Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) enjoyed a prominent position in European music during his lifetime. Impresarios and performers saw him as a great musician whose songs and works for the piano the audience had become familiar with at home and whom they were also keen to hear in the concert hall. As a Norwegian, Grieg became associated with his exotic little native country on the outskirts of Europe where people lived in direct contact with nature and where nature thus directly influenced Grieg's music. His attractive melodies and pioneering harmonies were seen as deriving from snow, mountains, fjords and peaceful valleys and his Piano Concerto in A minor was considered to be a musical portrait of Norway.

Grieg himself was more concerned with his European and universal status than with folkloristic matters. He saw that his music appealed to people beyond his own immediate sphere of activity. Musicians and audiences were enthusiastic in both America and Australia. In the hundred years that have passed since Grieg's death, many of his works have been subject to varying fates and some of them have remained unperformed for a time. But in recent years his entire œuvre has met with greater interest and it is perhaps a healthy sign that a younger generation of musicians has revitalized the manner of performing Grieg's music - liberating it from some of the hoarier myths. Grieg's music is Norwegian but it is not merely that.

Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46; Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55 Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was director at the theatre in Grieg's native city of Bergen for several years during Grieg's boyhood. But it was probably their en¬counter in Rome in 1866 that led to the masterly music drama we know as Peer Gynt. Ibsen published the play in 1867 and, in 1874, he wrote to Grieg asking him to participate in producing a unified musical drama. Needing the fee, Grieg agreed to accept the undertaking but, during the composition process, he expressed certain doubts both about the play and his own music.

The drama was first produced in Christiania (now Oslo) in February 1876. Neither Ibsen nor Grieg attended the first performance but they were cheered by an enthusiastic reception on the part of the newspapers and the public. Grieg had composed a series of interludes that immediately became popular; music that emphasized the varying atmosphere of the play and Peer's erratic moods but that could also be performed independently of the play. Parts of the music appeared in versions for piano two-hands and four-hands as early as 1877.

Grieg knew the musicians in the Christiania orchestra very well, having been their conductor for several years, and he was careful to avoid making overly severe demands on them. But for the performance in Copenhagen in 1886 he revised the music and re-orchestrated parts of it. As early as 1881 Grieg had toyed with the idea of revising some of the orchestral music from Peer Gynt for publication by Peters in Leipzig. This resulted in two suites. The first suite received its first performance at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig in 1888 under the baton of Grieg's former teacher Carl Reinecke. This proved a great success and the suite was soon widely known. Grieg himself conducted the first suite in London and he wrote to his Bergen friend Frants Beyer: 'At the end of the performance there was an explosive burst of applause; a noise like that of animals. Well, you know, that unarticulated sound which only finds its expression in ecstatic rapturous moments. I was called in three times and I had to repeat the troll stuff [In the Hall of the Mountain King]. The performance was also really first-rate.' (Letter dated 14th March 1889). But success also has its downside. When he attended a performance by the Monte Carlo orchestra in March 1893 he noted in a letter to Beyer dated 2nd April that he had, indeed, received ovations but 'they could not compensate for the damage. For The Death of Aase performed as a polka and  Anitra's Dance as an fast waltz - that is going too far. The strange thing is that people can stomach it and even seem to like it.'

The popularity of the work has also served to erode the artistic ambitions that Grieg in spite of everything nursed for it. He complained in a letter of 22nd September 1896: 'The dissemination of arrangements of my works is beginning to become unsupportable. I now only lack a version of the Peer Gynt suite [Op. 46] for flute and trombone. The extraordinary popularity of the barrel organ I shall not even mention...'

Suite No. 2 was published in 1893 and, in the initial version, comprised five movements. The Dance of the Mountain King's Daughter was the fifth movement. But Grieg was not happy with the structure of the suite feeling, perhaps, that this final movement was too distinct. As early as 1874 he had written to Frants Beyer (27th August): 'I have also written something for the scene in the hall of the mountain king - something that I literally can't stand to listen to because it absolutely reeks of cow pats, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism, and trollish self-sufficiency! But I also have a hunch that the irony will be discernible...' (This was a reference to this part and not to In the Hall of the Mountain King! ) But Grieg felt that the irony of the exaggerated musical 'Norwegian-ism' of the dance was not understood.

The popularity of the suites in the concert hall also prepared the way for the drama Peer Gynt[i], Grieg acting as an opener of doors for Ibsen. The music was so familiar that increasing numbers of theatres performed the entire drama or parts thereof because people wanted to experience the full symbiosis of music and drama.

Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak (1866)
In Rome on 6th April 1866 Grieg drew a large cross in his diary and wrote:

The saddest news that could hit me - Nordraak is dead! - my only friend and the hope of Norwegian culture. What terrible darkness now surrounds me. And there is no one here who can properly understand my grief. May I find consolation in music - that has never failed at times of mourning. - Have composed a Funeral March for Nordraak. 7. [...] Wrote a trio for the funeral march.

The Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak (1842-66) was of decisive importance in the development of Grieg's career as a musician and composer. Nord¬raak wanted Norwegian composers to create a specifically Norwegian form of art music with its roots in the Norwegian mountains and the Norwegian soil - and the country's national music.

The funeral march was conceived for the piano and this version was published in Copenhagen the same summer. The following year Grieg produced two arrangements for small and large brass ensemble (with percussion) prior to creating a version for a large wind band, a 'military band' with two percussionists. This is probably the version that was first performed in Christiania in 1867. Grieg revised this version somewhat in 1878 and undertook further revisions in conjunction with Peters publishing the score in 1892. Grieg wanted the funeral march to be played at his own funeral and the composer Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935) orchestrated a version for symphony orchestra in 1907. The march shows that Grieg 'had reached full maturity with regard to melody and harmony and that, within the confines of a short piece, he was able to create an organic whole characterized by total concentration of the material. There is not a note that is superfluous.' (Benestad/Schjelderup-Ebbe).

Old Norwegian Melody with Variations, Op. 51
Grieg composed the [i]Old Norwegian Melody for two pianos in 1890, dedicating it to the French composer Benjamin Godard (1849-95). It was presumably intended as a follow-up to his extended piano variations Ballade in G minor, Op. 24. By 1891 he had already decided that individual variations could be omitted in performance. For the orchestral version, produced in 1900-03, he cut two of the variations and shortened the coda. The orchestral version was first performed in Christiania in 1904.

The variations are based on a Norwegian folk tune, Sjugurd og Trollbrura (Sjugurd and the Troll Bride), that L.M. Lindeman (1812-1887) had published in his collections of folk melodies (No. 22). Johan Svendsen (1840-1911) had used the tune in his Norwegian Rhapsody No. 2 (1876) and Grieg had himself harmonized the melody in Norwegian Melodies (1875, later included in Six Norwegian Mountain Melodies, 1886). It is particularly interesting to see how differently the tune collected by Lindeman is treated.
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Svendsen did not use an up-beat to any of the phrases while Grieg made use of Lindeman's own up-beat in 1875/86, but in the Old Norwegian Melody he let the up-beat start on the note below (in brackets in the music example). This creates a different sense of tonality. When (in company with Svendsen) Grieg also exploits the 'exotic' shift in the major/minor third we are offered numerous interesting harmonizations.

Johan Svendsen and Johan Halvorsen were at the time considered to be the most gifted orchestrators in Norwegian music. They worked rapidly and with great facility. Grieg had the most natural harmonic sense but he had to work at his orchestrations. Nevertheless, the Peer Gynt music, Bell Ringing and the Old Norwegian Melody show that he knew what he was doing and that he was able to find new timbral combinations that well fitted with the total conception of the music while at times departing from the 'norm' that was current in Western Europe.


Bell Ringing, Op. 54 No. 6
Grieg's fifth album of Lyric Pieces was published in 1891. The album won wide popularity and individual melodies were included in collections of piano music and in instrumental tutors. Anton Seidl (1850-98), a Hungarian conductor active in New York, orchestrated four of the pieces (Norwegian March, March of the Dwarfs, Notturno, Bell Ringing) in 1895, calling the collection Norwegian Suite. Grieg saw Seidl's score in 1903 and he re-orchestrated the pieces himself in the summer of 1904. He gave them the title Lyric Suite and he explained in a letter to Julius Rцntgen (the dedicatee of the suite) dated 12th December 1904: 'In my view the only questionable thing about the suite is that when the audience has heard Bell Ringing they will think that I have gone mad and the next three pieces are thus condemned beforehand. Well, we'll see. I think the pieces sound very well.'

Grieg's doubts led to his removing Bell Ringing/[i] from the suite and replacing it with the [i]Shepherd's Boy. The piano version of Bell Ringing is a radical composition with harmonic innovations and effects that were to be used by the impressionists. It is a timbral study in which the open fifths played independently by the left and right hands create two moving ribbons of sound, each of which has its own rhythmic focus out of sync with the other. Grieg was trying to give an impression of motion to the stationary bells. But the orchestral version is even more forward-looking. In the piano version, the pedal is cleverly used to veil the sound but in his orchestration Grieg lets the orchestra resound for longer than is possible on the piano and this creates a sort of sighing reverberation.

Bell Ringing is unique in Grieg's жuvre. For many years it was customary to open the Bergen Festival with a performance of the piece.

© Arvid O. Vollsnes 2006

Запись чУдная.

This studio recordings follows the semi-staged concert version by Svein Sturla Hungnes presented in Bergen in 2003 includes the complete incidental music.