Respect at Last for Grieg?

EDVARD GRIEG was a fiercely proud Norwegian who embraced his role as a leader in the movement to foster a national identity for Norwegian music.

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The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who died 100 years ago, wrote music profoundly influenced by his country’s history and nature.

“Norwegian folk life, Norwegian sagas, Norwegian history and above all Norwegian nature have had a profound influence on my creative work ever since my youth,” Grieg wrote in 1900 to an admiring music historian from America.

Yet Grieg routinely lost confidence in his Norwegian-inspired music when it was slighted by patronizing foreign critics, usually Germans, who thought of his works as charming but provincial.

In 1874, immersed in a challenging project to provide incidental music for Ibsen’s epic play “Peer Gynt,” Grieg complained to his closest friend, Frants Beyer, a lawyer and amateur pianist, that working on the score was excruciating. In a letter, Grieg called the rousing and melodramatic orchestral and choral episode “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” “something that I literally can’t stand to listen to because it absolutely reeks of cow pies, ultra-Norwegian-ness and trollish self-sufficiency.” A melancholic, moody man and a thoroughly decent colleague to composers he considered greater talents, he was his own toughest critic.

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