Edvard Grieg

“ And among them you will love such pieces as The Birds, In Spring Time, Arietta, the Peer Gynt Music, the Piano Sonata, the Piano and Violin Sonata, and lots of lively Norwegian dances and tunes. Indeed, he has composed many compositions which you will number among your favorite pieces.
Three great names stand out more than all others in the musical history of Scandinavia. You have learned two, Edvard Grieg and Ole Bull. The other is Jenny Lind, known as "the Swedish nightingale," who was loved not only for her wonderful voice but for her kindness and noble nature. ”

“ But one day later a prize was offered in Sweden for an orchestral composition. Grieg's In Autumn won the prize. And Gade was one of the judges. We wonder if he forgot about it!
GADE
Grieg married his cousin Mina Hagerup, to whom he dedicated his famous song: I Love Thee. But the mother of his bride did not think highly of him.
"He is a nobody," she said, "who writes music that no one cares to listen to."
GRIEG AND HIS WIFE
But people were beginning to listen. After a concert in Christiania, entirely of Norwegian music, the Government gave Grieg a small pension and he went to Rome. ”

“ He looked over Edvard's compositions and made the boy play them to him. You can see him nodding his head in pleasure as he listens. His fine eyes are lighted up. He tells the boy composer that his music is quite good, but that there is a lot for him to learn yet. So he must study earnestly and make many sacrifices.
Then Ole Bull sits down and talks with Father and Mother Grieg. It is a serious talk, as one can see. Finally, when the talk is finished, Ole Bull takes the wondering boy by the hand and says to him:
"You are going to Leipzig to study and become a fine musician." ”

“ Heinrich Hofmann (1842–) has composed a good many pretty and highly effective pieces. His duets 'Italienische Liebes-Novelle' (op. 19) , transcriptions of Norwegian, Hungarian, and Russian melodies, have become very popular. Edvard Grieg (1843–) has composed a concerto, a sonata, and several smaller pieces, all elegant, and strongly impressed with the Norwegian character. Alexander Mackenzie, of Edinburgh (1847–) , has published a quartet for pianoforte and strings (op. 11) , Trois Morceaux (op. 15) , and other pieces. ”

“ Edvard Hagerup Grieg was born June 15, 1843, at Bergen, Norway. His musical talent asserted itself early, and fortunately his parents were able to provide him with the best of conditions for its development. The famous violinist Ole Bull was a friend of the family and encouraged him to devote himself to the musical profession. In 1858 Grieg went to Leipsic to study under Moscheles, Hauptmann, Wenzel, and Reinecke. He graduated in 1862, receiving praise for one or two small compositions which were played at the final rehearsal, but he was not considered as marked for certain distinction. ”

“ One of these bands was made up of several dozen men who played the national and popular airs, and played them well. The Scandinavians are a musical people; Scandinavia gave the world Jenny Lind, Christine Nilsson and Edvard Grieg, you know.
Yesterday was Sunday, and it was arranged that I was to go on a tour of Danish country castles in the part of Seeland which is to the north of Copenhagen. As Cousin Lars had been over the same route only a couple of weeks before, he decided not to go. The boys were to accompany me instead. The “boys” are Cousin Lars’s two sons ”

“ Poland is represented by Paderewski, while Soltys has won renown in symphony, and Stalkowsky in opera.
Norwegian Music.—Norway is preëminently a land of song. Its sombre fiords, dark forests, and smiling meadows have at all times inspired a school of Folk-music whose plaintive sweetness exerts the utmost charm on the musical auditor. In Edvard Hagerup Grieg (Bergen, 1843-1907) we find a composer of wonderful melodic gifts and expressive power, who has preserved admirably the flavor of the local Folk-songs and dances. ”

“ Peer, in the dwelling of the trolls, is beset and tormented by gnomes and imps. The music of this number has been characterized as "a veritable hornets' nest."
FOOTNOTES:
[61] "In cyclopædias," says Mr. H. T. Finck, "we generally find his name given as Edvard Hagerup Grieg, but he does not sanction the middle name, and never uses it in his correspondence. 'It is true,' he writes to me, 'that my baptismal name includes the Hagerup. ”

“ A few years later he built a beautiful villa at Troldhaugen, not far from Bergen, where he spent the rest of his life. Some American friends who visited them in 1901, speak of the ideal existence of the artist pair. Grieg himself is described as very small and frail looking, with a face as individual, as unique and attractive as his music—the face of a thinker, a genius. His eyes were keen and blue; his hair, almost white, was brushed backward like Liszt's. His hands were thin and small; they were wonderful hands and his touch on the piano had the luscious quality of Paderewski's. ”

“ To prove this he composed the Humoresken, Op. 6, and dedicated them to Nordraak. From now on he felt free to do as he pleased in music—to be himself.
In 1864 Grieg became engaged to his cousin, Nina Hargerup, a slender girl of nineteen, who had a lovely voice and for whom he wrote many of his finest songs. He returned to Christiania from a visit to Rome, and decided to establish himself in the Norwegian capital. Soon after his arrival, in the autumn of 1856, he gave a concert, assisted by his fiancée and Mme. Norman Neruda, the violinist. ”

“ Intellectually, the man is not more mature than the people. From whatever sources he might draw his germinal ideas, he would never combine them in complexer forms or larger patterns than he has found ready-made to his hand in the national song. There are, however, in Norwegian music peculiarities of a different sort that we can hardly conceive as proving other than hindrances in the formation of a wholesomely eclectic style—peculiarities which are all present full-fledged in so early a work of Grieg as the Piano Concerto, opus 16, written in 1868. ”

“ In the third stage, the folk-tunes were frankly utilized, the national scales and rhythms were deliberately and continuously called into service, and the whole musical output given a character homogeneously and distinctively national. It was in this stage that the Scandinavian music became known to the world at large. Grieg, a man of the highest talent, possibly of genius, made himself one of the best loved composers of the nineteenth century, and awakened a widespread taste for the exotic. Together with Tschaikowsky the Russian he made nationalism in music a world-wide triumph. ”

“ In the case of this particular work by Grieg, the child portrayed is no delicate rose-tinted girl-baby, downily cushioned upon silken pillows, peeping timidly 263 from a drift of dainty laces like the first crocuses from the feathery snow of April, but the lusty son of a Viking stock, with the blood of a sturdy race of fighters coursing red through his veins, and with a will and a voice of his own, cradled in the hollow trunk of a pine or the hide-lashed blade-bones of the elk, wrapped in the skin of wolf or bear, and lulled to sleep by the rough, but kindly, crooning of a peasant nurse. ”

“ Nina and I, with the energy of the American woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it, were determined to see Grieg in his surroundings. We hired a carriage in Bergen and started on our pilgrimage. It needed not only the energy of an American, but the tongue of a Dane and the perserverance of Danaides. The Griegs live in the most unget-at-able place that you can imagine, because he does not want any one to get at him. ”

“ To speak of such a man—seven-eighths of whose works are still music of the future—as a writer of 'dialect,' is surely the acme of unintelligence. If Grieg did stick to the fjord and never got out of it, even his German critics ought to thank heaven for it. Grieg in a fjord is much more picturesque and more interesting to the world than he would have been in the Elbe or the Spree."
While Norway has neither permanent opera nor permanent orchestras, she has produced concert virtuosi of a high order. ”

“ We stayed as long as we dared, and, on being offered tea and cakes and urged to stay longer, we were shown, as a great privilege, the little summer-house at the bottom of the hill where Grieg retires when he wishes to compose, and where Mrs. Grieg or any other angel dare not to tread. He has a grand Steinway. This is about the only American thing which Grieg does not hate. He said that he would have been a rich man if America had given him a royalty on his music, which is, as he said, played in every house in America. They bemoaned that they were overrun by American lady reporters. ”

“ He completed the score in the autumn of 1875. The first performance was given on February 24, 1876, at Christiania. Grieg himself was not present, as he was then in Bergen. The play proved a real success and was given thirty-six times that season, for which success the accompanying original and charming music was largely responsible.
Norway is a most picturesque country, and no one could be more passionately fond of her mountains, fjords, valleys and waterfalls than Edward Grieg. For several years he now chose to live at Lofthus, a tiny village, situated on a branch of the Hardanger Fjord. ”

