This brilliant comic opera was written in a remarkably short period of time. Nielsen, Denmark's leading composer, had been mulling over the project for a few months while he was fighting a battle over whether he would remain as a deputy conductor of the Royal Theater or revert to being nothing more than a back-desk second violinist. When he came out on the losing end, he resigned from the theater. He was ordered to bed with a heart condition. When he was able to work again, an "undercurrent" of creativity (as he described it) took over, and he wrote one of the most sparkling and delightful of all comic operas.

The original story comes from the play Mascarade by the revered Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg; Nielsen asked Vilhelm Anderson (an expert on Holberg) to make it into a suitable libretto. Holberg was so revered, in fact, that when word got around that Nielsen was adapting his sacrosanct words, a literary furor erupted. The opera had to be completed and submitted by a certain deadline to be considered for performance. Nielsen and Anderson took a gamble and submitted it unfinished, writing in a few perfunctory closing chords. The work was accepted for performance and the score returned for preparation—or, in Nielsen's case, completion. Nielsen managed to finish the opera, and then, with six weeks left before the premiere, he began work on the overture, completing it only eight days before opening night. The concert version of the overture has become one of the most popular of Nielsen's compositions.

The opera is a delightful satire on social conventions. The music was unreservedly praised and became a popular hit; the only substantial criticism concerned Anderson's treatment of Holberg's text. It has remained the most popular of all native operas in Denmark. Probably due to the unfamiliarity of Danish it was slow to catch on abroad: the first foreign production was in Sweden in 1930. It did not reach the United States until 1972, and Britain's first professional performance was only in 1990. By that time, the work was well on its way to becoming an international repertory item. The language really isn't much of an obstacle, for the work's high spirits and positively Mozartian language come through even to those who don't understand a word of the original.

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