Grieg said his most famous tune reeked of cow dung and troll smugness
In the Hall of the Mountain King is one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, yet its composer, Edvard Grieg, told a friend in 1874 that he could hardly bear to hear it. He grumbled that it stank of farmyard, overblown Norwegian nationalism and trollish self-satisfaction, while hoping listeners would catch the irony.
Grieg was born in Bergen on 15 June 1843. His father was a merchant and British vice-consul, his mother a music teacher who began his piano lessons at six, and the family name, once spelled Greig, traced back to Scottish ancestors who settled in Norway around 1770. At fifteen he impressed the violinist Ole Bull, a family friend, who talked his parents into sending him to the Leipzig Conservatory. Grieg later confessed he left it as ignorant as he arrived, though he enjoyed the city's concerts and, unusually, the compulsory organ lessons.
Illness shadowed him. In 1860 he survived pleurisy and tuberculosis, which left him with a ruined left lung, a deformed spine and a lifetime of respiratory infections and sanatorium stays. In 1867 he married his cousin Nina Hagerup, a soprano; their only child, Alexandra, died of meningitis in 1869. The year before, on holiday in Denmark, he had written his Piano Concerto in A minor. When Franz Liszt sight-read the manuscript in Rome in 1870, orchestral part and all, Grieg politely told him the first movement was too fast.
Ibsen asked him for incidental music to Peer Gynt, a commission that interrupted an opera project with the poet Bjornstjerne Bjornson and briefly soured their friendship. The music helped the play succeed and, in concert suites, became his best-known work. Tchaikovsky admired its warmth and originality, and Queen Victoria heard Grieg and Nina perform at Windsor in 1897. In 1899 he cancelled concerts in France in protest at the antisemitic Dreyfus affair and received a flood of hate mail.
He made gramophone records and piano rolls late in life, so his own playing survives. He died of heart failure in Bergen on 4 September 1907, and between 30,000 and 40,000 people lined the streets for his funeral. His ashes rest in a mountainside crypt at his home, Troldhaugen, and a crater on Mercury carries his name.
Source: Edvard Grieg
