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| Premise Checker... |
 Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 3:27 am |
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TLS 7.3.16: Paul Binding: Air on a sympathetic string
EDVARD GRIEG IN ENGLAND. Lionel Carley. 488pp. Boydell. Pounds 45 (US$80). -
978 1 84383 207 2.
GRIEG. Music, landscape and Norwegian identity. Daniel M. Grimley. 246pp.
Boydell. Pounds 50 (US$85). - 978 1 84383 210 2..
A little more than a year before he died, Edvard Grieg returned to London with
his wife Nina to give two recitals at the Queen's Hall in May 1906. Their host
asked him if there was anybody he would like to meet. Yes, Grieg said, "this
young composer, Percy Grainger". Grainger had already made known his enthusiasm
for two recent major piano compositions, Nineteen Norwegian Folksongs (Op 66)
and Slatter (Norwegian Peasant Dances, Op 72). Now Grieg had the pleasure not
only of listening to the twenty-three-year-old Australian praising these in
person, but of hearing him play them. Never easy to please where piano
performance was concerned, Grieg was enormously impressed, especially by
Grainger's rendering of the demanding Slatter.
"Yes, he's a genius," he wrote in his diary, "that's for sure. I feel happy to
have gained such a young friend." He was moved to confide in Grainger his own
favourites among his compositions, all neglected, even in Norway, because of
their difficulty for both players and listeners -Slatter in particular, but
also Den Bergtekne (Taken by the Mountain, Op 32) for solo baritone, strings
and horns, and the Symphonic Dances (Op 64), works underrated to this day.
Grainger was able later to stay with Grieg at Troldhaugen, the composer's home
outside Bergen, in the summer of 1907. The nature of the younger man's regard
for Grieg's music is central to both books under review. As Lionel Carley, at
the outset of his richly detailed Edvard Grieg in England, reminds us:
For the concert-going public and equally for the amateur pianist in homes
across the land, by the 1880s Grieg had assumed Mendelssohn's former mantle as
the most popular living composer in England, and during the course of his
several tours over here his concerts were invariably sold out.
Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, British honours were copiously bestowed on the
Norwegian -royal command performances, honorary memberships, fellowships,
doctorates -and the press treated him handsomely. But Grainger's ardour tapped
a vein of deep instinct and artistic conflict in Grieg, which general audiences
couldn't altogether appreciate. A collector of folk-song himself (famously of
"Brigg Fair" in Lincolnshire, in 1905), Grainger realized that his age needed
atavism in music if its culture wasn't to atrophy, that an increasingly over-
sophisticated society must get back in touch with primary emotions, for which
no better vehicle existed than folk music. Grieg was well placed to express
these needs, as the facts of his life indicated -born (1843) and raised in
Bergen, but trained at the prestigious Leipzig Conservatory, and owing much of
his success to the cultural machinery of continental Europe.
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M. Grimley, makes us
see how the composer's development coincided with, and contributed to, the
debate about the meaning of nationhood in a Norway moving towards full
independence from Sweden in 1905. The creation of a new national language
forged out of the speech of Grieg's own Western Norway -landsmal, given an
official status in 1885 -mirrored the composer's intensifying feeling that
large-scale works with foreign models (the symphony, the concerto, the sonata)
were inadequate for his purpose, which was to distil the essence of his
relationship to Nature and to the history of his country's peasant culture. It
was in landsmal that Arne Garborg wrote his 1895 verse-novel, Haugtussa (The
Mountain Maid) from which Grieg created his song-cycle, Op 67, one of his most
beautiful and intensely worked compositions, pivotal to Grimley's argument and
illuminatingly discussed by him.
But Grieg was not content with the literary absorption of folk- culture. Well
into his fifties, he made ambitious expeditions with like-minded friends into
remote areas of Hardanger and Jotunheim, getting shepherds and herders to sing.
One little herding-girl, Gjendine, whose haunting cradle-song gave rise to No
19 of the ground-breaking Op 66, lived until 1972 and would give recollections
in her extreme old age of the composer she'd so delighted.
