Nielsen's third symphony represents a critical turning point in his career. As the preceding chapters have suggested, it is arguably the work in which Nielsen most convincingly synthesised or held in balance the conflicting notions of Danishness that had underpinned and motivated his music hitherto: the opening movement's energetic breakthrough of a new Nordic-Hellenist symphonic modernism, first unveiled in the Helios overture and celebrated in the Bacchic carnivalesque world of Maskarade; the second movement's unfolding of a mythic Danish Arcadia, the singing fjords of Johannes V. Jensen's great summer; and the finale's earthy apotheosis of Jeppe Aakjær's figure of the Danish bondemand, confidently striding towards his new social democratic artistic domain. The symphony hence becomes Nielsen's most compelling musical realisation of the modern symphonic hero. But more importantly, as John Fellow has discussed, the work simultaneously marks Nielsen's engagement with a critical shift in European modernism. This is a period, as James Hepokoski has persuasively argued, characterised by the emergence of a younger generation of seemingly more hard-line musical modernists. For Hepokoski, this moment demanded a radical reorientation of the modernist musical project: a senior generation of composers alongside Nielsen, including Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Debussy, became strategically outflanked by the apparently more progressive musical stance adopted by a younger avant-garde, symbolically headed by Schoenberg and Stravinsky.