The composer Carl Nielsen describes the house as a “palace with sun and light and happiness” in his autobiography “My Childhood on Funen”, which is unfortunately out of print and has already been translated into German in Odense.
Sun, light and happiness warm the place to this day.
Only the palace is reduced to a low half-timbered house with three tiny rooms for the family of seven.
Before that, the Nielsens had lived even more cramped, which is hard to imagine, says museum director Ida-Marie Vorre.
Nielsen's only surviving and lovingly restored home belonged to the Bramstrup estate, where he tended geese as a child.
You still remember it like it was yesterday.
Today the estate sees itself as an interdisciplinary center of knowledge.
Idea generator and host Niels Langkilde personally welcomes the concert-goers in the barn that has been converted into a wooden cathedral and is seventeen meters high and seventy meters long: one of the many magical places on the island of Funen, which was now attached to the first Carl Nielsen Festival in Odense.
Star guest Daniil Trifonov provided two great moments in chamber music: in the morning together with the Danish String Quartet in the piano quintet in G minor op. 57 by Dmitri Shostakovich, a nervous system of seismographic sensitivity exposed in terms of sound and analysis.
In the evening together with the violinist Nikolai Szeps-Znaider, who is also the artistic director of the festival,
Szeps-Znaider reveals that only a few colleagues have what Trifonov has: "when he plays, the heart beats a little faster".
Inviting great musicians just to have a solo concert played – Trifonov with Peter Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto on the Bechstein grand piano – Szeps-Znaider considers that to be a waste.
Rather, they would have to be "experienced very closely" at a festival.
In addition to Trifonov, these were the cellist Gautier Capuçon and the violist Maxim Rysanov: "Musicians who can listen and react in the moment," says Szeps-Znaider.
Then a work like Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's spontaneously rehearsed octet "uncanny light" would also work - an acclaimed morning gift in the architectural jewel of the also converted barn at Lundsgaard Manor, in a fantastic location on the Baltic Sea.
In Hvidkilde Castle, where Nielsen's first string quartet, which awakens the dance floor, makes you want more, you suddenly tip out of the fairytale land of Funen: "Moving out on May 5th", it says in German in chalk on a wall segment of the knight's hall in the castle.
Add the year – 1945: the end of the German occupation of Denmark.
At eight o'clock in the morning the Wehrmacht's partial capitulation came into effect: the soldiers who had billeted on Hvidkilde withdrew.
A relative of the current head of the house fixed the German announcement with hair spray.
Danes invest in culture and even feel obliged to do so because of the socially oriented form of society.
That is why there are many family foundations here, often from the assets of former tobacco and brewery entrepreneurs.
And when Znaider infected his school friend Jacob Soelberg, owner of an artist agency and manager of the triennial Carl Nielsen Competition (in the subjects violin, flute and clarinet), with the idea of a new festival, he took the financing into his own hands .
Soelberg firmly rejects the suspicion that this could be a conflict of interest: “We are not a mafia and are playing open cards in Denmark.” The only artist at the festival who represents Soelberg in Scandinavia was Isabelle Faust with the violin concerto by Alban Berg.
But then came Corona and then the war in Ukraine: Odense is the sister city of Kyiv, and a Russian focus was planned for the first festival edition, with two concerts by the Mariinsky Theater and Valery Gergiev.
Russian music was not discontinued, so that the WDR Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Cristian Măcelaru were able to break a lance for Sergei Rachmaninoff's second symphony.
But Gergiev and his orchestra were uninvited and replaced at very short notice by Tugan Sokhiev conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.
He conducted a somewhat massive, broadly played fourth symphony by Johannes Brahms and Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto, in which Trifonov appeared momentarily as a medium through which 'it' plays.
In the final concert, Szeps-Znaider himself took up the baton and laid out an orchestral tapestry for his soloist Maxim Vengerov for the Brahms Violin Concerto - Vengerov owns the superb-sounding Stradivarius "Ex-Kreutzer", by Rodolphe Kreutzer, the Beethoven sonata that was dedicated to him , shamefully ignored.
When the double basses became quieter and quieter at the end of Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony, the "Pathétique", the present caught up with you: Isn't that the heart of Russia that stops beating here?
A mood of catastrophe that had already set in in the opening concert with the Oslo Philharmonic and its young boss Klaus Mäkelä in Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony.
There was nothing wrong with that, because Mäkelä relies above all on the self-determined zest for action of his exorbitant instrumentalists, who are just waiting to present “their” Mahler.
The Norwegians began their concert with a sunrise, with the overture "Helios" by Carl Nielsen: a work composed in Athens in 1903, which hymnically celebrates the day of our shining star and raised the call for more Nielsen.
Znaider wishes this for the future.
Next year in Odense.