Edvard Grieg, born in Bergen, Norway, received music lessons
from his mother at the age of six. In 1853 he was sent to the
Leipzig Conservatoire where he studied piano and composition. He
did not enjoy life at the Conservatoire; in 1860 he had to take
time off after suffering a violent attack of pleurisy that left
him with recurring respiratory troubles. He returned to Norway in
1862 and the following year travelled to Copenhagen m order to
forge a career as a pianist. There he met his cousin and
future-wife, Nina Hayerup.
At this time Norwegian culture was heavily overshadowed by
Danish influence. As Grieg grew older, however, he became
increasingly conscious of the musical potential of his own country's folk-culture and began
to promote Norwegian nationalism by writing pieces based on
traditional popular music.
In 1867 he produced his first set of miniature pieces for
piano, the Lyric pieces, which consists of eight short
movements in contrasting moods. Over the course of his life he
wrote nine further collections under the same title, each
gathering together between six and eight short but beautifully
constructed movements of an individual character. The following
year Grieg finished what has become one of his best-known pieces,
the Piano concerto in A minor. It is a striking and
technically demanding work that retains much of its original
freshness even today.
Grieg started work on the suite Peer Gynt when the
playwright Ibsen asked him to provide music for his play of that
name. The first performance m 1 876 was a resounding success and
made Grieg into a national figure overnight. In the same year he
attended and thoroughly enjoyed the first performance of Wagner's
cycle of four operas, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The ring
cycle). Yet musically the two composers could not be further
apart: Wagner produced colossal pieces lasting over tour hours
while Grieg concentrated on concise and beautiful miniatures.
In 1884 Grieg accepted a commission to write a piece to
commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of the Norwegian
philosopher and playwright, Ludvig Holberg. The resulting
Holberg suite is a five-movement piece for piano written in
the manner of an eighteenth-century dance suite. Several months
later he arranged it for string orchestra, in which form the
lyrical and graceful music has become popular.
By 1885 Grieg had established a considerable reputation. He
built himself a house at Troldhaugen, where he lived for the rest
of his life. Over the next 20 years he managed to establish a
pattern of composing in the spring and early summer, fitting in a
walking holiday in late summer and then spending the autumn and
winter on lengthy concert tours. The impulse to travel never left
him and even in his final years he continued with gruelling
concert schedules around Europe. In the last year of his life he
visited Berlin and Kiel; he was making plans to leave for England
when he was taken ill and died. He was buried near his house in
the wall of a cliff which overhangs a fjord.
Grieg shied away from the larger forms of musical expression,
such as the symphony and the opera, but in his preferred field -
as a miniaturist — he is without equal. His music, highly
individual and with a nationalist flavour, has almost universal
appeal.
