Abstract
Despite his important status in Denmark, many critics and scholars alike have proclaimed that Otto Benzon was not an effective choice of poet for Grieg’s songs, Opp. 69 and 70. This chapter argues that the composer’s decision was not as puzzling as it has been portrayed. On the contrary, by situating these works within the context of the cosmopolitan conditions outlined in Chap. 2, their significance comes into better focus. This chapter thereby offers an analytical survey of the experiments Grieg generated for the purpose of interweaving rich layers of national and cosmopolitan identities. It also demonstrates how techniques such as chromatic juxtapositioning and tetrachordal transformation, which were developed as musical analogues for literary practices, became common strategies for cosmopolitanizing national sources in his late songs and last choral works, Four Psalms, Op. 74.
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Notes
- 1.
Peder Severin Krøyer (1851–1909) was a contemporary of Grieg. He was born in Norway but spent most of his career in Denmark and became one of the best-known exponents of the Skagen painters. Krøyer’s techniques in the visual arts parallel the methods of the contemporaneous writers and musicians that I describe, especially his interest in connecting regional and international elements. See also Thor Mednick, “Skagen: Art and National Romanticism in 19th-Century Denmark” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2009). Patricia Berman has also written widely on this topic, including In Another Light: Danish Painting in the 19th Century (New York: Vendome, 2007).
- 2.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 398–99. See also the editors’ comments regarding the misappropriation of the term “gammel” (old) for “genial” (brilliant) that led, in part, to this conflict.
- 3.
David Monrad-Johansen, Edvard Grieg (New York: Tudor, 1938), 342.
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
John Horton, Grieg (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1974), 192.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, A Study of Grieg’s Harmony with Special Reference to his Contributions to Musical Impressionism (Oslo: Johan Grundt Tanum, 1953), 45.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Beryl Foster, Songs of Edvard Grieg, 211–12.
- 10.
Elisabeth Oxfeldt has discussed the significance of place in crossing social boundaries in Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1800–1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005); Nordic Orientalism, 53–58.
- 11.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 230.
- 12.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 18.
- 13.
Ibid., 19.
- 14.
While I will problematize the term “universal” in future chapters, it is important to note at this juncture that Grieg’s concept of cosmopolitanism approximates his use of the term universalism, for he used both terms interchangeably.
- 15.
Nordic Orientalism, 67.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 50.
- 18.
Ibid., 51.
- 19.
Ibid., 52.
- 20.
In Grieg’s letter to Bjørnson on 2 May 1876, he states, “Perhaps you have heard that last fall both of my parents were suddenly called away, and I ended spending the winter here [in Bergen]. It has been dark and depressing, and I have been living cooped up within reflections of all kinds. What I have composed during this time reflects this as well.” [Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 122.]
- 21.
For the historical significance of the lament bass, see Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” The Musical Quarterly 65/3 (July, 1979): 346–59.
- 22.
The pitch content of the half-diminished seventh chord in measure 7 [A♭-B(=C♭)-E♭-F] corresponds to the famous “Tristan chord”—an influence of Wagner’s harmonic procedures.
- 23.
Richard Taruskin traces the origin of this “out of time” device in the Romantic literature to the works of Schubert. See “The Music Trance: Romantic Characterstücke; Schubert’s Career,” in Music in the 19th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 61–118.
- 24.
Interestingly, many of these writers have deep-seated connections to music. Ishiguro, for instance, started his career as a singer/songwriter well before winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.
- 25.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 2.
- 26.
Ibid., 7.
- 27.
Ibid., 8.
- 28.
Arne Garborg, Weary Men, trans. Sverre Lyngstad (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Weary Men, 240.
- 29.
Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, 10.
- 30.
Ibid., 15.
- 31.
See, for instance, see discussion of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, 35–53.
- 32.
Ibid., 20.
- 33.
Ibid., 22.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Benedict Taylor, Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg’s Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2017), 13.
- 36.
This aspect of Grieg’s harmonic language can be compared to the techniques of French composers of this period. See Dmitri Tymoczko, “Scale Networks and Debussy,” Journal of Music Theory 48/2 (2007): 215–92. An earlier, generalized aspect of this theory can be found in John Clough, John Cuciurean, and Jack Douthett, “Hyperscales and the Generalized Tetrachord,” Journal of Music Theory 41/1 (Spring, 1997): 67–100.
- 37.
Here Grieg reinterprets the dominant seventh as an augmented sixth and resolves it through parsimonious voice leading.
- 38.
Schjelderup-Ebbe, Edvard Grieg: 1858–1867, 251.
- 39.
See also Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 55–65.
- 40.
Kofi Agawu, “Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the 19th-Century ‘Lied,’” Music Analysis 11/1 (March, 1992), 12.
- 41.
Cosmopolitan Vision, 102.
- 42.
Ibid., 109.
- 43.
Lionel Carley, Edvard Grieg in England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), 168–69.
- 44.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 540. In this lengthy letter, Grieg also discusses his beliefs regarding the ever-pervasive cultural/political divides in Norway—differences he thought demanded respect.
- 45.
For a survey of the key theological principles of the Unitarian Church during the nineteenth century, see Francis A. Christie, “Unitarianism,” The American Journal of Theology 21/4 (October, 1917): 554–70. Russell E. Richey offers a critical account of its practices in England where Grieg first encountered universalist teachings in “From Puritanism to Unitarianism in England: A Study in Candour,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41/3 (September, 1973): 371–85. More recent information on the presence of Unitarianism in Norway can be found online in Knut Heidelberg, “An Outline of the History of the Unitarian Movement in Norway 1893–1937,” accessed 3 January 2011, http://unitarforbundet.org
- 46.
Foster, Edvard Grieg: The Choral Music (Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999), 158. Grieg’s views toward religion as related to the Four Psalms are also chronicled by Erling Dahl, Jr. in his “Four Psalms, Op. 74—Grieg’s last immersion into the source of folk music and faith of his childhood,” accessed 5 April 2011, http://www.griegsociety.org/utskrift.asp?id=4792&kat=1022&sp=2
- 47.
Ludvig Mathias Lindeman (1812–1887): Norwegian composer and organist who received a grant from the state to produce collections of folk music, the most substantial of which is mentioned here. For further commentary surrounding the influence of Lindeman’s collection on Grieg’s work, see Daniel Grimley, Edvard Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2006), 36–45.
- 48.
Foster, Edvard Grieg: The Choral Music, 156.
- 49.
“Cosmopolitan, National, and Regional Identities in 18th-Century European Musical Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music, ed. by Jane F. Fulcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 223.
- 50.
Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th-Century Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 164.
- 51.
Ibid., 167.
- 52.
Ibid., 187.
- 53.
Ibid., 195.
- 54.
Ibid., 100.
- 55.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 229.
- 56.
Chart adapted from Beryl Foster, Edvard Grieg: The Choral Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 156–172.
- 57.
Percy Grainger later produced an English translation, which accompanied the 1925 Peters Edition.
- 58.
Alternatively, the E Locrian mode can be interpreted as a Phrygian mode on A, which is supported by the bass pedal in the choir. This interpretation also supports Grieg’s endeavor to recontextualize the opening material by manner of modal transformation.
- 59.
Philip V. Bohlman, “World Music at the End of History,” Ethnomusicology 46/1 (Winter, 2002): 13.
- 60.
Carl Dahlhaus, 19th-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 309.
- 61.
Ibid., 310.
- 62.
Robert J. Holton, Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 210.
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Weber, R.R. (2018). From Songs to Psalms: Grieg’s Cosmopolitan Aesthetic. In: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_3
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