Humour and Caricature in Nielsen’s Symphonies

ABSTRACT This article seeks to define a musical notion of caricature as a means to grasp Carl Nielsen’s peculiar approach to modernism, with special attention to the symphonies. Caricature is a specifically modernist technique, given prominence in Hogarth’s and Baudelaire’s art criticism. There is, however, little extant musicological work on this concept. Caricature must be differentiated from the grotesque (Berlioz, Stravinsky) and humour (from Haydn to Mahler), with reference to modernist visual art (line in Picasso, Expressionism, Wilhelm Worringer’s Gothic), as also to Nielsen’s Danish literary context. Links are also made to Nielsen’s relation to Brahms. This allows for extension of critical insights made by Daniel Grimley and David Fanning on Nielsen’s peculiar relation to modernism. Caricature may be seen as a latent form of abstraction or constructivism once it is cut free of mere depiction of ‘character’. The last two symphonies (especially the Fifth) are seen as culminations of this development in Nielsen.