Edvard Grieg

Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born on June 15, 1843, in Bergen, a busy trading port on Norway's west coast. His father, Alexander Grieg, was a merchant who also served as British consul in the city, continuing a family connection to Britain that went back to Edvard's great-grandfather, a Scottish businessman who had settled in Bergen in the eighteenth century and adjusted the spelling of the family name Greig ^[1]. His mother, Gesine Hagerup, came from a prominent Norwegian family and was an accomplished pianist who performed in Bergen's concert life. She gave Edvard his first piano lessons when he was six, and the boy soon began writing small pieces of his own ^[2].

Any question about the direction of his education was settled in the summer of 1858, when the violin virtuoso Ole Bull, a friend of the family and one of the most famous Norwegians alive, visited the Grieg household. After hearing the fifteen year old play, Bull persuaded his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory, then the most respected music school in Europe ^[1].

Leipzig proved a mixed experience. Grieg later complained that the teaching was conservative and that he learned little about composition there, though the city's concert life, including performances at the Gewandhaus, left a lasting mark. The stay also cost him his health. In 1860 he fell seriously ill with pleurisy, and the disease destroyed the function of his left lung. Respiratory trouble would shadow him for the rest of his life ^[3]. He completed his studies and graduated in 1862, returning to Bergen a skilled pianist with a solid German technical grounding but no clear artistic direction of his own.

The decisive years came in Copenhagen, where Grieg moved in 1863. The Danish capital was then the cultural center of Scandinavia, and he sought advice from Niels Gade, the leading Scandinavian composer of the day. More important was his friendship with Rikard Nordraak, a young Norwegian composer who wrote the melody that became Norway's national anthem. Nordraak burned with the conviction that Norwegian composers should build on their own folk traditions rather than imitate German models, and his enthusiasm transformed Grieg's thinking ^[2]. Nordraak died of tuberculosis in 1866 at only twenty three, and Grieg composed a funeral march in his memory that he kept close for the rest of his life; it was played at his own funeral decades later ^[4].

Grieg settled in Christiania, as Oslo was then called, in 1866. He worked as a conductor and teacher, and in 1867 he joined the composer Otto Winter-Hjelm in founding a music academy in the city, part of a broader effort to build institutions for Norwegian musical life ^[1]. Money was short and the concert public small, but his reputation grew steadily.

The breakthrough arrived quickly. During the summer of 1868, staying in Denmark, the twenty five year old composed his Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16. Edmund Neupert gave the premiere in Copenhagen in April 1869 to immediate acclaim ^[3]. The following year Grieg traveled to Rome, where Franz Liszt sight-read the concerto from manuscript and encouraged the young Norwegian warmly, an endorsement Grieg described in delighted letters home ^[2]. The concerto, with its dramatic opening drumroll and cascading piano entry, became one of the most popular works in the entire repertoire and has never left it.

In 1874 the playwright Henrik Ibsen invited Grieg to compose incidental music for the first staged production of his verse drama Peer Gynt. Grieg found the task difficult and worked on the score for nearly two years, but the premiere in Christiania on February 24, 1876 was a triumph ^[3]. He later extracted two orchestral suites, published in 1888 and 1893, and numbers such as Morning Mood, In the Hall of the Mountain King, and Solveig's Song carried his name into concert halls, and eventually films and advertising, around the world ^[1].

Among Edvard Grieg achievements, the sixty six Lyric Pieces for piano hold a special place. Published in ten books between 1867 and 1901, these short works, with titles like Butterfly, To Spring, and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, brought his harmonic imagination into middle class parlors across Europe and America ^[4]. He wrote roughly one hundred and eighty songs, many for his wife's voice, including the celebrated I Love You on a text by Hans Christian Andersen and the song cycle Haugtussa of 1895, a setting of Arne Garborg's verse that many scholars count among his finest work ^[4].

