Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist whose music drew on Norwegian folk idioms to create one of the most recognizable national voices in nineteenth-century European music. Born in Bergen to a family of mixed Norwegian and Scottish descent, he was sent at fifteen to the Leipzig Conservatory on the recommendation of the violinist Ole Bull.

His Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 16 (1868), composed at twenty-five, became one of the most performed concertos of the Romantic repertoire, admired by Franz Liszt at an early reading. The ten books of Lyric Pieces for solo piano, written across his life, distilled his harmonic language into short character pieces that reached a wide domestic audience.

His incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's verse drama Peer Gynt (1875), commissioned for the play's premiere, supplied the orchestral suites that include Morning Mood, In the Hall of the Mountain King, and Solveig's Song. The Holberg Suite, written for the bicentenary of the playwright Ludvig Holberg, used Baroque dance forms filtered through Grieg's harmonic ear.

He toured widely as a pianist and conductor with his wife, the soprano Nina Hagerup, and corresponded with Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Delius. From his villa Troldhaugen outside Bergen he supported younger Norwegian composers, and his death in 1907 prompted a state funeral attended by tens of thousands.

The given name Edvard is the Scandinavian form of Edward, from Old English ead, meaning prosperity, and weard, meaning guardian. The surname Grieg comes from his Scottish great-grandfather Alexander Greig, who settled in Bergen in the eighteenth century and adapted the spelling. He kept the Norwegianized form throughout his life.