Critically contemplating a composer's iconography – the visual trace they leave in our collective imagination – can be a challenging but worthwhile task. Carl Nielsen is a compelling case study. Two photographs of the composer stick obstinately in my mind. The first is a portrait of an early middle-aged man, elegantly dressed in a pale linen suit with gold watch chain and walking cane, gazing nonchalantly towards the camera with a searching look in his eyes – an expression that suggests powerful, intense inner concentration. The second is a snapshot of the composer as a young boy in an almost comically oversized military uniform, carrying a cornet in his hand and a slide trumpet by his side (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). It is difficult to try to reconcile the two sharply contrasting images with the same historical figure; both seem slightly unreal, and have the quality of dream pictures or memories from an uncertain or mythic past. The first, taken by portrait photographer Georg Lindström in summer 1908, midway between the composition of Nielsen's Second and Third symphonies and two years after the unexpected popular success of his second opera, Maskarade, presents a cosmopolitan fin-de-siècle artist or bohème at the height of his powers, the consummate homme du monde like a character from a Thomas Mann novel. The second photograph, in contrast, taken c. 1880 of Nielsen as a fourteen-year old boy in the Odense town battalion, offers an image drawn from a predominantly agricultural society and the rural Danish working class.