Without the least
attempt to want to flatter you, I can
honestly tell you that you are now [1900]
the best loved and most popular
composer ever here!
England has been a
generous and hospitable host to foreign
composers and their music from Handel
to Sibelius, probably Mendelssohn the
most feted of them all. Lionel Carley’s
utterly absorbing account of Edvard
Grieg’s reception here raises as many
interesting questions as it answers.
Of all Grieg’s works - there are 74
published opuses - it is clearly the
evergreen piano concerto (written in
1874 and highly praised by Liszt) which
almost, but not quite, sends him into
Room 101 for one-work composers. Of
the rest it is the Lyric, Holberg
and Peer Gynt Suites, with particular
favourites the Hall of the Mountain
King, and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,
which the public knew well then and
still knows best today after the concerto
which Morecambe and Wise used for their
celebrated encounter with Andrew Preview.
What was it that made Grieg’s music
so popular in his day? Apart from the
concerto, his popularity lies with some
sonatas (three for violin and one for
cello), songs, and above all solo piano
music which disseminated his music and
reputation throughout the salons and
homes of the country, and which made
him ‘the most popular musician in the
home life of England since Mendelssohn’.
That these players were inevitably ladies
eventually irritated Grieg; ‘Yesterday
at Cheltenham crammed full, but only
ladies (more than 40 autographs)’ (December
1897).
But why are there no
symphonies apart from one in C minor
(‘never to be performed’ he wrote on
this manuscript of this youthful work)
and the Symphonic Dances, both of which
are no more than on the fringes of the
repertoire? Why no operas, no choral
works in the standard fare, no concertos
for any instrument beyond the single
one for piano (such as a violin concerto
for his close friends Adolph Brodsky
or Johannes Wolff?), and no chamber
music other than one completed string
quartet (a second remains unfinished)?
At a time when concert life was thriving
in Britain in the latter part of the
‘long’ 19th century, from
1875 to 1914, thanks to the Philharmonic
Society (despite the prickly relationship
which emerges in Grieg’s correspondence
with its secretary Francesco Berger),
August Manns at the Crystal Palace,
Charles Hallé in Manchester,
Hans Richter in Vienna, London and Manchester,
Dan Godfrey in Bournemouth, and Henry
Wood in London, one would have thought
that Grieg would have seized upon his
popularity and produced work after work.
And how did the folk music of his native
Norway, which permeates his creativity,
strike a chord with his adoring English
public? All his vocal works relied on
translation into English, but clearly
anything Scandinavian was à
la mode. ‘Norway had become the
fashion, and they [Grieg and his wife]
looked as if they had only just emerged
from the fells’, as the Danish pianist
Henrik Knudsen put it after their first
London appearance in 1888. The hotel
register of Smeby’s Hotel in Bergen
for the summer of 1887 lists 559 visitors
from England and Scotland, four times
more than any other nationality including
native Norwegians, while Violet Crompton-Roberts
observed in A Jubilee Jaunt to Norway
(1887) that ‘Norway is becoming
more "the rage" every year’.
Not so far back in
the family genealogy (four-plus generations)
Griegs were found in Scotland; presumably
at some point they had been Greigs,
which remains to this day a common spelling
error when it comes to the composer’s
name. From 1797-1875 Griegs were unpaid
vice-Consuls on behalf of Britain in
Norway, the last being Edvard’s brother
John. Apart from a private visit with
his parents and brother in 1862 when
he was 19, Edvard (1843-1907) paid five
visits to Britain, the first in 1888,
the last in 1906. The following year
he was literally on his way to the Leeds
Festival but got no further than Bergen
from his country house called Troldhaugen,
when he died in hospital on 4 September.
And that appears to be the clue to so
many riddles in Grieg’s character and
his musical output, namely his health.
