From 1858 to 1862, Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg studied at the Leipzig Conservatory, a popular destination for many international music students. While he would later speak disparagingly of the education he received, the conservatory had a lasting impact on some of his most important compositions. His piano teacher, Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel, had been friends with Mendelssohn and Schumann and exposed him to their music. Grieg also heard Clara Schumann perform her husband’s piano concerto, an experience that profoundly impacted him. In a 1905 article in The Independent, Grieg remembered being so captivated by the piece that he gave a fellow student the only manuscript of his early String Quartet in exchange for the Schumann score:

One day a fellow student who admired my creative efforts led me into temptation. He had a complete score of Schumann’s piano concerto, which he had written out himself, and which at that time had not yet been published except for a piano reduction and separate orchestral parts. “If you will give me your quartet,” he said one day, “I will give you the score of Schumann’s concerto.” I could not resist the offer. I still think with secret dread about the fact that my abortive early work very likely still exists somewhere in one of the countries of southern Europe.

Grieg’s account may not be entirely accurate; he presented a concert shortly after his return to Bergen that included the string quartet in question. However, his point about the concerto’s influence over him still obtains. Listeners hear numerous echoes of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in Grieg’s, yet at the same time, the concerto is highly original. The piano’s opening material features a three-note repeating motive—also featured prominently in Norwegian folk music—that appears in many of Grieg’s compositions and is known as Grieg’s fingerprint. The concerto’s instrumental color is also distinctively Grieg’s and is an aspect of his composition that Liszt and Tchaikovsky particularly admired (Liszt even gave Grieg a few tips on orchestration). The work was beloved from its first performance. According to its first soloist, Edmund Neupert, “the three dangerous critics...applauded with all their might,” and Grieg’s friend Benjamin Fedderson reported a “thunderous chorus of applause” throughout the work. Though Grieg continued to revise it over the next three decades, the Piano Concerto’s popularity with its audiences remains unchanged.