psychological depth and richness of their characters,
which some modern writers have thought surprising. But
one important strand of Enlightenment enquiry, aesthetics,
developed as the basis of modern psychology, because it
required its students to carefully observe their own
responses to, and understanding of, their personal
experience. Some writers continued to argue in the
classical tradition, maintaining the views we usually
associate with Plato: that physical manifestations in the real
world seem beautiful to us (or not so) because they stand
for ‘ideals’ that actually exist in our minds, rather than in
the objects we see. The Enlightenment’s commitment to
dialectical examination inevitably encouraged some others
to argue against this view, and during the course of the
eighteenth century, personal insights and discussion of
their significance, for example in the cluster of aesthetic
writings by William Hogarth, Allan Ramsay, David Hume and
Edmund Burke published in the 1750s, took shape as an
alternative to the old classical model.
The authenticity of Mozart’s characterisations
show how far he appreciated this alternate view: rather than
being ‘classical’, he is actually working in the new,
personally engaged world of ‘Romanticism’, informed by
personal experience and explicitly intended to engage the
listener’s emotions.
It is, perhaps, unlikely that Mozart actually read
any of Immanuel Kant’s work; but it is clear that he knew
about its ideas, as they passed incredibly quickly through
the European Masonic network from Kant’s home in
Königsberg to Mozart’s in Vienna. We can see, in The Magic
Flute, that Tamino’s perceptions of the world he travels
through change dramatically as he follows his journey to
truth. In Don Giovanni, Mozart is not yet so radical, but the
raw emotion of Elvira’s determination to challenge the
‘traditional’ bad behaviour of the Don, and the delightful
ambivalence of Mozart’s presentation of it in ‘La ci darem
la mano’, Leporello’s ‘Madamina’ (the catalogue aria) and
Zerlina’s ‘Vedrai, carino’, are excellent illustrations of the
work’s lyrical intensity and quality.
As Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher
whose 200th birthday we celebrate with this festival, began
his own ‘journey to truth’ with publications in the late 1830s
and early 1840s, his first explorations were into precisely
these aspects of ‘aesthetics’ and experience, and in one of
his most substantial and best known works, Either/Or, he
writes at length about Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, and
its importance. We might not share his assessment of the
opera’s position amongst Mozart’s work nowadays, but
Kierkegaard’s commentary is well worth reading. He says,
‘…only one of [Mozart’s] works makes him a classic
composer and absolutely immortal…With his Don Giovanni,
Mozart enters the rank of those immortals, of those visibly
transfigured ones, whom no cloud takes away from the eyes
of men; with Don Giovanni he stands supreme amongst
them’. (trans. Howard and Edna Hong, vol. 1, p. 51,
Princeton 1987).
Carl Nielsen: Suite for Strings, Opus 1
Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) was born, and grew up in, the
countryside outside the town of Odense, on the island of
Fyn in Denmark, the son of Niels Jørgensen and Maren
Kirstine Johansen—so although the practice had long been
outside the law, he was still named with his father’s
forename in the old manner. His musical aptitudes were
recognised when he was quite young, and he soon went out
playing the fiddle alongside his accomplished violinist
father (who was a painter by trade but earned much of his
income from playing). The seventh in a family of twelve
children, Carl’s first preserved composition is a polka
written when he was just 9, which was dismissed by his
father as ‘impossible to dance to’. His apprenticeship to a
grocer at the age of 14 was hardly the best preparation for
a career in music, but the grocer’s poor health led to the
collapse of his business, and Nielsen took up a position as
a musician in the 16th battalion’s military band, playing
bugle and cornet. His wages included an eighth of a pound
of bread every fifth day. He continued to play with his
father’s musician friends, and took violin lessons to
supplement his developing musical skills. Like his famous
countryman Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), also
the son of a very poor family in Odense, Carl Nielsen found
patronage from local benefactors that allowed him to make
the leap from enthusiastic amateur music-making in
Odense to a formal professional training in Copenhagen,
and in May 1883 Nielsen visited one of Denmark’s best
known composers, Niels W Gade (1817-1890) carrying with
him the andante movement of a string quartet in D major
that he had been working on at home. Though Gade’s
support was rather grudging, Nielsen’s sponsor, Klavs
Berntsen, agreed to fund the young composer’s studies at
the Copenhagen Academy of Music, and Nielsen began his
studies there on 1 January 1884 as pupil no. 300.
