Edvard Grieg
“Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I wanted to build dwellings for people in which they might feel at home and happy.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyGesine Hagerup Grieg
A pianist trained in Hamburg, she was the mother who gave her six-year-old son his first piano lessons.
- InfluenceOle Bull
The violinist who brought Norwegian folk music to the world, he persuaded Grieg's parents to send their fifteen-year-old son to Leipzig.
- FriendshipRikard Nordraak
The friend who opened Grieg's eyes with a call to find a music that was Norway's own, he died young at twenty-three.
- FamilyNina Grieg
His cousin and his wife, a soprano who came through crisis and for the rest of her life sang his songs more deeply than anyone.
- InfluenceFranz Liszt
In Rome in 1870 he played through the concerto manuscript at first sight and encouraged the young Grieg.
- FriendshipPyotr Tchaikovsky
They met in Leipzig in 1888 and held each other dear; he dedicated his overture 'Hamlet' to Grieg.
I. The boy from Bergen · 1843–1858 (age 0–15)
(Birth) He was born in June 1843 in Bergen, Norway. Norway at the time belonged to a union of kingdoms that shared the Swedish king, yet it was a country with its own constitution and parliament. His father, Alexander Grieg, was a merchant and the British vice-consul in Bergen, and the family's roots reached back to a great-grandfather who had come over from Scotland in the late 18th century. He was the fourth of five children, and his brother John would later play the cello. (Mother) His first teacher was his mother, Gesine Hagerup. Trained in piano and voice in Hamburg, she was one of Bergen's finest performers, and she sat her six-year-old son down at the piano. Practice was strict, but the boy, as he later recalled, was drawn less to finger exercises than to the mystery of pressing chords this way and that and hearing the sounds overlap and ring. (School) School was no pleasure for him. He was a daydreaming child and was often scolded by his teachers. He himself wrote of the time, around the age of twelve, when he brought his first composition, 'Variations on a German Melody', written in a notebook, to school and earned nothing but a teacher's scorn, and of the rainy days when he deliberately got himself soaked on the way to school in the hope of being sent home. (Ole Bull) In the summer of 1858, the violinist Ole Bull visited the Grieg home. Having heard the fifteen-year-old's playing and early attempts at composition, the virtuoso who had carried Norwegian folk music onto the European stage persuaded the parents that the boy must be sent to Leipzig to be trained as a musician. That autumn the boy left for Germany. This road away from the sea and mountains of home became the starting point of a path that would lead him back home all his life.
II. Leipzig · 1858–1862 (age 15–19)
(The conservatory) The Leipzig Conservatory had been founded by Mendelssohn in 1843, the year Grieg was born. He studied piano and composition with Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Reinecke and others, yet he later belittled those years, saying he had 'come out just as stupid as he went in'. Lessons that drilled the rules of harmony and counterpoint again and again were tedious homework to him. (Beyond the classroom) What truly shaped him lay outside the classroom. At the Gewandhaus he heard Clara Schumann play Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto, and he is said to have gone to Wagner's opera 'Tannhäuser' fourteen times. Schumann's short, lyrical piano pieces became his lifelong manner of speech, and Wagner's bold harmonies broadened his ear. (Lungs) In the spring of 1860 he collapsed with pleurisy (an inflammation of the membrane surrounding the lungs) compounded by symptoms of tuberculosis, and his mother came all the way to Leipzig to take him home. He recovered, but his left lung lost its function. For the rest of his life he was short of breath and tired easily, and in a small body barely over 150 centimeters tall he always had to watch his health. (Graduation) Back at school, he performed his own piano pieces at his graduation concert in 1862 and was well reviewed. That same year he also gave his first public concert in his hometown of Bergen. Having mastered the grammar of German Romanticism, the nineteen-year-old now had to discover what he would say in that language, and in whose voice.
III. Awakening in Copenhagen · 1863–1869 (age 20–26)
(Gade) In 1863 he moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, the center of Nordic music, and sought advice from Niels Gade, who was regarded as Mendelssohn's heir. At Gade's urging he completed a Symphony in C minor in 1864, but he soon decided it was not his own voice and withdrew it. (Nordraak) The one who changed his direction was Rikard Nordraak, a Norwegian composer a year older than he. Nordraak, who wrote the melody of the song that later became Norway's national anthem, insisted that a truly Norwegian music had to be sought in folk songs and country dances. Grieg recalled that 'the scales fell from my eyes'. In 1864 the two founded 'Euterpe', a society for presenting Nordic music, but in 1866 Nordraak died of tuberculosis in Berlin at the age of twenty-three. Grieg received the news in Rome and wrote a funeral march that very day. (Nina) Around the same time he fell in love with his cousin Nina Hagerup, a soprano born in Bergen and raised in Copenhagen. When they became engaged at Christmas 1864, he presented her with 'I Love You', a setting of a poem by Andersen. Nina's mother is said to have objected that he had nothing to his name and wrote music nobody listened to. The two married in June 1867. (Alexandra) The couple settled in Christiania (today's Oslo), the Norwegian capital. Their only daughter, Alexandra, was born in April 1868, and that summer, in a country house in Denmark, Grieg wrote his Piano Concerto in A minor, modeled on Schumann's concerto in the same key. Its premiere in Copenhagen in April 1869 made his name widely known. But the following month their daughter died of meningitis at just 13 months, and the couple never had another child.
