On the 14th of December 2011 a group of people gathered at the South Pole to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the achievement of a small party of Norwegians, who were the first to succeed in reaching that tantalizing goal (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg at the South Pole, 14 December 2011. (Erik Edland, by kind permission of the Office of the Prime Minister.) The photograph may be seen in colour at http://www.flickr.com/photos/statsministerenskontor/6508900215/in/set-72157628381100885

The Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, was present and in his address to the assembled group he said: ‘The 14th of December 1911 was a proud day for Norway, a young nation that had gained its full independence only six years earlier. The polar expeditions of Roald Amundsen helped to form our new national identity.’

The race to the South Pole, which had been won by Amundsen and in which Robert Falcon Scott and his companions tragically lost their lives, was certainly a sensational event that captured the imagination of the entire world. In Norway it was undoubtedly a source of great national pride and inspiration, but what did the prime minister mean by saying that it had ‘helped to form our new national identity’? What need did the ancient Kingdom of Norway, whose exploits are well known in saga and song, have of ‘a new national identity’? To answer that question it will perhaps be helpful to be reminded briefly of some essential facts of Scandinavian history in broad outline.

In 1363 the King of Norway, Håkon VI Magnusson, married Princess Margaret, daughter of Valdemar IV Atterdag, King of Denmark. They had a son, Oluf, born in 1370, and when King Valdemar died in 1375, Margaret's son was appointed to succeed his maternal grandfather on the throne of Denmark as Oluf II. When five years later, in 1380, his father, King Håkon, died, he succeeded him as well, as Oluf IV of Norway. Thus, from 1380 Norway and Denmark shared the same monarch and were accordingly ‘twin kingdoms’. For part of the time Sweden too came under the same crown until Gustav Vasa took Sweden out of the Kalmar Union in 1523. Norway and Denmark remained together, however, until 1814, when – Denmark having ended up on the losing side in the Napoleonic Wars – the Treaty of Kiel ceded Norway to Sweden as spoil of war. In 1905, however, following a national referendum, the King of Sweden gave up his claim to the Norwegian throne, and Norway at long last, after 525 years, stood once more alone as an independent nation. It was to this situation that Prime Minister Stoltenberg referred when he said that the country at that time felt the need of ‘a new national identity’.

Although during the struggle for independence republican sympathies had been expressed, the people of Norway chose nevertheless not to become a republic and Prince Carl, one of the grandsons of King Christian IX of Denmark, ‘the father-in-law of Europe’, was invited to come to Norway to reign as King Håkon VII. In so doing he had the unnatural experience of becoming a king before his father, who the following year ascended the throne of Denmark as Frederik VIII. It is important to bear in mind that the union between Norway and Denmark, which lasted from 1380 to 1814, was not the result of aggression or conflict but of a normal and natural dynastic process. In principle, the two nations coexisted equally under one sovereign and, if we may believe the testimony of the great Ludvig Holberg (Figure 2), they got along very well – at least throughout his life-time.

Figure 2

Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754).¹

Ludvig Holberg was born in Bergen in 1684. He was sent to Copenhagen in 1702 to continue his studies at the university and, after graduating in theology, he went to Oxford, where he was inscribed in the Bodleian Library on 18 April 1706 as ‘Ludovicus Holbergius Norvegus’. He returned to Copenhagen in 1708, where he held, successively, three different professorships in the university and wrote a number of learned works, which circulated widely in Latin and in translation. Above all, however, he is famous for having laid the foundations of Danish and Norwegian theatre with a remarkable series of 31 comedies, several of which are still in the theatrical repertories in both countries and have earned him the title ‘the Father of Scandinavian theatre’. As a consequence he can probably be said to have been the most internationally famous Norwegian in the eighteenth century, and in the fascinating Description of Denmark and Norway that he wrote in 1729 he says: ‘As for the Norwegians, seeing that they live in a different climate, they differ greatly from the Danes, both in humour [mood] and customs: however this difference does not prevent a perfect union and agreement between both these nations and ever since the illustrious union of Denmark and Norway became a fact [in 1380] they have been regarded as one people.’²

