If Edvard Grieg and Mark Twain got into a knife fight, who would win? Twain, probably. But once Grieg sat down at the piano, there would be no contest. Did this guy ever write a bad note?
Celebrated as Norway’s greatest composer, Grieg embraced his native folk music, lovingly elevated it, and infused it with an intriguing delicacy, melancholy, and yes, lyricism. Like listening to a Nordic Schubert, you never know when a cloud will break across the fjords. Or perhaps, more to the point, a sunny jaunt across a field of wildflowers will be disrupted by an encounter with a troll.
The most common criticism leveled against Grieg is that he was essentially a miniaturist. You might as well attack Chopin for being a sloppy orchestrator.
From his letters, we know that Grieg himself was frustrated by his propensity for shorter works. “Nothing that I do satisfies me,” he wrote, “and though it seems to me that I have ideas, they neither soar nor take form when I proceed to the working out of something big.”
Claude Debussy was only too happy to kick him while he was down. He famously derided Grieg’s output as so many “pink bonbons filled with snow.” Yet it has been convincingly demonstrated that Debussy owed more than a little to his Norwegian colleague in the writing of his String Quartet in G minor and in some of his own piano miniatures. What is it about Grieg that so galled the Gauls?
Myself, I could listen to Grieg all day. In fact, I think I will.
Neeme Järvi conducts the four “Symphonic Dances.” I used the second of these as signature music for an overnight show, back when I was starting out in community radio.
Emil Gilels plays a selection of the “Lyric Pieces.” Gilels hedged when asked to make the recording, fearing that no one would buy it. Of course, it went on to become one of the great piano classics.
The husband-and-wife team of Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires whip up a fair amount of unsuspected passion in the Violin Sonatas. Here’s the full album.
“The First Meeting,” sung by Barbara Bonney
Six Songs, Op. 48
“Solveig’s Song” from “Peer Gynt”
Arturo Benedetto Michelangeli shatters the stereotype of Grieg as “provincial” composer with this volcanic performance of the Piano Concerto in A minor:
PHOTO: Grieg is great! Happy birthday, master!
