He built a hut in his own garden with room for a piano and a desk, facing the fjord, and wrote alone in it for twenty years. The hut is still there.
Grieg was born in 1843 in Bergen, Norway's second city, into a merchant family. The surname is Scottish: his great-grandfather Alexander Greig emigrated from Scotland to Norway in the mid-eighteenth century and respelled it Grieg so Norwegians could pronounce it.
When he was fifteen the violinist Ole Bull visited the house, heard him play, and talked his parents into sending the boy to the Leipzig Conservatory on the spot. He stayed four years and learned the German way of doing things; he said later that what actually told him what to write was not Leipzig but the people and the folk tunes he met after coming back north.
In 1874 Ibsen wrote asking him to provide music for Peer Gynt. He found the job exhausting and did it unwillingly, and out of it came the most widely heard music he ever wrote.
In 1885 he built a house outside Bergen called Troldhaugen, and down by the fjord a separate hut holding an upright piano and a desk and not much else. Most of his late music was written in there.
He was a very small man; pleurisy at seventeen destroyed one of his lungs and he had breathing trouble for the rest of his life, yet he toured every year. He died in Bergen in 1907, and contemporary reports put the crowd at his funeral in the tens of thousands.
The giveaway with Grieg is the colour of the harmony — he loves a hollow-sounding interval and a chord that darkens without warning, as though the light had shifted behind cloud. The world eventually decided that colour was the sound of the North.
His pieces are mostly short: two or three minutes to say one thing, then a stop, with no dragging. That makes his piano music good to play one after another.
Rhythmically he often writes a limping sort of three-time with the weight on a beat you were not expecting. That is how Norwegian folk dances go; it is not a mistake.
