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Grieg's Slåtter, Op. 72: Change of Musical Style or New Concept of Nationality?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Ståle Kleiberg
Ståle Kleiberg*
Affiliation:
University of Trondheim
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Extract

Slåtter, op. 72, was composed in 1902-3, and is thus among Grieg's very last works. It is also one of his least familiar. ‘Here [in Norway] my early position is still being promoted, praised at every available opportunity at the expense of my current one’, he wrote in his diary on 21 March 1906. Earlier that day he had played six of the 17 slåtter at a concert in Kristiania (now Oslo), and he was disappointed by the lukewarm response. Grieg did, however, live long enough to witness the successful reception of the work, not least in France where avant-garde circles talked about ‘le nouveau Grieg’. Nevertheless, the widespread perception of Grieg - even today - is based on his lyrical pieces, the ‘wheat buns’, as he himself called them. Yet Slåtter is without doubt one of Grieg's most fascinating works. We do indeed meet a ‘new Grieg’ here, and there is good reason to believe that the work played some part in Béla Bartók's development. There was a copy in Bartók's library, and in an article in the Hungarian journal Zeneközlöny from 1911 (a year before he visited Norway) he mentions Norwegian slåtter and Romanian joe as distinctive types of instrumental folk music. According to the Norwegian Grieg scholar Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, he probably became aware of Grieg's Slåtter in Paris in 1910.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 121 , Issue 1 , 1996 , pp. 46 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1996

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References

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