However, the location of the royal residence and seat of administration in Copenhagen inevitably gave Denmark certain advantages, which became more apparent and more keenly felt with the passage of time. When the Union came into being in 1380 the population of Norway was probably not much more than 100,000 people, spread out over a country that even today is one of the most thinly populated in Europe. At the dissolution of the Union in 1814 this number had grown to 885,000³ – still less than a million and still little urbanized, but sufficiently large for the want of the cultural institutions associated with nationhood – such as a university – to begin to be felt. When in 1479 King Christian I had been granted papal permission for the establishment of a university in Copenhagen, it was, of course, intended as a university to serve both of his kingdoms, but by 1811 the need for Norway to have a university of her own had become recognized and it was agreed that a university should be established at what was then Christiania, the doors of which were opened in 1813.

Ludvig Holberg died in 1754 and the amicable coexistence that he described was soon to be subjected to the disruptive influence of the American and the French revolutions. Inevitably, the rise of national romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century was accompanied by an increasingly urgent desire on the part of Norwegians to get out from under the shadow of Denmark, and the constitution, hastily adopted in 1814 during the brief interregnum between Denmark and Sweden, provided a proud basis on which to assert a national identity. This was a mission that romantic artists were prepared to take upon themselves, whether poets, painters, playwrights or musicians. Artists such as Johan Christian Dahl, Adolph Tideman and Erik Werenskjold and writers such as Henrik Wergeland, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson and Jonas Lie, taught Norwegians about themselves, while some, such as Edvard Munch, Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun also made Norway known to the outside world. In this respect, none were more successful than the two musicians, Ole Bull and Edvard Grieg – both, like Holberg, also born in Bergen – who with patriotic fervour dedicated their art to the service of their nation.

Ole Bull (Figure 3) was born in 1810 and showed an unusual talent for playing the violin from a very early age. After a couple of years in the capital city, Christiania, where he shared the revolutionary enthusiasm of young patriots, such as his friend, the poet Henrik Wergeland, he ventured out into the world in 1831, going first to Paris and then to Italy, where he won such success that he was elected to honorary membership of the Accademia Filarmonica in Bologna. He returned to Paris in 1835 and boldly applied for permission to give a concert in the Opéra, something that only Paganini before him had presumed to do. He advertised himself simply as ‘artiste norvégien’, which the noted critic Jules Janin apparently thought was not fully self-explanatory, since he began his enthusiastic review with the useful information that: ‘The Kingdom of Norway begins at the 58th degree of latitude and ends with the North Cape at 71° 10’’ North…’.Reference Haugen and Cai⁴ Bull continued his success in England, where the press reported: ‘Norway can be proud of having fostered such a son. England is glad he came to us.’Reference Haugen and Cai⁵ By placing so much emphasis on his country of origin and by including Norwegian folk music on his programmes, he put Norway on the map of Europe. In 1836–1837, the year in which Queen Victoria began her reign, it is said that he gave 274 concerts in a period of ten months in the British Isles alone and he continued his tireless concert-giving throughout the rest of Europe as well. The reports of his triumphs that reached Norway gave him the status of a national hero – as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson said: ‘He became the first and greatest festive moment in the life of this people.’Reference Haugen and Cai⁶ In 1843 he extended his field of conquest to include the New World, where he found an environment that appealed to him as a democrat and adventurer and that welcomed him in return with a quite exceptional appreciation – ‘my relationship to the Americans’, he wrote, ‘was that of an adopted child.’Reference Bull⁷

Figure 3

Ole Bull (1810–1880).

His mission on behalf of Norway was not forgotten: in addition to his concerts, he founded a colony for Norwegian immigrants, raised funds for the purchase of a collection of Scandinavian books, which led to the establishment of a chair of Scandinavian languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, and he collected money for a statue of Leif Ericson, the Norse discoverer of America in the year 1000, which was raised posthumously in Boston in 1887. At Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1852, the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who was on a lecture tour in America, met Bull and described him as ‘a mad-cap fiddler… Quite a figure for a book.’Reference Wilson⁸ – and indeed, some ten years later, in 1863, he appeared as the enchanting unnamed Norwegian violinist in the Tales of a Wayside Inn,Reference Longfellow⁹ a kind of American counterpart to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, by another of his American friends at Cambridge, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Figure 4). In the ‘Prelude’ he is thus described:

Figure 4

Illustration from 1864 edition of H.W. Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn.