A song he set to a poem by Andersen and dedicated to Nina the year they became engaged. All her life Nina sang it on stage, along with her husband's other songs.
- The original lyrics are Andersen's Danish 'Jeg elsker dig', but the song is more often sung in the German translation, 'Ich liebe dich'. Compare recordings in the two languages and you can hear how the breath of the melody shifts with the resonance of the words.
- The piano repeats its chords evenly, carrying the song like a racing pulse. Listen to the steady beat of this accompaniment rather than to the vocal line, and the tension of the piece comes through clearly.
- Barely a minute long, the song reaches its climax on the final 'I love you', where the melody soars to a high note. Singers differ on whether to let that last high note ring out or to wrap it softly.
Written in the summer his daughter was born and premiered just before he lost her, the concerto took Schumann's concerto in the same key as its model. It is the very piece whose manuscript Liszt read and praised.
- At the opening, after the timpani (kettledrums) swell, the piano crashes down in chords as if pouring from high to low. The three notes heard here, bending down 'A-G♯-E', form a figure common in Norwegian folk song, and they reappear throughout the piece.
- Late in the first movement, the passage where the orchestra stops and the pianist alone displays virtuosity (the cadenza) was written into the score by Grieg himself. The section in which huge chords toll like bells in the low register varies greatly in power and tempo from one performer to the next.
- The second movement opens quietly in the strings, fitted with devices that soften the sound (mutes), and the piano enters only much later. It is worth noticing that the orchestral introduction alone already sets the whole mood of the piece.
- The third movement races along in the vigorous duple rhythm of the 'halling', a dance in which Norwegian men leap high into the air. The tranquil melody sung earlier by the flute returns at the end in the full orchestra, and the piece closes in a bright A major.
- The recordings by Dinu Lipatti (1947) and Sviatoslav Richter (1974) are often compared. The former is clear and poised; the latter, slow and majestic.
IV. Christiania and Peer Gynt · 1870–1876 (age 27–33)
(Liszt) In 1870, traveling to Rome on a government travel grant, he sought out Franz Liszt. Seeing the concerto manuscript for the first time, Liszt played it through to the end at the piano and said, 'Keep on, you have the gift for it, and don't let them frighten you.' Grieg described the scene in detail in a letter to his parents and held this encouragement close for a long time. (Making a living) Life in Christiania was not easy. The orchestra was full of amateurs and audiences were small, and he had to divide his time between conducting and teaching piano. Only when the Norwegian parliament voted him a lifetime artist's pension in 1874 did he gain the freedom to devote himself to composing. In the summer of 1876 he went to Bayreuth as a correspondent for a Bergen newspaper, attended the premiere of Wagner's 'The Ring of the Nibelung', and sent back reports. (Peer Gynt) In 1874 the playwright Henrik Ibsen asked him for incidental music for a staging of his dramatic poem 'Peer Gynt'. He found the task a burden. To his friend Frants Beyer he grumbled that 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' reeked so of cow dung and excessive Norwegian pride that he could hardly bear to listen to it. Yet the premiere in February 1876 was a success, and the music, later gathered into two suites, carved his name across the world. (Loss) In the autumn of 1875 his parents died one after the other. Taking a single Norwegian folk song as his theme, he wrote the Ballade in G minor for piano, a set of variations in which a dark theme changes shape fourteen times. He never performed this most personal of his works in public.
Four numbers drawn from the incidental music he reluctantly wrote for Ibsen's play. The 'Mountain King's Hall' Grieg grumbled about became, instead, his most famous melody.
- In 'Morning Mood', flute and oboe trade the same melody back and forth, painting a sunrise. It is usually imagined as dawn over a Norwegian fjord, but in the play it is morning in the Moroccan desert where Peer has wandered.
- 'Åse's Death' is played by muted strings alone. It is the scene in which Peer's mother, Åse, breathes her last; follow the way the melody gradually sinks lower and grows softer.
- In 'Anitra's Dance', the light ring of the triangle and the plucked sound of the strings depict the seductive dance of a desert chieftain's daughter.
- 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' begins low and stealthily, with cellos and double basses plucking the strings with their fingers (pizzicato) and the bassoons. The same short melody repeats without pause, growing faster (accelerando) and louder; in the play, it is the scene in which the trolls chase Peer.
Written in the year he lost both parents in quick succession. Grieg never performed it in public.
- The theme is a song called 'The Northland Peasantry' from a folk-song collection gathered by Ludvig Lindeman. Fix the slow, dark-hued chords of the opening theme firmly in your ear, and the transformations that follow will come through with striking clarity.
- The theme changes shape fourteen times. In the middle variations, where the harmonies slide downward a half step at a time (chromatically), one senses the influence of Liszt and Wagner.
- After the last variation surges violently upward, the theme returns unadorned, exactly as it first appeared, and the piece ends quietly, without consolation. It is in this close that the work's full weight bears down most heavily.
- Pianists count it among Grieg's most profound works for the instrument, yet it is rarely heard in recital.
V. Fjords and the hill of trolls · 1877–1888 (age 34–45)
(Hardanger) In 1877 he left the city for Lofthus, on the shores of the Hardanger Fjord in the west. He built a small working hut on an orchard hillside and, gazing out over the water, wrote the String Quartet in G minor. The layered, resonant sound of the Hardanger fiddle played by country musicians sank deep into his ear during these years, and its traces can be heard in the quartet's thick, rough-edged harmonies. (Crisis) From 1880 he spent two years conducting the Harmonien orchestra in Bergen, but work and poor health wore him down. His marriage faltered as well. In the summer of 1883 his heart turned toward the young painter Elise Schjelderup, and he left Nina behind and set off alone for Germany. His friend Frants Beyer acted as go-between, and early the following year the couple were reconciled in Rome. From then on the two remained together to the end. (Holberg) In 1884, for the bicentenary of the birth of the Bergen-born playwright Ludvig Holberg, he wrote the suite 'From Holberg's Time.' Borrowing the dance forms of the Baroque era, the piece took him a step beyond the label of 'nationalist composer.' (Troldhaugen) In 1885 he built a house on a hillside outside Bergen and called it 'Troldhaugen' (the hill of trolls). As the Leipzig publisher C. F. Peters steadily bought up his works, the household grew comfortable. (Leipzig) In late 1887 in Leipzig he gave the premiere of the Violin Sonata No. 3 with the violinist Adolph Brodsky. On January 1 of the following year, at a luncheon in Brodsky's home, the Griegs sat at the same table as Brahms and Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky recorded in his memoirs the enchanting blue eyes of this small, frail-looking man, and that year dedicated his overture 'Hamlet' to him.
Written for the bicentenary of the Bergen-born playwright Holberg. It began as a piano piece and was arranged for string orchestra the following year.
- In the 'Praeludium,' the low strings spread a broad melody over a rhythm in which the other strings tick off the pulse in ceaseless, springing strokes. Whether this busy accompaniment holds steady to the very end is what separates one ensemble from another.
- In the musette of the 'Gavotte and Musette,' a single low note is sustained at length like a bagpipe (a drone), and above it the melody dances.
- The 'Air' is a movement in G minor marked 'slowly, religiously' in the score, and the deep song of the cellos is the center of gravity of the entire work.
- In the closing 'Rigaudon,' a solo violin and a solo viola trade rapid remarks. Following the dialogue between the two instruments separately by ear is a great pleasure.
Written after he settled at Troldhaugen, and premiered in Leipzig with Brodsky. Grieg described his three violin sonatas as works of simplicity, of national color, and of wider horizons, respectively.
- The first movement opens with a theme in which the violin rises passionately from its low strings over fierce chords in the piano. It is counted the most dramatic opening in all of Grieg's work.
- The second movement is a gentle, songlike movement in E major, but in its middle a quick passage like a folk dance suddenly breaks in. Don't miss the moment when stillness and dance collide.
- The third movement races along in a dark C minor, then turns at the end to a bright C major to close.
- A 1928 recording by the violinist Fritz Kreisler with Sergei Rachmaninoff at the piano has come down to us as a legendary performance. The very fact that these two masters chose this piece together speaks to the work's standing.