Grieg drew constantly on Norwegian folk material, from the early Twenty Five Norwegian Folk Songs and Dances of 1869 to the remarkable Slåtter, Op. 72, of 1902 and 1903, piano transcriptions of Hardanger fiddle dances whose biting dissonances startled contemporaries and fascinated later composers, Bartok among them ^[3]. The Holberg Suite of 1884, written for the bicentenary of the Bergen born playwright Ludvig Holberg, and the String Quartet in G minor showed his range beyond miniature forms. Honors accumulated: election to the French Legion of Honour, and honorary doctorates from Cambridge in 1894 and Oxford in 1906 ^[1].

In June 1867 Grieg married his first cousin Nina Hagerup, a Danish trained soprano he had met in Copenhagen. Both families disapproved of the match, but the marriage endured for forty years, and Nina became the foremost interpreter of his songs. Grieg said repeatedly that he composed his songs for her voice, and the couple toured Europe together giving recitals, he at the piano and she singing ^[2].

The marriage carried one deep sorrow. Their only child, a daughter named Alexandra, was born in 1868 and died of meningitis the following spring, barely a year old. The loss strained the couple for a time, yet they remained together, childless, for the rest of their lives ^[4].

In 1885 the Griegs moved into Troldhaugen, a wooden villa built on a hill above Nordås Lake outside Bergen. Grieg composed in a small hut by the water, away from household noise, and the house became the fixed point in a life otherwise spent on trains and in hotel rooms during long concert tours. Friends described him as small in stature, barely over five feet, wry and quick tempered, devoted to hiking in the mountains each summer despite his damaged lung ^[2]. His convictions were firm: in 1899 he publicly refused an invitation to conduct in Paris in protest at the French handling of the Dreyfus affair, a decision that brought him hostile mail and hostile audiences when he finally did appear in France in 1903 ^[3].

The final two decades of Grieg's life were shaped by fame and by failing health. He was now an international celebrity, welcomed in London, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Warsaw, and his tours drew enormous audiences even as chronic breathing trouble, rheumatism, and exhaustion made travel harder each year ^[3]. He formed friendships with younger musicians, among them the Australian pianist Percy Grainger, who shared his passion for folk music and whose playing of the concerto Grieg admired greatly in the last summer of his life ^[4].

He kept composing, though at a slower pace. The Slåtter transcriptions, the late Moods for piano, and the Four Psalms of 1906, his last completed work, based on old Norwegian religious melodies, show him still experimenting with harmony at the end ^[4]. He also wrote essays and a large correspondence that remains a rich source for historians of the period.

In the autumn of 1907 Grieg planned yet another tour, with engagements in Leeds. He collapsed before departure and died in a Bergen hospital on September 4, 1907, at the age of sixty four. Norway gave him what amounted to a state funeral, with tens of thousands lining the streets of Bergen. Following his wishes, his ashes were placed in a rock grotto in the cliff face beside Troldhaugen, overlooking the lake; Nina's ashes joined his after her death in 1935 ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Edvard Grieg soon meets a paradox: a composer of mostly small forms who achieved enormous influence. He rarely attempted symphonies or operas, yet his handling of harmony, his modal turns drawn from folk music, and his fondness for unresolved color chords pointed directly toward musical impressionism. Debussy and Ravel both knew his music well, and Bartok acknowledged the Slåtter as a precedent for his own folk based modernism ^[3].

For Norway the meaning was larger still. Grieg's career coincided with the country's push toward full independence, achieved in 1905, two years before his death, and his music became a symbol of national identity without ever descending into mere flag waving. Streets, festivals, and Bergen's concert hall, the Grieghallen, carry his name, and the Bergen International Festival has made his home city a place of musical pilgrimage ^[1].

Troldhaugen is now a museum devoted to his life, preserving the villa, the composing hut, and the gravesite, and drawing visitors from around the world ^[5]. His scores, letters, and diaries are held in the Bergen Public Library, one of the largest single composer archives anywhere, and they continue to feed new scholarship ^[6]. Basic Edvard Grieg facts, the Bergen birth in 1843, the Leipzig training, the A minor concerto, Peer Gynt, appear in every music history survey, but any full Edvard Grieg biography also has to reckon with the quieter achievement: he proved that a composer from a small country on Europe's edge could speak to the whole world in an accent unmistakably his own.