The Festival Prelude (FS24) is a short piano piece written in 1900 to commemorate the new century. Originally scored for string and wind instruments, it briefly recalls some of the Symphonic Suite’s orchestral qualities. In 1901 it was first printed in the Danish newspaper Politiken and by Edition W. Hansen, and performed by Dagmar Borup.

 

The Suite, Op 45, (FS91), arguably Nielsen’s most ambitious work for piano, was dedicated to the virtuoso Artur Schnabel. It was composed mainly in Sweden during the 1919-20 season, when Nielsen was engaged as conductor of Stenharnmar’s Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra, and first performed on 14th March 1921 by Johanne Stockmar. When the work was published (by Peters in Leipzig, as the Danes would not pay well enough) the composer dropped the title Luciferan: instead of the Greek mythological Bringer of Light, listeners were expecting some association with the devil. Only the sixth movement has a diabolic element, according to the composer, "urging the player on to stronger contrasts and more violent accents." Nielsen’s foreword acknowledged the freedom of each performer to find his or her own interpretation, but advised. "... the beginning of the first movement rather cold and restrained in tone with a peaceful flowing tempo... The second movement poco moderato with the most beautiful tone and subtle use of pedals, as if one were listening. The third movement with transcendental calm and power, and in many places... a certain brutal humour. The fourth movement with a chilly, glass-like execution, without the slightest trace of feeling, but with exquisite tone. The fifth movement is self-evident."

 

The third and final phase of Nielsen’s piano music began with some of Nielsen’s ultimate statements in modernism. He had met, among others, Bart6k and Schoenberg, and had returned from the 1927 Music Festival in Frankfurt where the eminent German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler had conducted Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony. Three Piano Pieces, Op. 59 (FSI31) were composed in the following year. Initially two separate impromptus dated 15th January and 1st March were first performed by Christian Christiansen on 14th April (in reverse order and with the titles Adagio and Impromptu). The third piece was completed on 6th November and the collection was posthumously published in 1937. Like the Sixth Symphony and the Flute and Clarinet Concerti, the Three Piano Pieces not only reflect but anticipate modernism. They reveal Nielsen’s deep concerns in the direction of the new music with its minimal and transparent textures, disintegrating tonality, and thematic discontinuity. Thus it may be in the piano music that Nielsen reaches out to his furthest point of musical impressionism, with subjects containing all twelve notes of the scale (in the fugue of the third piece) and the prominent role of the augmented fourth, the diabolus in musica.