5. Songs.

In 1900 Grieg wrote to his American biographer Henry Finck:

How does it happen that my songs play such an important part in my production? Quite simply owing to the circumstances that even I, like other mortals, was for once in my life endowed with genius (to quote Goethe). The flash of genius was: love. I loved a young girl who had a wonderful voice and an equally wonderful gift of interpretation. That girl became my wife and my lifelong companion to this very day. For me, she has been – I dare admit it – the only genuine interpreter of my songs.

Even if one cannot conclude from this letter that Nina Grieg was the direct source of inspiration for all of her husband’s 170 songs, she was at least for the early songs The Heart’s Melodies op.5, and it was through their collaboration that Grieg came to his remarkable understanding of the capabilities and expressive possibilities of the human voice. Not surprisingly, when one element or another has occasion to dominate in his songs, it is the vocal line, especially in the earlier works; sheer melodic inspiration has kept some of these early songs alive in spite of their mediocre texts. However, in many other songs the piano accompaniment is highly developed, with short preludes and interludes and motifs imitated from the voice part.

Formally, the songs are mainly simple: usually strophic, sometimes with strophic variations. This folklike simple form is especially characteristic and appropriate in the Vinje and Garborg settings, where the texts are modelled after Norwegian folk poetry, and where form is integral to stylistic distinctiveness, to what makes them folksong transmuted into art music.

Grieg’s songs encompass a wide range of emotional expression, from the deep pain of such Vinje settings as Den særde (‘The Wounded Heart’) op.33 no.3 to the racy humour of Og jeg vil ha mig en hjertenskjaer (‘And I Will Take a Sweetheart’), the fifth of the op.60 Krag settings. In larger pieces there is often a motivic development mirroring the content of the poem. A good example of this, and of Grieg’s refined sense of sonority, is in the passionately intense Vinje song ‘Beside the River’.

Impressions of nature frequently provide an atmospheric background in the songs, as in several of these op.33 Vinje settings and in most of the eight songs of Haugtussa op.67, one of Grieg’s finest works. Garborg’s Haugtussa is a long epic, strongly influenced by Norwegian folk poetry, and in his settings Grieg used only a small portion of the action. From remarks in his letters, from the existence of another eight Haugtussa songs left in manuscript, one of them for women’s chorus, and from some sketches for instrumentation, it appears that Grieg had originally planned a larger work. The Haugtussa cycle contains some impressionistic uses of harmony and piano sonority, and these features are even more striking in the op.70 settings of Otto Benzon poems. In the fourth of these, Lys nat (‘Summer Night’), interest is concentrated on the evocative impressionistic piano writing, while the vocal part is largely relegated to the role of recitative. An essential element of Grieg’s songwriting achievement was his ability to reinterpret a lyrical impression, to create or reflect a definite atmosphere by simple melodic and harmonic means, and it is this atmospheric quality in his best songs, particularly the late ones, that places them among the finest examples of Romanticism.

Grieg, Edvard