When it is the Musician's turn to entertain his fellow-travellers he relates ‘The Saga of King Olaf’, a story taken from the thirteenth century Icelandic manuscript known as Heimskringla, interspersed with musical interludes on his violin, and in this way Ole Bull became – if indirectly – the inspiration for the choral work by Edward Elgar, Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Op. 30 (1896), which opens with this passage from the ‘Interlude’ preceding the Musician's tale in Longfellow's poem:

The figure of Ole Bull thus continued to spread Norway's fame and strengthen the feeling of national identity of its people even after he had put down his bow and Norwegians approached the long-awaited moment of independence for which he had laboured to prepare them.¹⁰

The story of King Olaf Trygvason was also the subject of an opera to a text by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson on which Edvard Grieg worked for several years. Unfortunately, it was never completed, although some fine parts were eventually printed and are now separately performed.

Edvard Grieg (Figure 5) was born in Bergen in 1843. The Bull and Grieg families were related by marriage and the young Grieg's talent for music was recognized and encouraged by Ole Bull. Although Grieg idolized the legendary violinist and shared his patriotic ambitions, he was never as narrowly nationalistic as Bull. When he wrote in a letter that he ‘didn't exactly want to be Norwegian, much less super-Norwegian, I just wanted to be – myself’,Reference Benestad¹¹ he was perhaps distancing himself from his famous relative, who had boastfully referred to himself as ‘a Norse Norwegian from Norway’. His national feelings were nevertheless strong and it is this that Grieg wished to convey in a letter written in 1866 to his Danish friend Gottfred Matthison-Hansen. Although he would much rather have stayed in Copenhagen, Scandinavia's only cosmopolitan city, he felt obliged to return to Norway after his marriage, ‘where I shall live and work. Yes, it is a strange thought, a strange mixture of delight and wistfulness. It is my enthusiasm for the national idea that leads me to reconcile myself with my native land as a place for an artist to make his home…’.¹² Some years later, discouraged, he spoke of the conditions under which he worked in ‘our developing artistic environment, where we still have none of the institutions that in foreign countries have a stimulating effect on the creative artist's imagination; for we lack the fundamental support that is to be found in a national opera with an orchestra and a chorus corresponding to the requirements of art and of our time.’Reference Benestad and Halvorson¹³

Figure 5

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907).

In 1875, while working on Olav Trygvason, Grieg wrote to Bjørnson: ‘To depict Norwegian nature, Norwegian folk life, Norwegian history and Norwegian folk poetry in music stands for me as the area in which I think I can achieve something.’¹⁴ He was to pursue this declaration of purpose with dedication and realize it with remarkable assurance and the tremendous success his music enjoyed showed with what insight he had judged his genius. His reception at his first concert in England in 1888 was overwhelming and he wrote to his friend Frants Beyer:

It is characteristic of Grieg that he should regard his personal success as a success for Norway and natural that in so doing he should think of Ole Bull, but he and Ole Bull were quite different types who achieved their respective successes by different means. As we could read in Longfellow's description, Ole Bull was tall, strong, athletic and charismatic; the impact of his personality was frequently commented upon – Bjørnson said that when he entered a room he eclipsed all others. In the opinion of no less a critic than Robert Schumann he was the greatest violinist of his time, at least the equal of Paganini and certainly unrivalled after Paganini's death and his performances were greeted with wild enthusiasm wherever he went. In the long run, however, his success was closely bound up with his appearance and personality. Although he composed many works, including two violin concertos, he published very little and his performances of his own music were often improvisations. Accordingly, although appreciation of his importance to Norway's struggle for national recognition survives, his musical legacy – with the exception of two much-loved songs – gradually faded when he was no longer on the stage to mesmerize his audiences with his own performances. Grieg, on the other hand, was very small of stature and, though intellectually strong, he was physically frail and plagued all his life by a pulmonary ailment. Although not in Bull's class as a performer, he was a pianist of distinction and a fine conductor, but above all he was a composer. Publishers competed for his works and it was eventually C.F. Peters of Leipzig who enjoyed the privilege of publishing most of Grieg's compositions – and, it must be said, they treated him very well in return. In addition to his large orchestral works, Grieg wrote many songs and piano pieces (many of them based on Norwegian folk melodies), which were sold in large numbers and performed in the many homes that hadn't yet learned the passive pleasures of gramophone, radio and television, and whose popularity made far-away Norway seem a familiar neighbour. The reviewer of his first concert in England in 1888, for example wrote:

