Previous writing on Grieg has often dwelt on images of landscape and nature. Landscape, in that sense, is central to Grieg's musical identity. In extreme cases, as the iconography of Grieg's grave suggests, images of Grieg (or representations of his music) literally become part of the landscape, grounding his creativity in the Norwegian soil. But other more programmatic accounts of music and landscape are no less prevalent in Grieg scholarship. The images of sunlit fjords as a backdrop to the ‘Morgenstemning’ (‘Morning Mood’) from Peer Gynt promoted in the popular media, for example – a travesty of the original stage setting in the incidental music for Ibsen's play (which is located in the Morrocan desert) – simply represents the tip of one of the strongest traditions in Grieg's critical reception. The association between Grieg's music and the Norwegian landscape is not a natural one, therefore, but is an ideological phenomenon, an assumption which has been culturally and historically defined.

This book has argued that representations of landscape in Grieg's music are inextricably bound to broader cultural formations of Norwegian identity. The processes through which the Norwegian landscape was framed, visualised and interpreted in the nineteenth century were part of wider European traditions of representation. Attempts to define the Norwegian landscape were shaped by a fundamental tension in Norwegian nationalism, between cosmopolitan impulses which sought to assimilate Norway within a continental European framework, and isolationist trends, which sought to achieve (and maintain) Norwegian cultural and political independence.