1843–1907 · Norway · Romantic
Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) was a Norwegian Romantic-era composer and pianist whose music drew on Norwegian folk tunes and helped shape the country's national musical identity. He wrote the music for Peer Gynt, a piano concerto and ten books of Lyric Pieces — pieces that are often where a pianist's first encounter with his music begins.
Grieg was born on 15 June 1843 in the Norwegian port city of Bergen, into a well-off, musical family. His father, Alexander Grieg, was a merchant and served as British vice-consul; on his father's side, Grieg's Scottish ancestors carried the surname Greig and had settled in Bergen back in the late eighteenth century. The composer's mother, Gesine Grieg, née Hagerup, was herself a gifted pianist and singer who received her musical training abroad.
It was his mother who first sat Edvard down at the piano — he was only four, and the beauty of the combinations of sound soon caught his attention. Gesine taught music to all her children, but Edvard's regular piano lessons began when he was six. Works by Mozart, Weber and Chopin were constantly played in the house, and it was with this music that the future composer's musical education began.
Grieg was not fond of the town school in Bergen, which he started attending in 1853, although he stayed fond of his music teacher there. At the age of twelve he wrote his very first piece for the piano. Everything changed when he met the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in the summer of 1858: a longtime friend of the family, Bull listened to fifteen-year-old Edvard's playing and convinced his parents that the boy should go and study music at the Leipzig Conservatory.
In autumn 1858 Grieg enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, founded by Mendelssohn. He disliked the general discipline of the conservatory course, and things did not work out with his first piano teacher, Plaidy: Grieg arranged to be transferred to the class of Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel. His relationship with his composition teacher, Carl Reinecke, was far warmer — Reinecke recognised the young man's real talent.
Outside the conservatory walls, Leipzig itself was a fine school for Grieg: the city remembered Mendelssohn and Schumann, and the Gewandhaus concert hall performed music by Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Chopin. Schumann affected him most strongly — his influence can be felt in Grieg's early works from this time, including piano pieces and songs set to poems by German poets.
In 1860 Grieg fell seriously ill with pleurisy, an illness that affected his health for the rest of his life. Despite this, he finished the conservatory in 1862 with high marks: his professors praised his gift for composition and his expressive way of playing the piano. Much later Grieg recalled his conservatory years without much warmth, criticising his teachers as out of touch with life, though he always spoke gratefully of his composition teacher.
After the conservatory Grieg returned briefly to Bergen, but soon realised he needed a livelier musical environment to develop, and in 1863 moved to Copenhagen, then the centre of musical life in Scandinavia. There he joined a circle of musicians drawn to the idea of national art, and grew especially close to the Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak: their friendship helped Grieg see his own path more clearly.
That same year, 1863, Grieg wrote a piano cycle called Poetic Pictures, in which the Norwegian traits of his music appear for the first time, including a rhythmic figure typical of folk tunes. In 1864, together with Danish colleagues, he founded the music society Euterpe, which introduced audiences to works by Scandinavian composers; Grieg himself took part as a conductor, pianist and composer.
In Copenhagen Grieg met again his cousin Nina Hagerup, with whom he had grown up in Bergen: she had moved to Copenhagen with her family at the age of eight, and by the time they met again she had become an adult singer with a lovely voice. He proposed to her at Christmas 1864, and they married in 1867; the creative partnership of the two musicians continued for the rest of their life together.
Because relatives turned away from the newlyweds after their unconventional marriage, the couple moved to Christiania (now Oslo). In autumn 1867 Grieg put on a concert of works by Norwegian composers, after which he was appointed conductor of Christiania's philharmonic society. In the following years came the first book of Lyric Pieces and the Piano Concerto — works that became among the most famous in his output. In 1868 the Griegs had a daughter, Alexandra, but a year later the girl died of meningitis; the loss weighed heavily on the family, though the couple went on giving concerts together.
