The Danes are probably the world’s worst self-promoters. There is no other probable reason why it should have taken the non-Danish world so long to wake up to the originality, freshness and vitality of Carl Nielsen (1865-1931). Strikingly, his most influential champions have been non-Danes: the American conductor Leonard Bernstein, the Swede Herbert Blomstedt, the Finn Esa-Pekka Salonen, the British composer and author Robert Simpson. This isn’t so much modesty on the Danes’ part, more a kind of stubbornness: “If we produce anything good, the world can come and find it,” as a Copenhagen colleague put it.

Carl Nielsen

 Then there’s Jantelov (‘Jante’s Law’), the Danish version of ‘tall poppy syndrome’: basically ten different ways of saying ‘thou shalt not get above thyself’. Maybe that’s the problem: Nielsen grew...