As a composer, Grieg occupied as exalted a position as Bull did as a performer. He was loved by his audiences and his company was sought by kings and emperors. As perhaps the ultimate recognition, he was honoured with a Doctor of Music degree by both Oxford and Cambridge. In the latter case, the intention was that Grieg should have shared the honour with Saint-Saëns, Bruch, Boito and Tchaikovsky at a particularly festive occasion in 1893, but due to ill-health he was forced to postpone his receipt of the degree until the following year. Although not a symphonist, like Brahms, nor an opera composer, like Verdi, his music, in particular the originality of his harmony, exerted a remarkable influence on his younger contemporaries. This can be illustrated by his setting of a Norwegian folk song ‘I Ola-Dalom, i Ola-Kjønn’, no 14 of his 19 Norwegian Folk Songs, Op. 66 (1896–7) (Figure 6):¹⁷

Figure 6

Edvard Grieg, 19 Norske Folkeviser, Op. 66 no. 14.

Grieg's influence was especially felt in France, where his advanced harmonic sense pointed in the direction of Impressionism. In an interview in 1926 Ravel asserted that he had not written a single work that was not influenced by Grieg, and when the English composer, Frederick Delius (who lived in France) declared categorically that modern French music was simply Grieg plus the Prelude to the third act of Tristan, Ravel agreed.Reference Schjelderup-Ebbe¹⁸ The folksong melody of the music example above will perhaps be better known to audiences today in the lovely setting by Delius entitled On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, a work in which all the impressionistic possibilities suggested by Grieg are realized.

Towards the end of his life, in 1905, when Norway's independence had been achieved, Grieg assessed the significance to himself of the long struggle for independence that was now a reality. On New Year's Eve 1905 he wrote in his diary: ‘Now the year 1905 – the great year – goes to rest, and I part from it with deep gratitude because I have experienced it! And yet, without the youthful dreams that this year has made real, my art would not have had its proper background. The longings have transformed my personal experiences into tones. Had the 7th of June come in my youth, what would have happened?’Reference Benestad and Halvorson¹⁹ This idea that making the trip is of greater consequence than reaching the objective is reminiscent of Ole Bull's motto: Vita bellum – bellum vita [Life is war – war is life]. But what did he mean by saying that his journey in search of recognition for his country had given his art ‘the proper background’? – obviously, in the first place, that his art had been given shape and purpose by the national struggle, but at the same time, surely, that the national struggle had endowed his art with significance – in the work of defining a national identity, for example – in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. The achievement of Ole Bull and Edvard Grieg in bringing Norway from Isolation to Recognition was thus, according to themselves, due to the nobility of the struggle in which they engaged – it was ‘twice blest’, as Shakespeare might have said – and this was long before Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911.

In his contribution, above, John Bergsagel made a good point about Jens Stoltenberg's remark in connection with the centenary of Roald Amundsen's expedition to the South Pole. I have chosen to begin on the opposite side of the world with Fridthjov Nansen's expedition to the North Pole. In 1896 he returned from a three-year-long journey over the Polar Sea. He did not reach the North Pole, but was nevertheless the first person to go as far as 86 degrees, 4 minutes north. Nansen's journey over the Polar Sea on skis made him world-famous. The series of lectures he gave in France the same autumn contributed to strengthening the impression that Norway was a nation with huge talents in, so to speak, all areas. ‘The little Norwegian nation suddenly emerges from the darkness and introduces itself to Europe with hands full of the fruits of its renaissance. Norway exports from its riches,’ wrote the French writer Lescoffier.Reference Lescoffier¹

In Paris, the French went to the Salon to see the painter Frits Thaulow's winter scenes. Afterwards they went to the theatre, amongst other things to see and hear Henrik Ibsen's drama Peer Gynt with Grieg's music and with scenery by the painter Edvard Munch. The Norwegian paintings in the Salon helped the French to experience nature when they heard Grieg's music:

So wrote a critic after one of Grieg's concerts in 1889. ‘A great triumph for Norway’, was Grieg's reaction. Just like today's sportsmen, he accepted the honour for the benefit of his country. It was not strange, therefore, that caricaturists lined up Nansen and the Norwegian artists as the nation's defence, when the political relationship between Norway and Sweden became critical (Figure 1).

Figure 1

The explorer, scientist and diplomat Fridtjov Nansen with his ‘army’ at the Swedish-Norwegian border. From the left: the painter Frits Thaulow, the writers Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Jonas Lie and Henrik Ibsen, the composer Edvard Grieg and, as commander, Fridtjov Nansen himself. The poem in the bottom corner reads: A line of skirmishers No, Norway is certainly not open for the taking, The old boys flock to the sound of battle. Here they have cast aside their weapons of the spirit and mustered with rifles on their shoulders.³

There was no war between Norway and Sweden. It all ended happily, perhaps because the country had so clearly demonstrated that it had its own culture. ‘Freedom, that is: the fight for freedom!’ Grieg wrote in his diary in 1905, feeling that his youthful dreams had been fulfilled, and Grieg wondered whether it was not just this longing for freedom that had unleashed his own creative powers.

When the 15-year-old Grieg travelled from Bergen to Leipzig in 1858 to become a musician, he had no clear thoughts about what would happen. His vocation as a national composer only grew gradually, not least after he had visited Ole Bull on Osterøy outside Bergen, where Bull had local fiddlers perform Hardanger-fiddle dances for him.

The need for Norwegian music had already arisen when, in 1814, Norway was forced into a union with Sweden. In 1820, the Society for Norway's Welfare announced a competition for the best Norwegian national song. The writer Conrad Nicolai Schwach prepared a detailed formula of what that should be like: ‘The melody to a Norwegian national song should be in the minor key and preferably in A minor, in which – if you like – I am convinced that Norway is tuned.’⁴ I do not know if Grieg knew Schwach's theory about A minor being a Norwegian national key, but who knows? Perhaps he wrote the piano concerto in A minor because Norway is tuned in A minor!

At any rate, the first convincing attempt to create music with national colour is in a minor key: ‘Aagot's Mountain Song’ from Waldemar Thrane's ballad-opera Fjeldeventyret (A Mountain Adventure), which had its premiere in 1825 (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Waldemar Thrane: ‘Aagot's Mountain Song’ from A Mountain Adventure.

After his studies in Paris, Thrane had been inspired to use local colour to depict the herdgirl's song, but after he died in 1828 there were no other composers who could further that first attempt to create a national tone. The discussions continued, however, in literary circles. The publication ‘Some Words on National Music’, issued in 1831, takes the form of a discussion between two men with widely differing views. One thinks that the more a race tries to protect its nationality from outside influences, the purer the national individuality can be maintained and further developed. Every race had to make use of the means that were in accordance with its own nationality; otherwise, the foreign or half-foreign would lead to nationality being diluted and disappearing. The other disagreed: nationality could not keep itself pure and unadulterated in any race if there was not complete isolation. What came from outside would blend in with what already existed and when amalgamation was a fact the new would be national, even if it were not the same national as previously. It had been like this for centuries and so it would continue. One must not believe that the notes now sounding from mountain to mountain were the same as when King Harald Fairhair united Norway into a nation in 1030. The far-sighted man was quite sure of that.

Cultural openness or national isolation were the extreme points in the debate and were almost a prophecy of the dilemma with which Norwegian artists were faced throughout the nineteenth century and far into the next. Authors and poets, but most of all musicians had constantly to ask the questions: what is Norwegian or national art? How does one relate to international impulses? How can one, through art, help place one's country on the international map and thereby prove that the country is an independent nation with its own identity?

That song could be an effectual means of shaping identity, Norwegians realised seriously when, in 1824, they wanted to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution. King Karl Johan was so strongly against it that he issued a ban on singing patriotic songs in public on 17th May. In his opinion it was a demonstration of defiance, emphasizing that the Norwegian parliamentary representatives had chosen the Danish prince, Christian Frederik, as Norwegian king on 17th May 1814.

Karl Johan tried to stifle freedom of speech by arresting those who sang national songs, but did not get anywhere. People had noticed what feelings of solidarity and strength they had when they sang patriotic songs such as: ‘To Norway, birthplace of warriors’ (For Norge kjempers fedreland vi denne skål vil tømme), or ‘Sons of Norway’ (Sønner av Norge). The row about the national day reached a high point in 1829, when Karl Johan chose to use military force. The poet Henrik Wergeland and the violin virtuoso Ole Bull were among the demonstrators in the famous market-square battle in the Norwegian capital. The patriotic singers were chased away, but the king must nevertheless have realised that the battle of Norway's national day was lost.

Wergeland's thoughts of freedom inspired his musical friends to set his poems to music. ‘Norway's Freedom’ (Hymne til friheden) and ‘In the thunder’ (Tordenen) were amongst Ole Bull's first attempts at composition. As a child he had impressed the people of Bergen and his teachers with performances of Paganini's Caprices, and it was as a violin virtuoso that he later created an international name for himself as the Scandinavian Paganini. Everywhere on his concert tours Bull met people who were fighting for freedom. In northern Italy he felt the Italians’ hatred of and opposition to the Austrian supremacy and in Prague he improvised on well-known Bohemian folk-tunes, receiving in thanks an ode of homage from the Czech patriots. The violin fantasia, Polacca Guerriera, is a homage to the exiled Poles he met after their rebellion against Russia in 1830. In Cuba he created fantasias on local melodies, in sympathy with the repressed Creoles. His reception was never more enthusiastic than when he improvised on folk-tunes from the countries he visited. The Spanish fantasia from 1847, La Verbena de San Juan, is a brilliant example of how he could use a country's characteristic folk melodies.⁵

Ole Bull never concealed his democratic views and love for his country, but it was the February Revolution in Paris in 1848 that aroused the nationalist feeling in him in earnest. On 15 March, with 24 Norwegians, he went in procession to the town hall, where he was met by the Foreign Minister, Alphonse de Lamartine. For the occasion, Ole Bull had paid for a Norwegian flag to be made in silk without the Swedish-Norwegian union emblem in the upper left-hand corner, but with the inscription ‘La Norvège’ in gold. In that way, Bull paid tribute to the French Republic and showed the world that Norway was a nation independent of Sweden.

Later, in the autumn, he went home to Norway and roused the students to play the Marseillaise and tell of their experiences in Paris. His aim was not just to encourage them to fight for national freedom. Bull felt himself to be Wergeland's heir and wanted to make his country aware that they had their own identity in folk art. He sent a message to the foremost Hardanger-fiddle player in the land, Myllarguten – the ‘Miller's Boy’ – (Torgeir Audunssøn) from Telemark and had him play with him in the concert halls of the bourgeoisie, showing that folk music, which up to then had been considered as something amateurish and inferior, could compete on the same level as classical music. He even published Hardanger-fiddle dances that he himself had written-down.

In 1850 Bull returned to his home city and opened a national theatre, for which he engaged the young Henrik Ibnsen, and later Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, to write national theatrical works. The Norwegian language was to replace Danish and, above all, all the staff at the theatre were to be ethnic Norwegians.

Ole Bull felt that, as artist, as genius, he should fight for right and his country's freedom. He wanted to be a model and used his international position as a violin virtuoso to emphasise political points of view. Unfortunately, he did not have the strength or stamina to carry out his vision. Others continued and spoke up for his national vision.

There was no school of music in Norway for the general public. Norwegian men and women who wanted to become professional musicians had to travel abroad, preferably to the music conservatory in Leipzig. From a national point of view that was quite mad, thought the writers. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson maintained that all those who studied music in Leipzig would come home dissatisfied, without having received the knowledge necessary to create national music. ‘Do you believe that Norwegian geniuses will suddenly leap out of our foreign music?’ wrote Bjørnson, with a dig at the immigrant German musicians. ‘Shouldn't we first break into a national spring-song? If one believes the opposite, one can give up all possible efforts. Send children to Leipzig! If they are Norwegian-born geniuses, they will still come to play Norwegian’, continued Bjørnson ironically.⁶

Bjørnson's article in Bergensposten may be considered as indirect criticism of Edvard Grieg's parents, who only a few months previously, in the autumn of 1858, had sent the 15-year-old boy to study music in Leipzig. Bjørnson was certain that the song was the most important means of creating a sense of community amongst people and of giving them a feeling of national identity. Bjørnson had indeed learned by experience that music could be superior to the art of writing: ‘Poets can come and express our feelings of freedom and love for our country, depict our historic or day-to-day ways, they can give words to many a silent longing. But one only has to hear a “halling” being played or a simple folksong drifting by, and their own works pale.’Reference Collin⁷

This quotation explains how, all his life, Bjørnson was searching for a Norwegian composer who, with his melodies and music, could give life to his poetry and thereby spread his thinking to the people. Bjørnson waited impatiently for the composer who could deliver Norwegian-ness in music. In his disappointment at its taking such a long time to produce musicians who could master the large forms, he made fun of Norwegian music students, who believed they had to go to Leipzig to become national composers.

Only with Edvard Grieg did Bjørnson fulfil some of his dreams. He could have no idea that the lad he would have preferred to be kept at home in Norway in 1858, was precisely the one he had been waiting for. What Bjørnson and the other Norwegian writers did not understand or think of was that a composer could not create good music without solid craftsmanship. That was what Grieg received in Leipzig, even if later he would not admit it.

To start with, Grieg was most concerned with developing his pianistic accomplishments and dedicating himself to European musical language. The thought of becoming a national composer only grew little by little. Instead of doing the same as his predecessors, who for the most part contented themselves with writing potpourris on national tunes, Grieg used the small characteristic melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements in folk music as building blocks for larger musical works. The violin sonata in G major and the piano concerto in A minor are striking examples of how the barely 25-year-old Grieg succeeded with his national project. It was precisely that which made the Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt shout with enthusiasm during their legendary meeting in Rome in 1870. Grieg had not only found a national tone, but at the same time had developed his own personal musical language, which distinguished him from all the others. Looked at harmonically, his music was so new and daring that his own countrymen, including his Norwegian musical colleagues, had problems understanding it. Grieg used more of the wild and trollish aspects hidden in the slåtter (peasant dances) than composers before him. His music began to be met with opposition, not just in Norway, but also in Germany, where the newspapers criticised him for ‘Norwegianising’ his music.

Such reactions could easily make a young composer uncertain of himself, but Franz Liszt encouraged him to continue on the path on which he had set out. In his report to the government about the use of his travel- and study-grant to Rome in 1870, Grieg wrote: ‘I brought him [Liszt] several of my compositions, he played them, and it was of the greatest interest to me to notice how it was the national element in them which first took him by surprise – but then excited him. Such a triumph for my efforts and my view of the national was alone worth the journey.’Reference Grieg⁸

In the 1880s Grieg was worried that, with his Norwegian tonal language, he would be perceived and judged as just a local composer. By toning down the national colour, he tried to be more European, but gradually he realised that it was exactly this folkloristic element that, together with his own personal harmonic style, made him internationally sought after and famous. When in 1905 the circle around Maurice Ravel got to hear his Slåtter, Op.72 (1903), they spoke enthusiastically about ‘le nouveau Grieg’, the new Grieg.⁹

Edvard Grieg was the first who managed to paint Norwegian nature, Norwegian country life, Norwegian history and Norwegian folk-poetry in music in a way that made a whole world listen. With Ibsen, Munch and Hamsun he has remained as (forgive the commercial expression) the very ‘trademark’ of Norwegian culture, of Norwegian music. This has ever since been a problem for the artists who came after him. In musical circles, Grieg's commanding position led to composers having to find new paths. Throughout the whole of the twentieth century Norwegian folk music nevertheless continued to be an inexhaustible source for many Norwegian composers, almost regardless of which European stylistic currents they allowed themselves to be influenced by. That is another story, but let us end with an example from Arne Nordheim's incidental music to Peer Gynt from 1969. Nordheim was a pioneer of electro-acoustic music in Norway and succeeded as no one else in his time in creating an international name for himself. As a young progressive composer, he clashed violently with national-romanticism and the national anchoring of the interwar years, but if listened to carefully, in spite of the modernism both a fairy flute and slåtter-rhythms will be heard, not to mention small ugly trolls! What did they say in 1831? Those who are welcomed from outside will blend with what already existed, and when the blending is fact, it is national, even if it no longer is the same nationality as previously.¹⁰