Niels Wilhelm Gade

Short biography Niels Wilhelm Gade was born on 22 February 1817 in Copenhagen, where he also died on 21 December 1890. He received his musical training initially in Denmark, studying amongst others with Andreas Peter Berggreen, and in 1840 won the prize of the Copenhagen Music Society with his overture *Efterklange af Ossian*. A scholarship enabled him to travel to Leipzig in 1843, where he formed a close association with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and served for a time as conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. Following his return to Denmark in the wake of the First Schleswig War of 1848, he became the central figure of Danish musical life: he directed the Copenhagen Music Society and was a co-founder of the Copenhagen Conservatoire (1867).

Historical placement Gade ranks among the most significant Scandinavian composers of the Romantic era and is regarded as the founder of an independent tradition of Danish art music in the nineteenth century. His style combines the German Romantic tradition — shaped above all by Mendelssohn and Schumann — with elements of Nordic folk music and evocative landscape painting in sound. In this respect he was an important precursor of the later Scandinavian nationalist movement in music, even though his output remained more firmly rooted in the moderate European Romantic style than, for instance, that of Edvard Grieg.

Personal connections Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was Gade's most important patron in Leipzig; in 1843 he conducted the première of Gade's First Symphony and gave decisive support to his career. Robert Schumann expressed his admiration for Gade's early works and maintained an artistic exchange with him. Edvard Grieg studied at the Copenhagen Conservatoire and was in personal contact with Gade. Carl Nielsen, though of a younger generation, belonged to the Danish musical circle in which Gade was the formative teacher figure for an entire generation — though a direct teaching relationship between the two has not been established with certainty.

Important works
Overture *Efterklange af Ossian* (Anklänge an Ossian) — concert overture (op. 1, 1840)
Symphony No. 1 in C minor — symphony (op. 5, 1842)
Symphony No. 8 in B minor — symphony (op. 47, 1871)
*Elverskud* (Erlkönigs Tochter) — ballad for soloists, chorus and orchestra (op. 30, 1854)
Violin Concerto in D minor — concerto (op. 56, 1880)
Octet in F major — chamber music (op. 17, 1848)
*Comala* — cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra (op. 12, 1846)
*Frühlingsbotschaft* — cantata (op. 35, 1858)
String Quintet in E flat major — chamber music (op. 8, 1845)
*Holbergiana* — orchestral suite (op. 61, 1884)