Another important friend in the 1890s was Knut Dale, a Hardanger fiddler who
had preserved the techniques of the eighteenth-century masters. The Hardanger
fiddle has an extra set of "sympathetic strings" beneath the fingerboard that
help to create sounds impossible on an ordinary violin and expressive of the
most essential characteristics of the Norwegian landscape. So thought Grieg and
his violinist friend, Johan Halvorsen. Halvorsen noted down Dale's melodies for
the composer who then transcribed them into the succinct but often metrically
complex Slatter which were to inspire the young Bela Bartok in his own
researches. It is always best to hear these pieces juxtaposed with Hardanger
fiddle renderings of the original airs. Grimley gives us meticulously close
readings of Slatter and many other piano-pieces and songs, attempting to show
how certain intervals, key changes and rhythmic devices, ancient in lineage,
constitute in themselves correspondences to the landscape that begot and
nurtured them. An excellent example of his methodology here is his fascinating
discussion of "I Ola-dalom, i Ola-kjonn" ("In Ola-Valley, in Ola-Lake") from Op
66, an evocative piece that so moved Grieg's greatest English musician-friend,
Frederick Delius, that he based On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring on it
(without ever formally acknowledging the debt).
Two caveats must be made. We know what a preoccupation with regional excellence
and a unique national spirit can lead to, and Grainger, as Grimley points out,
was not immune to offensive, intellectually unrespect-able theories of
exclusiveness.
But Percy Grainger, for all his gifts, was an inspired eccentric; Edvard Grieg
was a figure of far greater stature, with an amplitude of sympathies and
interests remote from any narrow nationalism. Like Ibsen, whom he much admired
(though he didn't find him easy), and fellow playwright Bjornstjerne Bjornson,
Grieg was, for all his feelings for the past, committed to progress. He became
converted - largely through English friends -to a Unitarianism centred on
general practical benevolence. Carley's lively and moving portrait is of a man
with a gift for friendship, getting on well with all sorts of people, a
thoroughgoing democrat.
We should also proceed carefully where Grieg's comparative eschewal of the
"classical" large scale is concerned. Other factors, personal diffidence,
restlessness and ill-health, even the strain of his marriage, may have been
operative here. Certainly, alongside the perennial Piano Concerto, Grieg's
String Quartet (which influenced Debussy's), the third Violin Sonata (in C
minor) and the magnificent Cello Sonata are major and adventurous con-
tributions to their respective genres. They were admired as such by English
audiences and critics of the time.
When news reached London of Grieg's death on September 4, 1907, the Promenade
Concert that night added Chopin's Funeral March to the programme as a mark of
respect. It also played Peer Gynt, Suite No 1, still perhaps his most popular
composition. The audience remained standing throughout. |
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| John... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 7:23 am |
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On Oct 2, 3:37 pm, "Gerard" <ghen_nospam_drik... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Quote: Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Premise Checker <chec... at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name?
His name was never "Hagerup", although many recordings bear that name.
The Hagerup family were Grieg's Danish relatives and Edvard married
his cousin, Nina Hagerup.
Incidentally, although the name Grieg is of Scottish origin, the
spelling had to be transposed from 'Greig', otherwise the G would
have not been voiced in Norwegian. |
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| Matthew B. Tepper... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 8:30 am |
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Guest
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Premise Checker <checker at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the following
letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Quote: Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M. Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way he's
often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
Read about "Proty" here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/proty.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of my employers |
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| Gerard... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 8:37 am |
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Guest
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Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Quote: Premise Checker <checker at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name? |
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| John... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:28 am |
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On Oct 2, 9:51 pm, Aage Johansen <aagjo... at (no spam) offline.no> wrote:
Quote: John wrote:
On Oct 2, 3:37 pm, "Gerard" <ghen_nospam_drik... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Premise Checker <chec... at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name?
His name was never "Hagerup", although many recordings bear that name.
The Hagerup family were Grieg's Danish relatives and Edvard married
his cousin, Nina Hagerup.
