Northern Lights and Notes on Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor
The Backstory

A busy summer in Denmark

In the summer of 1868, I took my young family to stay in Søllerød, Denmark, to get some fresh air and write music. I had married my cousin Nina Hagerup in June 1867, and our daughter Alexandra had just been born in April 1868. Nobody had commissioned me to write my Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, so I was simply writing for the joy of it. Try as I might to relax on holiday, I ended up pouring all my energy into the score while the baby was napping.

Borrowing a blueprint

As I worked through that summer, I kept Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54, firmly in the back of my mind. People sometimes claim I copied his opening note for note, since both pieces are in A minor and send the piano tumbling down the keyboard early on. However, I built my opening cascade around a traditional Norwegian melodic interval, which gives the music the unmistakable scent of my homeland. It is a bit like borrowing a friend's coat pattern, but weaving the cloth out of wool from your own sheep.

Three courses at one table

Following that pattern, I divided the concerto into three large sections called movements, which work much like the separate courses of a good dinner. The first course, I. Allegro molto moderato, is a lively conversation where the piano and orchestra trade bold melodies before the pianist shows off completely alone in a long solo passage. Then comes II. Adagio, a calm and dreamy middle section in D-flat major that lets everyone catch their breath. Without even stopping to clear the plates, that quiet mood leads straight into III. Allegro moderato molto e marcato, an energetic finale inspired by an athletic Norwegian folk dance called the halling and the sound of our traditional Hardanger fiddle.

Two names on the title page

When I first began putting all these Norwegian sounds on paper, I wanted to dedicate the work to my late friend and fellow composer Rikard Nordraak. As the piece took shape, though, the pianist Edmund Neupert took a keen interest in preparing the solo part for the stage. Scholars still debate whether Neupert actually wrote part of the big solo cadenza in the first movement or simply suggested a few helpful changes that summer. Either way, when the score was finally printed, I decided to dedicate it to Neupert for championing the music.

Missing my own big night

Neupert sat down at the keyboard for the world premiere on 3 April 1869 at the Casino Theatre in Copenhagen, with Holger Simon Paulli conducting. Even the famous Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein was in the hall, and he kindly lent his own touring piano for the evening. Borrowing a concert grand is a bit more generous than lending a neighbor a cup of sugar, and it helped make the night a triumph. Sadly, I could not even be there to hear a single note of it, because I was stuck in Christiania with my own conducting commitments.

Sight-reading in Rome

A year later, in 1870, I carried my manuscript down to Rome to visit Franz Liszt. To my amazement, Liszt put the handwritten pages on his music stand and played through the whole thing at sight. Watching someone play your hardest music without a minute of practice is enough to make any young composer feel both thrilled and slightly redundant. He was wonderfully enthusiastic about what he heard, which gave me a huge boost of confidence.

Second thoughts about the trumpet

During that visit, Liszt was so excited that he suggested I hand the warm second melody of the first movement to the trumpet instead of the cellos. Because you do not easily ignore advice from a living legend, I actually tried out his idea when I prepared an later edition of the score. In the end, though, a brassy fanfare just did not suit that gentle tune the way a row of cellos did. I quietly changed my mind and gave the melody back to the strings, proving that even the greatest musical minds can get carried away in the moment.

Never quite finished

That little change was hardly the only time I took a pen to my work after it was first published in Leipzig by E. W. Fritzsch in 1872. Over the rest of my life, I went back and revised the score at least seven times, making more than three hundred adjustments to the orchestral parts. I was like a homeowner who cannot walk down his own hallway without straightening a picture frame or repainting a door. I only put the brush down for good when the final version was published shortly before my death in 1907.

One and only

All that tinkering meant that my Piano Concerto in A minor remained the only concerto I ever finished. I did sit down in 1883 to sketch out a second piano concerto in B minor, hoping to give my first one a companion. For one reason or another, the pages never came together the way they had back in Denmark, and I left the project unfinished. Still, if you are only going to build one ship in your life, it is nice to know that it floats as well as this one does.

An afterlife on television

Even without a catchy nickname, the concerto traveled far beyond the concert halls of Europe and took on a life of its own. In 1961, Jimmy Wisner turned my music into a lively pop hit called Asia Minor, which would have surprised me greatly back in Søllerød. Ten years later, in 1971, the British comedians Morecambe and Wise featured the piece in a famous BBC Christmas television sketch alongside conductor André Previn. When a pianist claims to be playing all the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order, I suppose my old score is sturdy enough to survive the joke.