Program 7 - Scandinavian Memories

From Holberg’s Time, Suite for String Orchestra

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)

Composed for solo piano in 1884; arranged for string orchestra in 1885.

By 1884, the year Grieg composed the Holberg Suite, the pattern of his life had become well established. After serving as conductor of the Harmoniske Selskab in his native Bergen from 1880 to 1882, he never again held an official appointment, freeing himself to pursue the things that pleased him the most deeply. Thereafter, he usually spent the spring and early summer months in the composition of new works or the revision of older ones. Later in the summer, he would make a journey on foot through the beautiful mountains of Norway, often in the company of such friends as Julius Röntgen or Percy Grainger. The fall and winter were given over to the extensive concert tours as pianist throughout Europe that Grieg, despite his fragile health, seemed unable to resist. By the last two decades of the 19th century, Grieg was recognized as not only the most prominent musician in Scandinavia, but also as one of the world’s pre-eminent composers.

In 1884, Grieg was approached by the commission organizing the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Holberg, the writer generally acknowledged as the founder of the Danish-Norwegian school of literature, to make a musical contribution to the proceedings. Holberg (1684-1754), a native of Grieg’s hometown of Bergen, Norway, attended the universities of Copenhagen and Oxford before settling permanently in Denmark in 1717. He gained fame with his satiric comedy Peder Paars of 1719, a work with sufficient stinging barbs to rouse the ire of the authorities. His recognition continued to grow, however, and in 1722 he was named as playwright to the newly formed Danish National Theater, for which he wrote, within the next five years, a series of 26 comic masterpieces inspired by Molière and the commedia dell’arte. His comedies were the first original plays written in the Danish language. After 1727, he wrote several volumes of history and biography, but his early plays always remained his most popular works. “[His plays] frequently poked fun at people who thought it smart to speak Latin, German or French in preference to their native Danish or Norwegian,” wrote Georg Strandvold. “They also ridiculed the mustiness and artificiality of Holberg’s age and, in general, satirized the lives and manners of his contemporaries. Holberg’s comedies are considered ageless because their characters remain as true to life in modern times as they were more than 200 years ago.”

The center of the 1884 Holberg celebration was in Bergen, where the playwright was born. A new statue of him was to be unveiled on the waterfront, and a series of concerts was planned to commemorate the event, to which Niels Gade contributed a Holbergian Suite, and Grieg a cantata for men’s voices and the piano suite From Holberg’s Time, which he arranged the following year for string orchestra. Grieg cast the movements of his charming suite in the musical forms of the 18th century, but filled them with the spirit of his own time and style. A vivacious Praelude, a miniature sonata-form movement, is followed by a series of dances: a touching Sarabande; a perky Gavotte, which is linked to a Musette built above a mock-bagpipe drone; a solemn Air, modeled on the Air on the G String from Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite; and a lively closing Rigaudon.

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16

Edvard Grieg

Composed in 1868.

Premiered on April 3, 1869 in Copenhagen, with Edmund Neuport as soloist.

Grieg completed his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1863. Rather than heading directly home to Norway, however, he settled in Copenhagen to study privately with Niels Gade, at that time Denmark’s most prominent musician and generally regarded as the founder of the Scandinavian school of composition. Back in Norway, Grieg’s creative work was concentrated on the large forms advocated by his Leipzig teachers and by Gade. By 1867, he had produced the Piano Sonata, the first two Violin and Piano Sonatas, a Symphony (long unpublished and made available only as recently as 1981) and the concert overture In Autumn. He also carried on his work to promote native music, and gave an unprecedented concert exclusively of Norwegian compositions in 1866. Grieg arranged to have the summer of 1868 free of duties, and he returned to Denmark for an extended vacation at a secluded retreat at Sölleröd, where he began his Piano Concerto. He thoroughly enjoyed that summer, sleeping late, taking long walks, eating well, and tipping a glass in the evenings with friends at the local inn. The sylvan setting spurred his creative energies, and the new Concerto was largely completed by the time he returned to Norway in the fall.

Grieg’s Piano Concerto closed the youthful period of his life that was devoted to large-scale compositions. In 1869, a year after the Concerto was written, he discovered Aeldre og nyere fjeldmelodier, Lindemann’s collection of Norwegian folk tunes. Grieg turned his attention thereafter to the idealization of the folk song in miniature musical works, producing only three compositions of sonata length during his remaining forty years. The Concerto exhibits some of the folk-influenced characteristics that mark Grieg’s later works, but it is also firmly entrenched in the German Romantic tradition of Schumann’s Piano Concerto.

The first movement opens with a bold summons by the soloist. The main theme is given by the woodwinds and taken over almost immediately by the piano. A flashing transition, filled with skipping rhythms, leads to the second theme, a tender cello melody wrapped in the warm harmonies of the trombones. An episodic development section, launched by the full orchestra playing the movement’s opening motive, is largely based on the main theme in dialogue. The recapitulation returns the earlier themes, after which the piano displays a tightly woven cadenza. The stern introductory measures are recalled to close the movement.

