On the wall of the room where I was drinking a glass of beer with my wife and some friends hung an extremely comical coloured picture, divided into four sections in which ‘the Temperaments’ were represented and furnished with titles: ‘The Choleric’, ‘The Sanguine’, ‘The Melancholic’ and ‘The Phlegmatic’.
He had a long sword in his hand, which he was wielding fiercely in thin air; his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, which was so distorted by rage and diabolical hate that I could not help bursting out laughing.
Some time later, then, I began to work out the first movement of a symphony, but I had to be careful that it did not fence in the empty air, and I hoped of course that my listeners would not laugh so that the irony of fate would smite my soul.
For example, in the phlegmatic temperament of the second movement, the composer visualized a young teenager who is loved by all: His real inclination was to lie where the birds sing, where the fish glide noiselessly through the water, where the sun warms and the wind strokes mildly round one's curls.
I have never seen him dance; he wasn't active enough for that, though he might easily have got the idea to swing himself in a gentle slow waltz rhythm, so I have used that for the movement, Allegro comodo e flemmatico, and tried to stick to one mood, as far away as possible from energy, emotionalism, and such things.
The second symphony, like the first, still belongs to the tradition of Brahms and Dvořák, but is more compact and concentrated, with a simple but powerful ending that takes the form of an A major march.
Writing in the Danish newspaper Dannebrog, composer and music critic Leopold Rosenfeld commented: "Carl Nielsen’s new work should, I suppose, rather be called a suite of moods for orchestra than designated as what we understand by a symphony.
But aside from the name, this new work by the highly fêted composer again bears favourable testimony to its author’s uncommon ability to give expression to characteristic sound painting through a considerable orchestral technique.
Busoni took an interest in the work and promised to put it on the programme in the series of concerts of new and rarely heard music that he was giving at this time with the Berlin Philharmonic.