Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway, on the eve of the revolutionary upheavals that transformed the social and political landscape of 19th-century Europe. When the precociously gifted 15-year-old pianist arrived to study at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1858, the Romantic tradition embodied by Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann was still thriving. By the time Grieg died in 1907, Richard Strauss had scandalized opera audiences with his dissonantly modernist Salome and Schoenberg had embarked on his long journey toward 12-tone music and the “emancipation of the dissonance.” Grieg’s own music was deeply rooted in Norway’s landscape and folk culture, as reflected above all in his dozens of art songs and short piano pieces. Yet he also experimented with forms and harmonies that anticipated 20th-century practices. So strong was his influence on Debussy and Ravel that British composer Frederick Delius was moved to quip that all of “modern French music is simply Grieg plus the prelude to the third act of [Wagner’s] Tristan.”
Grieg’s reputation as a master miniaturist was firmly established by the publication of his first set of Lyric Pieces for piano in 1867. The ever-popular A-minor Piano Concerto, which he introduced the following year to thunderous acclaim, demonstrated that he was fully capable of composing in larger musical forms as well. Grieg’s fundamentally intimate and lyrical sensibility is manifest in a pair of works that he composed during a sojourn to Denmark in the summer of 1865: the Piano Sonata in E Minor, Op. 7, and the Violin Sonata in F Major, Op. 8. At age 22, Grieg was just beginning to open up to Norwegian influences in his music, partly as a result of his friendships with the great Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and the avowedly nationalist composer Rikard Nordraak. With Nordraak and others, he founded a musical society dedicated to the performance of music by young Scandinavian composers. The back-to-back sonatas pointed the way to Grieg’s emergence as a full-fledged musical nationalist himself.
Recalling the creative euphoria he experienced that summer in Rungsted, on Denmark’s east coast, Grieg told an interviewer: “Whether it was the enchanting surroundings or the stimulating air that inspired me, I cannot say. Enough that in 11 days I had composed my Piano Sonata, and very soon after my First Violin Sonata.” He dedicated the E-Minor Sonata to his Danish mentor Niels Gade, then the dean of Scandinavian composers. But Grieg’s music—with its stark contrasts of turbulence and repose, poetic intimacy and heroic grandiloquence—has little in common with Gade’s mannerly Mendelssohnian conservatism. Grieg boldly (albeit cryptically) announces his individual voice in the principal theme that permeates the dramatic Allegro moderato: The first three descending notes (E-B-G) spell the composer’s initials in German musical notation. The ensuing Andante molto tempers the sonata’s muscular virtuosity with placid lyricism, while the last two movements are characterized by vigorous, percussive rhythms redolent of the Norwegian peasant dances that Grieg would celebrate in later sets of piano pieces.
Born the year after Grieg’s death, Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt was a bona fide musical maverick in the mold of Charles Ives. Like Ives, he was a loner who lived and worked in isolation from the musical mainstream: He spent most of his life on a farm in the mountainous Hardanger district of western Norway. Like Ives—whose idiosyncratic musical language was a rich stew of popular styles, European Romanticism, and radically avant-garde elements—Tveitt was at once a cosmopolitan modernist and a devotee of vernacular traditions: He’s best known for his settings of Hardanger folk tunes for both piano and orchestra. Unlike Ives, however, Tveitt had the satisfaction of hearing most of his music performed during his lifetime. Indeed, as a well-respected concert pianist he performed much of it himself. Leif Ove Andsnes, who has championed Tveitt’s music for many years, ranks him among the 20th century’s “greatest composer-pianists, alongside Bartók, Britten, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff.”
