From Classroom to Concert Hall

Although Hartvigtson and Backer-Grøndahl used Grieg's additions to pieces by Mozart in their public recitals, the composer had initially conceived them as aids to his activities as a piano teacher. The significance of repurposing Grieg's practical classroom tools as professional concert repertoire in this way results in part from the mixed connotations of the works to which the additions were appended. In the late nineteenth century Mozart was widely regarded as one of the greatest classical composers, but this status rested on the renown of the few large-scale works that were regularly performed, notably the later symphonies, the operas Don Giovanni and Le Nozze di Figaro, and the Requiem. The composer's solo piano music, by contrast, was widely regarded as aesthetically inferior to these ‘masterpieces’ and associated primarily with amateur female players of limited technical skill. This reputation was informed by the idea that in composing these pieces Mozart had moderated his genius to suit the lesser capability of his students. ‘What could be expected of a master like Mozart even’, asked one English critic in 1885, ‘when he was compelled to fit a sonata to a lady's ability, as a dressmaker would fit a dress to the lady's form?’Footnote ²⁰

The perceived femininity of Mozart's sonatas was reinforced through unflattering comparisons with those of Beethoven that frequently drew on an implicitly gendered contrast between the sublime and the beautiful which privileged the former category.Footnote ²¹ Frederick Niecks's review of Augner's new edition of Mozart's piano music in 1885, for example, is typical in asserting that the composer ‘was not, like Beethoven, a man of sublime thoughts and grand passions’ and that his sonatas therefore ‘[leave] something to be desired if we wish for more than agreeable entertainment; if instead of a caressing of the superficies we long for a stirring of the innermost depths of our being’.Footnote ²² While Niecks resisted the widespread belief that Mozart's sonatas were merely nascent examples of a genre that culminated with Beethoven, he conceded their particular suitability for young (that is to say, nascent) players.Footnote ²³ The perception that Mozart's keyboard works were artistically weak, technically simple, and feminine ensured that they were largely avoided by professional pianists, notwithstanding the composer's canonical status. As well as being predominantly male, professional recitalists were expected to present virtuosic modern repertoire that distinguished them from the amateur female players with whom Mozart's piano music had become so strongly associated.Footnote ²⁴ The growing number of female recitalists in London in this period generally followed their male counterparts in avoiding Mozart's solo piano works.

In this context, it is not surprising that Grieg's additions to piano works by Mozart were initially conceived for teaching purposes rather than public performance. The additions also developed an existing tradition of pedagogical accompaniments that can be traced back at least as far as the keyboard method produced by François-Joseph Fétis and Ignaz Moscheles, who later became Grieg's piano professor at the Leipzig Conservatoire. This manual included exercises in which ‘the master’ could accompany ‘the pupil’ on the same instrument in order to ‘teach the division of time in the bar and develop in the student a sense of harmony’ as well as introducing some musicality into otherwise dull and repetitious technical drills.Footnote ²⁵ Adolf Henselt, who also contributed to Fétis and Moscheles's treatise, elaborated on this idea by adding a new piano part to fifty existing Études by Johann Baptist Cramer.Footnote ²⁶ In his Melodic-Contrapuntal Studies Op. 137b Moscheles went further, providing an ‘additionally composed concertante part for a second piano’ not for didactic compositions but rather for canonical repertoire commonly encountered by piano students: a selection of ten preludes from J. S Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.Footnote ²⁷ Published in 1863, only a year after Grieg completed his studies with Moscheles in Leipzig, this collection may have served as a model for the younger musician's ‘freely composed additional accompaniments’ to pieces by Mozart. Like Moscheles's Melodic-Contrapuntal Studies, Grieg's additions are instructive on two levels, allowing teachers to nurture their pupil's technique while simultaneously exposing them to the work of ‘great’ composers from music history.

Grieg's second piano parts also paralleled those of Moscheles in being as satisfying to hear as they were instructive to play, and soon proved effective as concert repertoire. During work on the additions in 1877, the composer wrote to his friend Max Abraham, a partner of Leipzig's Edition Peters, to request publication of the complete set once it was ready. ‘The task’, Grieg explained, ‘was initially intended for teaching purposes, but by chance ended up in the concert hall, where Mrs. Lie-Nissen performed my part for the first Sonata (in F) quite masterfully’.Footnote ²⁸ Adding that ‘the Mozartian part was played by Miss Rytterager (pupil of the Leipzig Conservatory)’, he recounts that ‘the narrative sounded so well that the ladies were twice recalled’ for applause. Although this early performance in Christiania (now Oslo) was received enthusiastically by a concert audience, it also retained traces of the addition's initial didactic purpose. The differing professional status of the recent graduate Johanne Rytterager (1849–1924) and Erika Lie-Nissen (1845–1903), who had already established a performing career, mirrored the hierarchical relationship between student and teacher.Footnote ²⁹ This significant asymmetry later fed into ambiguity about which piano part the principle recitalist ought to play, as discussed below. Grieg's letter also signals his continuing commitment to the educational potential of the additions by stating his intention to dedicate them to the famed piano teacher Theodor Kullak, at whose Academy in Berlin both Rytterager and Lie-Nissen had begun spells of study in Germany.

