The work
How fitting that the sociable composer Carl Nielsen should find inspiration for his Second Symphony in a country pub while having a beer with his wife and friends. There he spotted a naive, brightly coloured painting depicting the Four Temperaments – characters based on the medieval theory of humours that regulate the human body. Nielsen laughed out loud at the comic, exaggerated figures representing the Choleric, the Phlegmatic, the Melancholic and the Sanguine man, yet couldn’t get them out of his mind. ‘These simple paintings contained a core of goodness and – even – a
