Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg grew up in Bergen, Norway, at a time when artistic and intellectual circles in the country were heavily influenced by Danish and German cultures. As he entered his twenties, this began to change, and Grieg was caught up in a national awakening, with artists in every medium seeking a specifically Norwegian cultural identity. He was one of the first major composers from the Nordic lands to embrace the Romantic nationalism that swept across Europe in the late 19th century, and in keeping with this aesthetic he incorporated traditional folk music, drawing inspiration from the history and mythology of his homeland. In addition, he looked to landscape as a direct source of inspiration—a trend that resonates more widely in Nordic cultural nationalisms. Indeed, it was in part the evocation of landscape that encouraged some of the more innovatory features in his music, recognized by some as a kind of proto-Impressionism.

Early Years: Bergen—Leipzig—Copenhagen

Taught initially by his mother, a gifted pianist, Grieg was admitted to the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of 15, studying composition with Carl Reinecke in his fourth and final year. Perhaps more importantly, he attended the famous Gewandhaus concerts, where he heard Clara Schumann perform her husband’s Piano Concerto. (His love of Robert Schumann’s music was lifelong.) Yet he made little mark on Leipzig and, after graduating in 1862, opted to move to Copenhagen, at the time considered “the capital of Scandinavia,” where he felt more at home and remained for most of 1863–6. In Copenhagen he met, and was encouraged by, Niels Gade (1817–90), along with other leading artists and thinkers including Hans Christian Andersen. Four of Andersen’s love poems were set by Grieg in one of the first works to show signs of a maturing personal voice, the Hjertets melodier (Melodies of the Heart), Op. 5, of 1864–5. These songs were also inspired by his love for his cousin, the singer Nina Hagerup, to whom he gifted the songs as an engagement present. They were married in the Danish capital in 1867, against the wishes of both families.

Grieg: Sonata No. 3 in C minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 45

The Quest for Norwegian Music  

During his time in Copenhagen, Grieg associated with some of the leading ideologues of a Norwegian national music, including Rikard Nordraak (1842–66), who encouraged him to draw on traditional music after his return to Norway. This was facilitated by the appearance in 1867 of a collection of folk music by Ludvig Mathias Lindeman (1812–87). In studying the collection, Grieg spoke of the “undreamt-of harmonic possibilities” of this music, and of his attempts “to express my sense of the hidden harmonies of our folk melodies.” Among the earliest works to reveal this influence was Humoresker for Solo Piano, Op. 6 (1865), closely followed by piano arrangements of some of Lindeman’s melodies, including those published as Op. 17 (1869). This “Norwegian turn” was not all-embracing (on a return visit to Denmark in 1868 he wrote the famous Piano Concerto, which speaks more of Schumann than of folk music), but the direction of travel was clear, and especially so in songs and piano pieces from the late 1860s, including the first of his ten books of Lyric Pieces, Op. 12 (1867). It was above all in these pieces, but also in the incidental music to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Sigurd Jorsalfar, Op. 22 (1872), and Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Op. 23 (1875), that the influence of landscape—specifically the one surrounding his villa in Troldhaugen near Bergen, but also in the Hardanger district—made itself felt. The titles of some of the Lyric Pieces are indicative: I hjemmet (In my Homeland), Bryllupsdag på Troldhaugen (Wedding Day at Troldhaugen), Aften på højfjellet (Evening in the Mountains), Skogstillhet (Peace in the Woods).

International Acclaim 

In the 1870s, Grieg spent most of his time in Christiania (now Oslo), where he worked to foster musical life as a pianist, as conductor of the Philharmonic Society, and as cofounder of the Christiania Music Society. He was increasingly recognized at home and abroad as a master of small forms and a harmonist of true originality, a precursor of musical “Impressionism.” It was during this decade that he produced works such as Den bergtekne (The Mountain Thrall) for Baritone, Horns, and Strings, Op. 32, and the G minor String Quartet. Op. 27 (both 1877–78). Then, in the 1880s, a government grant freed him up from professional obligations, and he developed a routine that involved composing (in stops and starts) at Troldhaugen in the early part of the year, hiking in the mountains in the late summer, and concertizing in the autumn and winter. In the 1890s, there was major international recognition and a sustained period of creativity, giving rise to works such as Norske folkeviser for Piano, Op. 66 (1896–97), the Haugtussa song cycle, Op. 67, on poems by Arne Garborg (1895), and the Slåtter for Piano, Op. 72 (1902–03), inspired by Hardanger fiddle music. But in the end, his extensive concert tours abroad began to take their toll, especially given lifelong respiratory problems, and he died in 1907.

Grieg: Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 27

Legacy

Grieg’s immediate influence on Norwegian music is most apparent in the early music of David Monrad Johansen (1888–1974), and especially his Violin Sonata, Op. 3 (1913). It is significant that Johansen later engaged closely with the music of Debussy, for it was above all in modern French music (Debussy and Ravel) and in Delius (whose music has some affinities with Debussy’s) that Grieg’s influence was registered outside Norway, though it is not entirely fanciful to connect a work such as Slåtter to the music of Bartók. More generally, an engagement with landscape—embracing a love of the outdoors—together with an idealized blend of purity and physicality came to be associated with a Scandinavian identity in music; and here too Grieg was an inspiration. He was not, however, a major influence on the remarkable Northern awakening of the early 20th century. This had less to do with the folk music Grieg espoused than with a “second growth” of the symphony, in which composers from Northern Europe recaptured something of Beethoven’s lofty humanism in ways that no longer seemed available to their coevals in central Europe.

Watching and Listening

There is a marked difference—not just in style but also in authority and conviction—between the two violin sonatas represented in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Digital Archive. The Second, in G major, was composed in 1867, much of it during Grieg’s honeymoon, and is rather less secure in its marriage of folk elements and Classical forms than the Third, composed the following year; it is both more closely unified thematically and freer and more improvisatory in structure. It has become a cliché of criticism that Grieg’s larger forms, as in these two works, are episodic. Rather than challenge this claim, we might argue that it is alright to be episodic.

The String Quartet in G minor, composed in Hardanger in 1877–8, is one of Grieg’s most ambitious extended works. When played with real technical acumen and conviction, as in the performance in the Digital Archive, it comes across as an utterly convincing work in its own right, and not merely as a harbinger of Debussy’s String Quartet, also in G minor, though the connection is often made. Aside from the sheer vitality and intensity of its outer movements, this work is marked by a bold, even radical approach to the treatment of dissonances. A phrase from Grieg’s song Spillemaend (Minstrels, 1876), to a text of Ibsen, is the unifying element that underpins all four movements.

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