3. Maturity, 1880–1907.

The spring of 1880 brought new creative vigour, with the completion of the songs to words by Vinje (op.33). Grieg also became for a time closely associated with the music of his native city, as conductor of the Bergen Harmonic Society (1880–82). This was the last official appointment he was to hold. Freedom from such commitments enabled him to embark, at the beginning of 1883, on a second piano concerto, commissioned by the firm of Peters but never finished, and to complete the Cello Sonata op.36, the Walzer-Capricen for piano duet op.37 and a second set of Lyric Pieces op.38.

1883 was a critical year in his life. His relationship with his wife was strained, and he was dissatisfied with his work as a composer. In the summer he left, possibly not intending to return to Nina. He paid another visit to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal, and the following autumn began a long concert tour that included visits to Weimar, Dresden, Leipzig, Meiningen, Breslau, Cologne, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Arnhem, The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Meanwhile Nina moved in with their friends Marie and Frants Beyer, who did their best to reconcile the couple. They succeeded. In January 1884 the Griegs and the Beyers met in Leipzig, and the Griegs then spent four months together in Rome.

Part of the summer of 1884 was spent executing commissions for the Holberg bicentenary celebrations. Grieg’s contribution included a male-voice cantata and the suite Fra Holbergs tid (‘From Holberg’s Time’), written originally for piano and scored for strings the following year. He now resolved to settle altogether in the Westland and began to build the house at Troldhaugen that was to be his permanent home for the rest of his life. The Griegs took up residence there in April 1885.

For the next 20 years the pattern of Grieg’s life was subject to few variations. Spring and early summer were usually given up to composition or the revision of older work. Later in the summer he would make a tour on foot in the mountains, often in the company of Frants Beyer, a neighbour as well as an intimate friend, or with visitors from abroad like Julius Röntgen or Percy Grainger. Autumn and winter were spent in the lengthy concert tours which Grieg, in spite of his delicate constitution, seemed unable to resist. One reason for this was undoubtedly the great success he achieved as conductor and pianist – a success he shared with his wife, for though Nina had no great voice, she sang her husband’s songs with incomparable feeling and grace. Grieg performed only his own music, and, with few exceptions, notably in Leipzig, gained positive reviews. A particular effect of his extensive travels, and of his wide circle of friends and correspondents, was that he gained a more cosmopolitan outlook than he had adopted at the outset of his career, when he had worked under strong nationalist influences.

What may be described as a second nationalist period began, however, in the 1890s, with a fresh exploitation of Norwegian folk idioms in characteristic miniatures like Gjaetergut (‘Herdboy’) and Klokkeklang (‘Bellringing’) from the fifth set of Lyric Pieces op.54, as well as in the folksong variations for two pianos op.51, the 19 Norske folkeviser for piano (on folksongs collected by Beyer in the Jotunheimen mountains) op.66, the children’s songs op.61 and, most distinguished of all, the Haugtussa song cycle op.67, on poems by Arne Garborg.

During this time numerous distinctions were conferred on Grieg from abroad, including honorary doctorates from Cambridge and Oxford and membership of the Institut de France, and prominent musicians he met included Tchaikovsky and Brahms. He also produced a certain amount of critical writing, contributing articles on Mozart, Schumann and Verdi to foreign journals. The culmination of his efforts to raise standards of performance and criticism in Norway came in 1898, when the Norwegian Music Festival was held at Bergen, and he, Svendsen and other Norwegian composers shared with Mengelberg the conducting of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw orchestra which he, in defiance of chauvinistic opinion, had insisted on inviting for the occasion.

In September 1899 he conducted his music to Bjørnson’s Sigurd Jorsalfar at the opening of the National Theatre at Christiania. During 1900 his health deteriorated; yet by the 1902–3 season his concert tours were taking him as far afield as Prague, Warsaw and Paris, and his birthday was celebrated by a great concourse of friends, Bjørnson making a notable speech on the occasion. The most interesting of his compositions during these final years were the Slåtter, or peasant fiddle-tunes, written down by him and the violinist Johan Halvorsen from the playing of Knut Dale, one of the exponents of the traditional style of playing on the Hardanger fiddle; these tunes he arranged for piano as op.72. His last work, Fire salmer (‘Four Psalms’), was based on folk melodies and written in the summer and autumn of 1906.

Finding that the climate of the Westland had an adverse effect on the pulmonary disorders from which he increasingly suffered, he took rooms in a Christiania hotel during the winter of 1906–7. Even in the last year of his life, however, he was able to make a tour to Copenhagen, Munich, Berlin and Kiel, and he was on the point of leaving for England when he was ordered to hospital, where he died the following day. His funeral was on a national scale; the body was cremated, and in April 1908 the urn containing the composer’s ashes was placed in a rock-hewn recess overlooking the fjord at Troldhaugen.

Grieg, Edvard