Edvard Grieg
Norway's greatest composer — the pianist-composer who distilled Norwegian folk idiom into a lyric language the world immediately recognised.
Edvard Grieg is the composer who gave Norwegian music a place in the international repertoire, absorbing the rhythms, scales, and modal inflections of his country's folk tradition into a lyric style that sounded entirely original and entirely Norwegian at once. His Piano Concerto and Peer Gynt suites are among the most performed pieces of the Romantic era.
Bergen and Leipzig
Grieg was born in Bergen in 1843 into a family with Scottish roots on his father's side — the family name was originally Greig, anglicised from the Scottish original. His mother, Gesine Juell, was an accomplished pianist who gave him his first musical instruction. At fifteen he was sent to the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition and absorbed the Romantic tradition at its source. He found the conservatory curriculum dry but emerged with a thorough technical foundation.
More formative was his encounter with the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, who pointed him toward Norwegian folk music as the material his compositional instincts needed, and with the Danish composer Niels Gade, who encouraged the nationalist direction. In Copenhagen in 1864 he met Rikard Nordraak, a young Norwegian composer of intense nationalist conviction who reinforced the direction Grieg was already taking. Nordraak died of tuberculosis at twenty-three; Grieg continued the project alone.
The Piano Concerto and the folk materials
The Piano Concerto in A minor (1868, revised repeatedly thereafter) was written when Grieg was twenty-five. Its opening — a drum roll, a full-orchestra crash, and then a sweeping piano cadenza descending from the heights — became one of the most recognisable openings in the concerto repertoire. The concerto's lyrical middle movement and spirited finale absorbed Norwegian folk dance rhythms, particularly the halling and the springar, without quotation — the folk influence was metabolised into original material.
His ten sets of Lyric Pieces for solo piano, composed across his career from 1867 to 1901, are the intimate counterpart to the concerto: short, precisely characterised miniatures in which folk-influenced melody meets post-Romantic harmony. They are among the most played piano pieces of the nineteenth century.
I have drawn on the rich treasure of Norwegian folk songs and sought to create from this source a national art.
Peer Gynt
In 1874 Ibsen invited Grieg to compose incidental music for his dramatic poem Peer Gynt. The score, premiered with the play in 1876, produced two orchestral suites extracted for concert use. In the Hall of the Mountain King, Morning Mood, Åse's Death, and Anitra's Dance became among the most instantly recognisable pieces in the orchestral canon. The paradox — that Norway's best-known music internationally derives from a deeply ironic play about Norwegian national character — was not lost on Grieg.
Troldhaugen and legacy
Grieg built his villa Troldhaugen outside Bergen in 1885, and it became his permanent base. He was an energetic champion of Norwegian music internationally, touring as a pianist and conductor across Europe. His song settings of Norwegian poetry — including many texts by Ibsen and Bjørnson — extended the folk-influenced lyric voice into the intimate vocal form. He died in Bergen in 1907, en route to a planned American tour, at sixty-four. Troldhaugen is now a museum.
