Composed 1897; Duration: 30 minutes
First performance of this work by the BPO.
Entering the Leipzig Conservatory was no doubt crucial to the young Edvard Grieg’s development as a composer. Still, he felt constrained by the rigorous and entrenched Germanic tradition, and longed for an individual voice informed by his Norwegian home. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, Grieg was something of an artist figurehead for Norway, furthering the goals of cultural and political autonomy, touring as a concert pianist, and composing music with Norwegian themes.
Grieg’s reputation as a composer who utilized Norwegian folk melodies may have been impossible without the work of his lesser-known countryman, organist and composer Ludvig Mathias Lindeman (1812-1887). Having collected and published more than three thousand folk melodies, Lindeman provided crucial material for Grieg, notably for the 1897 Symphonic Dances. While initially conceived as a keyboard work, it grew in scope to full orchestral proportions. However, he avoids the traditional continental trappings of the symphonic form by favoring movements that flow freely as fantasias with minimal development of folk melodies.
The halling is a traditional rural dance performed at parties by men who compete with acrobatic leaping movements. The opening movement portrays the up-tempo dance with the bravado of brass and dexterous woodwinds trading a raucous melody. Central to the movement is a dreamy, picturesque landscape in which a plaintive melody dramatically grows as if portraying the spacious, scenic valleys where the dance originated.
The Allegretto opens with a gentle oboe solo. While the scene is bucolic and comforting, a contrasting section captures an excitement akin to the opening movement. This theme opens the third movement, but the Allegro is now in an airy triple meter. Here, the springar, a dance found in the inland Hedmark region, builds into a boisterous foot-stomping affair. However, most of the movement is wrapped up in a pastoral scene that glides with natural wonderment.
The finale is the most formally complex, opening on a dramatic motif. A persistent figure builds overlapping layers of tense colors, overshadowed by threatening brassy outbursts. The storm subsides, ushering in a welcome love song draped in sunbeams. Grieg is noted as having said, “Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted... to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.” While Grieg’s masters in Leipzig may have preached a drama that unfolds in complex formal design, in his Symphonic Dances, he seems content to let the drama of Norwegian landscapes speak for themselves.