2. Nationalism and fame, 1864–79.

With the latter part of 1864 his artistic life entered a new phase. He had been brought up in the environment of middle-class Norwegian urban society, with its predominantly Danish speech, traditions and cultural outlook. Except for the years spent at Leipzig his musical associations were Danish in character; he knew next to nothing of the Norwegian nationalist tendencies of his time and had scarcely heard any genuine Norwegian folk music. During that summer, however, he stayed with Ole Bull at Osterøy, played the classics with him, and caught some of the violinist’s enthusiasm for Norwegian peasant culture; and on a second visit to Copenhagen in the autumn and winter of 1864–5 he met the man on whom the Norwegian nationalists set their chief hope for a national school of music. Rikard Nordraak was 22 at that time, had been working in association with Bjørnson, had produced incidental music for the dramatist’s Sigurd Slembe, and was at work on Maria Stuart i Skotland. After their meeting Nordraak dragged Grieg round to his lodgings and sang and played him fragments of these and other examples of his own work. Thenceforward Grieg felt that his path was clear: it was that of a musician dedicated to Romantic nationalism. He acknowledged his debt to Nordraak in the Humoresker for piano op.6, the first of his compositions to show the influence of Norwegian folk idioms. He also joined Nordraak, Horneman and Matthison-Hansen in founding a society, known as Euterpe, for the promotion of Scandinavian music. It was some time, however, before Grieg’s reorientation towards a distinctively Norwegian style was complete. His next important works, the Piano Sonata op.7 and the First Violin Sonata op.8, both written in Denmark in the summer of 1865, still show Danish affinities.

A plan for a tour of Germany and Italy in the company of Nordraak was frustrated by Nordraak’s fatal illness. Grieg, after visiting Leipzig and taking part in performances of the two sonatas at a conservatory concert, reached Rome towards the end of the year. The chief events of his winter’s stay there were his first meeting with Ibsen, the composition of the fantasy I höst (‘In Autumn’) op.11, based on the song Efteraarsstormen (‘Autumn Storms’) op.18 no.4, and the news of Nordraak’s death in Berlin. The manuscript of Grieg’s march in memory of Nordraak is dated 6 April 1866, a month after the young man’s death.

Grieg now set himself in earnest to make a livelihood in his own country. After failing in attempts to obtain the post of musical director at the Christiania Theatre, of which Bjørnson had recently been placed in charge, he gave a concert of Norwegian music (songs by Nordraak, Kjerulf and himself, and Humoresker and the two sonatas) on 15 October 1866. Given with Nina Hagerup and the violinist Wilma Neruda, this concert resulted in the acceptance of Grieg as one of the foremost young musicians in the country: he obtained pupils and was made conductor of the Philharmonic Society. In collaboration with the critic Otto Winter-Hjelm, he launched a project for a Norwegian Academy of Music, which opened on 14 January 1867. On 11 June he and Nina Hagerup were married. In July, the second Violin Sonata op.13 was completed, and dedicated to Johan Svendsen, who arrived from Leipzig in October to conduct his Symphony in D major, a work which made a profound impression on Grieg and no doubt weighed with him in deciding to relinquish further attempts to write on a symphonic scale.

Before the end of 1867 Grieg had composed the first set of Lyric Pieces for piano (op.12). Signs of his awakened nationalism are apparent in the titles of no.6 (Norsk), no.5 (Folkevise) and no.8 (Faedrelandssang), to the last of which Bjørnson was soon afterwards to write patriotic verses. In June 1868 Grieg and Nina, with their two-month-old daughter Alexandra, again sought the milder air of Denmark, where, at Søllerød, the Piano Concerto in A minor was composed.

