Edvard Grieg
Composer

A Scottish Name on a Norwegian Boy

I was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1843, and although my family name sounds Norwegian enough, it began as "Greig", because my great-grandfather came over from Scotland around 1770. My father was a merchant who also served as British vice-consul, and my mother, a music teacher, sat me down at the piano when I was six. In 1858 the violinist Ole Bull, a friend of the family, convinced my parents to send me to the conservatory in Leipzig, where I studied piano until 1862. I will be honest with you, though: I left feeling that my own musical voice had hardly begun to develop.

Finding My Own Voice in Copenhagen

After my first concert as a pianist in Sweden in 1861, I moved to Copenhagen in 1863 and stayed for three years. There I met older musicians like Niels Gade and J. P. E. Hartmann, but it was my friend Rikard Nordraak who made me see how much Norwegian music I had been ignoring. In 1867 I married my cousin Nina Hagerup, a soprano with a wonderful voice, and her singing stayed close to my songs for the rest of my life. In the summer of 1868 I wrote my Piano Concerto in A minor, and when it was first played in Copenhagen in 1869, it was clear that I had finally found what I was looking for.

A Man of Bergen, with Visits to the World

Bergen was always the place I came back to, even when I was busy elsewhere. From 1880 to 1882 I was music director of the Harmonien orchestra there, which is now called the Bergen Philharmonic. In 1885 Nina and I finished building our villa Troldhaugen just outside the city, and I lived there until the end of my life. It sits close to the fjord and the mountains, and I never found a better place to write.

The Music That Made the Trip Home

In 1874 Henrik Ibsen asked me to write music for his play Peer Gynt, and I finished it in 1875, in time for the first performance in Christiania in 1876. It was written for the stage, so later I picked out some of the movements and put them together as concert pieces, and the Peer Gynt Suite No 1 was published in 1888. If you have ever heard a gentle morning melody that slowly brightens, or a tune that begins tiptoeing and grows steadily louder and faster, you have probably heard my suite without knowing it. I am still amazed that a few pages written to go with a play have travelled so far from the theatre.

A Body That Rarely Cooperated

My health was poor from my youth, and in 1860 I survived pleurisy and tuberculosis, which left me with a ruined left lung and a curved spine. I was never a big or strong man, and I had to be careful with my energy for the rest of my life. Still, I kept travelling and performing, because a composer who stays at home is a composer nobody hears. My lungs and my heart complained along the way, but my music mostly refused to sound sickly.

Honours and a Final Farewell

In my later years the honours arrived, and I received honorary doctorates from Cambridge in 1894 and from Oxford in 1906. I kept returning to Troldhaugen between journeys, as I always did, and that was where I felt most like myself. I died in the hospital in Bergen on 4 September 1907, aged 64, and the story goes that my last words were "Well, if it must be so." Somewhere between thirty and forty thousand people came to my funeral, which I find both touching and a little overwhelming.

What Remains in Bergen

My ashes were placed in a mountain crypt near Troldhaugen, and later Nina's were placed beside mine. My house is now a museum, so visitors can walk through the rooms where I worked. In Bergen the concert hall and the music academy both carry my name, which is a lot of responsibility for one person. I hope they were named for the music, and not for the fact that I lived nearby.

What I Would Like to Hand You

If you take only one thing from my music, I would like it to be a feeling of open air. I wrote many small piano pieces, and the Lyric Pieces number 66, so you can listen to them one at a time, whenever you have a quiet moment. You do not need to know anything about music to hear a mountain morning or a quiet evening in them. Start with the Peer Gynt Suite No 1, sit back, and let the north come to you.