Edvard Grieg

Edvard Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist, born in Bergen in 1843. Encouraged by the violinist Ole Bull, he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory before working in Copenhagen and Christiania (now Oslo). He drew on Norwegian folk melody and dance rhythms within a Romantic idiom, producing songs, piano works, the Piano Concerto in A minor, and incidental music for Ibsen's Peer Gynt. He toured widely as a conductor and pianist across Europe. In 1877 he moved to Lofthus in Hardanger, where a composer's cabin was built and he wrote the String Quartet in G minor Op. 27; he then lived in Bergen from 1880, directing the Harmonien (Philharmonic), before building his villa Troldhaugen near Bergen, where he settled from 1885. He died in Bergen in 1907 and was widely mourned as a national figure.