THE KRISTIANIA-YEARS

 

The Griegs went from Copenhagen to Kristiania (Oslo) in order to participate in the building of a Norwegian environment for music in the Norwegian capital. It became a period of hard labour, both concerning the establishing of a Norwegian musical-life and concerning their daily income.

The family’s income came from the various jobs Edvard took as a conductor and piano-teacher. Their daughter Alexandra was born on the 10th April 1868. The same year Edvard Grieg composed his brilliant piano concerto in a minor, during a stay at Søllerød in Denmark. This masterpiece became his final breakthrough as a composer, and after this he was reckoned as one of the greatest composers in his time. The concert was first performed in Copenhagen on the 3rd April 1869, with Edmund Neupert as pianist and Holger Simon Pauli as conductor.

The joy of the success as a composer was to be short; on the 21st May 1869 their daughter Alexandra dies from meningitis while visiting their family in Bergen. The fact that they didn’t have a child was maybe the main reason why Edvard and Nina didn’t become a normal couple, but ended up as a two artists that travelled around in Europe without proper roots. This situation became clearer in 1875 when Grieg’s parents died. Now they didn’t have a home in Bergen to come home to. In addition to this, Edvard Grieg felt that he had stagnated artistically. The situation reached a critical point in 1883 when Edvard left Nina. The intervening force that rescued their marriage was Grieg’s incomparable friend Frants Beyer. He persuaded Grieg to reconcile with Nina, and they went to Rome in order to start the reconciling process.

Frants Beyer also convinced Grieg that he needed a proper home, something to come home to after long tours abroad. Beyer helped Grieg to buy a place at Hop, in the outskirts of his hometown Bergen, and in 1885 Edvard and Nina Grieg could move into their villa at Troldhaugen.

Grieg, Ibsen and Bjørnson

On the beginning of the 1870’s Edvard Grieg co-operated extensively with the Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, which led to Grieg composing music to Bjørnson’s poems.

In addition to the songs came the music for the melodrama Bergljot, the choral-work Landkjenning (Land-sighting) and the music for the play Sigurd Jorsalfar from this period. Grieg and Bjørnson’s most ambitious project was a national opera based on the history of the Norwegian king Olav Trygvason. In the beginning the work went forward quickly, but after a while they both lost some of the inspiration and a conflict raised between the two. The conflict concerned what had to be done first; the music or the libretto. When there came to a halt in the work with the opera, Grieg found time to compose music for the Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem Peer Gynt. To start working with Ibsen, before the opera was finished, made Bjørnson so dissatisfied that a conflict rose between Grieg and Bjørnson, a conflict that lasted for almost 16 years.

Edvard Grieg met Henrik Ibsen for the first time in Rome in 1866. Ibsen immediately felt that Edvard Grieg was an artist with unusual musical and intellectual capacities. He and Grieg had the same views on Ibsen’s famous drama Brand. This is one of the reasons why Edvard Grieg was chosen when Ibsen in 1874 planned a staging of Peer Gynt with music. Grieg accepted the task, and started immediately with the greatest enthusiasm. But setting music to Peer Gynt wasn’t as easy as he had thought it would be, but on the 24th February 1876, the play was performed for the first time on Christiania Theater in Oslo, and was an immediate success. Alongside the work with Peer Gynt, Grieg also set music to six poems by Ibsen. In 1888 and in 1893 Grieg published respectively the Peer Gynt Suite I and II, which contained the most popular melodies from the play Peer Gynt. These two suites are among the most played orchestral pieces in our time.

An established composer

As a composer Edvard Grieg was fortunate to be a success while still alive. First of all it was because of his piano-concerto in a-minor and the music for Peer Gynt, but also as a composer of Romances and of small piano-pieces Grieg became famous and relatively wealthy.

Grieg spent much time on travels, and received impressions from the big musical metropolis like Leipzig, Prague, Berlin, London and Paris, as well as the Norwegian mountains. He found new ways of approach to the Norwegian folk music, with the result that in the late 19th century France they spoke about two main stiles in music; the Russian school and the Norwegian School. On his many journeys in Europe he met, and became a good friend of, other composers like Peter Tchaikowsky, Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Frederic Delius, Camille Saint-Saens, Julius Röntgen and more. He influenced other composers, first of all Bela Bartok, but also Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy are influenced by Edvard Grieg.

Even though Edvard Grieg was well paid by Peters Verlag in Leipzig for his compositions, it was said that they flagged at the publishers every time they received a new collection of Lyric Pieces, it was through his tours that Grieg received his main income. He was indefatigable on his concert tours. With only one lung working it is astounding that he managed to cope with the life on tour. Luckily he was able to return to Norway and Troldhaugen for the summers, and through walks in the nature get his energy back before he left for Europe in the autumn. The extensive touring with innumerable concerts, combined with a weak health condition was to put an end to his life. His body couldn’t take more, even though his will to continue absolutely was present. In September 1907 he and Nina planned to participate on the music-festival in Leeds, England. They had left Troldhaugen for the season and lodged at Hotel Norge in Bergen, waiting for the boat that should take them to England via Oslo. Grieg became seriously ill and was hospitalised in Bergen, where he died on September 4th 1907 of chronic exhaustion.

Compositions

“I make no pretensions of being in the same class as Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Their works are eternal wheras I have written for my day and generation…”

Edvard Grieg is seen by most as the master of the piano and song. More than 150 compositions for piano and still more songs make up for his musical output.

His Piano Concerto, The String Quartet and his five sonatas provide clear proof that he also mastered the larger forms.

Likewise, his orchestral works for the music of Peer Gynt, with the symphonic dances in the forefront, arre proof that he was a composer who mastered the orchestral genre. Few composers have written as well as Grieg for strings. The Holberg Suite and various movements of other compositions he wrote for the string section conjure up a fantastic tonality.