The Suite for Strings is Carl Nielsen’s Opus 1, the
very first work of his to be published (though not the first to
be performed), and his first great success after passing his
final conservatory examinations in 1886. The suite was first
performed on 8 September 1888 at the Tivoli Gardens Hall
(still one of the main venues for classical music
performance in Copenhagen) by the resident orchestra, in
which Nielsen had been playing the violin regularly. The
orchestra’s conductor, Balduin Dahl, had accepted the work
for performance because ‘it did not have too many quick
notes—and no semiquavers at all’. The concert was itself an
important one, the second ‘Nordic’ concert designed to
support the Great Nordic Industrial Exhibition being held in
Copenhagen at the time.
The work, which is dedicated to Orla Rosenhoff,
the most influential of Nielsen’s teachers, has three
movements, which were graced with mythological names at
the time of the first performance, ‘The Danaids’, The Dance
of the Charites and ‘The Bacchus Procession’. The
conductor, Dahl, thought the names affected and asked
Nielsen to remove them. The composer refused at the time,
but they were changed when the work, with its last
movement fairly radically re-worked, was prepared for
printing, and when it was performed again at Tivoli on 25
May 1889, the movement titles had been altered to,
‘Prelude’, ‘Scherzino’ and ‘Finale’. The printing fair-copy has
them in French, ‘Prélude’, ‘Intermède’ and ‘Finale’, and
then they were changed again for the actual printing, this
time to ‘Präludium’, ‘Intermezzo’ and ‘Finale’. The Suite was
published by the Danish firm Wilhelm Hansen from their
Leipzig office in order to gain the copyright protection
afforded by the then newly agreed Berne Convention
(1886), which was not accepted in Denmark at first.
The 48 bar Prelude, in A minor, sustains a tonic
pedal through its first nine bars before beginning a
beautifully chromatic modulatory sequence that sounds as
characteristically ‘Nielsenish’ as anything he was to write
later. The movement’s high point, at bar 23, is a fortissimo
bar in B flat major, by no means a closely related key, after
which the music gently, and less chromatically, retires back
to A minor. The melody taken by the ’cellos in the first half
of the movement is now given to a solo viola.
The Intermezzo is a gorgeous, lilting waltz, a
cunning cross between scherzo and sonata forms, wearing
its learning (and its clever false recapitulation) lightly. For
those who know Nielsen’s later orchestral works, this may
offer a first hint of his fascination with triple metre, and
thus of the wonderful first movement of the third symphony,
Espansiva.
The Finale, marked andante con moto—allegro con
brio, is the movement Nielsen had most difficulty with. Only
fragments of the first version remain, in sketch form. The
introductory passage uses richly divided violins (first and
seconds) against an independent bass, and it’s pretty clear
that Nielsen’s primary interest in the sonata-allegro is to
explore the greatest variety of textures and sonorities he
can produce from his string orchestra. The coda, più mosso,
chunters firmly along on its E dominant pedal (we’re in A
major) until it simply stops: Nielsen writes out a rest of a bar
and three quarters after the final A major chord!
Jean Sibelius: Symphony No 2 in D, Opus 43
Jean Sibelius’s second symphony was first performed in the
Great Hall of Helsinki University on 8 March 1902, almost
exactly one hundred and one years ago today.
The work, which is in the four movement form then
expected of a symphony (with the slow movement second
and the scherzo third), is relatively conservative in its tonal
language and structure, but the ‘through composed’ nature
of the work’s expressive content, the way in which it steadily
‘drives through’ towards the thumping good tune with which
it ends, show Sibelius moving towards the innovative and
absolutely individual path he was to follow in his later works.
Some of Sibelius’s contemporaries wondered whether to
construe the symphony’s forward motion as ‘one large
crescendo’ (Kari Kilpeläinen, in the preface to the new
Complete Edition), and speculated about whether there was
any ‘Finnish’ content—Sibelius had associated himself with
the movement to gain independence from Russia, and
establish an independent Finland, through a series of works
based on Finnish legends and, best known, Finlandia of
1899/1900. Critics admired the symphony’s orchestral
briliance, noting Tchaikovsky’s influence on the composer.
Colin Roth
David Ross studied music at the University of
Sheffield, graduating in 2011. He led and
conducted the University’s chamber and
symphony orchestras, as well as working with his
own Jessop Sinfonia. David’s repertoire ranges
from film to electric prom, as well as including
the great symphonic works.
David is passionate about music education and
is much in demand as an instrumental teacher
and youth conductor.
David Ross and the Centre for Nordic
Studies would like to express their
heartfelt appreciation to the wonderful
members of the Sheffield and district
musical community, who have so kindly
given their time and energy to perform for
us this evening.
Drot og Marsk: a wormhole to West Scandinavia
This article is an extended version of the ‘translator’s preface’
which will be published by the Centre for Music Publications of
the Royal Library, Copenhagen, on 5 April 2013 in the vocal
score of their new edition of Peter Heise’s 1878 opera, Drot og
Marsk—King and Marshal. It aims to consider the implications
for our understanding of the shared history of the English and
Danish languages which have emerged from this very particular
and specialised translation, commissioned for this edition.
The first purpose of the unsingable singers’ translation of Drot og
Marsk—King and Marshal—was to make an English parallel text that
would show singers the exact meaning of every single word as
precisely as possible, so that they could, when learning their part for a
performance, get a real sense of the relative importance or
insignificance of each word.
We1 expected that doing so would present a problem for syntax, that
the relationships between the English words would be difficult to
untangle if they were in their Danish order.
It seemed desirable, where possible, to find a word equivalence that
would keep or parallel the consonants in the Danish original, so that a
singer might readily connect them with the English words we’ve
assumed they would already know (in these days when English is, for
the time being, the most common international language). We wanted
them to feel ‘at home’ with the texture and sound of the words they
were singing, even though English vowels are, in modern speech, quite
far removed from those of modern Danish.
We sought to parallel Christian Richardt’s deliberately historicist
invention of a ‘mediaeval’ Danish, for example using ‘old’ words from
poetic sources that had fallen out of common usage, with language
used at the same time (the third quarter of the nineteenth century) by
British writers and artists to conjure their own historicist fantasies of
‘old England’, for example in the work of the artists and poets of the
‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ and the slightly later movements
associated with John Ruskin and Willam Morris. There were no more
swains (‘svender’) in the late nineteenth century English countryside
than there are today.
What emerged from the process of making a translation of Drot og
Marsk that would be of practical use to singers has been something of
a surprise, as we did not expect to find so many Danish words as close
to surviving English ones as they are, and we were pleased, too, to
find how rarely we were defeated by syntactical inequivalence. We
have, we think, succeeded in showing that it is possible to make a
convergent translation between Danish and English in the very
particular case of this opera libretto, because we have been able to
ignore the currency of usage of words and expressions, and gloss over
the sometimes considerable differences that exist in modern speech
and writing conventions, not least because the libretto’s lines are, for
the most part, relatively straight forward utterances.
There is enough common ground between the vocabulary and syntax
of the two languages to evoke the ideas presented in recent times by
archaeologists like Colin Renfrew2 and Marek Zvelebil3, and the
genetic historian Stephen Oppenheimer,4 and to deduce that the
people living across the land of north western Europe before ice-melt
waters broke through and flooded what are now the North Sea and
the Channel, were speaking one language before they were separated
by the water flow which began their languages’ distinctive
development.
Recent writing has maintained something of the old idea, that the
‘Indo-European’ language group ‘emerged’ from the ice-age refuge in
the Balkans after the last period of ice, the ‘Younger Dryas Event’ in c.
9,000 BC, and gradually spread northwards as the need for more
farming land and the milder climate worked together to encourage
settlement of central and northern Europe. But there is no evidence
that the hunter-gatherers who preceded this ‘wave’ of Indo-European
farmers (dated from c. 6,000 BC) were not already speaking this one
language.5 Perhaps the wave model of language transmission in
Europe is misleading, and the isolated non-Indo-European languages,
Basque, Albanian and Etruscan, are not so much evidence of
chronological layers in which one language group dominates only to
be suppressed by a successor, but rather evidence of greater
linguistic diversity in what was, after all, a massive land area
populated very sparsely indeed. A possibility which has emerged from
the latest revisions to our archaeological knowledge of the very early
movement of hominids from Africa, from a population estimated at
around 20,000 in all, suggests that there might be a correlation
between the settlement locations of Neanderthals (from whom light
skin and red hair are supposed to have come) with non-Indo-European
languages in modern Europe, and of homo sapiens with the areas of
Indo-European speaking. It has become clear that the two populations
co-existed for some time, and interbred. Perhaps Indo-European
languages survived best because their speakers were the most
economically successful of the inhabitants of pre-historic Europe.
Perhaps the notion of ‘language migration’ after the ice age should be
replaced, as the old myths of Celtic migration were put aside, with a
recognition that the Indo-European languages may have originated far
earlier than previously supposed, in the family groupings of those who
travelled from Africa, placing the origins of our languages at the
beginning of the species’ evolution, perhaps some 200,000 years ago.
Certainly the ‘normal’ history of the English language is quite
mistaken. It has been evident for some time that the old stories about
the Romans ‘pushing aside’ the ‘Bretonic’ speaking Celts are
completely untrue. The Galicians, Bretons, Cornish, Welsh, Scots and
Irish were, demonstrates Stephen Oppenheimer, always coastal
peoples, confined to the Atlantic seaboard from their probable origins
in the Basque (and therefore perhaps non-indo-European speaking)
region which, like the Balkans, was high enough to provide refuge
from the ice. It isn’t clear why or when they adopted the indoEuropean Celtic languages they all share now, but they were not the
inhabitants of eastern England at the time of the Roman invasions in
55 and 54 BC. One group who were inhabitants of the southern
coastlands of England were, according to Julius Cæsar, Belgians,
members of the same tribe who lived across the Channel, and
speaking the same Germanic language.6 They were not heroic sailors
or colonists: their presence on both sides of the Channel supports the
proposition that languages, and recognisable ethnic ‘family’
connections, could survive the flood which separated the British Isles
from continental Europe.
If it is true, as David Crystal writes in The Stories of English (p. 59) that
palatalization changed the original ‘sk’ of English words to ‘sh’ around
the 3rd century AD, half way through the Roman occupation, then the
settled population of the land must have been speaking a version of
the Norse language to have an ‘sk’ sound to change.7 These words—
like ‘skær<sheer’ and ‘skinne<shine’—remain the most conspicuous
and by far the most easily identifiable element in the common vocabulary
of Danish and English. But, as the language of Drot og Marsk’s libretto
shows, that common vocabulary extends very widely indeed.
Of course not all the words in common date from olden times, and
quite a number of shared words—‘hej<hi’ for example—have arrived far
more recently.8 Buried in modes of speech and common expressions
or the ritualised language of ceremonies are phrases like, ‘be
upstanding for the Queen’, and one can adroitly compose more than
‘unruly and utterly awkward sentences’ which can be set over into
Danish equivalents without any barrier. Once the main manoeuvres
have been spotted—the change of ‘sk’ to ‘sh’; the addition of ‘w’ to
words like ‘word’ (‘ord’) and to Danish question words like what, why
and when (there has been a switch of letters - the Danish words have
a silent ‘h’ before ‘v’ where English adds a ‘w’ as well as ‘h’); and the
changes where orthography (the writing out of a sound) has left us
with identical sounds but different looking words, or identical looking
words with completely different sounds—you begin to appreciate the
scale of the surviving fellowship. It is, indeed, easier to believe that
the languages have a history which extends far back beyond the ice
age when you consider the glacially slow rate of change that has
allowed both to remain so close today.
Unsurprisingly, it is the words in most regular use that have changed
the most: it’s a long journey from ‘hilse’ to ‘hello’, through ‘hail’ (as in
‘…good fellow well met’) and now sharing ‘hi’. The words which have
survived with the same or recognisably related meanings in both
languages are the ones which have become trapped, like flies in
amber, in ‘expressions’ and ‘modes of speech’, which are only used in
particular circumstances. ‘Slag’, meaning a woman with a casual
attitude to her relationships with men, survives in nearly the same
form in both languages; only babies ‘thrive’ in modern English usage,
and only car horns or children’s toys ‘toot’ (‘tyt’) like the backstage
trumpet in Drot og Marsk. In the libretto wooden beams are ‘knækert’
— ‘knackered’ — an expression only used of horses for many years.
