One of the recurring tropes in Nielsen reception, both at home and abroad, is his association with the Danish landscape. Repeatedly presented as a true and faithful son of the soil, Nielsen is held to have captured some elemental quality of the Danish landscape in sound, just as the landscape seems somehow to have determined the texture and grain of much of his musical work. The pastoral cantata, Fynsk Foraar (‘Springtime on Funen’), is emblematic in this respect. It is here that Nielsen's evocation of the Danish countryside, and the island of Funen where he was born, appears most powerful and explicit. But Nielsen's response to the idea of landscape, and to the construction of Funen as specific place and sensibility in music, is more ambiguous than it first seems. In a brief, illuminating moment towards its closing bars, the whirling round dance with which Springtime on Funen concludes unexpectedly gives way to a hushed cadenza for tremolo violins, solo voices, horns, and bassoons. Marked molto adagio, the seven-bar passage is canonic: the soprano's ornamental melodic arabesque is imitated first by the tenor and then by the baritone (doubled by the woodwind), beneath a shimmering inverted pedal in the upper strings (Ex. 5.1). Texturally, dynamically, and harmonically, the cadenza is an exceptional and striking event: its A♭ minor orientation is a sharp diversion from the round dance's final tonal goal, a radiant E major (the transition pivots on the enharmonic transformation E♭/D#), and the sudden drop in dynamic level and textural weight is in sharp contrast to the finale's prevailing fortissimo tutti.