Edvard Grieg

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Edvard Grieg : biography

15 June 1843 – 04 September 1907

Death

Edvard couldn’t get rid of heart pain and started to create. His pleurisy intensified because of dampness in his native city and an apprehension that it could turn into tuberculosis appeared. Nina Hagerup estranged more and more. The slow agony lasted for eight years, in 1883 she left Edvard. For three long months Edvard lived alone. But his old friend France Beyer convinced him that he should meet his wife again. “One have very few really close people in the world”, he said to his hopeless friend.

Edvard Grieg and Nina Hagerup reunited and as a sign of reconciliation they went on a tour in Rome, and returning sold their house in Bergen and bought a wonderful farmstead in suburb. Grieg called it “Trollhaugen” – the house of trolls. It was the first house which Grieg really liked.

Grieg became more and more unsociable. He wasn’t interested in life, he left his house only to go on a tour. Edvard and Nina were in Paris, Vienna, London, Prague, Warsaw. During every performance Grieg had a clay toy in his pocket – a small frog. Before the concert he pulled it out and stroked its back. The talisman worked: every concert was an incredible success.

In 1887 Edvard and Nina Hagerup were in Leipzig again. They were invited by an outstanding Russian violinist Adolf Brodsky (afterwards he became the first performer of Grieg’s third violin sonata). Besides Grieg there were two other famous guests – Johannes Brahms and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky became a close family friend, composers began to write to each other. Later in 1905 Edvard wanted to move to Russia but the chaos of Russian-Japanese war and problems with health prevented it. In 1889 in token of protest against Dreifus’ case Grieg abolished his performance in Paris.

Grieg began to have more often problems with his lungs. In spite of it he continued to create and rush to new goals. In 1907 the composer were going to have a tour in England. They stayed in a small hotel in Bergen to wait for ship to London. Edvard felt bad and he had to go to hospital. On the 4th of September in 1907 Edvard Grieg died in his native city.

Musical activity

The first period of creation. 1866-1874

From 1866 till 1874 the intense period of musical, composing and performing period lasted. In autumn of 1866 Edvard Grieg organized a concert – a report about achievements of Norwegian composers – in the capital of Norway Christiania (Oslo). Grieg’s piano and violin sonatas, songs of Nordraak and Kjerulf (on Bjorson’s texts) were performed on this concert. This concert allowed Grieg to became a conductor of the Christiania philharmonic society. Eight years Grieg spent working intensely and it brought him many creative victories. Grieg’s conducting activity had a character of musical education. Symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Schumann, Schubert’s compositions and Mendelssohn’s oratorio, Wagner’s operas sounded on his concerts. Grieg paid big attention to performing the compositions of Scandinavian composers.

In 1871 Grieg with Johan Svendsen organized the society for musicians which aim was to raise activity of concert life of the city, reveal creative possibilities of Norwegian musicians. The approaching to leading representatives of Norwegian poetry and prose was considerable fact for Grieg. It joined the composer in general activity for national culture. Grieg’s creative work reached full maturity. He wrote a piano concert (1868) and the second violin and piano sonata (1867), the first notebook of “Lyric plays” which became the favourite kind of piano music for him. Grieg wrote a lot of songs at that time, some of them were written on Ansersen, Bjornson and Ibsen’s texts.

When he was in Norway he met the world of national art which became the source of his own creative work. In 1869 the composer familiarized himself with a classical collection of Norwegian musical folklore which was made up by a famous composer and folklore expert Lindeman (1812-1887). An immediate result of it was a cycle of “Norwegian national songs and dances for piano”. It consists of favourite national dances hailing and springdance, different comic and lyric, labour and peasant songs. An academician Asafiev successfully named these songs “sketches of songs”. This cycle was a creative laboratory for Grieg: when he touched national songs he found methods of musical composition which were rooted in national art. Only two years separated the second violin sonata from the first. Nevertheless the second sonata “has richness and variety of themes and freedom of its development” as critics said.