Nevertheless, the success of Grieg's version of Mozart's Sonata in F major as concert repertoire paved the way for numerous further public performances using his additions. In 1884 Grieg performed the Sonata with Julius Rontgen at a chamber music concert in Amsterdam, and had played his version of the Fantasy in C minor with Backer-Grøndahl at a private subscription recital in Christiania four years previously.Footnote ³⁰ With Lie-Nissen, Backer-Grøndahl performed the Sonata once and Fantasy four times between 1881 and 1886.Footnote ³¹ Significantly, while studying at Kullak's Academy in the 1860s both women had lodged with the family of their fellow student Alma Haas (then Holländer, 1847–1932), with whom Backer-Grøndahl performed the Fantasy in London over two decades later.Footnote ³² Far from being an anomaly, that performance built upon a broader reconception of Grieg's initially pedagogical additions as concert repertoire that had begun in Christiania in 1877 and in which Backer-Grøndahl herself had played a central role.

The extent to which professional pianists usually avoided Mozart's solo keyboard works makes it especially significant that Grieg's additions to them should be heard in public recitals such as those given by Hartvigson and Backer-Grøndahl in 1890. In a season that London critics noted for its ‘epidemic’ of piano recitals, the Musical Times reported only one at which a solo piano piece by Mozart was heard without an added part by Grieg.Footnote ³³ Conversely, Mozart's music was heard with Grieg's additions not only at Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's recitals on 5 March but also at an educational duo recital in Glasgow on 5 April and a concert by students of London's Trinity College of Music on 9 July.Footnote ³⁴

Although Shaw protested that he would rather hear Mozart's solo keyboard music without Grieg's additions, it appears that it was only the use of these additions that enabled professional pianists to include this repertoire in their recitals at all. Elsewhere, the critic complained that recitalists avoided the composer's music because it seemed ‘easy’ but actually demanded ‘the finest execution’: ‘You cannot “make an effect” with Mozart’.Footnote ³⁵ The prevalence of this idea is corroborated by a satirical guide to formulating ‘a really acceptable, up to date recital programme’ penned by E. M. Trevenen Dawson in 1897.Footnote ³⁶ Dawson sarcastically remarks that ‘Haydn, Hummel, and Weber, who, as is now at last recognized, wrote solely for schoolgirls, must be rigidly excluded, as also Mozart, whose sonatas it is well known are only fit for Local Examination syllabuses’.Footnote ³⁷ Continuing in this ironic vein, he advocates modern transcriptions as a way for pianists to namecheck historical composers whose work was ‘too ridiculously simple and old-fogeyish’ to be played without alteration. Construed more positively, Grieg's additions enabled pianists such as Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson to present classical repertoire that would otherwise not have been accepted within the performance culture of the time. While Mozart's solo keyboard music had long been popular among educators and their students, these supplementary piano parts sparked its fleeting ‘rediscovery’ as viable concert repertoire. This noteworthy consequence of Grieg's additions was ignored by contemporary critics, and therefore offers a productive counterpoint to the hostile reception to which we now turn.

The Critics and the Classics

The critical attacks suffered by Grieg's additions in London in 1890 resulted largely from the ‘great transformation of musical taste’ described by Weber, by which fidelity to a canon of classic works became the highest ideal of the new ‘musical intelligentsia’. This ideal rewards attention because, although widespread, it was not monolithic; in practice musicians and critics took a range of approaches to fidelity, as the use and reception of Grieg's additions attests. However, textual literalism was an influential strand of the ‘great transformation’ in taste as it developed in musical centres such as Leipzig, where it found paradigmatic expression in the first complete and ‘critically revised’ edition of Mozart's works.Footnote ³⁸ This edition was issued by Breitkopf & Härtel in a series of volumes from 1877, the same year that Grieg wrote to Abraham in the city to request publication of his additions, and was intended to oppose just the kind of ‘unfaithful’ approach to Mozart's music that they represented. For its promoters, the complete edition's authority derived from the fidelity of its approach, which used ‘comparison with the autographs’ to correct the ‘transgressions’ of ‘dangerous editors’ who had ‘dared to introduce textual alterations and supplementary instrumentation’.Footnote ³⁹ Given the increasing imperative of fidelity to the classics in Leipzig and elsewhere, it is hardly surprising that Abraham refused to publish Grieg's additions, advising that they would threaten his burgeoning reputation as a ‘respectable’ composer of ‘significant original compositions’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Grieg ignored this advice, instead taking his additions to another Leipzig publisher, E. W. Fritzsch, which issued the full set of four additions between 1879 and 1880.Footnote ⁴¹

