Four Songs

Jeg elsker dig Op 5 No 3 (1864)

En svane Op 25 No 2 (1876)

Solveigs sang Op 23 No 18 (1875)

En fugelvise op 25 No 6 (1876)

Although Ibsen was not as fundamental to Grieg’s development as, say, Shakespeare to Quilter’s or Mörike to Wolf’s, he was a significant factor in the composer’s growing inclination towards Norwegian poetry as an inspiration for his songs and Norwegian folk song as a source of his musical language in the later 1860s and the 1870s. The incidental music to Peer Gynt is the prime example of that but, as well the vocal numbers in Peer Gynt, there are seven songs with piano to words by Ibsen.

Grieg’s first songs were settings of German poetry, in the German original and in the German manner, written during or just after his student years at the Leipzig Conservatoire. In 1864, however, at the time of his engagement to his cousin and future wife, Nina Hagerup - to whom he had already presented the Seks Digte Op 4 to words by Chamisso, Heine and Uhland - he turned to H.C. Andersen in Danish for his four Hjertets Melodier (Melodies of the Heart) Op 5. These are his first songs in a Scandinavian language and the difference, the personal quality of the melodic line, above all in Jeg elske dig, is immediately obvious.

The decisive influence in Grieg’s identification of his own creativity with Norwegian culture was his discovery in 1868 of Ludvig Mathias Lindeman’s collection Aeldre og nyere norske fjeldmelodier (Older and Newer Norwegian Mountain Melodies). That collection became the source of inspiration for all kinds of pieces, including the Ballade in G minor Op 24 in 1875. By then he had integrated the Norwegian idiom with his chromatic harmonies in a style that was entirely his own. The deceptively simple En Svane from Sex Digte af Ibsen Op 25, which is harmonically more sophisticated than it might seem, is perhaps the most famous example after Solveigs Sang which - a cradle song with a sadly dancing vocalise interlude - offers such a poignant melodic image of Solveig’s patient devotion.In the last of the Ibsen settings, En Fugelvise, consolation after parting is found in the bubbling bird song so discreetly suggested in the piano part and the radiant harmonies and impulsive rhythms reflecting by a bright spring day.