Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg: The Miniaturist Who Made Norway Audible

In 1874 Grieg described the piece that would become the most recognisable music he ever wrote as something that "reeks of cow-pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism," adding hopefully that "I have a hunch that the irony will be discernible." It was not. A century and a half later "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is shorthand for creeping menace in a thousand films and adverts, its author's private embarrassment entirely lost in transit.

A Bergen Merchant's Son with a Scottish Name

He was born on 15 June 1843 in Bergen. His father, Alexander Greig (1806–1875), was a merchant and British Vice-Consul; his mother, Gesine Judithe Hagerup (1814–1875), was a music teacher who sat him at the piano at six. The name came down from Clan Gregor by way of a great-grandfather, also Alexander Greig (1739–1803), who settled in Norway around 1770; his paternal great-great-grandparents, John and Anne, lie in the churchyard of St Ethernan at Rathen in Aberdeenshire. He attended Tanks Upper Secondary School, a Bergen boy with a foreign surname and a Norwegian ear.

Ole Bull's Verdict

In the summer of 1858 the violinist Ole Bull — whose brother had married Grieg's aunt — heard the fifteen-year-old play and told his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory, where Ignaz Moscheles ran the piano department. Leipzig gave Grieg Mendelssohn, Schumann, and a lasting grudge. "I left Leipzig Conservatory just as stupid as I entered it," he said afterwards, conceding that he "did learn something there." In the spring of 1860 pleurisy and tuberculosis nearly killed him. He emerged with a destroyed left lung and a considerable deformity of the thoracic spine, and carried both for the remaining forty-seven years of his life, cycling through spas and sanatoria.

Copenhagen and Rikard Nordraak

In 1863 he moved to Copenhagen for three years and fell in with the Danish establishment — J. P. E. Hartmann, and Niels Gade. But the decisive meeting was with a fellow Norwegian. Rikard Nordraak, who wrote the Norwegian national anthem, showed him in 1864 what Grieg later called "the northern folk tunes and my own nature." Nordraak died in 1866; Grieg wrote him a funeral march and asked for it at his own funeral forty-one years later.

THE FREE TEST

How high is yours?

Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.

Take the IQ test →

Nina, and Alexandra

On 11 June 1867 he married his first cousin, Nina Hagerup (1845–1935), a lyric soprano who became the definitive interpreter of his songs. Their daughter Alexandra was born in 1868 and died of meningitis in 1869. There were no other children.

The Concerto and the Play

In the summer of 1868, on holiday in Denmark, Grieg wrote the Piano Concerto in A minor, modelled openly on Schumann's and destined to overtake it at the box office. Edmund Neupert gave the premiere at Copenhagen's Casino Theatre on 3 April 1869; the composer missed it, tied up conducting in Christiania.

Peer Gynt arrived by accident. Grieg and the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson had planned an opera on King Olav Trygvason and fell out over whether words or music should come first. Ibsen's play filled the vacancy, and the incidental music Grieg wrote for it — "Morning Mood," the Mountain King — made him globally famous and privately uneasy.

Sixty-Six Small Pieces

Across ten collections he produced 66 Lyric Pieces for piano: "Arietta," "To the Spring," "Little Bird," "Butterfly," "Wedding Day at Troldhaugen." Britannica describes his harmonies as "novel," his lyrical sense as "refined," and his rhythms as "spirited" and folk-connected, and identifies the Lyric Pieces as the clearest demonstration of his gift for the piano miniature. This, rather than the concerto, is the centre of his output.

Cambridge, Windsor, and the Dreyfus Refusal

Cambridge gave him an honorary doctorate in 1894 and Oxford another in 1906. In 1897 he and Nina performed privately for Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. In 1899 he cancelled a French concert tour in protest at the Dreyfus affair, writing that he hoped France would "soon return to the spirit of 1789, when the French republic declared that it would defend basic human rights." France answered with sacks of hate mail.

Why Edvard Is Called a Genius

The telling detail is that in the record of his own words, the one time Grieg reached for the word he was describing somebody else. Of the young Australian pianist Percy Grainger in 1906 he said: "He is a genius that we Scandinavians cannot do other than love." His own claim rests on something narrower and more definable than the word usually carries — harmonic invention at small scale. Tchaikovsky praised the "beauty, originality and warmth" of his music; Britannica calls the harmonies novel. What Grieg actually did was extract modal and inflected turns from Norwegian folk material and fold them into late-Romantic practice, producing progressions that had not previously existed and that French composers would later mine. Doing that inside a two-minute piano piece, sixty-six times, without repeating himself, is a genuine and unusual faculty.

The counter-case is that the faculty did not scale. Grieg wrote one piano concerto, one string quartet in G minor, no symphony that holds the repertory and no completed opera — the Olav Trygvason project collapsed in an argument. His durable output is dominated by miniatures, songs and theatre music, and even the most famous orchestral pages are extracts from incidental music written to order. He half-admitted the weakness himself: the complaint about learning nothing at Leipzig is also a confession of thin formal training. To call him a genius of musical architecture would be inflation. To call him a genius of harmonic colour on a small canvas is defensible on the evidence, and it is why his influence outran his ambition.

Legacy

He died on 4 September 1907 at the municipal hospital in Bergen, aged sixty-four, of heart failure compounded by the lung he had lost at seventeen. His last words were "Well, if it must be so." Between thirty and forty thousand people filled the streets of Bergen for the funeral procession, where Nordraak's march was played as he had asked, alongside Chopin's. He was cremated in the city's newly opened crematorium and his ashes were placed in a mountain crypt at Troldhaugen, the house outside Bergen that is now the Edvard Grieg Museum. Bergen's largest concert hall, its music school and its professional choir all carry his name; so does a crater on Mercury.