In 1928, the 20-year-old Tveitt—like Grieg before him—went to Leipzig to pursue his formal musical training, followed by studies in Paris and Vienna with Arthur Honegger, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Schoenberg’s pupil Egon Wellesz. Upon returning to Norway, he composed a Norse-themed ballet titled Baldur’s Dreams, featuring nine specially designed “Stone Age” drums tuned to the pentatonic scale. Tveitt’s adoption of the modal scales associated with Norwegian folk tunes, coupled with other stylistic traits that one scholar has characterized as “burlesque barbarism,” defined his identity as a committed musical nationalist. Although Tveitt’s strain of Nordic archaism fell out of fashion after World War II, his reputation was such that the great soprano Kirsten Flagstad commissioned him to write an opera based on a comedy by Ludvig Holberg (the inspiration for Grieg’s Holberg Suite), which was staged at the 1966 Bergen International Festival. Four years later, a house fire destroyed the manuscripts of some four-fifths of Tveitt’s enormous output, much of which had never been published.
The Sonata No. 29 is Tveitt’s only surviving piano sonata—out of how many, nobody can say. Leif Ove Andsnes speculates that the number alludes to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 29, the monumental “Hammerklavier” Sonata. “It even has the opus number 129, so I believe this was him playing with numbers and signifying that this is his big piece. It’s a 35-minute sonata, very impressive, and basically built on one theme. There are some variations, but the theme runs through all three movements. It’s so colorfully written for the piano and so exciting. Some of the piano writing might be in a sort of French style, influenced by Ravel, but there are also rhythmical patterns like in Russian music that remind me of Prokofiev.” The work’s subtitle, “Ether Sonata,” reflects Tveitt’s fascination with extraterrestrial phenomena—he was a keen amateur astronomer—as do the three movement titles: “In cerca di” (“In Search of”), “Tono etereo in variazioni” (“Celestial Tone in Variations”), and “Tempo di pulsazione” (“Pulsation Time”). With its otherworldly sonorities, insistent ostinato patterns, and no-holds-barred harmonies, the “Sonata etere” is a Nordic cousin of Ives’s The Celestial Railroad.
Chopin is so intimately associated with the culture and society of mid–19th-century Paris that it’s easy to forget that he lived there, on and off, for less than 20 years. Born in 1810, he graduated at age 19 from the Warsaw Conservatory. Eager to make his mark and buoyed by his teachers’ praise of his exceptional talent and musical genius, he struck out to conquer Europe and eventually landed in the French capital, where he would make his home for the rest of his short life. He threw himself into the city’s glittering social and musical life, turning out dozens of waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, and other solo piano pieces that gave new meaning to the term salon music, the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and ’40s. Chopin’s radically unconventional conception of the piano, and his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom, made him one of the most revolutionary figures in music history. His fellow virtuoso Franz Liszt memorably characterized him as “one of those original beings who are adrift from all bondage.”
Throughout the 1830s, Chopin channeled much of his manic creative energy into a series of short but enormously sophisticated piano pieces masquerading as exercises. In one sense, this preoccupation was a natural outgrowth of the private teaching by which the composer earned his living. But Chopin’s more than four dozen preludes and etudes rise far above the level of didactic student pieces; they explore uncharted realms of musical expression and pianistic technique. The Op. 28 Preludes descend directly from J. S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. (Chopin often warmed up before concerts by playing Bach’s preludes and fugues.) Like Bach, Chopin traversed the gamut of the 24 major and minor keys. The resemblance is heightened by the organic structure of the work, with each prelude in a major key being followed by one in the relative minor, the next pair a perfect fifth higher, and so on.
Within this schematic framework, Chopin rings an astonishing variety of changes. Some of the preludes seem to be over almost before they begin, while others plumb musical and emotional depths that belie their brevity. Chopin’s determination to cast off the constraints of Classical form, harmony, key relationships, and keyboard technique bewildered even such a sympathetic observer as Robert Schumann, who described the Op. 28 Preludes as “sketches, beginnings of etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusion.” Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the preludes is their extreme economy of expression. In each piece, Chopin goes straight to the heart of the matter without extraneous preliminaries or musical filler. The development of his ideas is radically compressed, yet each of these jewel-like miniatures contains a world of meaning. It is no wonder that one of their greatest interpreters, pianist Hans von Bülow, felt justified in inventing detailed dramatic programs for each of the preludes.
—Harry Haskell