“ In 1863 he pursued further studies under Gade at Copenhagen. In companionship with a talented young composer, Ricard Nordraak, Grieg set himself, as he says, "against the faded Scandinavianism of Gade and Mendelssohn intermingled, and undertook to put into tones the real [Pg 518] beauty, strength and inner spirit of the northern folks-life." He composed in many varieties of work, and in 1879 attained German recognition by playing his own piano concerto at the Gewandhaus in Leipsic. ”

“ He has since become aware of other older and newer masters, without however showing very distinct traces of their influence in his compositions. The characteristic Scandinavian features of Grieg's musical talent took a tangible shape soon after his return to the north. ”

“ The reason for this discrepancy of estimate seems to be that the layman, fascinated by Grieg's lovely melodies, unusual and piquant harmonic treatment, and contagious rhythm, looks for no further quality; but the musician, unconsciously referring all [Pg 50] music to a standard based on works of greater solidity, greater breadth and force and passion as well as wider learning and superior skill, is too conscious of the shortcomings of this Norwegian minstrelsy to do justice to its qualities. It is, of a truth, music in which merit and failing are curiously mingled ”

“ His somewhat arbitrary treatment of tonality relations and of rhythm is thus illustrative of a general laxity of method highly characteristic of the man. In contrast with a jealously accurate artist like Grieg, he is felicitous more by force of genius than by wisdom of intent.
Dvořák's childlike spontaneity is in no way better exemplified than by his attitude toward folk-music, and here again he may profitably be contrasted with Grieg. Both devotees of local color have enriched art with unfamiliar lineaments and unused resources, yet their modes of procedure have been quite different. ”

“ Although a lyric writer, he has written a piano sonata, three sonatas for violin and piano, and a most effective piano concerto, all of which show brilliancy and keen dramatic sense. His Holberg Suite for piano and the Elegiac melodies and the Norwegian theme for strings are full of rich, romantic feeling. As a song writer, too, Grieg ranks very high.
Some of the other Norwegians are: Johan Severan Svendsen (1840–1911) , Wagnerian in feeling yet writing his compositions with strong Norwegian color. ”

“ In the Scandinavian countries Grieg, and, to a lesser degree, Nordraak, as well as Svendsen and Sinding tempered nationality with German culture. Grieg, the more dominant personality, was a born poet, and imparted a truly national fervor to his songs and piano pieces. In the sonata form he was pathetically inept, despite the former popularity of his chamber works and [Pg xvi] piano concerto. Certain mannerisms in abuse of sequence, and a too persistent cultivation of small forms, have caused his works to lose ground rapidly ”

“ No other Norwegian composer has been so widely popular as Grieg. It is true that already amateur and professional alike have discovered the sameness of his mannerisms and his procedure; but such compositions as the concerto and the ballade are strong enough to bear the music above these heavy shackles. They are fairly to be considered as contributions to the literature of the instrument of unusual worth. ”

“ Grieg has written in almost every department of music: chamber music, orchestra suites, overtures, compositions for string quartet, and sonatas for piano and violin, a sonata for piano, concerto for piano, and a very considerable variety of poetic and interesting compositions for piano alone; in addition to these, many songs, some of which have attained a wide currency. In all these works certain characteristic peculiarities of Norwegian music continually make themselves felt, so that there is nothing of Grieg's which could be mistaken for the work of any good German composer. ”

“ Marjorie’s aunt Julia had asked the same question of him the night before in the drawing-room, and he had told her that the piece was by Grieg, which was untrue, and which he knew to be untrue. He was not aware that that cheerful, spiteful, and horribly intellectual old lady also knew that he was lying. He had felt it better to blaspheme the name of Grieg than to give her a chance by owning that he had composed the thing himself. He was a young man of dangerously diverse talents. He was just at the end of his first year at Cambridge, and was reading for the [185] Classical Tripos. ”