“The ‘general public’ for which Grieg longed is us – and he is still waiting.
The musical legacy that he left us is larger, and deeper, and richer, and
more varied than most of us have imagined.
It is time for us to claim it. Let us do so without delay.”
- William Halverson

Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907) is recognized as the greatest composer in Norwegian history. His talent for music was recognized at an early age, and he entered the Leipzig Conservatory when only 15. After finishing his traditional training, Grieg put his compositional talents to work in service of Norwegian folk music, striving to create a uniquely Norwegian music along grand lines. Grieg’s first great masterpiece, the Piano Concerto in A minor, remains his best-known works, and is among the most popular of classical music selections. His incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is almost as well known. Although he struggled early to make a living as a choir and orchestra director, and as a music teacher and performer, by 1869, at age 26, he received a state stipend and was able to devote himself more fully to his composing activities.

Grieg was (along with Bach and Delius) one of Percy Grainger’s most significant cultural heroes, and Grieg helped launch his young Australian friend on a major career. Grieg and Grainger met in London in 1906, when Graninger was 24 and Grieg was 63. They worked together in the summer of 1907 preparing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in anticipation of a performance at that year’s Leeds Festival; tragically, Grieg died just weeks before the planned performance. Grainger’s career was made, though, and, because of the history of his having being coached by Grieg, Grainger was recognized as the greatest interpreter of Grieg’s Piano Concerto for his entire performing career.

Grieg’s stature as “Norway’s greatest composer” is generally recognized, but Grieg’s status as a “great” composer without the Nationalist modifier is not so generally acknowledged. Part of the difficulty in making a case for Grieg’s greatness as a composer is the relative paucity of knowledge among the general concert going public about his music outside of the Peer Gynt Suites and the Piano Concerto. Composers of the succeeding generation, though, seemed to know his music well. Debussy and Bartok were influenced significantly by Grieg’s music. When Maurice Ravel visited Oslo in February 1926 he said: "The generation of French composers to which I belong has been strongly attracted to his music. There is no composer to whom I feel a closer affinity -- besides Debussy -- than Grieg." William Halverson traces Grieg’s influences to “Sibelius in Finland, Carl Nielsen in Denmark, Delius in England, Grainger, MacDowell and Gershwin in the United States, Debussy and Ravel in France and Bartók in Hungary.” Halverson asks, “Have not certain features of Grieg’s harmonic style had some impact on twentieth-century popular music and on certain film music composers?” Certainly Grieg’s harmonic influence can be heard in the work of contemporary film composer Hans Zimmer, as well as in Howard Shore’s score to The Lord of the Rings trilogy (which includes as a significant solo instrument the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle).