The Carl Nielsen Museum is an experience full of contrasts, one where you meet the Funen composer who wrote both large-scale, temperamental symphonies and fine popular songs that encapsulated Danish culture and the Danish mentality. Denmark’s most famous composer came from humble beginnings on Funen and, through his music, became famous in the major concert halls of Copenhagen.
Both as a composer and an individual, Carl Nielsen always challenged existing borders. Carl Nielsen the composer refused to be labelled. He wrote music in every conceivable genre – symphonies, operas, music for plays, chamber music, choral works and songs – his forms of musical expression point in many different directions.
Please be aware that flashing lights will show in the exhibition.
It is Carl Nielsen’s music that makes him something special, so naturally it is the music that is the point of departure for your experience when visiting the Carl Nielsen Museum. At the Nielsen Museum you will encounter his contrasting and wide-ranging musical universe in a way that renews the image of Carl Nilsen and his place in the world. The key to getting to know Carl Nielsen is precisely his music: the duality in the compositions that shows a composer with an understanding of both the complex and the simple. The contrasts between the calm and the wild, the playful and the methodical, the traditional and the modern. This is precisely the idea behind the Carl Nielsen Museum and the reason why he is more topical than ever.
At the museum you can explore Carl Nielsen’s musical world. Experience his musical awakening, his resistance to conventions, his times of crisis and the reconciliation he arrived at during his later years. The most important thing at the museum is the music. Every item at the exhibition communicates music and tells a story from the composer’s life. Sometimes you are to give some help yourself – lift, turn, press and open – in order to activate the music.
At the Carl Nielsen Museum we work with music as a universal language – it can be playful, passionate and curious. It can be difficult to pin down. Just as Carl Nielsen himself was. Explore Carl Nielsen in your own way and at your own tempo. Most of all, discover who the composer was. Follow the pulse of his music as the light that streams through the exhibition and leave the building full of the unexpected and with a new understanding of what Carl Nielsen’s music is able to do.
The content of the exhibition is curated by the Carl Nielsen Museum in close collaboration with the research project Carl Nielsen – European Composer, University of Copenhagen, employing the latest knowledge in the field. The collaboration includes the selection of themes, music and artefacts, as well as the design of the exhibition. The project’s four researchers, Professor Michael Fjeldsøe, Katarina Smitt Engberg, Bjarke Moe and Peter Hauge, have worked in parallel on the design of the museum and the publication of the book Carl Nielsen. A Cultural Biography, which complements the exhibition at the Carl Nielsen Museum.