VI. A lyric poet touring Europe · 1889–1902 (age 46–59)
(Touring) In the 1890s he spent every winter traveling among the cities of Europe, conducting and playing the piano, while Nina sang his songs. In London he performed before Queen Victoria, and in 1894 the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate. Yet every journey brought shortness of breath and sleeplessness, and in his letters he often confessed to the strain and exhaustion of facing the stage. (Silver wedding) In 1892, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, well-wishers flocked to Troldhaugen. The memory was set down a few years later in 'Wedding Day at Troldhaugen' in the eighth book of the 'Lyric Pieces.' This collection of short piano pieces, which ran to ten books from 1867 to 1901, was something like his diary. But in 1901 his elder brother John, a cellist, died. Grieg had dedicated his Cello Sonata in A minor to this brother in 1883. (Haugtussa) From around 1895 he wrote the song cycle 'Haugtussa,' setting poems from a collection by Arne Garborg. He counted this cycle, which sings of a mountain girl's love and loss in rural Norwegian speech, among the finest of his songs. (Conscience) He trusted reason and conscience over the doctrines of the church. He was drawn to the Unitarian thought (a liberal Protestantism that rejects the doctrine of the Trinity) he encountered on his travels in England, and politically he was a liberal. In 1899, when Captain Dreyfus was again found guilty at his retrial in France, he sent a letter declining an invitation from the Colonne Orchestra in Paris. When the letter appeared in the newspapers, a storm of fierce condemnation broke out in France.
The piece holds the memory of the well-wishers who flocked to Troldhaugen on the couple's silver wedding anniversary in 1892. It is the best-loved page of the diary-like Lyric Pieces.
- Its original title was 'The Well-Wishers Are Coming.' The opening march begins softly, as though people were approaching from afar, and steadily grows louder.
- The passage that hammers the same chord again and again sounds like the giddy air of a house in celebration, and like the ringing of bells.
- The middle section turns to a slow, quiet melody. It sounds like a moment in which the couple, amid their guests, look back on the years that belong to them alone.
- A record Grieg himself made in Paris in 1903 (a gramophone recording, partly abridged) survives, so one can listen and compare against the composer's own tempo.
VII. The last psalms · 1903–1907 (age 60–64)
(Debussy) When he at last took the stage in Paris in April 1903, there were those in the audience who had not forgotten what he said during the Dreyfus affair. Claude Debussy, who was also active as a critic, mocked his music by likening it to the strange and charming taste of 'a pink candy filled with snow.' Even so, on his sixtieth birthday that June, the whole city of Bergen held a festival. (Slåtter) Around the same time he published the piano collection 'Slåtter,' based on transcriptions made by the violinist Johan Halvorsen of dances played by the Hardanger fiddle master Knut Dahle. Rendering the rough dissonances of country dances without smoothing them over, the collection shows that even in his last years he was still searching for new sounds. When Norway ended its union with Sweden in 1905 and became fully independent, he rejoiced. (Grainger) In his final years he held the young Australian pianist Percy Grainger dear. In the summer of 1907 he rehearsed the concerto with Grainger, who was staying at Troldhaugen, and around this time he also completed the last revisions to the piece he had been reworking for nearly forty years. (Psalms) His last work was the 'Four Psalms' of 1906. Recasting old hymn tunes once sung in Norway's rural churches for mixed chorus and solo baritone, the piece amounted to a return, by a man who had kept doctrine at a distance, to the songs of faith of his homeland. (Death) In September 1907, as he was about to leave for England to conduct at the Leeds Festival, he collapsed at a hotel in Bergen and was taken to the hospital, where he died on September 4 at the age of 64. Crowds of citizens filled the streets for his funeral, and the funeral march he had written for Nordraak was played. His remains were laid to rest in a rock face beside the lake at Troldhaugen, and Nina, who died in 1935, sleeps beside him.
Lesser-known stories
Grieg, too, wrote a symphony. The Symphony in C minor, composed in Copenhagen in 1863~64, was withdrawn by Grieg himself after a few performances, and on the score were written words to the effect that it 'must never be performed.' After meeting Nordraak, he had concluded that the German-style symphony was not his path. The manuscript was kept at the Bergen Public Library and, out of respect for the composer's wishes, lay buried for many years until it was at last formally performed again in Bergen in the early 1980s. That is why the claim that 'Grieg never wrote a symphony' is still common today. Even the famous piano concerto was not a single fixed work. After completing it in 1868 he revised its orchestration and details again and again for nearly forty years, and the final touches were only finished around 1907, the year of his death. The concerto we hear today is less the draft of his youth than the result of an aging Grieg's refinements. Though he was called 'the voice of Norway,' his family's roots lay in Scotland. His great-grandfather Alexander Greig crossed to Bergen in the late 18th century and established himself as a merchant, and the spelling was Norwegianized into Grieg. Family tradition holds that his great-grandfather left Scotland after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It is said that he suffered greatly from stage fright and always carried a small toy frog in his pocket, fingering it before he performed. As anecdotes about great composers go it may seem trivial, a story more often preserved on museum placards than in the main text of biographies, but it captures well a man who walked onto the stage all his life with weak lungs and frayed nerves.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Counterpoint
(Meaning of the word) Daewi (對位) means 'positions (位) set facing (對) each other.' The Western name, counterpoint, comes from the Latin punctus contra punctum, 'point against point': setting one note against another. (In music) The art of sounding several independent melodies at once while weaving them so they sit well together. Each melody must go its own way, yet heard together they must form a single piece of music. In a round, one person sings the opening phrase while another starts the same song later, and still the sound does not tangle — that is the effect counterpoint creates. Bach was the master of this art, and it was exactly this subject that bored Grieg in his lessons in Leipzig.