It completely dominated his life and
dictated his life schedule. He was a
diminutive man, his short elfin body
surmounted by a leonine head with a
flowing (latterly white) mane of hair
and piercing blue eyes. His life was
plagued by illness, with bronchitis,
asthma, rheumatism, insomnia and perpetual
exhaustion after any form of exertion
being his chief complaints. Many more
than the five visits to Britain which
did take place (in 1888, 1889, 1894,
1897 and 1906) were planned, but Grieg
was forever cancelling due to the wretched
state of his health. Even the award
ceremonies to receive honorary Doctorates
from Oxford and Cambridge Universities
were deferred, the former by a week,
the latter by a year. He needed money
for the enormous cost of building Troldhaugen,
so concert fees and royalties became
a vital source of paying off his debts.
Fortunately sales in sheet music of
salon works rose significantly during
and immediately after his tours (‘a
rush for reprints of the piano pieces
and the issue of song translations by
several English publishers’ – The
Musical World), but it did mean
that he had to endure the rigours of
playing and conducting as well as the
rehearsals and the travelling. While
not a keyboard virtuoso, by all accounts
Grieg was a fine performer in both disciplines,
for piano rolls survive and there are
descriptive accounts of his conducting
style, which was clearly affected by
his fairly rudimentary English when
he first came. Grove described it as
‘strange gestures, odd noises and strange
words…[which] make everyone laugh until
we find that the gestures, looks and
words are the absolute expression of
the inmost feeling’.
His audiences were
enormous from the start, which was a
Philharmonic Society concert on 3 May
1888 at St James’s Hall at which he
played his piano concerto under Frederic
Cowen (a ‘blockhead, so the orchestra
left a lot to be desired’, he told his
friend Frants Beyer), after which he
accompanied two of his own Lieder (sung
by Carlotta Elliot), and conducted his
Two Elegiac Melodies for string
orchestra. Grieg always had good connections
as far as England was concerned; the
right people liked him. Earlier as a
student of Moscheles in Leipzig he had
moved in a circle which included Arthur
Sullivan, Walter Bache, Carl Rosa, John
Francis Barnett, Franklin Taylor, Ethel
Smyth and Edward Dannreuther, all subsequently
active in England. The last named had
premiered his piano concerto fourteen
years earlier in 1874 at the Crystal
Palace, while Henschel had already conducted
the Two Elegiac Melodies in London.
Richter found a serious lack of accuracy
and discipline in the playing of London
orchestras during rehearsals for his
first appearance in 1877 and when he
came annually from 1879 until he moved
to Manchester in 1900, so clearly there
was still room for improvement in 1888
when a reviewer (The Standard)
wrote that Grieg, ‘in the second of
the Elegiac pieces, obtained
a pure pianissimo from the orchestra
– one of the rarest things to be heard
nowadays’. The clue to his popularity
probably lies in the word ‘charm’ in
a review (Musical Times, June
1888) which identified it as ‘the charm
of the songs and pianoforte pieces which
long since had made his name a household
word’. The name Grieg may have been
long familiar, but now the man himself
had to be seen, as one later review
(Musical News, 11 December 1897)
put it, ‘The music of Grieg, and above
all the presence of Grieg last Saturday,
attracted a large audience’.
After that first orchestral
concert in May 1888 he appeared as accompanist
with his wife Nina, of equally diminutive
stature (when photographed together
they looked more like brother and sister
than husband and wife) and who had a
light, sweet soprano voice, together
with violinist Wilma Norman-Néruda
(Lady Hallé) in songs, violin
sonatas and piano solos. As he put it
to Tchaikovsky, ‘the English were served
up with some of my smaller pieces’.
Later in 1888 Grieg went to Birmingham
for the Triennial Festival, famous from
1846 for Mendelssohn and his Elijah,
followed (1882) by Gounod with his Redemption
and Dvořák (1885) with The
Spectre’s Bride, and since 1885
under Richter’s musical direction. That
year Grieg (‘the little Norseman’ according
to the Post) conducted his concert
overture In Autumn and the Holberg
Suite, for he was never tempted to produce
choral music for such festivals, which,
in his view, drew from English composers
‘all their big and boring works for
choir and orchestra’. On the other hand
one of the works on the programme was
Dvořák’s Stabat Mater
conducted by Richter. Dvořák too
was very popular in England (making
nine visits between 1884 and 1896) so
the comparison becomes an interesting
one. Both men worked at Birmingham,
Leeds (though death intervened for Grieg),
and for the Philharmonic Society, both
were awarded honorary doctorates
at Cambridge, both stayed at the south
London homes of their publishers Littleton
of Novello (Dvořák), and George
Augener (Grieg), and finally both men
used the proceeds from their London
concerts to help finance their homes,
respectively Rusalka and
Troldhaugen (Grieg’s from 1885).
A composer intriguingly missing from
the list is Elgar. When Grieg’s music
was first played (in his absence) under
Charles Williams at the Three Choirs’
Festival (Worcester 1890) it was Peer
Gynt Suite No.1, and on the same
programme was the first hearing of Elgar’s
overture Froissart, while in
the same city in January 1901 Elgar
himself conducted Grieg’s choral work
Land-sighting, by which time
the English composer was famous. But
it would appear that there was no social
intercourse or exchange of letters between
the two composers.
Grieg would often accept
concerts in Germany either before or
after working in England. He was hugely
popular there too (‘hundreds were turned
away’, he reported to his friend Delius
in February 1889) though not with the
‘abusive’ critics. While his relationship
with them in that country never changed,
it was, on the whole, a far better one
in England, apart from Shaw, who ‘found
the room filled with young ladies, who,
loving his sweet stuff, were eager to
see and adore the confectioner’, and
described his music as possessing ‘sweet
but very cosmopolitan modulations’,
with an occasional ‘pretty snatch of
melody’. Only on his last visit did
the critics in England begin to carp
about any lack of development in Grieg’s
music, or indeed the lack of any new
works at all; ‘Easily understandable,
I’m afraid to say’, he wrote in his
diary in the Spring of 1906, ‘as I haven’t
been willing to talk with any interviewers’.
However other English critics were capable
of putting an iron fist into a velvet
glove, such as this gentle sideswipe
in the Musical Times of April
1889, which reviews the Griegs’ first
appearance in Manchester using the especial
flowery language of the day for such
journals.
Herr Grieg was
especially fortunate with his executants,
for Sir Charles Hallé undertook
his Pianoforte Concerto (Op. 16),
and Lady Hallé so thoroughly
co- operated with the composer in
Op. 8 as to secure a perfect realisation
of the pleasing duet. Madame Grieg,
with modest powers as a vocalist,
gave probably the most sympathetic
interpretation possible of the little
Lieder, which so happily display
her husband’s fertility in bright,
sketchy fancies, rather than gift
of bold and sustained flight.
As to his treatment
of his audiences high-born or low, Grieg
apparently ‘once more rebuked the vulgar
"insatiables" by declining
an encore’, and on another occasion,
by stopping playing, he chastised King
Edward VII at Buckingham Palace on 28
May 1906 for talking loudly to the Norwegian
Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Audiences
were notoriously badly behaved it would
appear, a common habit being to vacate
the hall during the last work on the
programme, having heard Grieg’s contributions.
Mendelssohn and Mackenzie seemed to
have been the unwitting victims on at
least two occasions, the more embarrassing
in the latter instance because Sir Alexander
himself was on the podium. The encore
incidentally was usually In the Hall
of the Mountain King, which Wood
invariably produced with his Queen’s
Hall orchestra. As to rival Norwegian
composers, only Sinding’s Rustle
of Spring came anywhere near threatening
Grieg’s popularity from 1895.
Grieg only kept a diary
in the years 1865, 1865-1866, 1905-1906
and 1907 and they were published by
Bergen Public Libraries in 1993. That
this was so intermittent a habit is
unfortunate because when he did keep
one, he often provided detailed and
fascinating accounts of his day-to-day
life and observations. Otherwise most
of his records are confined to expenditure
and addresses in notebooks dated 1872-1873
and 1880-1902. Ironically the pull of
England ensnared him into a dilemma
when it came to looking after his health.
London was a dreadfully unhealthy city,
its smogs in the autumn virtual death
traps, so the month of May was the best
time to be in the capital or in any
other English city. Bristol, like Leeds
in 1907, had to forgo his presence in
the autumn of 1902 when he cancelled
with another bout of bronchitis. More
fortunate, despite being November/December,
was Scotland which he visited once in
1897, his audiences as enthusiastic
as those south of the border. Despite
his frailty, Grieg could be feisty.