Are you sure (about Edvars's middle name)? Edvard's mother was "Gesine
B. Hagerup".
Sorry, Aage, I seem to have read the wrong biography. That said, even
some Grieg web sites exclude the name Hagerup, although it was indeed
his mother's maiden name. See this..
http://www.kunstmuseene.no/Default.asp?enhet=troldhaugen&kat=241&sp=2
Quote: Incidentally, although the name Grieg is of Scottish origin, the
spelling had to be transposed from 'Greig', otherwise the G would
have not been voiced in Norwegian.
Are you sure about this (about voicing the G)?
--
Aage J.
Reasonably sure. His grandfather was Scottish and his surname was
Greig (sounds like 'Greg') and, from what I've read -- and heard from
some friends in Norway (Trondheim), the G would not have been
pronounced had the original spelling, 'Greig' been retained. The name
was, supposedly, changed to 'Grieg' in order that it might resemble,
in least one respect, his grandfather's surname. |
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| John... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:54 am |
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Guest
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On Oct 2, 10:28 pm, John <johntat... at (no spam) ymail.com> wrote:
Quote: On Oct 2, 9:51 pm, Aage Johansen <aagjo... at (no spam) offline.no> wrote:
John wrote:
On Oct 2, 3:37 pm, "Gerard" <ghen_nospam_drik... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Premise Checker <chec... at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name?
His name was never "Hagerup", although many recordings bear that name..
The Hagerup family were Grieg's Danish relatives and Edvard married
his cousin, Nina Hagerup.
Are you sure (about Edvars's middle name)? Edvard's mother was "Gesine
B. Hagerup".
Sorry, Aage, I seem to have read the wrong biography. That said, even
some Grieg web sites exclude the name Hagerup, although it was indeed
his mother's maiden name. See this..http://www.kunstmuseene.no/Default.asp?enhet=troldhaugen&kat=241&sp=2
Incidentally, although the name Grieg is of Scottish origin, the
spelling had to be transposed from 'Greig', otherwise the G would
have not been voiced in Norwegian.
Are you sure about this (about voicing the G)?
--
Aage J.
Reasonably sure. His grandfather was Scottish and his surname was
Greig (sounds like 'Greg') and, from what I've read -- and heard from
some friends in Norway (Trondheim), the G would not have been
pronounced had the original spelling, 'Greig' been retained. The name
was, supposedly, changed to 'Grieg' in order that it might resemble,
in least one respect, his grandfather's surname.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
PS. I was wrong. His second name is indeed Hagerup. If you scroll down
this link, it explains why the spelling was altered from 'Greig' to
'Grieg'. http://www.greigfamily.co.uk/Greig%20Family%20Name.htm |
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| John... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 12:33 pm |
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Guest
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On Oct 2, 10:54 pm, John <johntat... at (no spam) ymail.com> wrote:
Quote: On Oct 2, 10:28 pm, John <johntat... at (no spam) ymail.com> wrote:
On Oct 2, 9:51 pm, Aage Johansen <aagjo... at (no spam) offline.no> wrote:
John wrote:
On Oct 2, 3:37 pm, "Gerard" <ghen_nospam_drik... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Premise Checker <chec... at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name?
His name was never "Hagerup", although many recordings bear that name.
The Hagerup family were Grieg's Danish relatives and Edvard married
his cousin, Nina Hagerup.
Are you sure (about Edvars's middle name)? Edvard's mother was "Gesine
B. Hagerup".
Sorry, Aage, I seem to have read the wrong biography. That said, even
some Grieg web sites exclude the name Hagerup, although it was indeed
his mother's maiden name. See this..http://www.kunstmuseene.no/Default.asp?enhet=troldhaugen&kat=241&sp=2
Incidentally, although the name Grieg is of Scottish origin, the
spelling had to be transposed from 'Greig', otherwise the G would
have not been voiced in Norwegian.
Are you sure about this (about voicing the G)?
--
Aage J.
