7. Chamber music.

Grieg’s chamber music comprises only three violin sonatas, a cello sonata and two string quartets, one of these unfinished, as well as one movement of a piano trio and part of one movement of a piano quintet. He did not find it easy to enter into the classical spirit which the medium requires, and his lyrical thematic ideas, often self-contained despite their brevity, lent themselves to elaboration only with difficulty. In earlier years he more or less uncritically took over the early Romantic formal principles he found in the music of Schumann and Schubert; he filled these moulds with a profusion of melodic invention, creating works of enduring appeal, but whose individual movements sometimes lack organic coherence and continuity. This problem is particularly noticeable in outer movements, where the demands of thematic concentration and a sure handling of formal ideas are paramount.

The first two violin sonatas (1865 and 1867) demonstrate that Grieg could overcome this original limited control of formal procedures by his fertile melodic, harmonic and rhythmic invention. But in 1877 when he undertook the String Quartet in G minor, his development had brought him to a new perspective, and he was either unable or unwilling to confront compositional problems in the same way as he had done in his youth. He had a clearer grasp of the problems involved and wrote in a letter to his Danish friend Matthison-Hansen in the summer of 1878, after the quartet’s completion:

I have recently finished a string quartet which I still haven’t heard. It is in G minor and is not intended to bring trivialities to market. It strives towards breadth, soaring flight and above all resonance for the instruments for which it is written. I needed to do this as a study. Now I shall tackle another piece of chamber music; I think in that way I shall find myself again. You can have no idea what trouble I had with the forms, but this was because I was stagnating, and this in turn was in part on account of a number of occasional works (Peer Gynt, Sigurd Jorsalfar and other horrors) and in part on account of too much popularity. I have thought of saying ‘Farewell, shadows’ to all this – if it can be done.

Here Grieg put his finger on two of the most significant requirements of the string quartet medium: in both tonal and structural matters he was a pioneer, and his quartet undoubtedly constituted an important precedent for Debussy when he came to write his own G minor quartet ten years later. Among the many interesting harmonic features of Grieg’s quartet is a prominent use of chromatically inflected chords within a functioning sense of tonal unity. But there are other instances of non-functional parallel part-writing with dissonant chords, and also long sustained blocks of sound, stationary chords which form passing consonances and dissonances with the moving parts and which are prolonged until their functional significance is weakened (ex.2). These last two features are of primary importance for impressionism.

The chief formal distinction of the quartet comes from its strong motivic cohesion, not only within each of the four movements, but also connecting them. A melodic fragment from one of Grieg’s op.25 Ibsen songs, Spillemaend (‘Minstrels’) (ex.3), frames the entire work. It appears in the minor mode as the first movement’s introduction (ex.4a) and concludes the piece in the major mode. It is employed with slight modifications as the first movement’s second subject (ex.4b) and as the introduction to the finale. Moreover, it furnishes material for other themes in the quartet: the motif denoted ‘x’ in exx.4a and 4b recurs in the contrasting theme of the second movement (ex.4c), in the principal subject of the third movement (ex.4d) and in the theme of the middle section of the last movement (ex.4e). There is also a connection between motif ‘y’ in ex.4b and the principal themes of the first movement (ex.4f), the second movement (ex.4g) and the middle section of the third movement (ex.4h). Because of this exceptional unity, and the expressive and at times dramatic musical language, the quartet is one of the composer’s most effective and attractive works.

Neither of Grieg’s last two completed chamber works, the Cello Sonata in A minor (1883) and the Third Violin Sonata in C minor (1886–7), is endowed with the quartet’s overall unity, but the latter's first movement shows an even greater degree of thematic concentration than the corresponding movement of the quartet. This work’s sonata movements are among the most boldly original structures in Grieg’s output, but the unfinished string quartet (1891) is relatively conservative. The two movements published (soon after the composer's death) exhibit neither the cohesiveness nor the expressiveness of the earlier quartet.

Grieg, Edvard