Programme note
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Suite No 1 from Peer Gynt, Op 46 (1881)
I: Morning Mood
II: The Death of Åse
III: Anitra’s Dance
IV: In the Hall of the Mountain King
Growing up in the small city of Bergen in Norway, far removed from the dominant Austro-Germanic network of musicians and composers, the odds of Grieg going on to achieve widespread success as a composer were stacked against him. But even at a very early age, Grieg remembered the thrill of playing with new ideas at the piano, recalling ‘the wonderful, mystical satisfaction of stretching one’s arms up to the piano and bringing forth – not a melody. Far from it! No, it had to be a chord… When I had discovered this my rapture knew no bounds.’
Grieg’s fortunes were turned around in the summer of 1858 when the virtuoso violinist, Ole Bull, came to visit his family in Bergen. After listening to Grieg perform some of his early compositions, Bull exclaimed: ‘You are going to Leipzig to become an artist!’ The following autumn, Grieg enrolled in the Conservatory at Leipzig, and in the years that followed he would study the works of the Austro-Germanic mainstream: Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Wagner. But although he was an able student, Grieg’s musical interests lay elsewhere, rooted in the folk music of his homeland. When, in 1863, Grieg spent some time working alongside fellow Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak, everything fell into place: ‘The scales fell from my eyes… For the first time I learned through him to know the northern folk tunes and my own nature. We made a pact to combat the effeminate Gade-Mendelssohn mixture of Scandinavism, and boldly entered upon the new path along which the northern school at present pursues its course.’
Grieg’s new mission to promote the national music of Norway gave him a distinctive edge among his contemporaries, and the premiere of his Piano Concerto in 1869 earned him the widespread success he had long been seeking. Around the same time, Grieg met the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, whose most famous work, Peer Gynt, was to be restaged a few years later. Alternating between hard-edged realism and fantastical folklore, moving in and out of consciousness as the drama unfolds, the play follows a lazy farmhand named Peer, who wastes his days in dreams and brawls, and whose selfishness lands him in all sorts of misadventures, journeying from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert. Feeling that he and Grieg shared common artistic values, Ibsen asked Grieg to write some incidental music to accompany the play on its revival in 1876. The music was such a triumph that Grieg later arranged eight of the most popular movements into two suites, the first of which is performed today. Lyrical, evocative and strongly grounded in the folksong of Norway, Grieg was largely delighted with his work, with just one exception which he lamented in a letter to a friend: ‘I have also written something for the scene in the hall of the mountain King – something that I literally can't bear listening to because it absolutely reeks of cow-pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism, and trollish self-satisfaction! But I have a hunch that the irony will be discernible.’
© Jo Kirkbride
