Nordic/Scandinavian Composers
In the course of the nineteenth century, Germany appropriated the mainstream of European music. The prestige of Haydn and Mozart in instrumental genres lay behind the expressive force of Beethoven, who in turn opened the floodgates of Romanticism for future generations. From that point onward the existence of both intellectual rigor and emotional surfeit coursed (in varying mixtures) through the veins of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and many others. Italy had opera; France too maintained and developed its own traditions of choral music and opera. By the end of the century, however, the German colossus Wagner had overshadowed and to some degree infected both of those traditions as well. A movement predicated on artistic idealism had become a manifestation of cultural colonialism.

No such activity can take place without engendering both resentment and the emergence of alternative ideals. The most visible response to German musical hegemony came via nationalism, in which the countries with less developed musical traditions claimed the values of regionalism and folk music as the core of their style. This could be accomplished in a more or less subtle way, as in the case of Dvorak, who managed to work Czech color into an essentially Brahmsian style of scoring and form. But more radical solutions were also possible-the greatest of the Russian nationalists, Musorgsky, cultivated a harsher style that sometimes disdained functional tonality and Teutonic craftsmanship in favor of natural declamation and raw, vigorous sonorities. Those works reached Germany in versions adapted by Rimsky-Korsakov, who filtered them through a lens of exotic harmonies and orchestration that were likewise alien to the German tradition.

And then there were the composers of the North. Those who studied in Germany-Edvard Grieg from Norway and Jean Sibelius from Finland prominent among them-found German instruction to miss the point when they were trying to develop their styles. For those two, sound itself was expression, and both spent their careers cultivating their own brands of sonority. Carl Nielsen from Denmark pursued a goal of writing approachable, diatonic music that lacks "key" in the way Germanic music defined it. In each case, the result is a kind of music that exerts its own magic, and most importantly, one that cannot be adequately understood by those whose perception of music is guided by Germanic ideals-which means that we must unlearn those ideals in order to enter the creative world of the North. These three composers turned out music that makes it worthwhile to become anti-intuitive, thereby to discover the true foundations of music.