EdvardGrieg

Edvard Grieg was born on 15 June 1843 in the family house at Strandgaten 152, above Bergen’s harbour. His father, Alexander, was a merchant and the British vice-consul; his mother, Gesine, who had studied singing, piano and theory in Hamburg, taught him the piano from the age of six. He hated scales. In his essay Min første Succes he recalled the day at five when he stretched up to the keyboard and found a third, a triad, a four-note chord and at last, with both hands, the five notes of a ninth. “That was a success!” he wrote. “Nothing since has been able to intoxicate me like this.”

1858–⁠62Leipzig

In the summer of 1858 the violinist Ole Bull called without warning at the Griegs’ summer house at Landås. Edvard was made to play. Bull grew serious, talked quietly with the parents, then shook the boy in his own way and said: “You are going to Leipzig to become an artist!” On 6 October Grieg entered the Conservatory. He later called it “that damned Leipzig conservatory”, but he went free to the Gewandhaus rehearsals, saw Tannhäuser fourteen times, and heard Clara Schumann play her husband’s concerto. In the spring of 1860 tuberculosis ruined one of his lungs. That autumn, against the doctor’s advice, he went back.

1863–⁠67Copenhagen

In April 1863 Grieg went to Copenhagen on a loan from his father. Niels Gade, the city’s leading composer, challenged him to write a symphony. Grieg wrote the first movement in two weeks and finished the work in 1864; a few years later he stamped the score Must never be performed. Rikard Nordraak, a year older than Grieg, changed his direction. Nordraak wanted Norwegian art music to grow from Norwegian folk music. After Nordraak had played and sung some of his songs, Grieg wrote, “a mist fell from my eyes and I knew what I wanted”. At Christmas 1864 he gave his cousin Nina Hagerup, a singer, a set of songs on poems by Hans Christian Andersen. The best-known song in the set is Jeg elsker Dig. Nordraak died in Berlin in March 1866. Grieg was in Rome and wrote a funeral march. In May he stood at the grave, took an oak leaf from it and sent the leaf to Nordraak’s father. On 11 June 1867 he married Nina in St John’s Church, Copenhagen.

1868–⁠70The Piano Concerto and Liszt

The Griegs settled in Christiania, where he conducted and, with the composer Otto Winter-⁠Hjelm, started a music academy. That June, 1868, Grieg went to Søllerød, a village north of Copenhagen, and wrote his Piano Concerto in A minor. It opens with a timpani roll and a flourish for the piano, and was first played in Copenhagen on 3 April 1869 by Edmund Neupert. Neupert wrote at once: “Already after the cadenza in the first movement the audience broke into a real storm.” Seven weeks later the Griegs’ daughter Alexandra, born the April before, died aged thirteen months.

In 1870 Grieg took the manuscript to Rome, to a monastery near the Forum where Franz Liszt was living. Liszt sat down at the piano with it, announced that he would show the company that he could not sight-read it either, and played the whole concerto, talking and nodding as he went. He took the first movement too fast and played the cadenza best. In the finale, where the orchestra changes a G♯ to a G, he got up, strode across the cloister and sang the theme loudly: “G, G, not G sharp! Splendid!” He then told Grieg to carry on.

1874–⁠76Peer Gynt

On 23 January 1874 a letter from Henrik Ibsen, in Dresden, asked Grieg for music for a stage production of Peer Gynt. He agreed gladly. The commission grew to twenty-six numbers, and he found it hard going. By August he was telling his friend Frants Beyer that he had written a piece for the troll king’s hall that he could hardly bear to hear, because it reeked so much “of cow-pats, of Norwegian-⁠Norwegianness and smugness”. He hoped the irony would be heard. The play opened at the Christiania Theatre on 24 February 1876 and had thirty-six performances that spring. In January 1877 the theatre burned down, and the scenery and costumes were lost with it. Grieg went on revising the score, and drew two orchestral suites from it, published in 1888 and 1893.

1877–⁠85Hardanger, Bergen, Troldhaugen

In the summer of 1877 the Griegs settled on a farm at Ullensvang in Hardanger, and before winter moved to Lofthus, where Grieg had a small work-hut that the farmers called “the Compost Heap”. Here he wrote his String Quartet in G minor. The marriage was under strain, and in 1883 he left Nina; his friend Beyer brought them back together, and in January 1884 she joined him in Leipzig. For the 200th birthday of the playwright Ludvig Holberg, on 3 December 1884, he wrote a suite in the manner of Holberg’s day, which he called “a good exercise for concealing one’s own personality”. In the spring of 1885 the villa he had commissioned from his cousin, the architect Schak Bull, was finished at Hop, outside Bergen. He called it Troldhaugen, “Troll Hill”. By April he was already writing: “By autumn I must think up some devilry to get out again.”

1888–⁠1903Tchaikovsky, Dreyfus and Paris

On 1 January 1888 Grieg met Tchaikovsky at the Leipzig home of the violinist Adolph Brodsky, and Nina sang her husband’s songs after dinner. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Hamlet overture to him. “Kindred spirits don’t grow on trees!” Grieg wrote that May. Cambridge invited both men to receive honorary degrees in 1893; Grieg was too ill to go, and received his in May 1894. The Lyric Pieces continued to appear, ten books and sixty-six pieces between 1867 and 1901, and the Leipzig publisher Peters nicknamed them Semmeln, wheat rolls, because they sold so readily. For the silver wedding in June 1892 more guests came to Troldhaugen than had been invited; in 1896 he marked the day with Wedding Day at Troldhaugen.

In 1899 Grieg, encouraged by his friend Bjørnson, declined an invitation from the conductor Édouard Colonne because of the Dreyfus case; the letter was printed across Europe, and threats arrived for months. Four years passed before he went to France again. On 19 April 1903, at the Concerts Colonne in the Théâtre du Châtelet, whistles and shouts of “À bas Dreyfus” drove him from the podium until the police had cleared the worst of the hall; the concert then continued and ended as a triumph. On 2 May he recorded nine sides at the piano for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company, among them Wedding Day at Troldhaugen in a two-minute version. Eleven days later he wrote to a friend: “I was glad to say farewell to France, and especially Paris.” In the same years he brought the sound of the Hardanger fiddle to the piano in the Slåtter, Op. 72, and the young musicians of Paris began to speak of le nouveau Grieg.

1906–⁠07The last tour

After a doctorate at Oxford in May 1906, Grieg spent the summer on his last choral work, Four Psalms, built on old Norwegian melodies. In March 1907 he set out on one more tour, to Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin and Kiel. His diary for 13 April records a visit to Nordraak’s memorial: “41 years have gone since I stood at this grave, that is: my life.” By late August he was practising for a festival at Leeds. He was admitted to hospital in Bergen on 3 September and died early on the 4th. His ashes, and Nina’s after her death in 1935, lie in the rock wall at Troldhaugen.