Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist.
28 Facts About Edvard Grieg
2.
Edvard Grieg is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide.
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Edvard Grieg's parents were Alexander Grieg, a merchant and the British Vice-Consul in Bergen; and Gesine Judithe Hagerup, a music teacher and daughter of solicitor and politician Edvard Hagerup.
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Edvard Grieg's mother was his first piano teacher and taught him to play when he was aged six.
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Edvard Grieg studied in several schools, including Tanks Upper Secondary School.
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Edvard Grieg enrolled in the conservatory, concentrating on piano, and enjoyed the many concerts and recitals given in Leipzig.
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Edvard Grieg disliked the discipline of the conservatory course of study.
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Edvard Grieg suffered from numerous respiratory infections, and ultimately developed combined lung and heart failure.
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Edvard Grieg was admitted many times to spas and sanatoria both in Norway and abroad.
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In 1863, Edvard Grieg went to Copenhagen, Denmark, and stayed there for three years.
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Edvard Grieg met his fellow Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak, who became a good friend and source of inspiration.
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Nordraak died in 1866, and Edvard Grieg composed a funeral march in his honor.
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On 11 June 1867, Edvard Grieg married his first cousin, Nina Hagerup, a lyric soprano.
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Edvard Grieg himself was unable to be there due to conducting commitments in Christiania.
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Liszt's rendition greatly impressed his audience, although Edvard Grieg said gently to him that he played the first movement too quickly.
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Edvard Grieg set several of his poems to music, including Landkjenning and Sigurd Jorsalfar.
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Edvard Grieg had close ties with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, and later became Music Director of the orchestra from 1880 to 1882.
18.
Tchaikovsky thought very highly of Edvard Grieg's music, praising its beauty, originality and warmth.
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Edvard Grieg was awarded two honorary doctorates, first by the University of Cambridge in 1894 and the next from the University of Oxford in 1906.
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Edvard Grieg recorded player piano music rolls for the Hupfeld Phonola piano-player system and Welte-Mignon reproducing system, all of which survive and can be heard today.
21.
Edvard Grieg worked with the Aeolian Company for its 'Autograph Metrostyle' piano roll series wherein he indicated the tempo mapping for many of his pieces.
22.
In 1899, Edvard Grieg cancelled his concerts in France in protest of the Dreyfus affair, an antisemitic scandal that was then roiling French politics.
23.
Edvard Grieg died at the Municipal Hospital in Bergen, Norway, on 4 September 1907 at age 64 from heart failure.
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Edvard Grieg was cremated in the first Norwegian crematorium opened in Bergen just that year, and his ashes were entombed in a mountain crypt near his house, Troldhaugen.
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Edvard Grieg wrote three violin sonatas and a cello sonata.
26.
Edvard Grieg composed the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, which includes the excerpts "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and "Morning Mood".
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Edvard Grieg wrote songs in which he set lyrics by poets Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and others.
28.
Edvard Grieg himself recorded many of these piano works before his death in 1907.