Hans von Bülow called Grieg “the Chopin of the North,” and that appellation is nowhere more justified than in the nocturnal second movement. A song filled with sentiment and nostalgia is played by the strings and rounded off by touching phrases in the solo horn. The soloist weaves elaborate musical filigree above the simple accompaniment before the lovely song returns in an enriched setting. The finale follows almost without pause. Themes constructed in the rhythms of a popular Norwegian dance, the halling, dominate the outer sections of the movement. The movement’s central portion presents a wonderful melodic inspiration, introduced by the solo flute, that derives from the dreamy atmosphere of the preceding movement. The dance rhythms return and gather increasing momentum. A grandiloquent restatement by the full orchestra of the theme of the movement’s central section brings this evergreen work to a stirring close.

Symphony No. 5

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931)

Composed in 1920-1922.

Premiered on January 24, 1922 in Copenhagen, conducted by Mogens Wöldike.

“In every man or woman there is something we would wish to know, something which, in spite of all defects and imperfections, we will like once we look into it; and the mere fact that when in reading about a person’s life we often have to say ‘Yes, I too would have done that!’ or ‘He ought not to have done that!’ is valuable because it is life-giving and fructifying.” Life-giving and fructifying: the essential elements of Carl Nielsen’s philosophy and the driving forces of his art, as he expressed them in the opening lines of his little autobiographical book titled My Childhood. Throughout his life, Nielsen believed in the basic goodness of life and the ability of music to express that goodness and to confirm and enrich it. “Music is Life and, like it, is inextinguishable,” he inscribed at the head of the score of his Fourth Symphony.

Optimism, however, is never completely unalloyed. In the years of Nielsen’s maturity, the years of his six symphonies, written between 1891 and 1925, it was especially difficult for a sensitive, thinking person in Europe to hold an excess of hope. The decades surrounding the First World War witnessed the collapse of continental Europe’s ruling houses, the unleashing of hitherto undreamed dark regions of human experience through Freud’s psychoanalysis, the political and social upheaval of ghastly combat, and the seeming end of a cultural era. Mahler recorded his doubts and fears in his magnificent, wrenching, panoramic symphonies, and he died in 1911 convinced that he would be the last musician to write such works. Sibelius retreated into a splendid but socially irrelevant musical abstraction, and had given up composing completely by 1927, three full decades before his death. Carl Nielsen never allowed his faith in man to be shaken, however, and he continued to produce works that voiced his belief. In the words of Wilfred Mellers, “The victory Nielsen’s symphonies achieve is a triumph of humanism won, not in the interests of self, but of civilization.”

In his excellent book on The Lives of the Great Composers, the distinguished writer and critic emeritus of The New York Times Harold C. Schonberg summarized Nielsen’s creative style. “Nielsen was more adventurous than many composers of his day,” wrote Schonberg, “but basically he was a traditionalist who accepted the Classic forms, sometimes surrounding them with more biting harmonies than conventional ears could stand. But even in the Fifth Symphony, with its polytonal clashes, there is never any doubt about the underlying tonality.... But the thing that most impresses about Nielsen’s music is its breadth. The man thought big. His rhythms are energetic, his melodies are long-breathed, his orchestration generous. There is a great deal of individuality to his writing. In the 1930s, music lovers were hearing a great deal about the ‘bardic’ qualities of Sibelius. It is ironic to realize that Nielsen, then all but unknown outside Denmark, had just as much sweep, even more power and a more universal message.”

The high place today accorded to Nielsen’s symphonies is due in no small part to the advocacy of the Danish conductor Erik Tuxen (1902-1957), who made the first widely available commercial recording of any Nielsen symphony (No. 3, “Sinfonia Espansiva” in 1946, for Decca), edited the Fifth Symphony and performed it to thunderous acclaim at the 1950 Edinburgh Festival (and subsequently made its first recording, for HMV), and introduced the work to America the following year. Of the Symphony No. 5, Tuxen wrote, “This work is a perfect example of Carl Nielsen’s symphonic art at its best. It consists of two highly contrasting movements. In his original score, the composer has characterized these two movements as expressions of ‘the dim, latent powers’ and ‘the patent powers,’ in other words it is the vegetative and the active modes of life which are here set into opposition to one another in the abstract language of music. The spiritual content of the work must be seen against the background of doubt, anxiety and unrest that seized the minds of people after the First World War. Through its expressive evolution, from a quiet simple movement to the most violent eruptions, the first movement is borne by a peculiar cosmic notion of life. One perceives a gigantic fight between the principles of good and evil, the latter being especially characterized by the snarling and persistent attempts of the snare drum to disturb and tear the melodic structure. The victory of light over the powers of darkness heralded already at the end of the first movement is completed in the second, with its manful belief in will and vitality in all their manifestations.”

©2007 Dr. Richard E. Rodda