Programme note
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Symphony in C minor
Allegro molto
Adagio espressivo
Intermezzo
Allegro energico
Finale: Allegro molto vivace
When Grieg wrote “must never be performed” on the manuscript of his C minor Symphony, should that have been regarded as the end of the matter? Was he dissatisfied with the symphony because he had misgivings about the actual quality of the music, or simply because it represented what he called “a vanished Schumann-period of my life”?
It was the Danish composer Niels Gade who, in 1863, suggested to the twenty-year-old Grieg that he should try his hand at a symphony. According to his own later account in a newspaper interview, Grieg began work fired with enthusiasm, and had the first movement complete and fully scored in two weeks. The rest of the work took him considerably longer, and the score was not finished until May 1864. It received two complete performances during the next three years. In addition, the last three movements were played twice, and in 1865 Grieg made his debut as a conductor directing the two middle movements. These he later transcribed for piano duet and published as Two Symphonic Pieces, Op 14.
It seems to have been in 1867 that Grieg decided to withdraw the work, after hearing Symphony No 1 by Johan Svendsen (1840-1911). The two men were good friends, but in both personal and musical terms they were complete opposites. Grieg appears to have compared his effort unfavourably with Svendsen’s confident handling of the orchestra and of symphonic form, and it was not heard again nor published in his lifetime.
In 1978 the Grieg Hall was opened in the composer’s home city of Bergen, and permission was sought to play the symphony. This was refused by the trustees of the public library’s Grieg Collection, but the matter was taken out of their hands a couple of years later when a photocopy of the manuscript was smuggled into the Soviet Union and the work was played by the Moscow State Radio Orchestra in December 1980. With a ban on future performances now rendered pointless, the symphony was played in the Grieg Hall during the Bergen International Festival the following May.
After a short, dramatic introduction the first movement gets underway with a compactly energetic theme which contrasts with the warmly expansive melody that follows. This combination of lyricism and urgency pervades the whole movement.
The second movement breathes an air of unruffled calm. Two central episodes increase the pace and raise the emotional temperature only slightly, heightening rather than disturbing the overall tranquillity.
The Intermezzo is the movement which most strongly foreshadows the Grieg to come, its robust triple-time rhythms suggesting the traditional dance known as the Springdans which he was to use so often in his later music. The central trio section offers a more easy-going contrast.
The finale returns to the vigour of the first movement, but in C major and a mood of surging optimism (there is even a secondary theme which suggests a fleeting echo of the finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). A hymn-like woodwind theme introduces a quieter central episode, but the symphony ends in a blaze of triumphant energy.
The symphony as a whole is not at all characteristic of Grieg’s mature style, in spite of occasional melodic or harmonic turns which suggest the direction his music would take later. But it does offer a fascinating glimpse of a young composer trying his hand at a large-scale work for the first time, and emerging with credit, even if he did decide that this was not where his future lay.
© Mike Wheeler
