In a letter to his son-in-law Emil Telmányi on 24 February 1931 he wrote: "None of my other works has demanded such great concentration as this: an attempt to reconstitute what is truly the only valid organ style, the polyphonic music that is especially suited to this instrument, which for a long time has been regarded as a kind of orchestra, which it absolutely is not."
The review by Svend-Ove Møller in Dansk Kirkemusiker-Tidende conveyed the emotional experience: “Mixed with the melancholy feelings that fill us on the death of Nielsen, is gratitude that it was granted him to complete this work, which we may designate without exaggeration as the most significant production in recent organ literature.
The expression becomes great and rigorous and demands a kind of dryness instead of the emotional, and must rather be gazed at with the ear than embraced by the heart.
The work is borne up by two fugues, to which an introduction, intervening movements and coda cling like climbing plants to the tree-trunks of the forest; however, the composer thinks that further analysis is superfluous.
"[1] The table below lists commercially available recordings of Commotio: Two orchestral versions of Commotio were made in recent years, by Bo Holten, who conducted the Odense Symphony Orchestra himself in 2007,[22] as well as Hans Abrahamsen,[23] whose version was performed by conductor Fabio Luisi and the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2016.