…………………………………………………………………………………………..
"I always associate Grieg with Winter.
As Chopin is Summer and Tchaikowsky
Autumn, so Grieg is Winter, sharpening
painfully into Spring, tingling with
vitality …….. Grieg’s music holds
that swift, sweet pang which thrills
the critic’s jaded heart with the
last spring wind on the chord of the
9th – Grieg’s characteristic
chord…."
‘A study in Silver’
Israfel in ‘The Dome’
Unicorn Press
It is surprising with
a composer as popular as Grieg how little
we really know of the Man - although
there is surely no one in the land unable
to whistle a few bars of one of the
most popular piano concertos of all
time? It is even more surprising that
the influence on English music of the
music of Grieg - which together with
the music of MacDowell and Chaminade
filled the music stools of every house
with a piano - is even today not fully
appreciated.
This beautifully produced
book by the President of the Delius
Society, Dr Lionel Carley, opens up
a world of which few today will have
any real knowledge – a period in English
music-making (‘The roots and the soil’
was how Scott Goddard described it (1))
the details of which were overtaken
by the more dramatic years of the English
renaissance and the folk revival. In
these pages, amongst the now virtually
anonymous personalities of such as Eaton
Faning, Leonard Borwick, Edward Dannreuther,
Franklin Taylor, J F Barnett, Stanley
Hawley, Ebenezer Prout, Johannes Wolff
(the list is endless) move the diminutive
figures of Edvard Grieg and his wife
Nina – lauded in his few visits to the
UK as the darling of the concert hall
– as composer, conductor or pianist.
In his prefatory pages
Dr Carley explains what he calls, appropriately
"the Grieg phenomenon in England" –
Grieg the composer with an exciting
new musical vocabulary:
‘Here was a counterbalance
to the weight of the Austro-German symphony,
the folk idioms of Norway being deployed
in subtly shifting forms to make quite
new sounds.’
Among Grieg’s devotees
were publishers, promoters, performers
and friends – and also Royalty both
English and Norwegian. Princess Louise
attended Neupert’s premiere of the Piano
Concerto in April 1869. Invitations
to Windsor and to Buckingham Palace
followed in 1897 and 1906. But it was
the general music-lover who filled the
concert halls.
Grieg wrote few large-scale
works but the A minor Piano Concerto
quickly worked its way to the current
‘top of the pops’ where it has steadfastly
remained. Performances, not only by
Grieg himself, followed with executants
such as Charles Halle, Oscar Meyer (that
at the Three Choirs Festival, the bastion
of English music-making) Herbert Fryer,
the 20-year-old Backhaus, and the ebullient
Percy Grainger – this latter whose tripartite
friendship with both Grieg and Delius
made him perhaps the ideal if eccentric
interpreter of the Concerto, and of
op. 66 and op. 72)
And there we begin
to know something more of the Man –
his relations with the close friends,
George Augener, Sir Edgar Speyer and
with his closest colleagues Delius and
Julius Röntgen – and also such
endearing vignettes as Grieg’s taking
a platform call, with hat and coat (to
discourage encores!), his friendhip
with Stopford Brooke and the Unitarian
movement – or his daring rebuke to the
English monarch, "because the King talked
out loud to Nansen while I played".
Dr Carley’s 500 page
account of the Norwegian composer’s
relations with England - and a solitary
visit to Scotland, the land of his forebears
in November 1890 - is divided into seven
sections:
Prelude
First successes in England
Interlude 1
Grand Tour
Interlude 2
Final Curtain calls
Closure
covering the years
from 1862 to 1907, the year of Grieg’s
death even then ‘on the first leg of
their circuitous route to England.’
The narrative of the
book follows concert performances and
subsequent press reactions in considerable
detail, filling in much of the musical
activity of these somewhat uncharted
years and providing "a snapshot of London
musical life as Grieg found it at the
end of the 1880s". The many photogravure
illustrations add a delightful sense
of period.
The book is a meticulously
researched contribution to musical history
and should be on the shelves of all
music-lovers.
Colin Scott-Sutherland
for
details