By 1890 Abraham must have felt that Grieg's reputation was secure enough for Edition Peters to publish their own edition of his second piano parts, an event that appears to have prompted the cluster of performances in England that year. However, the commitment to fidelity that had informed Abraham's initial suspicion had only become more widespread, ensuring that the additions prompted controversy in England as soon as Hartvigson announced his intention to use them at his Princes Hall recital. The Telegraph questioned the wisdom of Hartvigson's decision on the same day it first advertised his programme, 24 January, and soon even the South Wales Echo chimed in, warily anticipating the hostility with which the performance would be received by critics in London.Footnote ⁴² The debate gained further momentum when it emerged that Backer-Grøndahl also planned to employ one of Grieg's additions in her recital. However ‘clever’ or ‘effective’ these additions were, the Telegraph claimed, the ‘peculiar mental obliquity which permits one composer thus to deal with another’ was difficult to comprehend, if potentially justifiable in this case given the ‘infantile’ nature of Mozart's music.Footnote ⁴³ The columnist asserted the ideal of fidelity more explicitly a week later, however, condemning Grieg's ‘altogether inexcusable and entirely impudent addition to one of [Mozart's] finest works’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This more emphatic denunciation was provoked by a correspondent who remarked that the additions did not ‘venture on “improving” Mozart by the alteration of a single note’.Footnote ⁴⁵ That the correspondent defended Grieg by affirming rather than challenging the imperative of fidelity indicates its largely unquestioned status as an axiom of good musical taste.

It is worth noting that Grieg himself later made the same defence of his additions in an article on Mozart that he wrote in 1896 and which first appeared the following year in the Century Illustrated Magazine, an American periodical.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this article, he argued that the ‘Wagnerites’ and other advocates of modern music were wrong to regard Mozart's works as old-fashioned, not only because they possessed an ‘eternal’ beauty but also because they anticipated the chromaticism of modern music, notably that of Wagner. Grieg also promoted fidelity to Mozart's musical text, lamenting the ‘irreverence’ of many contemporary performances and warning against the ‘arbitrary alterations’ made by Hummel in his chamber arrangement of the Piano Concerto in D minor (K466).Footnote ⁴⁷ In this context Grieg contrasted his additions to other, ‘dangerous’ attempts at modernization, characterizing them as expressing rather than violating the principle of fidelity to Mozart:

Crucially, the unusual format of Grieg's modernization allowed him to exonorate it according to the imperative of fidelity in a way that a more comprehensive re-arrangement for two pianos, however stylistically conservative, would not have done. No matter how ‘freely composed’ his additions were, Grieg could claim fidelity to Mozart's musical text as this was incorporated within the new ‘arrangement’ without alteration.Footnote ⁴⁹

For London critics anticipating Hartvigson and Backer-Grøndahl's performances in 1890, the instrumental format produced by Grieg's additions also drew them into more specific debates about performing the classics faithfully. These critics understood Grieg's supplementary piano parts as akin to the widespread but controversial practice of using ‘additional accompaniments’ to bolster the limited instrumental forces of vocal works by Bach and Handel, which were particularly popular among England's choral societies. ‘Surely Grieg has not joined the company of “additional accompaniment” writers?’, questioned an incredulous Musical Standard when Hartvigson's programme was announced.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such comments interpreted Grieg's additions through the longstanding debate, outlined in Ebenezer Prout's 1879 Grove entry on the subject, between ‘purists’ who opposed supplementary instrumentation entirely and commentators who defended respectful accompaniment ‘in unison with the spirit … of the original’.Footnote ⁵¹ When discussing Grieg's second piano parts several critics referred to Mozart's own additions to Handel's Messiah, which were particularly contentious because they were created by a composer revered in his own right.Footnote ⁵² For example, the Daily Graphic's suggestion that Grieg was justified in adding to Mozart because Mozart himself had added to Handel prompted a stern rebuttal from the Musical Times: ‘it used to be accepted as an axiom that no number of wrongs can make one right’.Footnote ⁵³ The supposed ‘wrong’ in both cases was a lack of fidelity to an existing work.

Commentators continued to associate Grieg's second piano parts and the additional accompaniments used to supplement choral works in their reviews of Hartvigson and Backer-Grøndahl's recitals.Footnote ⁵⁴ Crucially, this association is only one of many strands by which Grieg's additions became entangled in a broader debate about the role of fidelity in contemporary performances of classic works that erupted later that season. The perceived relevance of Grieg's additions to this debate suggests that many listeners understood them through ideas about performance practice as much as the composer-centred concept of arrangement. This inference constitutes a central claim of this article that also informs its focus on performance, which offers a historically appropriate alternative to the exclusively arrangement-oriented perspective adopted in existing scholarly discussions about Grieg's additions. It is therefore useful to consider the evidence for this claim in the season's longer-term debates about fidelity before using it as a lens through which to read more immediate critical responses to the performances given by Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson.

In July 1890, the Musical World printed an anonymous article on ‘Modern Pianism’ that explicitly framed the recent use of Grieg's additions as an example of contemporary performance practice.Footnote ⁵⁵ The article begins by remarking on the ‘unprecedented’ number of recitals given that season by a long list of pianists, including Backer-Grøndahl and the Hartvigson brothers, before arguing that the intense competition produced by this surplus of performers resulted in an attention-seeking emphasis on ‘muscular’ virtuosity and ‘passionate’ utterance.Footnote ⁵⁶ While necessary for when playing modern repertoire, the author suggests, such qualities were unsuited to music by ‘old masters’, who consequently found themselves ‘grotesquely clothed in modern expression’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The critic complains that Mozart's music had been a notable victim of this approach, drawing on the gendered connotations of this repertoire in troubling language that implicitly characterizes modern performance as a libertine violation of a virtuous classical works. ‘How often has not his delicate refinement and quaint artificial grace been lost in rough phrasing and exaggerated expression?’, the critic laments, ‘Mozart, it is true, has his moments of passion and deep pathos, but it is the passion and pathos of a beautiful woman who never forgets that she is beautiful’.Footnote ⁵⁸ While this comment initially appears to refer to performance style alone, the article proceeds to connect Grieg's additions to the same trend:

In this way, the article presents the use of Grieg's additions as a response to the Darwinian ‘struggle for life’ among the crowd of pianists in London, with the result that ‘[r]ealism is pursued beyond the verge of extravagance, and the beautiful is often sacrificed in the desire to “bring down the house”’.Footnote ⁶⁰

‘Modern Pianism’ sparked a controversy that raged among numerous correspondents in the pages of the Musical World for the rest of July and into August.Footnote ⁶¹ Although almost all of the responses to the initial article follow its author in upholding the imperative of fidelity, they vary in their tolerance towards altering aspects of classic works in performance. While some correspondents opposed any change to the ‘authentic’ text whatsoever, others considered changes permissible if they served to ‘keep the original intention of the composer … in touch with the ever-changing perceptions of successive generations of musical hearers’.Footnote ⁶² Only one correspondent rejected the ‘composer's intention’ as the primary yardstick by which a performance should be judged, arguing that a performer's primary task was the pursuit of beauty rather than fidelity.Footnote ⁶³ The differing arguments made by each interlocutor are, however, less significant than their shared assumptions about the range of practices that were relevant to the topic at hand. This discussion of ‘modern pianism’, that is to say performance practice, addresses not only contemporary playing styles, improvised embellishments, and pedagogical editions, but also texts that might otherwise appear primarily compositional in nature: additional accompaniments, supplementary instrumentation, and even arrangements ranging from ‘strict’ piano reductions to ‘extension by fantasia’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Furthermore, the debate construed such practices as means by which performers tried to gain attention in an overcrowded market rather than as motivated by compositional concerns.

This contemporary performance-oriented understanding of Grieg's additions is also evident in press reviews of Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's recitals and stands in marked contrast to the exclusively composition-focused approach of recent scholarly accounts.Footnote ⁶⁵ Recall, for example, that Baton reported that an ‘artistic sin’ had been committed at Princes and Steinway Halls, an allegation which locates wrongdoing in unfaithful performances of Mozart's music using additions by Grieg as much as the composition of the additions themselves.Footnote ⁶⁶ While some critics did take a composition- rather than performance-oriented perspective, in many reviews the two merge or overlap.Footnote ⁶⁷ Reporting on Backer-Grøndahl's performance of Grieg's version of the Fantasy, the Musical World urged her never again to ‘deface her concerts with a work which is best forgotten’, a comment that presents performer and composer as equally guilty of infidelity to Mozart.Footnote ⁶⁸

An understanding of this potentially dual conception of Grieg's additions (as both arrangement and performance practice) facilitates a more nuanced and historically informed reading of the negative reception of Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's performances. On the one hand, the unfavourable response to these performances is unremarkable due to the ubiquitous imperative of fidelity. On the other hand, however, the ways critics brought this general imperative to bear on the specific instrumental configuration of performances that used Grieg's additions fomented more particular meanings and associations which are worthy of historical attention and to which this article now turns.

Performing Mozart's music with Grieg's additions maintains a spatial (if not sonic) separation between the old musical material in one piano part and the new material in the other. As we have already noted, this approach allowed some commentators, including Grieg himself, to defend the additions as faithful to Mozart's music on the grounds that it is retained unaltered as one of the two piano parts. This argument would have been difficult to sustain had Grieg created a more conventional arrangement for two pianos that synthesized old and new material across both instruments. By the same token, however, Grieg's instrumental configuration was particularly vulnerable to accusations that it failed to embody the organic unity that critics widely considered essential to any successful musical work. For reviewers of Hartvigson and Backer-Grøndahl's performances, this configuration juxtaposed music by Mozart and Grieg in what J.S. Shedlock called an ‘inartistic mixture of styles’ rather than combining these elements into a coherent whole.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Lute, for example, speculated that Grieg might have escaped criticism had he simply recast the ‘thoughts of Mozart … in his own language’, an assessment that values unity above even fidelity.Footnote ⁷⁰ The unquestionable status of both unity and fidelity as criteria of musical value ensured that the few critics who wished to affirm the worth of the additions felt bound to deny the evident contrast between them and Mozart's music rather than attempting to defend it.Footnote ⁷¹

Most critics, however, were unable to ignore the stylistic contrast between the two piano parts, particularly in performances of the Fantasy in C minor. Grieg's addition, the Athenaeum claimed, was ‘utterly out of keeping in style, harmony, and phraseology with the original work’.Footnote ⁷² The added part's opening bars certainly dispel any expectation of conservative pastiche, featuring extreme exaggerations of Mozart's dynamics and a rumbling tonic pedal that supplement the Fantasy's comparatively thin texture to create an expansive Romantic soundscape (Example 1). Furthermore, this pedal and the ascending chromatic phrases also furnished by Grieg introduce stark dissonances within his addition and, more crucially, against Mozart's winding melody. Critics found such moments of ‘discord and extravagance’ particularly shocking, declaring that they ‘would have made [Mozart's] hair stand on end’ and were ‘utterly alien to the spirit of the original music’.Footnote ⁷³ These comments indicate that reviewers heard this dissonance in metaphorical as well as harmonic terms as a sonic representation of the aesthetic incompatibility of the two piano parts. Several critics characterized this coupling as ‘monstrous’, a biological metaphor that inverts the notion of organic unity, and called Grieg's additions ‘useless’, as if they were alien limbs grafted onto bodies that were already complete.Footnote ⁷⁴

Example 1.

Opening bars of Mozart's Fantasy in C minor with Grieg's ‘freely composed additional accompaniment’ (Edition Peters, 1890)

The unusual instrumental format of Grieg's ‘arrangements’ appeared to challenge the expected primacy of Mozart's music over Grieg's ostensible accompaniment. By ‘coolly placing his music side by side with that of the elder master’, claimed the Lute, Grieg implied an unwarranted ‘assertion of equality with Mozart’ that would not have arisen in the case of a more conventional arrangement.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such concerns were intensified by the prominence of Grieg's additions within the compound musical texture. The Telegraph complained that the ‘impertinent second piano’ not only ‘fills up Mozart's rests with commonplace echoings’ but also ‘imposes upon his music new themes which Mozart has to accompany’.Footnote ⁷⁶ As this comment suggests, the additions frequently introduce contrapuntal lines, overpoweringly thick textures, and even novel melodic material that belie their stated role as mere accompaniments and question the primacy of Mozart's music despite its canonical status. In the final bars of the Fantasy, for example, Grieg's addition introduces melodies doubled in octaves that almost overwhelm Mozart's material, concealing it in the middle of the texture (Example 2). In this context, it is worth recalling that Grieg only described his additions as ‘accompaniments’ upon publication; his letter to Abraham, by contrast, refers simply to a ‘free second piano’.

Example 2.

Final bars of Mozart's Fantasy in C minor with Grieg's ‘freely composed additional accompaniment’ (Edition Peters, 1890)

This tension between the textural prominence of Grieg's additions and the canonical status of Mozart's music results in part from their initial pedagogical function. In the context of teaching, the more skilled musician took the secondary part, supporting their student's rendition of a classic work. While the simple textures of Mozart's keyboard pieces made them ideal for teaching purposes, Grieg's additions are more technically demanding, making extensive use of doublings, frequent changes of hand position, and rapid shifts in register. However, this disparity presented professional recitalists who wished to use the additions with a dilemma: should they perform Mozart's original work, the most artistically esteemed of the two parts, or Grieg's addition, which employed a more up-to-date and technically impressive pianistic idiom?

It is difficult to determine with complete certainty how Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson responded to this question. Some reviews specify that in each concert the principal recitalist performed Mozart's music and left Grieg's additional part to their assistant, but at least as many reports suggest the reverse.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whichever configuration really was used in each case, this contradictory collection of accounts indicates the extent to which either piano part could be plausibly considered the more important of the two.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although it is not possible to identify conclusively who performed which part at each concert, reviews reporting that the lead performers themselves played Grieg's additions frequently offer telling details that suggest they may be more reliable.Footnote ⁷⁹ For example, Shaw's outrage that Backer-Grøndahl did not play Mozart's Fantasy, instead ‘striking up’ a second part while Haas performed it, seems too specific to be misremembered. It therefore appears likely that both of the principal recitalists chose to forgo Mozart's original music in order to play the additions provided by Grieg. If this was the case, the resulting performances can only have reinforced the perception that the additions challenged and even inverted the expected primacy of Mozart's music over the supplementary parts.Footnote ⁸⁰

In this context, it is revealing that for some London critics Grieg's additions to works by Mozart invited immediate comparison with the melody that Charles Gounod layered over the music of another canonical composer in his Meditation on the First Prelude by J.S. Bach (1853).Footnote ⁸¹ Although the Meditation enjoyed great popularity, particularly in its guise as a vocal ‘Ave Maria’ (1859), it was inevitably attacked by those who upheld fidelity to classic works. Critics used the similarity between Grieg's additive procedure and that used in Gounod's more famous – and, to many, infamous – adaptation as a means to attack his supplementary piano parts for their perceived infidelity to Mozart.Footnote ⁸² The Times for example, pronounced it ‘scarcely fitting that the name of Edward Grieg should be added to the ignoble army of “meditators” and improvers of the masterpieces of classical music’.Footnote ⁸³ The potential aptness of this designation, and its negative implications, are indicated by the vehemence with which Grieg felt compelled to deny any kinship between his additions and Gounod's Meditation in his later article on Mozart. Grieg claimed that while his own ‘modernization’ expressed ‘admiration for an old master’, he ‘thoroughly disapprove[d]’ of the way Gounod had ‘transformed a Bach prelude into a modern, sentimental and trivial piece’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Crucially, Grieg objected to the Meditation not on the grounds that it was unfaithful to the text of Bach's prelude but rather that Gounod had altered its genre and therefore its cultural status, re-presenting this classic work as a parlour piece fit for mass consumption.

That critics in London derided Grieg's additions as ‘meditations’ suggests that they believed he had effected a comparable trivialization of classic works, even if their reviews are more overtly preoccupied with the narrower issue of textual fidelity. This label carried an implicit accusation of poor musical taste that found open expression in the Observer, that by adding to Mozart's Fantasy Grieg had ‘vulgarised’ a ‘masterpiece’.Footnote ⁸⁵ From this standpoint, the vehemence with which critics attacked the supposed infidelity of Grieg's additions appears to have been motivated in part by further reaching (but less easily articulated) anxieties about the threat they might pose to dominant conceptions of good musical taste.

That critics called Grieg's additions ‘meditations’ also suggests that they interpreted them against the backdrop of an emerging concern with overlapping notions of mass culture, poor taste, and femininity, of which the Meditation was emblematic.Footnote ⁸⁶ For example, in 1897 Franklin Peterson lamented the ‘dreadful fate is overtaking … Bach's First Prelude, which is seldom or never heard in public, unless it be as the blind and degraded Samson chained to his task, turning the organ-handle for Gounod's pretty tune!’Footnote ⁸⁷ Peterson's scriptural allusion (to Judges 16) suggests that the attractive melody emasculates this classic work by forcing it to serve as an accompaniment, just as the beautiful Philistine Delilah subordinated the mighty Samson by seducing him and shaving his hair.Footnote ⁸⁸ This characterization also hints that the Meditation had likewise seduced and weakened a mass public, which now consumed Bach's prelude as entertainment rather than contemplating it as a work of art. The self-considered guardians of good taste were apparently not immune: ‘even musical purists’, noted another critic, ‘have been known to listen [to the Meditation] (much against the grain) with pleasure’.Footnote ⁸⁹ This supposedly feminine and feminizing quality of Gounod's piece was reinforced by its mass appeal as parlour music, a genre predominantly performed by young women in their family homes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Numerous commentators of the period complained that the attraction this melodious and often sentimental repertoire held for an army of ‘piano girls’ placed the classical music they valued under siege.Footnote ⁹¹

By characterizing Grieg's additions as ‘meditations’, critics exploited their formal similarity with Gounod's arrangement to disparagingly associate them with the bourgeois domestic taste of which it had become musically iconic: an upwardly aspiring nod to the classics that was ultimately ‘vulgarized’ by its mass appeal. Significantly, the author of ‘Modern Pianism’ considered Grieg's additions typical of a ‘premeditated portrayal of the ugly’ continuous with the garish accoutrements of middle-class domesticity.Footnote ⁹² In this context, the reader is invited to consider Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson presenting Grieg's additions in concert as a public, musical analogue to the ‘yellow piano faced with aggressive green or crimson silk’ that had graced countless parlours a generation previously.Footnote ⁹³ Such remarks identify the additions with a popular, domestic, and feminine musical taste that critics believed was eroding the appreciation for classic works that they advocated, of which textual fidelity was but one facet.

An implicitly feminized conception of poor musical taste inevitably affected how critics, who would have been almost exclusively male, described the way audiences responded to Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson's use of additions by Grieg. As Weber has shown, nineteenth-century critics generally adopted the values of the emerging ‘musical intelligentsia’ in order to reinforce their newfound and otherwise precarious professional status.Footnote ⁹⁴ Reviewers had a strong incentive to differentiate themselves from other listeners by asserting the superiority of their own musical taste and, ingratiatingly, that of their readers. It is therefore unsurprising that several London critics expressed their own disdain for Grieg's additions by characterizing their fellow concertgoers as an undiscerning majority who responded to the performances given by Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson with misplaced enthusiasm. ‘That a thoughtless assemblage should loudly applaud [Backer-Grøndahl's] performance was only to be expected’, declared the Athenaeum: ‘It seems useless to look for the manifestation of true artistic feeling in an ordinary English audience’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Referee expressed the same sentiment in explicitly gendered terms, reporting that this ‘caricature’ of Mozart's Fantasy was ‘applauded by a crowded assemblage, mostly composed of unintelligent beings in petticoats’.Footnote ⁹⁶ This disparaging association between Grieg's additions and femininity is also evident in the Telegraph's review of Hartvigson's recital. Characterizing the additions as both frivolously ornamental and primly didactic, the critic claimed that they comprised ‘scales, arpeggios, and decorative passages calculated to delight the young ladies of Miss Pilkington's Academy’.Footnote ⁹⁷ In this way, critics swiftly dismissed any positive response to Grieg's additions by attributing them to women whose musical taste was supposedly unsophisticated.

These reviews of Hartvigson and Backer-Grøndahl's recitals suggest that reactions to their use of Grieg's additions were at the very least more varied than the uniform negativity of critics might initially suggest.Footnote ⁹⁸ Positive reports of these performances were simply not recorded at first hand; anyone able to publicly disseminate their views about music was unlikely to dissent from the authoritative ideal of fidelity to the classics.Footnote ⁹⁹ However, if critics sought to differentiate themselves from those who applauded Grieg's additions, then their particular objections may indicate what it was about them that other listeners enjoyed. Most obviously, such listeners did not place the strong emphasis on fidelity to classic works that caused critics to reject the additions. It is possible that they regarded Grieg's ‘modernization’ of Mozart's music as investing old-fashioned and potentially dull classics with new charm to suit musical tastes cultivated by performing pieces such as Gounod's Meditation in the home.

Grieg's Additions as ‘National’ Music

The apparent polarization of opinion about Grieg's additions mirrors a similar divergence of taste concerning the supposedly ‘national’ character of his music more generally. Among English audiences, the idea that Grieg's work was essentially Norwegian was central to both its popular appeal and the criticism it suffered from detractors. Shaw was a particularly vocal critic of Grieg's compositions, characterizing such ‘national’ music as parochial and therefore of less value than classical repertoire whose relevance was ostensibly universal. This insistence on the primacy of the classics over ‘national’ music permeates Shaw's critical engagement with Backer-Grøndahl's performances in London in 1889 and 1890, not least the juxtaposition of these two categories implicit in her presentation of Mozart's Fantasy with an additional piano part by Grieg.

Although the letter Shaw wrote to Backer-Grøndahl after this performance is not extant, her surviving reply suggests that it evinced the same objection to ‘national’ music that informed his published criticism. The pianist's reply, which subtly resists Shaw's dismissive attitude toward ‘national’ music in general and Grieg's additions in particular, offers a rare and historically informative contrast to the widespread condemnation the additions suffered in press reviews. Before examining this important source in further detail, however, it is necessary to consider the context provided by Shaw's engagement with Grieg's music, Backer-Grøndahl's performances in London, and the concept of ‘national’ music.

For late-nineteenth century audiences, Grieg's fame as a representative of the contemporary flowering of Norwegian artistic culture was matched only by the dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Perhaps inevitably, Ibsen's reputation often informed how critics interpreted Grieg's music, including the additional piano parts used by Backer-Grøndahl and Hartvigson. The author of ‘Modern Pianism’, for instance, echoed a common criticism of Ibsen's plays when complaining that such reworkings pursued an ugly ‘realism’ over traditional artifice.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Referring to Ibsen in order to ascribe a national motivation to the composer's actions, Shaw quipped that ‘Grieg's appendage to Mozart's fantasia must be Norway's revenge for Mr Walter Besant's appendage to Ibsen's Doll's House’.Footnote ¹⁰² This allusion was highly topical: the social and aesthetic debates sparked by the first London production of A Doll's House (1879) at the Novelty Theatre the previous season had secured Ibsen's fame in England, and Besant's prose continuation of the play, ‘The Doll's House – And After’, was published the following January.Footnote ¹⁰³ Shaw, an enthusiastic supporter of Ibsen's play, had sought his own ‘revenge’ on Besant by penning a further continuation, ‘Still After a Doll's House’, published only weeks before his review of Backer-Grøndahl's recital.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Shaw's facetious characterization of Grieg's additions as ‘Norway's revenge’ on Besant is more revealing than it initially appears.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The analogy is founded upon Grieg and Ibsen's shared Norwegian identity, and so emphasizes the importance of nationality, but ultimately serves to denigrate the composer by likening him with Besant rather than his compatriot. Suggesting that Grieg, like Besant, had used an ‘appendage’ to subvert an existing masterpiece allowed Shaw to rank Ibsen alongside Mozart, presenting both as great artists wronged by lesser ones. However, Shaw's own willingness to add to Ibsen's plot (albeit mediated by Besant) indicates that his literary analogy constitutes more than a mere condemnation of artistic infidelity, and instead bears more detailed scrutiny.