In 1869 Grieg discovered a collection of Norwegian musical folklore compiled by Ludvig M. Lindeman, and based on it wrote a piano cycle of 25 Norwegian folk songs and dances. Two years later, together with the composer Johan Svendsen, he founded a concert society in Christiania that introduced audiences to the music of contemporary composers from abroad while also supporting Norwegian composers. In this work Grieg found support from the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, with whom he shared a long friendship and several joint works.
At the end of 1868 the composer Franz Liszt, who did not yet know Grieg personally, came across his First Violin Sonata and sent the author an enthusiastic letter; they met in person in 1870, and Liszt's support meant a great deal to the young musician. In 1874 the Norwegian government granted Grieg a lifelong state pension, and the poet Henrik Ibsen invited him to write music for the play Peer Gynt. The 1876 premiere in Oslo was a great success, and Grieg's fame soon spread far beyond Norway.
In the second half of the 1870s Grieg turned to larger chamber forms, but of what he planned he completed only a string quartet. Bergen's damp climate aggravated his long-standing pleurisy, and in 1883 his wife left him for a time; the composer's friend, the musicologist Frants Beyer, helped bring the couple back together. As a token of reconciliation the family decided to leave Bergen, and from 1885 Grieg's main home became the villa Troldhaugen nearby: there he spent long periods among the mountains, fishermen and farmers, and impressions of Norwegian nature are reflected in many works from these years.
Concert tours across Europe — to Germany, France, England, the Netherlands and Sweden — became a regular part of Grieg's life: he performed as a conductor and pianist, often accompanying his wife. In January 1888, in Leipzig, he met Tchaikovsky, and a warm friendship grew between the two composers.
In 1898 Grieg organised the first festival of Norwegian music in Bergen, which is still held today, and for the rest of his life he remained active in the country's musical and public life — as a performer, conductor and writer. In the 1890s and the early twentieth century he wrote a great deal for piano and voice: it was then that six more books of Lyric Pieces and numerous song collections appeared, along with the autobiographical essay My First Success.
Despite his poor health, in the spring of 1907 Grieg set off on a major concert tour of Norway, Denmark and Germany, and in the autumn he planned to travel to a music festival in England. While waiting for a ship in Bergen he fell ill, and was taken to hospital, where he died on 4 September 1907, after a long illness. Grieg's ashes were placed in a mountain crypt above the fjord beside the villa Troldhaugen, which was later turned into a memorial museum devoted to the composer.
Grieg's music is rooted in Norwegian folklore — herding-horn tunes, epic and lyrical songs, and the devices of folk fiddlers. He often turned to tales of trolls, gnomes and other creatures of the underground world, and the ornamentation of his instrumental pieces — grace notes, trills, suspensions — grew largely out of folk violin tradition. Grieg wrote few large-scale works: a symphony he himself later disapproved of, a piano sonata, three violin sonatas and a cello sonata — but he more often made his main statement in miniature.
Grieg readily drew on Norwegian dances — the springar, the halling, the gangar — already worked out by folk fiddlers, weaving their lively, sometimes humorous rhythms into his music. In harmony he favoured modes that sounded fresh in his day, the Dorian and Phrygian, along with chromatic bass movement and sustained pedal points. Grieg himself said that what he valued most in music was clarity and brevity: in his own words, these qualities belong to Norwegian speech itself, and he aimed for them in his own art.
Grieg wrote most of all for the piano: of his roughly one hundred and fifty pieces for the instrument, sixty-six made up the ten books of Lyric Pieces — a kind of musical diary in which lyrical, almost domestic pages alternate with scenes of Norwegian rural life and nature. He was just as ready to write songs to poems by Scandinavian and German poets, many of which he later arranged for piano himself.
The sheet music on the site includes both piano pieces and songs by Grieg. Norwegian colour can be heard in Lualåt, and in Troldtog (March of the Dwarfs) from the fifth book of Lyric Pieces — one of those miniatures about creatures of the underground world for which Grieg is known. The Peer Gynt music also includes the piece Ases Tod, and among the songs is Ich liebe dich, one of Grieg's earliest and best-known works. A good place to start with his piano music is with short pieces such as Albumblatt from the first book of Lyric Pieces, before moving on to more extended pages such as Wedding-day at Troldhaugen.