Nationalist

Most of the music that is played in concert halls comes from the broad musical meadows of Central Europe. But most of the tunes that set people dancing or whistling come from their own musical back yards. For want of a home-grown product even half as good, non-Germanic countries have had to import a large part of their concert music. But during the past 75 years composers in other countries have struggled to raise their own distinct national types of concert music, to produce symphonies, quartets, operas that are 100% Russian, Hungarian or American (jazz). Some have been fairly successful, especially those, like the Russians, who have had a rich store of national folk music to draw upon.

One of the earliest and greatest of nationalist composers was the late Edvard Hagerup Grieg of Norway, whose best biography to date was published last fortnight.* Born in 1843, while Norway was the weaker partner in a union with Sweden, Composer Grieg spent his student days in Germany, where he was influenced by the music of German Romantics Schumann and Mendelssohn. But all his classical musical education could not drive the smell of Norway's fishing boats and pine forests out of Grieg's nostrils. His music, delicately flavored with the weedy condiments of Norwegian folk song, soon won him world fame. By the time he was 60 even the Central Europeans admitted he was good, placed a bust of him in the famous Gewandhaus hall of fame in Leipzig. Even the concert-shy man-in-the-street knew and whistled melodies from Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite.

But Composer Grieg, for all his fame, remained one of music's flower gardeners. Most of his best compositions were light songs and piano pieces, small, lyric, orchestral posies. There was no room on his plot for big symphonic and operatic hedgerows and shade trees. For this situation his biographer blames not Grieg but the character of the national soil. Norway's folk idioms were wild flowers, not acorns, and even the ablest husbandman could not make them sprout into oaks.

Says Biographer Monrad-Johansen: "In following Grieg's development it becomes evident that musical feeling in Norway, though of an abundant richness and variety, lacks the technical resources . . . necessary for expression in the form of 'art' music. Grieg shows how far this unique material can be dealt with by a technique with which it has indeed some features in common but which in important respects has a restrictive rather than a liberating effect upon it."

*EDVARD GRIEG--David Monrad-Johansen-- Princeton University Press ($4).

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