Niels Gade
Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817–90) was the most prominent and influential figure in nineteenth-century Danish music. His extrovert nature and practical interest in contemporary musical life led to a wide-ranging career as composer, conductor, violinist, educationalist and administrator.
Born in Copenhagen on 22 February 1817, Gade was brought up in a musical household. His father was a cabinet maker who, by the time of Niels’ birth, specialised in making musical instruments. Niels showed musical talent from an early age but his family could not afford to provide a formal musical education until he was 15, when he began to study the violin, music theory and composition. Within just two years, Gade was engaged as a junior violinist with the Royal Orchestra in Copenhagen. His early compositions, however, seem to have been less successful. When the Royal Orchestra played through his overture Socrates, he burnt the score in disappointment. Nonetheless, these years were important in Gade’s development as he began to move in artistic circles and became acquainted with German Romantic literature and contemporary music, enjoying in particular the works of Mendelssohn and Schumann.
1840 marked a turning point in the young violinist’s life when his concert overture Efterklange af Ossian (Echoes of Ossian) won first prize in a competition organised by the Copenhagen Musical Society. The overture brought Gade to national prominence and to the attention of Mendelssohn who had been appointed to the competition jury and, although unable to attend, had taken an interest in its outcome.
In 1841–42, Gade composed his First Symphony, hoping to build on the success of the Ossian overture which had been performed the previous year. But when he presented the symphony to the Musical Society it was rejected on the grounds that it was ‘too German’. Undeterred, Gade sent the score to Mendelssohn, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, who responded enthusiastically. After rehearsing the Symphony, he wrote to Gade: ‘not for a long time has any piece struck me as more lively or more beautiful’. Its first performance, in March 1843, aroused ‘the lively, undivided joy of the whole audience, which broke into the loudest applause after each of the four movements’. Later that year, Gade travelled to Leipzig where he met Mendelssohn and Schumann, and was engaged as a teacher at the Academy of Music and as assistant conductor to Mendelssohn at the Gewandhaus orchestra. On Mendelssohn’s death in 1847, Gade was appointed chief conductor but was forced to return to Copenhagen in the spring of 1848 when war broke out between Prussia and Denmark.
Although only five of Gade’s 73 years were spent in Leipzig, these were formative years. The city was considered a bastion of musical conservatism where Mendelssohn’s values were upheld against those of Liszt and Wagner and their ‘music of the future’; values which perhaps tempered Gade’s early leanings to a more romantic and nationalistic compositional style.
When he returned to Denmark in 1848, Gade threw himself into Copenhagen’s musical life. He reorganised the flagging Musical Society, establishing a permanent orchestra and choir which gave the first Danish performances of Beethoven’s ninth symphony and Bach’s St Matthew Passion (a work which Mendelssohn had revived some years before), as well as premieres of his own major works. In 1862 he served briefly as conductor at the Royal Theatre and, from 1866, he was joint director of the newly established Copenhagen Academy of Music, where he also taught composition and music history. In addition to all these posts, he continued to compose energetically and served as a church organist from 1851 until his death in 1890.
Gade’s music may not be well known today but it was extremely popular in his own day. His tireless work as a conductor, teacher and administrator transformed Danish musical life, and his eight symphonies provided the foundation stone for the Scandinavian symphonic tradition.