In the autumn of 1868 Grieg, back at Christiania, advertised a further series of subscription concerts and persevered in his attempts to secure a financial subsidy for further travel and study. He received support from Liszt, who wrote at the end of the year warmly commending his earlier Violin Sonata (op.8) and inviting him to visit Weimar. The following summer was spent on the family estate at Landås, where the op.18 songs were completed. It was there that Grieg first came across a copy of Lindeman’s folksong collection, Aeldre og nyere norske fjeldmelodier (‘Older and Newer Mountain Melodies’), and thus gained a new insight into Norwegian folk music; his piano versions of 25 of Lindeman’s melodies were published as op.17. In the autumn of 1869 the Griegs were able at last to set out on a journey to Italy with the help of a state bursary. While in Rome Grieg called on Liszt and played him the Second Violin Sonata, the Humoresker, part of the Piano Sonata and the Nordraak march. On a subsequent occasion Liszt played through the Piano Concerto at sight and gave Grieg the warmest encouragement.

During the two years following his return to Christiania in the autumn of 1870 Grieg collaborated with Bjørnson in a number of works, setting his Foran sydens kloster (‘Before a Southern Convent’), from Arnljot Gelline, as a cantata for female voices, his Bergliot as an accompanied declamation, his Landkjending (‘Land-Sighting’) as a cantata for male voices with orchestra and organ, and a number of his shorter lyrics as songs. He also made his first attempts at writing for the stage. His music to Bjørnson’s Sigurd Jorsalfar was written at the beginning of 1872 and performed in May at the Christiania Theatre. Composer and author then began to make plans for an opera on a Norwegian subject.

In the meantime Grieg continued to give a considerable part of his time and energies to conducting and concert-giving, and in the autumn of 1871 he helped found the Christiania Music Society for the promotion of orchestral music. On 10 July 1873 Bjørnson sent him the first three scenes of an opera text, Olav Trygvason, on which he set to work at once, requesting Bjørnson to let him have the remainder of the text without delay. A long correspondence followed, with composer and author reproaching each other for hindering the completion of the opera. Meanwhile, in January 1874, Grieg received from Ibsen an invitation to write incidental music for Peer Gynt, and he accepted the commission believing that only a few fragments of music were required. Finally both he and Bjørnson lost interest in the operatic project.

The Peer Gynt music occupied Grieg for a much longer period than he had expected. Having obtained a further government grant giving him freedom to compose, he left Christiania in the beginning of June 1874 to spend the summer in the west. Landås had been sold, but a convenient place for working had been found for him at Sandviken, and there – and during the following autumn in Denmark and later in Leipzig – he laboured at Peer Gynt, completing the score by July 1875. Its first performance, with Ibsen’s drama in its revised stage version, took place on 24 February 1876.

In August that year Grieg was at Bayreuth attending the first performance of Wagner’s Ring, about which he sent a series of critical notices to the journal Bergensposten. Second piano parts to four of Mozart’s sonatas were written during the winter of 1876–7. The influence of an ever-growing love of the scenery of his native country began to show itself more markedly in his compositions at this period. In June 1877 he took a lodging at Lofthus, in the beautiful Hardanger district, and there he set Langs ei å (‘Beside the River’), a poem by the peasant poet A.O. Vinje. So much inspired and invigorated by his surroundings did he find himself that he prolonged his stay in the district through the winter and until the autumn of the following year. During this time he completed the folksong choruses for male voices op.30, Den bergtekne (‘The Mountain Thrall’) op.32 for solo baritone, two horns and strings, the String Quartet in G minor op.27, the Albumblade op.28 and the Improvisata over to norske fokeviser op.29.

Thereafter he wrote nothing for more than a year. But as his periods of artistic sterility, which he himself attributed to chronic ill-health, tended to increase, his reputation as composer and exponent of his own works expanded both at home and abroad. During the winter of 1878–9 the new quartet was performed in Cologne and Leipzig, and royalty patronized a concert given in Copenhagen on 30 April 1879, when Grieg conducted the first performance of The Mountain Thrall and played the solo part in his Piano Concerto.

Grieg, Edvard