Edvard Grieg

Born: June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway
Died: September 4, 1907, in Bergen, Norway

String Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 27

• Composed: 1877-1878
  
• Premiere: October 1878 in Cologne by the Heckmann Quartet
  
• Duration: approx. 35 minutes

By 1877, Grieg had established his reputation as a composer with the piano concerto, the incidental music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and a growing body of well-received songs and piano miniatures, and he felt the need to find a quiet place away from his increasingly frequent concert tours and conducting responsibilities to carry on his creative work. He settled on a summer retreat in the village of Børve, perched atop the scenic Sørfjord east of his hometown and professional base, Bergen. “You couldn’t help feeling well if you were here,” he wrote to the young composer August Winding. “Air so light one feels like a feather.” Grieg loved socializing with the country folk around Børve, listening to their songs and stories and playing them his latest pieces based on the traditional Norwegian idioms. 

Before he left Børve at the end of summer 1877, he had begun sketching out a most challenging work—a string quartet, traditionally one of music’s most tightly structured and intellectually rigorous forms, into which he would incorporate the distinctive but essentially simple gestures of Norwegian folk song. “It is not meant for small minds,” he warned his friend Gottfred Matthison-Hansen. “It aims at breadth, vigor, flight of imagination and, above all, fullness of tone for the instruments for which it is written.” For the motto theme that was to be woven throughout the quartet, he chose one of his own songs—Spillmaend (“Minstrels,” Op. 25, No. 1)—with a text by Ibsen that tells of the Hulder, the spirit of the Norwegian waterfall who can reveal the deepest secrets of the art to musicians, but only against the chance that the minstrel might lose his happiness and peace of mind in exchange. Grieg worked on the quartet throughout the winter, regularly soliciting technical advice on string writing from violinist Robert Heckmann, who had agreed to give the premiere with his ensemble and accept the dedication of the score; the piece was finished at Børve in July 1878 and introduced by Heckmann in Cologne four months later. The quartet is among Grieg’s tiny handful of abstract, multi-movement compositions, which otherwise include just an early (and withdrawn) symphony, the piano concerto, piano sonata and three sonatas for violin and one for cello. A second quartet, sketched in 1891, was broken off after only two movements and left incomplete.

The G Minor Quartet begins with a bold, introductory statement of the motto theme, from which is generated much of the music that follows. The main body of the first movement begins with the quick tempo and the presentation of the principal subject, an agitated theme constructed from short, close-interval phrases joined into an expansive melody. The second theme is a fast but quiet transformation of the motto. The development section is built largely from permutations of the main theme, into which are inserted frequent references to the motto. A full recapitulation and a large coda, based on the motto, round out the movement. The Romanze is at once a fine example of Grieg’s lyrical gifts and perhaps his most daring formal experiment. Rather than following a traditional classical structure, the movement is made from the juxtaposition of two starkly contrasted types of music: the first, given at the outset by the cello, is sweetly melodic and simply accompanied; the other is slashing and tempestuous and almost febrile in character. These two musical streams are brought into increasingly close alternation as the music unfolds, until a leisurely return of the sweet melody of the opening brings the movement to a close. The outer sections of the Intermezzo, a tribute to the dance music of Norway, are based on a vibrant tune of swinging energy and dynamic cross-accents, while the central Trio, leaner in texture, uses a plain, square-phrased, duple-meter melody. In the Finale, the motto theme appears at the beginning and end to frame a sparkling saltarello, the ancient Mediterranean dance that Grieg had learned on his travels through Italy during his student days in the mid-1860s.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda