Edvard Grig

[7/4]

September 16, 2007

Respect at Last for Grieg?

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

EDVARD GRIEG was a fiercely proud Norwegian who embraced his role as a leader in the movement to foster a national identity for Norwegian music.

“Norwegian folk life, Norwegian sagas, Norwegian history and above all Norwegian nature have had a profound influence on my creative work ever since my youth,” Grieg wrote in 1900 to an admiring music historian from America.

Yet Grieg routinely lost confidence in his Norwegian-inspired music when it was slighted by patronizing foreign critics, usually Germans, who thought of his works as charming but provincial.

In 1874, immersed in a challenging project to provide incidental music for Ibsen’s epic play “Peer Gynt,” Grieg complained to his closest friend, Frants Beyer, a lawyer and amateur pianist, that working on the score was excruciating. In a letter, Grieg called the rousing and melodramatic orchestral and choral episode “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” “something that I literally can’t stand to listen to because it absolutely reeks of cow pies, ultra-Norwegian-ness and trollish self-sufficiency.” A melancholic, moody man and a thoroughly decent colleague to composers he considered greater talents, he was his own toughest critic.

Grieg died on Sept. 4, 1907, at 64 in Bergen, his beloved hometown, and the centenary is being acknowledged with several programs in New York. Scandinavia House, on Park Avenue, presents a series of concerts and conversations, as well as a one-man show, “My Name Is Grieg, Edvard Grieg,” on Sept. 27. Record releases include “Ballad for Edvard Grieg” on EMI Classics, featuring the superb Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes.

Today Grieg is generally viewed as a composer of enduring popularity but secondary significance. This perception is not quite right on either count.

An audience favorite? His Piano Concerto brought him international attention by his early 30s and remains a staple of the repertory; but if anything, this soulful, brilliant and rhapsodic piece is performed too often for its own good. The two orchestral suites he drew from his “Peer Gynt” music were once standard fare, but I can’t remember the last time I heard a major orchestra play either one in concert.

Grieg wrote 10 volumes of “Lyric Pieces” for piano: short, colorful and imaginative novelties with endearing titles like “Homesickness,” “March of the Trolls” and “The Shepherd Boy.” Though major pianists of the past, like Arthur Rubinstein and Walter Gieseking, played and recorded these enchanting works, Mr. Andsnes seems to have the field to himself now.

A 1993 Deutsche Grammophon recording of 25 Grieg songs by the fine Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter struck many music lovers as a revelation. Grieg wrote dozens of elegant, personal and beautifully conceived songs, and during his lifetime he and his wife, Nina Hagerup, a soprano, had wide success performing them on the recital circuit. But today these works appear only intermittently on vocal programs.

Grieg’s scores are seldom studied in analysis seminars for student composers at American conservatories. This is unfortunate, because his pieces are models of the subtle use of piercing chromatic harmony and the art of spinning elegiac lyrical lines. Grieg was sometimes defensive about his melodic writing, at least when listeners assumed that his tunes were derived from folk song. Though strongly influenced by Norwegian folk music, he maintained that he seldom slavishly copied folk tunes. Instead he fashioned original melodies with a folklike character.

When Édouard Lalo made use of the first piece of Grieg’s “Pictures From Folk Life” in his own “Norwegian Rhapsody” for orchestra, Grieg took “this thievery as a compliment,” he wrote, since the melody was Grieg’s own. If aspiring composers want an example of music that conveys the sound world of a culture and breathes with emotional honesty, they can do no better than Grieg.

The emotional pull of the music got to me when I was a child. Grieg was my first favorite composer. This deeply feeling artist was painfully alert to the ambiguities of life. “Why do your letters make me simultaneously sad and happy?” he wrote Beyer in 1883. “It must be the power of friendship.” Grieg and his wife, though devoted to each other, had periods of alienation and suffered a terrible loss when their only child, Alexandra, died at 13 months.

Grieg’s melancholy suffuses every work, even pieces with a sprightly surface character like the vibrant march “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” which Mr. Andsnes plays with just the right balance of exuberance and wistfulness on the recent EMI release.

But many music historians and critics judge the significance of a composer’s work by his skill at structuring large forms. That was not Grieg’s strength. In his youth he went to a German conservatory, as composers were expected to do in the 19th century, to learn from the pedagogues who considered themselves the safekeepers of the craft. But Grieg could never quite master that particular discipline.

He wrote a symphony when young, but later disavowed the piece. (It has been recorded several times.) And though he thought all his life about composing a great Norwegian opera, he never came close to doing so. The “Peer Gynt” music, which includes ravishing songs and choruses, suggests what such an opera might have been like.

All the music to “Peer Gynt” can be heard in a 2005 Bis recording, performed with urgency and color by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bergen Vocal Ensemble and soloists, conducted by Ole Kristian Ruud. The recording includes excerpts of the play spoken by actors in Norwegian to place the incidental pieces in a dramatic context. (The Bergen Philharmonic will appear at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 6, conducted by its music director, Andrew Litton, in a program including the Grieg Piano Concerto, with André Watts as soloist.)

Grieg’s sole complete and surviving string quartet, an agitated, episodic and captivating work that anticipates Debussy with its plush impressionistic harmonic language, is finally starting to claim a place in the repertory. And Grieg was very proud of his three sizable sonatas for violin and piano, impetuous works that compel your attention even if they do not quite hang together.

In letters to his parents written in 1870, the 26-year-old Grieg tells of a gratifying visit with the titanic Liszt in Rome. At the piano, Grieg played through his own Violin Sonata No. 2, trying gamely to incorporate the violin part, until Liszt took over and showed him how to do it. But his account of Liszt’s comments (“Ah, how daring!,” “I like this,” “Let me hear it again”) suggests that Liszt responded enthusiastically to flashes and moments in the sonata, not necessarily to the entire work. Some would say that Liszt was not such a master of long form either; his piano sonata and concertos and his orchestral works have unconventional, if effective, structures.

The truly valuable item on Mr. Andsnes’s disc is a new recording of Grieg’s Ballade in G minor (Op. 24). The rest of the album consists of previously released selections: Mr. Andsnes’s scintillating and Apollonian account of the Piano Concerto, with Mariss Jansons conducting the Berlin Philharmonic (my choice for the best recording available), originally released in 2003; and six of the “Lyric Pieces,” taken from Mr. Andsnes’s award-winning 2002 album of 24 “Lyric Pieces,” recorded on Grieg’s piano at his home, now a museum, outside Bergen.

In the 20-minute ballade Grieg somewhat sidestepped the issue of organizing a longer form by casting the work as a set of 14 variations on a Norwegian folk melody. Even a Grieg champion like Mr. Andsnes passed over this piece until recently, thinking it uneven. A problematic concluding section builds to a furious and almost bombastic climax before returning to a final statement of the aching theme.

In his booklet notes Mr. Andsnes explains that he had to figure out technical solutions to some of the awkward piano writing. Now he reveres the piece, as he shows in his nuanced and subtle performance. Without overdoing it, he highlights the Wagnerian resonances in Grieg’s application of chromatic harmony, starting with the main theme and its stepwise descending bass line. In later variations Mr. Andsnes uncovers Chopinesque beauties, Lisztian colors and contrapuntal passages with the grand rigor of a Franck chorale. A somber variation with deep tolling bass tones anticipates Rachmaninoff. And Mr. Andsnes brings clarity and grim resolve to the climactic outburst in the final variation.

Mr. Andsnes will take his advocacy of this score on the road in a recital tour, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall on April 24. To make sense, some pieces need the help of insightful performers. Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge” was long considered unhinged, almost antimusical, until string quartets eventually figured out how to play it.

This is not to compare the Grieg Ballade to the late Beethoven quartets. Grieg’s affecting artistry is of the less-is-more school. Who cares if he never wrote a symphony that satisfied him?

[Larry Kart]

Grig is my second-favorite composer, right after Bethoven.

[JSngry]

What about Sherbert?

[Kalo]

I'm a Johann Sebastian Bah man myself.

[JSngry]

What a sheep.

[7/4]

What about Sherbert?

Isn't he kinda like ice cream or frozen yogurt? I've heard of him.

[7/4]

What a sheep.

Could we freeze it on a stick?