MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2803, 4 December 1907, Page 85

MUSICIANS AND COMPOSERS.

GRIEG, THE FAMOUS NORWEGIAN COMPOSER. (By T. P. O'Conkob, in P.T.O. of September 14.) 11. — Musio and Environment.— I remember well the curious impression made upon me when, from the depths of some valley, or from the deck of some steamer, I looked up to the dizzy heights above; and there, standing all alone, separated by thousands of feet from the land I below, and with no other place of human j habitation within sight, stood a little cottage in which a Norwegian family was living its life. If ever there were a country which ought to produce visionaries it :s: s [ this land of vast mountains, great eoli- ' hides, mighty sheets of inland seas, and ' this sometimes appalling loneliness of the I separated human dwellings and beings. | Here, therefore, was material for the poet i or the musician, who had the power of putI ting into words or notes the lesson of Nature in her most savage, her loneliest, her most detached moods. Grieg has such a genius. You have only to listen and you can read between the notes the gloom, the independence, the isolation, the vague vis ; ons, rnostlv of evil and melancholy, with which a race brought up in such environment 13 bound to be haunted. I make bold to say that these things, however grandiose, however difficult of expression, are to be found in Grieg's music. If I wanted proof of that I would point to the wondrous way in which, in " J'oer Gynt," he has in the wedding proce^sicui given the joyousne3s, on the one b?pd, and in Seneta's song given the gloom, on the other, of his own people. The joyousness is not free from some hauncings of terror and isolation., and the sadness fas in it none of the pettiness of every iay griefs, but something of tho lofty fate fulness one finds in a Greek drama. And if I wanted to prove that Grieg knew all about that infinite tenderness of farr«i'y affection which this isolation of Norwegian life is bound to produce, I would point to hi« wondrous lullabies ; and if I wantpd to show that he could also f?ive something of the divine and intoxicating exultation of the summer returning to those mount* in spots that have been enchained in the linn months of winter, I would mention ois socg of the butterflies. —The Man.— What manner of man was this rh.^t could prove himself equal to the expression of all Nature in one country -Natvro in her grandiose, Nature in her tn^ioa'-y gloomy, Nature in her softest mood 3? He was like, and yet unlike, what you would expect to have geen. Imagine a man, small in stature almost to dwarfhqod, with a great, bushy mass of white hair, a prominent nose that jutted out, and a long, thin face, with an expression of such tminess and such openness and simplicity as to suggest that he was never grown to man's estate, but was a little elf-child, a gnome from some Norwegian mountaintop that for the moment was dwelling among mortals, and yet was not one of them. If you were inclined to think more of the childlike size of the man, and of tho tiny little face, and to wonder how it was that euch tremendous potentialities could be packed into co small a frame, you had only to look at the eyes, and there you could see the greatness of the inner soul. I have rarely seen euch beautiful eyes in either man or woman. They always recalled to me the first sight I caught of Christine Nilsson — not the Christine Nilsson of later years, but the Chriatine Nilsson of 40 years ago, when sho was just a girl, and was bewildering and bewitching the world with that beautiful voice of hers. It was as she ascended tho etairs in the old Theatre Royal in Dublin, long since burned down, and now replaced by a gorgeous and palatial theatre with all modern improvements. Never shall I forget the impression I got from those wondrous light-blue eyes of hers — of a lighter blue than anything I had ever 6een before, and with something in them of a cold and pale jzlitter that seemed to bring to our little Western Isles tho eternal snow, the fierce winter, the Arctic desolation of the Scandinavian lands of which she seemed at once the embodiment and the ghost. The eyes of Grieg produced something likethe same impression upon you. They, also, were of that intense light-blue which you rarely see in any but Scandinavian faces ; they were soft, and yet they sometimes glittered ; they were the eves of a dreamer, of a genius, and of a Scandinavian Above all things. —Grieg's Home.— You rarely if ever saw Grieg without setting at the same time another figure ,

that in a way was quite as weird and as interesting as his own. Imagine Grieg in petticoats, and you get som§ idea of what Madame Grieg is like. There was the same bushy head of hair, the same infantile expression of face, the same tiny stature, the same striking blue eyes. Madame Grieg was everything to her husband. Without her he 6eemed incapable of movement. It was she who alone could sing his songs as he wished them to be sung; she was the interpreter of his genius to the world. After the manner of people happily married they grew more like each other as the years went on, until the two figures . somehow or other suggested one, or, to put it more correctly, until the two seemed some strange beings out of another world; children of some fairy tribe, gnomes that were 6ent to the worla to bring back to it something of the visions of its infancy. They led that curious life which is led by the world of artists in almost every country. They were cosmopolitan in speech — Grieg spoke German and French as well as his own tongue; my recollection ia that hiß English was nor, very good. For months they would live in Germany, Grieg doubtless revisiting the scenes of his obscure youth. Then they would go to Paris, and there would take part in a Grieg 1 concert amid the tumultuous applause of that art-loving capital. Now and then, every two or three years, they would come to London — they were here a few months ago — the guests of Sir Edgar Speyer, who, if he had not been a great financier by heritage, might have been a great artist. But their real home was, of course, in their own beautifui Norwegian land. I remember the day I was shown the home of Grieg. The blaze of tho beautiful sunshine which everywhere bathed the landscape still dazzles my eyes, and I can see that wondrous picture of the vast ocean and of the beautiful land, and of the little isle that seemed to bo so near and yet so remote, one of thosp islets in which erenius could work and dream and

breathe the inspiration of ocean and mount t*in and sky, undisturbed by the tumult of men. It was the fitting home for » J man who was & visionary, a musician ol : genius, but, above all things, a passionately patriotic child of that land of solitudes and visions and great stirrings from intimate aad isolated communings with Natufa' which is called Norway. There I hope his ashes will find a resting-place. No mausoleum could be fitter for the dead, as no home could nave Been more appropriate for I the living.