Reasonably sure. His grandfather was Scottish and his surname was
Greig (sounds like 'Greg') and, from what I've read -- and heard from
some friends in Norway (Trondheim), the G would not have been
pronounced had the original spelling, 'Greig' been retained. The name
was, supposedly, changed to 'Grieg' in order that it might resemble,
in least one respect, his grandfather's surname.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
PS. I was wrong. His second name is indeed Hagerup. If you scroll down
this link, it explains why the spelling was altered from 'Greig' to
'Grieg'. http://www.greigfamily.co.uk/Greig%20Family%20Name.htm
- Show quoted text -
PPS. Further research reveals that had the original spelling been
retained, the final three letters, 'eig', would rhyme with "high", and
the G would not have been voiced -- hence the change. |
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| Aage Johansen... |
| Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:51 pm |
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Guest
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John wrote:
Quote: On Oct 2, 3:37 pm, "Gerard" <ghen_nospam_drik... at (no spam) hotmail.com> wrote:
Matthew B. Tepper wrote:
Premise Checker <chec... at (no spam) panix.com> appears to have caused the
following letters to be typed in
news:Pine.NEB.4.64.0910020526440.20968 at (no spam) panix1.panix.com:
Grieg: Music, landscape and Norwegian identity, by Daniel M.
Grimley,
I wonder whether Grieg's Scottish surname has any bearing on the way
he's often referred to as Edvard Hagerup Grieg.
Isn't 'Edvard Hagerup Grieg' simply his name?
His name was never "Hagerup", although many recordings bear that name.
The Hagerup family were Grieg's Danish relatives and Edvard married
his cousin, Nina Hagerup.
Are you sure (about Edvars's middle name)? Edvard's mother was "Gesine
B. Hagerup".
Quote: Incidentally, although the name Grieg is of Scottish origin, the
spelling had to be transposed from 'Greig', otherwise the G would
have not been voiced in Norwegian.
Are you sure about this (about voicing the G)?
--
Aage J. |
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| John... |
| Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 6:50 am |
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Guest
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On Oct 3, 4:52 pm, Aage Johansen <aagjo... at (no spam) offline.no> wrote:
Quote: John wrote:
...
PPS. Further research reveals that had the original spelling been
retained, the final three letters, 'eig', would rhyme with "high", and
the G would not have been voiced -- hence the change.
I wasn't sure whether you meant G or g (in Greig) - I think both G/g
would be heard. "eig" may rhyme with "high" in German, but it would
usually (always?) be another sound in Norwegian. "ei" could be
something like in "hey", not "high". Either way (ei/ie), I would be
surprised if both "G" and "g" was not pronounced like "g" in "good".
Maybe the people in Bergen had their own twist.
Thinking about it a bit more it seems likely that with "Greig", the last
"g" would be very weak (but perceptible). So, yes, the explanation
isn't unreasonsble.
--
Aage J.
I'm sorry, I should have made it clear that I was referring to the
final "g". Unfortunately, my knowledge of the Norwegian language isn't
very extensive and, occasionally, I confuse it with Swedish. I've
heard Nowegians and Swedes pronounce 'ei' as both "ey" and "ay", as in
'Nej' (no) for example. According to my friends in Trondheim, the
'eig' sounds more or less like 'ay', but perhaps the pronunciation
varies according to area, just as it does here. But I'm grateful to
you for your explanation.
Hertig hilsen (or something like that)
JT. |
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| Aage Johansen... |
| Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 9:52 am |
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Guest
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John wrote:
Quote: ...
PPS. Further research reveals that had the original spelling been
retained, the final three letters, 'eig', would rhyme with "high", and
the G would not have been voiced -- hence the change.
I wasn't sure whether you meant G or g (in Greig) - I think both G/g
would be heard. "eig" may rhyme with "high" in German, but it would
usually (always?) be another sound in Norwegian. "ei" could be
something like in "hey", not "high". Either way (ei/ie), I would be
surprised if both "G" and "g" was not pronounced like "g" in "good".
Maybe the people in Bergen had their own twist.
Thinking about it a bit more it seems likely that with "Greig", the last
"g" would be very weak (but perceptible). So, yes, the explanation
isn't unreasonsble.
--
Aage J. |
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