Biography
-
Born
17 December 1840
-
Born In
Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark, Denmark
-
Died
8 June 1906 (aged 65)
Danish composer (Copenhagen 1840 - 1906)
"He was the flame, the clear flame, the purging fire in Danish music, the fire that melts all that is false and consumes all the spurious" - said Carl Nielsen of Horneman, when unveiling Horneman's sepulchral monument. Carl Nielsen, if anyone, understood that Horneman's Romantic music was strong enough to build further on. Horneman had in fact enjoyed little support in his career, which was not as productive as one might have expected. Horneman's temperament and difficult personality formed obstacles to almost everything in which he became involved. He opposed the conservative Niels W. Gade, who presided at the Royal Academy of Music, and the dominant Musikforeningen or Musical Society - and in protest he founded both an academy and a music society! What Horneman did manage to write was mainly incidental theatre music and occasional cantatas - genres that posterity has some trouble keeping alive. But these works as well as his string quartets, piano pieces and a couple of orchestral overtures have a warmth, spirit and perfection that is very atypical of the Danish music of the age. The most painful fruit of his labours was the full-length opera Aladdin, which was over twenty years in the making but only saw two unsuccessful productions.
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
