Line Tjørnhøj wrote the lament SORG with inspiration from Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's relief Egil Skallagrimsson Rides Home with the Body of His Drowned Son. Tjørnhøj tells about her work:
The background for Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen's work created in 1889 was that, at the age of 9, she witnessed her older brother being killed when a wall collapsed on top of him. She saw the construction workers carry away his lifeless body. When she created the relief, she drew inspiration from a passage in Skallagrimsson’s Poem:
‘The Loss of a Son’
Painful to me is the void the wave tore in my father’s kin-fence; I know that the son’s wound that the sea has struck in me will remain empty and open.
- Grimt vǫrum hlið,
þat ’s hrǫnn of braut
fǫður míns
á frændgarði;
veitk ófult
ok opit standa
sonar skarð,
es mér sær of vann.
Original text: Sonatorrek (B1)
This Old Norse text serves as the melismatic “refrain” of the work—Old Norse has many diphthongs in its linguistic tone, creating a uniquely bound musicality and emotional resonance.
Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen describes the dramatic incident of her brother’s death in an interview with Sven Alkærsig (timestamp 9:20). Her voice and the quality of the 1942 audio recording serve as a direct sonic and melodic foundation for the orchestration of the piece. The interview is thus transcribed phonetically and orchestrated for the ensemble — just as the soprano must work to imitate Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s vocal expression.
The interview with Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen is available as an audio document here.
Excerpt of the transcribed text that is imitated:
"I don’t know, but I only know that I myself didn’t realize it either. Not immediately.
It was met with great resistance when I tried to leave.
Yes, it was truly difficult.
My father said: ‘I will neither sacrifice my daughter nor my money on something whose outcome I do not know.’
Luckily, my father lived to see me receive a commission for the finest Jutland bull and the finest Jutland stallion for the exhibition in Paris, and it was a great satisfaction for him to see that I was of use.
I was allowed to leave, but only on the condition that within a year I could prove that I had talent.
So, I arrived in Copenhagen, where I was received by an acquaintance who took me to Bissen’s studio and asked if I could become a student there.
Bissen looked at me and said: ‘Women will never amount to anything.’"
There is an almost incomprehensible sensory grief in Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Egil Skallagrimsson Rides Home with the Body of His Drowned Son. The relief appears raw, complex, and direct in its expression—confronting me with the dead body held in the arms of the slumped, grief-stricken man who has 'let go of the reins' and is carried home by the horse.
Line Tjørnhøj's SORG is premiered on 8 March by Aarhus Chamber Orchestra and conductor and soprano soloist Johanne Sofie Bech Madsen in Møllevangs Kirken Aarhus.
Find more information about the performance here.