Grieg's Lyric Pieces

Synopsis

The Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen on today’s date in 1843. He is credited with putting Norway on the map, musically speaking, drawing inspiration from the folk music of his native land.

What you might not know is that two famous French composers were fans. Grieg was about 19 years older than Claude Debussy and about 32 years older than Maurice Ravel, but both knew and admired his music.

Despite criticizing Grieg’s Piano Concerto for being too much like Schumann’s, Debussy included Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata in one of his public recitals, praised Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” incidental music, and described Grieg’s songs as possessing “the icy coldness of the Nordic lakes [and] the intensive fire of the sudden Nordic spring.”

Ravel once played some of Grieg’s Norwegian dances for the composer in Paris, timidly at first, but when Grieg asked for a stronger beat, saying, “You should see our peasants with their fiddles stamping the rhythm with their feet. Start over!” Ravel complied, and the elder composer got up and started dancing. After Grieg’s death Ravel said: “Next to Debussy there’s no other composer to whom I feel more related than Grieg.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) Lyric Pieces Book VI, Op.57, No. 6. Homeward Emil Gilels, piano DG 449721

On This Day

Births

• 1763 - Baptismal date of German composer Franz Danzi, in Mannheim;

• 1843 - Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, in Bergen;

• 1864 - French composer Guy Ropartz, in Guingamp, Brittany;

• 1894 - American composer and arranged Robert Russell Bennett, in Kansas City, Mo.;

• 1900 - American composer Otto Luening, in Milwaukee, Wis.;

Deaths

• 1772 - French composer and organist Louis-Claude Daquin, age 77, in Paris;

• 1893 - Hungarian opera composer Ferenc Erkel, age 82, in Budapest;

Premieres

• 1810 - Beethoven: "Egmont" Overture and Incidental Music, at the Court Theater in Vienna, as part of a production of Goethe's drama of the same name;

• 1889 - Sousa: "Washington Post March," in Washington, D.C., outside the Smithsonian Institution, composer conducting the U.S. Marines Band;

• 1914 - Miaskovsky: Symphony No. 1, in Pavlovsk (Julian date: June 2);

• 1980 - David Byrne: "High Life for Strings,," at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, during the New Music America Festival;

• 1989 - Michael Torke: ballet "Slate," at the New York State Theater, by the New York City Ballet Orchestra, Hugo Fiorato;

• 1991 - Thomas Oboe Lee: "Seven Jazz Pieces" for string quartet, at Brandeis University, by the Lydian String Quartet;

• 1991 - David Ward-Steinman: "Cinnabar" for viola and piano, in Ithaca, N.Y., at the 19th Annual Viola Congress by violist Karen Elaine with the composer at the piano;

Others

• 1707 - J.S. Bach appointed organist at Blasiuskirche, Muehlhausen;

• 1733 - In London the "Opera of the Nobility" is established by several noblemen and supported by the Prince of Wales, as a rival opera company to Handel's company, the "Royal Academy"; Porpora's opera "Arianna in Nasso" (Ariadne on Naxos) opens their first season on December 29th that year; The company folded in 1737, with its final opera performance on June 11, 1737, at the King's Theater in the Haymarket (The original home of Handel's company); These dates are all according to the Julian "Old Style" calendar still in use in England that year.