When
Edvard Grieg grew up, Bergen was a small and busy European town. All
through its past as a Hanseatic city, Bergen had established a net of
connections that made it the only continental Norwegian city. The main
business was the trade with fish and other products typical for the coast.
There was a close contact with the rest of Europe, a fact that is easily
retraceable in the origin of the bergener. Most of the families within the
city limits had ancestors in Denmark, Germany, Scotland, England, the
Netherlands and other European nations. Bergen was also a meltingpot for
the population along the Norwegian coast. Edvard Grieg’s family was a
typical Bergen-family: His great grandfather Alexander Greig (later
changed to Grieg) came to the city from Cairnbulg close to Aberdeen in
Scotland in the 1770’s. He founded the family business, which was trade
with dried fish and lobster across the North sea. The raising of a child
in a bourgeois family in the 19th century Norway often included teaching
of music or other forms of art. Edvard Grieg’s grandparents were active
in the society of music «Musikkselskapet Harmonien», one of the
world’s oldest orchestras, founded in 1765. Edvard Grieg was also so
lucky to have the best piano teacher in Bergen as a mother. Gesine Hagerup
had studied at the music conservatory in Hamburg, Germany, an education
that usually was offered only to men. She played with «Harmonien» and at
chamber music concerts in Bergen.
He studied with E.F. Wenzel at the Leipzig
Conservatory (1858-62), where he became intimately familiar with early
Romantic music (especially Schumann's), gaining further experience in
Copenhagen and encouragement from Niels Gade. Not until 1864-5 and his
meeting with the Norwegian nationalist Rikard Nordraak did his stylistic
breakthrough occur, notably in the folk-inspired Humoresker for
piano op.6. Apart from promoting Norwegian music through concerts of his
own works, he obtained pupils, became conductor of the Harmoniske Selskab,
projected a Norwegian Academy of Music and helped found the Christiania
Musikforening (1871), meanwhile composing his Piano Concerto (1868) and
the important piano arrangements of 25 of Lindeman's folksongs (op.17,
1869). An operatic collaboration with Bjornson came to nothing, but his
incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1875), the most extensive
and best known of his large compositions, produced some of his finest
work. Despite chronic ill-health he continued to tour as a conductor and
pianist and to execute commissions from his base at Troldhaugen (from
1885); he received numerous international honours. Among his later works, The
Mountain Thrall op.32 for baritone, two horns and strings, the String
Quartet in g Minor op.27, the popular neo-Baroque Holberg Suite
(1884) and the Haugtussa song cycle op.67 (1895) are the most
distinguished.
Grieg was first and foremost a lyrical
composer; his op.33 Vinje settings, for example, encompass a wide range of
emotional expression and atmospheric colour, and the ten opus numbers of Lyric
Pieces for piano hold a wealth of characteristic mood-sketches. But he
also was a pioneer, in the impressionistic uses of harmony and piano
sonority in his late songs and in the dissonance treatment in the Slatter
op.72, peasant fiddle-tunes arranged for piano.
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