When this work was premiered in 1888, the program notes that accompanied Carl Nielsen's Little Suite for Strings in A minor curiously identified the composer as "Mr. Carl Nielsen, whom nobody knows." While this was to be generally true of the musical world outside of Scandinavia for a half century, the designation would soon lose its accuracy in Denmark. While this work shows the fledgling composer paying homage to central European standards of form, Nielsen's own innovative musical language is already in evidence. In three movements (Prelude, Intermezzo, and Finale), the elegiac opening theme will actually fill a cyclic function, a device to which Nielsen would return to wholeheartedly a quarter century later in the Symphony No. 4. Against a solemnly treading ostinato, the music unfolds in the manner of the Adagio for Strings popularly thought to be by Albinoni. The second movement gives a premonitory hint of the composer's love of triple time: it is an engaging waltz peppered with the occasional flat seventh grace notes that would later become so characteristic. The comparatively expansive third movement opens again solemnly with the elegy theme but soon breaks loose into an animated sonata form. The inventiveness of Nielsen's mind can be seen in the development, where a fragment of the opening theme is worked over and then reappears as an ostinato with the main theme in the recapitulation. The fragment's emergence in the bass line in the coda further enhances the movement's integral unity and rounds the work off nicely, giving an intimation of the important symphonist to come.

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