Although Carl Nielsen 's Symphony No. 4 was completed in 1916 and although it prominently features a thundering duel between timpani, the composer did not write this work in response to World War I. Instead, it is a noisy, energetic, thrusting paean to the inextinguishability of life itself. And as music, like life in this instance, is inextinguishable, the four intricately interlinked movements are played without a break. In this work can be heard the influences of Brahms, Dvorak, Sibelius and