Denmark played a key part in the life of Edvard Grieg. Not only did but he get married in Copenhagen to his wife of Danish extraction but it was in a cottage in Søllerød, north of the Danish capital, now housing the local museum, that he wrote his world-famous Piano Concerto - one of the greatest 19th century romantic piano works - surely the best loved piece of Scandinavian music ever - almost 140 years ago.
 
Of Norwegian of Scottish and Danish blood, Grieg, born in Bergen in 1843, was a frequent visitor to Copenhagen, spending all in all 10 years of his life in the Danish capital. He was descended from Alexander Grieg, a Scotsman, who settled in Bergen in the late 18th century, prospered and became British consul.
 
Grieg first visited Copenhagen in 1863 on a short stopover prior to spending four years studying music at Leipzig Conservatoire, his last visit was in 1907 for treatment at Skodsborg Sanatorium on the coast north of Copenhagen where he underwent treatment for his pleurisy only months before his death at the age of 64. Grieg, who wrote 74 works with opus number and a further 50-60 unnumbered pieces, is buried at his home in Troldhaugen near Bergen, today a museum to Norway's greatest composer.
 
Grieg's sojourn at Leipzig was followed by three happy years in the 1860s in Copenhagen, then the only Scandinavian city rich in European cultural life on an international level - the musical capital of the Nordic region. Here Grieg worked with the Danish romantic composer Niels W. Gade, a disciple of Mendelssohn and Scandinavia's most important musician at the time and mixed in musical circles, meeting and befriending Danish composers Carl Frederik Emil Horneman and Johann Peter Emilius Hartmann, compatriot Rikard Nordraak, who wrote the Norwegian national anthem and much later Carl Nielsen, the greatest Danish composer. It was Hans Christian Lumbye, the legendary musical director of Tivoli Gardens, known as the Nordic Strauss for his effervescent waltzes, polkas, mazurkas and marches, who conducted the first performance of parts of Grieg's Symphony in C minor in June 1864, a youthful work hastily withdrawn by Grieg who instructed that it "must never be performed" but revived in the 1980s and now published in the Grieg Complete Edition.
 
In Copenhagen Grieg wrote his only Piano Sonata and first Violin Sonata, taking them to his idol Gade for approval before the pieces were performed. At this time Grieg met and was entranced by his Danish cousin Nina Hagerup, with whom he had grown up in Bergen but who had since moved back to Denmark. Nina was an excellent pianist with a beautiful voice that fascinated the Norwegian composer and the couple became engaged in 1865 - Grieg's present to his fiancée taking the form of four songs with texts by his friend the fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen - Melodies of the Heart Opus 5. Grieg and Nina - whom he called "the only true interpreter" of his songs - married in St. Johannes Church on St Hans Torv in Copenhagen's Nørrebro quarter in June 1867.
 
The Griegs spent the summer of 1868 in leafy, idyllic Søllerød at the cottage called Mothsgaarden, which still exists today as Søllerød Museum. Opposite Mothsgaarden lies the ancient 17th century hostelry of Søllerød Kro where Grieg would pop in for refreshments during breaks from composing his concerto.
 
It was here in Søllerød, a suburb of north Copenhagen today, that Grieg composed his greatest masterpiece - the Piano Concerto in A minor, Opus 16 - a work abounding in romantic themes, cascading pianism and gushing Nordic lyricism - one of the finest specimens of the entire piano concerto repertoire - even if the fastidious Grieg was never fully satisfied with the work and went on refining it for many years.
 
"It was a stiflingly hot summer (at Mothsgaarden) but I look back on that time with great joy," Grieg wrote. "The sweltering weather was too much for me but I nonetheless felt the urge to get to work so I sat down and wrote a concerto for piano and orchestra which has some pretty good stuff in it."
 
"I should have time in the autumn to start work on the instrumentation of the first movement but time is short and I'm going to have to work in the evenings if I am to get the concerto finished for Christmas."  The work took longer to complete than Grieg expected, a planned premiere set for December 1868 had to be put off until the spring of the following year. 
 
After spending the winter in Norway polishing up the orchestration, the work received its world première in the now demolished Casino Concert Hall in Copenhagen on April 3, 1869 with Grieg's pianist friend Edmund Neupert performing under the baton of Royal Danish Orchestra conductor and ballet music composer Holger Simon Paulli.
 
Attending the première were Queen Louise of Denmark, composer colleagues and friends Gade and Hartmann as well as the great Russian piano virtuoso Anton Rubinstein - a friend of Liszt - who kindly provided his own piano for the concert. Grieg himself was not present at the world première of his greatest work due to commitments back home in Norway. Grieg was later soloist in the concerto at a Danish performance at the Royal Theatre on January 30, 1886 with his friend, the renowned Norwegian composer/conductor Johan Svendsen conducting the Royal Danish Orchestra - a concert which followed on quickly after a triumphantly successful performance of "Peer Gynt" in the Dagmar Theatre. In March of that year Grieg went on a concert tour of Jutland with the concerto, which quickly gained immense popularity throughout Europe, bestowing international fame on the Norwegian composer.
 
The A minor concerto was also the highlight of the first ever Nordic Music Festival held in Copenhagen in 1888.
 
The great Piano Concerto was Grieg's masterpiece, heralding his final breakthrough as a composer, even if the joy of his success was to be shortlived - Alexandra - Grieg's daughter with Nina - died just one year old of meningitis a month after the world premiere of the concerto.
 
Nina left Bergen after Grieg's death in 1907 and returned to Copenhagen, where she died 28 years later in 1935 at the age of 90. She kept in close contact with musical life in Denmark, inviting Carl Nielsen in 1911 for a fortnight stay in Troldhaugen, where he worked on the composition of his Violin Concerto in Grieg's romantic lakeside "composer's cabin". Grieg's Danish wife's ashes are entombed in a mountain crypt near Troldhaugen beside her husband.

Christopher Follett
Follett is a freelance journalist based in
Copenhagen, correspondent in Denmark for Musical Opinion Magazine (UK),
formerly contributor to Nordic Sounds.
 

 

 

Søllerød museum Grieg in Søllerød