He was an ardent nationalist and involved
himself in Norwegian politics, in particular
the country’s eventual break with Sweden
on 7 June 1905 and the establishment
of its own monarchy with King Haakon,
whose wife Queen Maud was another of
Queen Victoria’s ubiquitous daughters.
Grieg even wrote to King Edward VII
and his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, ‘I
implore your Majesty through arbitration
to prevent the shame and disaster of
a war between Norway and Sweden’. Fortunately
diplomacy won the day through the Karlstad
Agreement. Grieg, like Ibsen and Nansen,
were national heroes in their native
land, and indeed from 1874 Grieg had
been awarded an annual stipend from
the Norwegian government.
Finally there are Grieg’s
three close friends, Adolph Brodsky,
Delius and Grainger. Brodsky (who premiered
Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto under
Richter in Vienna in 1881), briefly
led Hallé’s orchestra before
succeeding him as Principal of the Royal
Manchester College of Music in 1895.
He had first met Grieg in Leipzig in
1888 when they gave the composer’s new
third violin sonata, and from that day
he and his wife Anna became fast friends
with Edvard and Nina. Whenever the Griegs
came to England they always tried to
spend days if not weeks at the Brodsky’s
home at Bowdon in Cheshire (where Richter
also lived). Of the two composers Delius
and Grainger, the former was befriended
in 1889, but he and Grieg saw little
of one another when Delius moved to
Grez-sur-Loing in France. Nothing of
Delius’ music was played in London after
1899 until his reputation took off in
1907 with the piano concerto then Appalachia,
but this was too late for Grieg. On
the other hand, the 24 year-old Grainger
met Grieg for the first time in May
1906 and for the remaining fifteen months
of the composer’s life virtually became
the older man’s surrogate son (the Griegs
had lost their only child, Alexandra
in 1869 when she died aged thirteen
months). Grainger was a fabulous pianist,
due to play under Grieg at Leeds in
1907, and he adored his mentor’s music,
by all accounts his interpretation of
the concerto closest to its composer’s
own. Grainger was even proud to act
as Grieg’s page-turner at his last public
concert in England on 24 May 1906 at
Queen’s Hall.
Dr Carley’s highly
enjoyable book is a compelling read,
not only providing a revealing insight
into the private and public life of
the composer, but also a detailed account
of concerts of the day between 1888
and 1906 in England. There is no discussion
of Grieg’s music apart from whatever
is alluded to in reviews (for the music
the reader should go to Boydell &
Brewer’s simultaneously launched book
by Daniel Grimley called Music, Landscape
and Norwegian Cultural Identity).
Dr Carley’s book is generously illustrated
including the splendidly atmospheric
dust-jacket with its photograph of Augener’s
house on Clapham Common where Grieg
stayed for four of his five visits,
and it has useful, user-friendly tables,
notes, bibliography and indices. Typographical
errors or factual slips are mercifully
few and trifling. On page 139, line
16 should be ‘to’ not ‘too’, a superfluous
‘only’ lies near the end of page 172,
on page 369 ‘respect’ is meant rather
than ‘repect’, while in this reviewer’s
opinion a train journey to Manchester
on page 147 is more likely to
have been started from Euston rather
than Kings Cross, and Streatham Hill
is in south east rather than south west
London, page 269.
As to the questions
posed at the start of this review, the
conclusion drawn from this excellent
book is that highly indifferent health
dogged poor Grieg throughout his life
and, with the exception of the one piano
concerto, it was probably his ailments
(traceable back to a life-threatening
lung disease in his youth) which diverted
him from large works such as more concertos,
symphonies, oratorios and operas. As
if mirroring his physical frame, he
became a miniaturist producing songs
and piano pieces for private homes,
salons and chamber concerts, but Grieg
was too harsh upon himself when he wrote
to a friend in May 1906, ‘There is nothing
I can do about my music being played
in third-rate hotels and by young girls’.
Christopher Fifield
