Grieg: music, landscape and Norwegian identity
Choice Reviews Online · 2007
This rigorously argued and strongly focused book seeks, as its conclusion states, 'an interpretative perspective' to facilitate a 'move beyond the cosy, small-scale image of Grieg that has prevailed in much Anglo-American scholarship ' (p.223).This is a laudable aim.It is also, as the preface declares, a timely one.Grieg's image in American scholarship remains notable for its virtual absence.In Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music (New York and Oxford, 2005) the composer is granted a single mention, and that is a passing comment in the discussion of Gershwin and authenticity.This is perhaps a surprising omission from Taruskin, since Grieg's music inevitably raises the problematic notion of 'periphery' and, as Grimley states, the 'tension between competing musical discourses, the folklorist, the nationalist and the modernist' (p.ix).All these topics have, of course, been central to much of Taruskin's work.Grimley's book focuses these discourses on the 'contested category of landscape' (p.ix).He proposes that this raises tensions and contradictions that can 'ultimately' be 'resolved' through musical analysis.The book is thus firmly tilted towards close reading.The many analyses are delivered in prose.There are no voice-leading graphs, motivic charts, or harmonic summaries, and this places a heavy burden on the text.It results in paragraphs of dense, richly observed material.The reader needs to digest the book slowly and in small portions, with frequent recourse to the generous selection of music examples.All analyses are offered in tandem with cultural critique.Thus, to embed this critical dimension, the book first explores definitions of musical nationalism from musicologists such as Celia Applegate, Taruskin, and particularly Carl Dahlhaus, who (unlike Taruskin) did not leave Grieg out.Indeed, Dahlhaus's discussion of Grieg in Nineteenth-Century Music (German original, 1980; English trans.1989) resurfaces at various points in the book.Through further reference to a range of influential cultural theorists and historians, Grimley offers a useful survey of recent approaches to nationalism, providing a cogent context for specifically Norwegian issues.The focus on Norway turns to discussion of littleknown music, including Waldemar Thrane's comic opera Fjeldeventyret ('The Mountain Tale', 1825), the debate on folklorism and national spirit in the writings of Henrik Wergeland, the performances of the virtuouso violinist Ole Bull, and the folksong collecting of Ludvig Mathias Lindeman from the 1840s onwards.Central to Grimley's thesis is the notion that landscape functions in Grieg's music as an expression of being in a certain time and space.He argues that landscape must be understood not merely in terms of imitative representation or pictorial evocation in tone painting but fundamentally as an ideological construction.He hears this manifest in tensions between differing obligations and characteristics in the music's formal process.As Grimley notes, similar conflicting expressions and structures have been discussed by Julian Johnson in studies of Mahler.Grimley hears Grieg's music sharing with Mahler's a strong sense of alienation, but finds very little irony: in Grieg landscape 'seems to point inwards, rather than outwards as in Mahler's work, leading towards a contemplative inner realm which is fully enclosed'.By comparison with