The shift in sense is not just recognisable in English: ‘ram’ (meaning
hit hard) is still current in English, at least so far as motor traffic is
concerned, but sits less comfortably with that sense in modern
Danish, and only some contexts allow the translation of ‘så’ as ‘so’ or
‘til’ as ‘to’, because their normal meaning in both languages has
shifted out of alignment. Some words look and sound the same, but
have taken on slightly different meanings. Siger<say and taler<tell
illustrate an interesting shift. They must have started in the same
place, but both words have become slightly more specialised in both
languages—but in precisely the opposite way! So in English we ‘say
something’ and ‘tell someone’; we cannot ‘tell something’, and if we
want to express communication with another person using ‘say’, we
need to use a preposition like ‘to’. The Danish practice is the exact
reverse, though the same words are used. Danish preserves broad
labels for process concepts like learning-teaching and borrowing, and
uses the same words, ‘lære’ and ‘låne’, for each. English has needed
a more pragmatic description of these processes, so distinguishes
‘teaching’ from ‘learning’ where Danish does not, and similarly
‘borrowing’ from ‘loaning’. The words for ideas of ‘look’ and ‘see’
share a similarly crooked path from their common origin. Sometimes
an expression survives in both languages, with a slight modification: if
we think someone has made an appropriate choice, for example of
their occupation, or hairstyle, in Danish we say ‘det klæder dig’ (‘that
clothes you’), and in English a French word for ‘clothe’ has slipped in
and we say instead, ‘that suits you’. We’ve even grown an adjective,
‘suitable’, from the expression. Our two languages have developed
differing conventions to express the difference between particular
objects and their universal kinds; Danish speaks of a single wing,
arrow, wood, where English insists on using the plural of these words
in the same contexts.
There are, of course, puzzles that these parallels do not help us
understand, like the ‘old’ names in England which have been labelled
‘Celtic’ or ‘pre-Anglo-Saxon’.9 But it seems clear that the ‘AngloSaxons’ who arrived after the Romans left around 400AD came to a
country already populated largely by people speaking their own
language, their ‘cousins’ in a sense, people who could understand the
language and feel the cultural connections of Beowulf (a story of
Danish heroes and dragons) just as the Vikings arrived some four
hundred years later to find that their close relatives were not in the
least happy to welcome them despite them speaking a language that
must have been mutually comprehensible.
Given the length of time that has passed since Danish and English
were divided, at least 8,000 years since the North Sea and Channel
broke through, and acknowledging that the Danish content of English
has been topped up by two subsequent immigrations of Danish
speakers, it still seems extraordinary that such a large common
ground exists between two languages. Their sounds seem so different
these days, and an ordinary Englishman can certainly be perplexed by
the sound of modern Danish (Stephen Fry10); but the stories which
survive on both sides of the seas about fishermen from Jylland and
Yorkshire being able to converse with each other in their dialects
during the twentieth century, if not as easily as in earlier times, are
evidence that the languages were once a single language held in
common, a fellowship that survived the watery intrusion. There are
still pockets of recognisable Danish in English speech: for example
Danish pronouns and irregular verb endings still thrive in the Dearne
Valley in South Yorkshire, once home to Ivanhoe (Walter Scott) and his
Danish foes, and the glottal stop lives on in East London’s cockney
and the so-called ‘common’ speech of southern England.