Concerto
(Meaning of the word) Hyeopjugok (協奏曲) means 'a piece (曲) played (奏) together (協).' The Latin root of the Western name, concerto, is concertare, which can also mean 'to contend,' so the give-and-take between soloist and orchestra is built into the name itself. (In music) A large-scale work in which a single solo instrument, such as the piano or violin, plays together with an orchestra, usually in three movements: fast–slow–fast. The soloist steps forward like a protagonist, while the orchestra sometimes supports and sometimes opposes. Picture a class choir contest in which a solo singer takes one phrase and the whole class picks it up and sings on together.
Incidental music
(Meaning of the word) Busu (附隨) means 'attached (附) and following along (隨)': music that comes attached to a play. (In music) Music written to be used when a play is staged — between acts, as background to scenes, or for the characters' songs and dances. The play is the star, and the music serves it. It is like the music that plays during scene changes in a school play, or the background music in a video game that shifts with each village or battle scene. Grieg's 'Peer Gynt' was originally incidental music for Ibsen's play.
Suite
(Meaning) The word moeumgok ('gathered pieces') means a piece made by collecting and binding several pieces together. The Western name, suite, comes from a French word meaning 'a set of things that follow one another.' (In music) A form in which several short pieces are played in succession as a single set. In the Baroque era the term meant a collection of dances; in the Romantic era a selection of the best numbers from an opera or incidental music, arranged for the concert hall, was also called a suite. Think of a 'greatest hits' album that gathers only a favorite singer's most popular songs, and the Peer Gynt suites make sense. The Holberg Suite, by contrast, was written from the start as a set in the old dance forms. (Elsewhere) A hotel 'suite' is a room made up of several connected rooms, and in computing a 'suite' is a bundle of programs sold together.
Variations
(Meaning) The word byeonju (變奏) means to play (奏) with change (變). (In music) A piece that first presents a single theme and then repeats it many times, altering its shape — faster, slower, sadder, more brilliant. Even as its appearance changes, the listener delights in recognizing the original theme hidden within. The game of singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' as a march, as a lullaby, as a lively dance — that is variation. Mozart, too, wrote a set of variations on this tune. (Elsewhere) In everyday speech, 'a variation on the same story' means something whose skeleton stays the same while only its surface changes a little at a time.
String quartet
(In music) Both the ensemble of four string instruments — two violins, one viola and one cello — and the music written for it. With no conductor, the four players must keep together through glances and the sound of one another's breathing, which is why it is also called 'a conversation among four people.' It is like a group project done by a team of four — each has a different role, but if even one person falls out of step, the whole result wavers. Haydn refined the form, and composers came to regard it as the genre for their most serious thoughts.
Hardanger fiddle
(In music) A traditional violin that originated in the Hardanger region of western Norway. It looks much like a violin, but beneath the four strings played with the bow lie four or five more that are never touched. When the upper strings are bowed, the lower ones tremble along on their own, spreading a soft resonance layer upon layer. If you have ever plucked one guitar string hard and seen the untouched string beside it start to shake, that is exactly the principle (resonance). It is an instrument no wedding or dance in rural Norway would be without, and Grieg strove to carry its sound into the piano and the orchestra.
Song cycle
(Meaning) The word yeongagok (連歌曲) means songs (歌曲) that are linked (連). In German it is also called a 'circle of songs' (Liederkreis). (In music) A work that binds several art songs together around a single story or theme. Each song may be sung on its own, but only when they are heard in order does the whole story come together. It is like a webtoon serialized one episode at a time that becomes a single story when read from beginning to end. Schubert's Winterreise is the classic example, and Grieg's Haugtussa tells, in just this linked way, of a mountain girl's love and parting.