Episode Details

Edvard Grieg wrote In the Hall of the Mountain King as a satirical parody of Norwegian folklore and privately confessed he could not stand listening to it, yet it became the sound of Norway. Born in Bergen in 1843 to a family with Scottish roots, Grieg was sent to the Leipzig Conservatory after violinist Ole Bull heard him play at fifteen. He hated its rigid German discipline, and in 1860 pleurisy and tuberculosis left him with a destroyed lung and a deformed spine for life.

This episode follows his meeting with Rikard Nordraak in Copenhagen, which turned him toward Norwegian folk sources, the death of his infant daughter Alexandra, the 1868 Piano Concerto in A minor, and his 1870 meeting with Franz Liszt, who sight-read the entire concerto and offered advice Grieg politely refused. We cover the Peer Gynt collaboration with Ibsen, his 1899 cancellation of French concerts to protest the Dreyfus affair, his 1903 gramophone and Welte-Mignon piano roll recordings, and his death in 1907, when 30,000 to 40,000 people filled the streets of Bergen.

• How Liszt's letter of recommendation, written before they had ever met, secured Grieg a government travel grant
• Why a touring pianist with half a working lung faced an immense physical toll at every concert
• The falling out with poet Bjornson over the abandoned opera project
• His Unitarian humanism and the hate mail he received from France
• His bond with Percy Grainger and his efforts to freeze his exact tempos for posterity