How has the huge variation in sound arisen? The great differential
appears to be trade. Both Denmark and England have long and
considerable histories of trading adventures in far distant places. At
the time of Nelson’s 1807 raid on Copenhagen, the Danish mercantile
fleet he captured was nearly the size of the British fleet, and the two
countries had been close rivals; the enforcement of a blockade
against Napoleonic Europe gave the British an excuse to solve a
commercial challenge with brutal force. With characteristic selfimportance, the English have forgotten that they were once ruled (in
the eleventh century) by Danish kings, and that in the eighteenth
century the Danes had a fleet that rivalled Britannia’s. But while
Denmark’s wealth in mediaeval times came from trade in the Baltic
and the Hanseatic ports, and especially from the tax levied on naval
traffic passing through the Skattegat, Britain’s business was done
with a western European market, notably including the French and
Portuguese Atlantic seaboard for its wines, ‘claret’ and ‘port’. The
causes of the ‘great vowel shift’ are complex11 but may include the
influence of sounds from the Romance lanugages, where Danish
trade was more tightly focused on Nordic and Germanic speaking
partnerships (Erik Glipping was married to Agnes of Brandenburg,
while his English contemporary, Henry III, was married to Eleanor of
Provence and was the grandson of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had
brought considerable possessions in France to the English crown). The
arrival of Norsemen speaking their adopted language, French, in
1066, seems to have had only a very gradual influence on English
vernacular speech, as French was used only by the court and lawyers;
it was the trading links that the French connection fostered which
gradually brought about the Frenchification of English over the next
five hundred years, until its vocabulary and pronunciation stabilised in
the great literary flowering at the end of the sixteenth century.
At the time of the action of Drot og Marsk (1286), Danish and English
will have sounded much more like each other than they do today. The
vowels, in which the difference is now so marked, began ‘the great
vowel shift’ during the century after Glipping’s death, so that when
Chaucer was writing in the second half of the fourteenth century,
English ‘y’ still sounded like modern Danish ‘y’ (like German ‘ü’), and
the vowels of English ‘a’ and ‘e’ made the broad sounds of their
modern names, rather than the modified sounds we use nowadays.
One of the ways a Danish-English bilingual reader can test this
proposition of a common source for both languages is to read
Chaucer: it’s startlingly accessible if you don’t try to work out which
language it is you’re thinking in while you read.
Of course this translation of Christen Richardt’s Drot og Marsk is not,
in itself, proof that Danish and English share an ancient common root;
but it lays out the ground upon which such a view might be supported,
challenges the traditional histories of English and Danish as well as
the old etymologies based on the written word alone. In paralleling the
new archaeological and genetic evidence of prehistoric humanity’s
journey, this work aims to throw dust in the face of a very old ghost,
our common linguistic ancestor, which, if its roots go back beyond the
ice ages, is quite literally older than our hills.
Peter Heise’s Drot og Marsk—King and Marshal is published by the
Royal Library, Copenhagen, in collaboration with Edition-S on 5 April
2013. Copies of the vocal score (hardback) can be ordered before
then at the reduced price of only 600 kroner (c.£70) by e-mailing
[email protected]. Copies of the full score in two volumes are
available for 3,000 kroner. After 1 May 2013, these prices rise to 750
dkk and 3,750 dkk.
Colin Roth
1
‘We’ includes the author of this article, Colin Roth; Drot og Marsk’s Editor-inChief, Niels Krabbe; and Eskil Irminger, who has generously supported the
translation work by catching errors, fielding misunderstandings, and providing a
wealth of helpful background information about Danish literature and the text’s
references. Of course the errors and misunderstandings which remain are the
responsibility of Colin Roth, not his collaborators.
2
Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins,
London 1987, and with Peter Forster, Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of
languages, Cambridge 2006, in which Chapter 11, ‘Evolution of English Basic
Vocabulary within the Network of Germanic Languages’ by Peter Forster, Tobias
Polzin and Arne Röhl, pp. 131-7, was particularly significant because it supported
the thought process which led to the ideas presented in this article: ‘A
Scandinavian component in English must also be considered, which may even
predate the traditional Norse invasions.’
3
Marek Zvelebil (1952-2011) wrote or edited more than a hundred scholarly
works, including Hunters in Transition (1986) and “Plant Use in the Mesolithic
and its role in the transition to farming” (1994). My conversations with him about
the ideas expressed in this article took place between 2007 and his death in
2011.
4
Stephen Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British, London, 2006.
5
Ibid, p. 117.
6
Ibid, pp. 311-23.
7
David Crystal, The Stories of English, London 2004, p. 59.
8
‘Hi’ has come into English from American films.
9
Oppenheimer, op. cit., pp. 325-9.
10
A view expressed during his tv series on language made for the BBC and
broadcast in 2011.
11
David Crystal, op.cit., pp. 223, 251-3. The ‘great vowel shift’ took approximately
200 years, roughly between the careers of Geoffrey Chaucer and William
Shakespeare, so from the 14th to the beginning of the 16th century.
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