Edvard Grieg photo by Elliot and Fry

World Premiere: April 3, 1869

Most Recent HSO Performance: December 1, 2004

Instrumentation: 2 flutes with second flute doubling on piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 30'

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 (1868)

Edvard Grieg

(Born June 15, 1843 in Bergen, Norway Died there on September 4, 1907)

Grieg completed his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1863. Rather than heading directly home to Norway, however, he settled in Copenhagen to study privately with Niels Gade, at that time Denmark’s most prominent musician and generally regarded as the founder of the modern Scandinavian school of composition. During his three years in that lovely city, Grieg met Rikard Nordraak, another young composer from Norway who was filled with the glowing ambition of establishing a distinctive musical identity for his homeland. His enthusiasm kindled Grieg’s nationalistic interests, and together they established the Euterpe Society to help promote Scandinavian music. Grieg’s concern with folk music grew stronger during the following years, especially when he was left to carry on the Euterpe project alone after Nordraak’s premature death in 1866 at the age of 23. Also during this Danish sojourn, Grieg met Nina Hagerup, a fine singer and his cousin. More than familial affection passed between the two, however, and they soon found themselves in love. Nina’s mother disapproved of the match (“He is nothing. He has nothing. And he makes music no one wants to hear,” was the maternal judgment), and plans for a wedding were postponed.

Back in Norway, Grieg’s creative work was concentrated on the large forms advocated by his Leipzig teachers and by Gade. By 1867, he had produced the Piano Sonata, Op. 7, the first two violin and piano sonatas, a symphony (long unpublished and made available only as recently as 1981), and the concert overture In Autumn. He also carried on his work to promote native music, and he gave an unprecedented concert exclusively of Norwegian compositions in 1866. Its excellent success brought him a notoriety that lifted him to the front rank of Scandinavian musicians: he was appointed conductor of the Philharmonic Society in Christiania (Oslo), had a full schedule of pupils, and was popular as a piano recital artist. As a result of his success, he was able to retrieve his fiancée, Nina, from Copenhagen, and the couple were married in June 1867. The daughter born the following spring was yet another mark of Grieg’s increasingly happy life.

Grieg arranged to have the summer of 1868 free of duties, and he and Nina returned to Denmark for an extended vacation. They deposited the baby with grandparents in Copenhagen, and then went off to a secluded retreat at Sölleröd. It was there that Grieg wrote his Piano Concerto. He thoroughly enjoyed that summer. He slept late, took long walks, ate well, and tipped a glass in the evenings with friends at the local inn. The sylvan setting also spurred his creative energies, and he composed freely for several hours each afternoon. When the couple returned to Norway in the fall, the Concerto was largely completed. He tinkered with the work throughout the winter, and had it ready for its premiere the following April. The piece was well received, but his joy over this success was tempered by the death of his thirteen-month-old daughter only a few weeks later.

One thing that helped Grieg through those dark times was an encouraging letter he received from Franz Liszt. Writing of the Violin Sonata, Op. 8, Liszt praised Grieg as a “strong, creative, inventive, and well-disciplined talent which has only to follow its natural bent to reach even higher levels.” Liszt proffered an invitation for the young Norwegian to visit him. Grieg, with the help of a government grant that had been facilitated by Liszt’s praise, left with Nina to meet Liszt in Rome in the fall of 1869. He wrote long, vivid letters to his parents describing the journey, the Eternal City, and especially the great Liszt, who amazed Grieg by sight-reading the difficult new Concerto. “Not content with just playing,“ Grieg reported, “he, at the same time, converses and makes comments, addressing a bright comment now to one, now to another of the assembled guests, nodding significantly to the right or left, particularly when something pleases him. In the Adagio, and still more in the Finale, he reached a climax, both as to his playing and the praise he had to bestow.... In conclusion, he handed me the manuscript, and said in a particularly cordial tone: ‘Keep steadily on; I tell you, you have the capability, and — do not let them intimidate you.’ ” A proud moment, indeed, for the 26-year-old composer. Liszt had some words of technical advice about the Concerto that Grieg acted upon, but it was this closing admonition that stayed with him throughout his life.

Grieg’s Piano Concerto closed the youthful period of his life that was devoted to large-scale compositions. In 1869, a year after the Concerto was written, he discovered Aeldre og nyere fjeldmelodier, Lindemann’s collection of Norwegian folk tunes. Grieg turned his attention thereafter to the idealization of the folk song in miniature musical works, producing only three compositions of sonata length during his remaining forty years. The Concerto exhibits some of the folk-influenced characteristics that mark Grieg’s later works, but it is also firmly entrenched in the German Romantic tradition of Schumann’s Piano Concerto.

The first movement opens with a bold summons by the soloist. The main theme is given by the woodwinds and taken over almost immediately by the piano. A flashing transition, filled with skipping rhythms, leads to the second theme, a tender cello melody wrapped in the warm harmonies of the trombones. An episodic development section, launched by the full orchestra playing the movement’s opening motive, is largely based on the main theme in dialogue. The recapitulation returns the earlier themes, after which the piano displays a tightly woven cadenza. The stern introductory measures are recalled to close the movement.

Hans von Bülow called Grieg “the Chopin of the North,” and that appellation is nowhere more justified than in the nocturnal second movement. A song filled with sentiment and nostalgia is played by the strings and rounded off by touching phrases in the solo horn. The soloist weaves elaborate musical filigree above the simple accompaniment before the lovely song returns in an enriched setting. The finale follows almost without pause. Themes constructed in the rhythms of a popular Norwegian dance, the halling, dominate the outer sections of the movement. The movement’s central portion presents a wonderful melodic inspiration, introduced by the solo flute, that derives from the dreamy atmosphere of the preceding movement. The dance rhythms return and gather increasing momentum. A grandiloquent restatement by the full orchestra of the theme of the movement’s central section brings this evergreen work to a stirring close.

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda