Grieg, E. H.: Piano Works I – Lyric Pieces


item number: 951513
in stock
Urtext edition for piano.

On 13 December 1901 Edvard Grieg (1845-1907), having just completed the tenth and final volume of his Lyric Pieces, sent a letter to Henri Hinrichsen (1868-1942), owner of the music publishing house of Edition Peters. »The ten volumes of Lyric Pieces,« he confided, »represent an intimate chapter in my life's history.« Even if he actually meant to say »internal chapter« (his handwriting may possibly be read as »interner« rather than »intimer«), the crucial importance of his statement, at once a confession and a resumé, remains unchanged. By that time forty-three years had passed since the fifteen-year-old Grieg had begun in earnest to write music, and no fewer than thirty-seven years since he had committed to paper the first of what would eventually become his sixty-six Lyric Pieces for piano, which we now present in a new edition to celebrate the Grieg centennial in 2007. At first he referred to the cycle as a collection of »little pieces« intended for use in his own piano teaching. But once Edition Peters had issued the first volume, as opus 12 in 1874, the pieces soon conquered the classroom, the domestic parlor, and ultimately the concert hall. Indeed, some of them advanced during Grieg's lifetime to become what the music historian Hermann Kretzschmar, at the end of his preface to the first complete single-volume edition of the Lyric Pieces (1902), called the »common property of musical humanity.« Nine decades later, for the 150th anniversary of Grieg’s birth, the Oslo musicologists Finn Benestad and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe, who edited the twenty-volume complete edition of Grieg's music for Edition Peters, succinctly summed up matters by writing that it was Grieg's outstanding achievement to have »given Norway a firm place on the world map of music.« That he was able to do so is primarily owing to the two Peer Gynt Suites, the Piano Concerto, his many lieder and dances, and, last but not least, the sixty-six Lyric Pieces, which tellingly fill the very first volume of the named complete edition (1977). One aspect of the Lyric Pieces that immediately catches the ear is the directly perceivable congruence between their titles and the music. Another is the folk-tinged basis of their rhythms, themes, motifs, and formal design. An equally important reason for their extraordinary popularity – and a key factor from a pedagogical standpoint – is their technical demands, which are at the most moderate and frequently tend toward the simple.

Editor: Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe.
Composer: Edvard Grieg.
Publisher: Edition Peters EP3100aa.

Content:
  • op. 12
  • op. 38
  • op. 43
  • op. 47
  • op. 54
  • op. 57
  • op. 62
  • op. 65
  • op. 68
  • op. 71