Norwegian Dances: A Song History

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Edvard Grieg's Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, are a set of four dances first written for piano four hands; Grieg drafted them in Copenhagen in January 1880 and completed them at Lofthus in Hardanger during a summer holiday in 1881.[1] Rather than inventing the themes, Grieg took four melodies from the collection of Norwegian mountain tunes that Ludvig Mathias Lindeman issued between 1853 and 1867.[1] The four-hand set came out in November 1881, while Grieg's own arrangement for one pianist was not published until 1887.[1] The first edition was published in Leipzig by C. F. Peters.[2]

A Norwegian Hardanger fiddle with a carved scroll and a fingerboard inlaid with bone and mother-of-pearl

Isak Nielsen (Skaar) Botnen, Hardanger Fiddle, pine, birch and other woods, bone, lignum vitae and mother-of-pearl inlay, 1756. A Norwegian folk fiddle, shown because Grieg completed the dances in Hardanger; it has no connection to them.

Grieg thought highly of the dances and played them often in concert, among other occasions with his friend Julius Röntgen, last in the Norwegian capital in 1907, the year of his death.[1] He never orchestrated them himself: three were scored by Georg Bohlmann and Robert Henriques as ballet music for a January 1886 staging of Peer Gynt in Copenhagen, but Peters judged those arrangers too little known in Germany, and after long negotiation Grieg and the firm settled on the musician and conductor Hans Sitt, whose orchestral version appeared in 1890 and is still often played.[1] When Max Abraham, head of Peters, proposed making one of the dances part of the Peer Gynt Suite, Op. 55, Grieg refused, writing in February 1892 that No. 2 would not do because its tune came from a folk dance rather than from him.[1] "Norwegian Dances," credited to Grieg, is among the twenty-six pieces in Shelley Stevens's Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a 37-page Fingers Of Steel book set in DAD tuning, though its listing does not say which of the four dances she arranged.[3]

Our book that contains the song "Norwegian Dances"

Sources

  1. G. Henle Verlag: "Grieg, Norwegian Dances op. 35, Version for Piano Two-Hands (HN 1282), Preface" (Ernst-Günter Heinemann and Einar Steen-Nøkleberg).
  2. IMSLP: "4 Norwegian Dances, Op.35 (Grieg, Edvard)".
  3. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  4. Image: Isak Nielsen (Skaar) Botnen, Hardanger Fiddle, pine, birch and other woods, bone, lignum vitae and mother-of-pearl inlay, 1756. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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