Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
A selection of songs

The author of Peer Gynt and Piano Concerto in A minor expressed himself through music of various genres and characters. Above all, however, he was a lyrical artist, a lyricist born. He made his name in music with his piano miniatures and songs. He wrote about 140 of the latter, inspired by texts of Heine and Goethego – to begin with, like a good graduate of the Leipzig Conservatory should – but chiefly by those of Northern poets: Andersen, Bjǒrnsen, Paulsen and Ibsen. Some of these songs followed in the footsteps of the German Romantic Lied, others created and preserved in song the lyrical idiom of the North.
Grieg wrote his songs as expressions of real feelings addressed to a real person. “I do not believe I have a greater talent for writing songs than for writing any other music,” he once wrote, not without false modesty. “Then why do they play such a great role in my life? Simply because I had the opportunity to exhibit some shrewdness once in my life. Through love: no other young girl had such a miraculous voice and such extraordinary talent for interpretation. That person became my wife. And the only true interpreter of my songs.”

∙ Gruss (Greeting). This fleeting page from an album has been inspired by a poem by Heine. With its dynamic expression of emotion and the surprising, it is more than a match for the well-known song by Mendelssohn composed to the same lyrics.

∙ Zur Rosenzeit (The Time for Roses). Meditation in transience expressed with the words of Goethe is carried forth by a beautiful and true melody, dominated by a nostalgic tone.

∙ Ein Traum (A Dream). In Grieg’s interpretation, the poem by Friedrich Bodenstedt – on a dream that becomes reality and on reality that overshadows the dream – blooms with vocal euphoria. The song attains the dimensions and the character of a concert song, a very serious one at that.

∙ En svane (A Swan). This is thirty-one bars of drama in a nutshell, inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s symbolist lyrical poem, an apostrophe to a swan singing its last song. In a Tristanic climate, the melody's seeming calm, its disturbance, its apogee leads on to silence.

∙ Jeg elsker Dig (I Love You). Christian Andersen’s four-line poem served Grieg to express his own feelings, addressed to Nina Hagerup, his future wife. The melody’s drive towards the climactic moment, towards the phrase “I love you now and forever, seems to have become the song’s only goal. Robert Schumann would be proud.

Mieczysław Tomaszewski