Music
Grieg is renowned as a nationalist composer, drawing inspiration from Norwegian folk music. Early works include a symphony (which he later suppressed) and a piano sonata. He also wrote three sonatas for violin and piano and a cello sonata. His many short pieces for piano – often based on Norwegian folk tunes and dances – led some to call him the "Chopin of the North".
The Piano Concerto is his most popular work. Its champions have included the pianist and composer Percy Grainger, a personal friend of Grieg who played the concerto frequently during his long career. An arrangement of part of the work made an iconic television comedy appearance in the Christmas 1971 Morecambe and Wise Show, conducted by André Previn.
Grieg also composed "Peer Gynt Suite- 'In the Hall of the Mountain King'". It was used as incidental music for the play "Peer Gynt".In this piece of music, Peer steals the bride at a wedding. The angry guests chase him and Peer falls, hitting his head on a rock. He wakes up in a mountain surrounded by trolls. The music represents the angry trolls taunting Peer, and gets louder each time the theme repeats. The music ends with Peer escaping from the mountain. https://s3.amazonaws.com/engrade-myfiles/4055174248588539/03-Grieg.pdf
Some of the Lyric Pieces (for piano) are also well-known, as is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, a play that Grieg found to be an arduous work to score properly. In a 1874 letter to his friend Frants Beyer, Grieg expressed his unhappiness with what is now considered one of his most popular compositions from Peer Gynt, In the Hall of the Mountain King: "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."
Grieg's popular Holberg Suite was originally written for the piano, and later arranged by the composer for string orchestra. Grieg wrote songs, in which he set lyrics by poets Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and others. Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky used a theme by Grieg for the variations with which he closed his Third String Quartet. Norwegian pianist Eva Knardahl recorded the composer's complete piano music during 1978 and 1980. The recordings were reissued in 2006 on 12 compact discs by BIS Records.
Read more about this topic: Edvard Grieg
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“Your remark that clams will lie quiet if music be played to them, was superfluous—entirely superfluous.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Opens its eight bells out, skulls’ mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.”
—Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)