Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, on the west coast of Norway, on 15 June 1843. His great-grandfather, a Scottish merchant, had settled in Norway in the eighteenth century. His father, Alexander, was British consul and a merchant; his mother, Gesine Hagerup, an excellent pianist, gave him his first lessons from the age of six. A dreamy child, Edvard improvised at the piano and composed little pieces very early. Norway was then united with Sweden and seeking to assert its cultural identity.

In 1858 the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, a family friend, heard young Edvard play his compositions and persuaded his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory, one of the most renowned in Europe. Grieg stayed four years. He had mixed memories of this very academic teaching, but there he discovered Schumann, who influenced him deeply. During his studies he caught pleurisy, which left one lung destroyed: all his life he had fragile health and a small stature (about 1.52 m).

In 1863 he moved to Copenhagen, then the cultural capital of Scandinavia. There he met the young Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak, an ardent patriot and composer of the Norwegian national anthem, who encouraged him to draw on his country’s folk music. Nordraak’s early death in 1866 devastated him. In 1867 Grieg married his cousin Nina Hagerup, a remarkable singer who performed his songs all her life. That same year he published his first book of Lyric Pieces for piano; he wrote ten in all, sixty-six pieces.

In 1868 he composed his Piano Concerto in A minor, inspired by Schumann’s, with its spectacular opening and themes with Norwegian folk accents. In 1870 in Rome he showed it to Liszt, who played it at sight from the manuscript and exclaimed enthusiastically, encouraging him to follow his own path. The concerto became one of the best-loved in the repertoire. Grieg founded a concert society in Christiania (Oslo) and conducted its orchestra.

In 1874 the playwright Henrik Ibsen asked him to write incidental music for his play Peer Gynt, the story of a whimsical, lying young peasant who roams the world. Grieg accepted, not without difficulty, and the play was premiered in Christiania in 1876. He later drew from it two orchestral suites that became extremely famous, with pieces such as Morning Mood, The Death of Åse, Anitra’s Dance and In the Hall of the Mountain King, in which a repeated theme speeds up into a frenzy.

In 1884, for the bicentenary of the birth of the writer Ludvig Holberg, born like him in Bergen, he composed the Holberg Suite in the style of eighteenth-century dances. In 1885 he settled with Nina in his villa at Troldhaugen (“Troll Hill”) near Bergen, where he composed in a small hut by the fjord. He nonetheless continued to make long concert tours of Europe as pianist and conductor and became one of the most popular composers of his time.

In 1903 in Paris he recorded several of his pieces on disc, so we can still hear him play today. He rejoiced at Norway’s independence in 1905. Ill, he died in Bergen on 4 September 1907, just as he was about to leave for a festival in England. More than thirty thousand people attended his funeral. His ashes rest in a cave in the cliff at Troldhaugen, above the fjord. He is regarded as Norway’s greatest composer.