A Doll's House ends with Nora Helmer literally slamming the door on her restrictive domestic existence in order to pursue personal freedom, a socially radical decision that Besant attempts to undermine by imagining its negative consequences two decades later. In Besant's story, Nora's abandoned family live in misery and disgrace, and her daughter, Emmy, kills herself when this stigma prevents her escaping to America with the son of Nora's original antagonist, Krogstad. In his continuation, Shaw aimed to challenge Besant's ‘middle class evangelical verdict on the play’ by inventing a subsequent conversation between Nora and Krogstad Senior that reveals his culpability for Emmy's suicide.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Besant's use of picturesque references to fjords and the midnight sun exoticized the play's Norwegian setting, an approach consistent with that of conservative critics who sought to dismiss Ibsen's work as ‘parochial’ or ‘provincial’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In contrast, Shaw's continuation treated the setting of A Doll's House as incidental to its action, encouraging English readers to regard the play as presenting a widely applicable social message that was as relevant to them as audiences in Oslo.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The low esteem in which Shaw held Grieg's music was influenced by the same suspicion that national specificity necessarily compromised an artwork's international relevance. ‘Hitherto I have not been a great admirer of Edvard Grieg’, he admitted during the composer's visit to London in 1889, ‘He is a “national” composer; and I am not to be imposed on by that sort of thing’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Shaw characterized ‘national’ music as reliant on evocations of folk idioms that were of little significance to listeners outside the composer's own country. ‘I do not cry out “How Norwegian!” whenever I hear an augmented triad’, he protested, claiming that Grieg's music did not remind him of Norway because he had never been there.Footnote ¹¹⁰ For Shaw, Grieg's music used these allusions to Norwegian folk music to celebrate national peculiarity rather than striving for the broader significance he valued in art, particularly the classical canon. ‘All good “folk music”’, the critic insisted, ‘is as international as … the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The comparison that Shaw drew a year later between Grieg's addition to Mozart's Fantasy and Besant's continuation of A Doll's House exhibits similar concerns; from his perspective, both ‘appendages’ undermined works of international importance by pigeonholing them within a particular national context.

While Shaw's impatience with nationalism in art was undoubtedly informed by the internationalism of his socialist political beliefs, the contradictions inherent to his case against Grieg betray its additional concern with issues of musical taste.Footnote ¹¹² The critic's claim that the national specificity of Grieg's music reduced its significance to listeners outside Norway was belied by its popularity in Britain and elsewhere. As Carl Dahlhaus argued, nationalist evocations of folk music satisfied a ‘craving for the exotic’ that was widespread among the middle classes in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote ¹¹³ The features most commonly heard as expressions of particular national characters – which included pounding ‘bare’ fifths, drones, and modality – actually constituted a generalized folk topic that was tied to particular countries only by its discursive context and the nationality of its composer.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In apparent contradiction with his own argument, Shaw implicitly conceded that ‘national’ music could be internationally appreciated as such by ridiculing the widespread identification of augmented chords in Grieg's music with his Norwegian homeland.

Addressing a Norwegian readership, Shaw tellingly attributed this response to the same young, female audience of domestic pianists that other critics later rebuked for applauding Grieg's additions. Noting that, through his popular lyric pieces, the composer had ‘visited England, parlor by parlor, before he called on us in person’, Shaw claimed that Grieg's music was particularly popular among ‘young women’: ‘When they hear that augmented triad for which he shews such a preference, they sigh “How Norwegian! How fitting for one who hails from the land of the fjords and the midnight sun! What local color!”’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ For Shaw, ‘national’ music such as Grieg's relied on an exoticist pictorialism that appealed to women and that was necessarily inferior to the ideal of internationalist, absolute music represented by his own (implicitly masculine) taste for the classics. Furthermore, Shaw derisively characterized those who thronged to hear Grieg's performances as ‘young ladies, who, loving [Grieg's] sweet stuff, were eager to see and adore the confectioner’, sarcastically relating that he forbore one concert altogether ‘lest occupying [his] seat should be the means of turning away even one enthusiastic worshiper’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By contrast, Shaw claims to ‘despise’ Grieg's ‘sweet’ and ‘pretty’ music, preferring instead ‘a good, solid, long-winded, classical lump of composition’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Reporting on Backer-Grøndahl's first performances in London in the same season, Shaw strove to distance her from both her compatriot Grieg and the supposedly unsophisticated young women who played his music on parlour pianos around the country. In a scene laden with fortuitous significance, the critic first met Backer-Grøndahl on the set of A Doll's House: both had been invited to a dinner at the Novelty Theatre on 16 June to celebrate the play's London opening the previous week. Shaw recounted this occasion in the Star, describing the various turns performed to entertain those gathered on stage amongst the furniture of the Helmer family parlour, in which all the play's action unfolds. Last of all, he wrote, a ‘quiet lady, neglected and unknown’ agreed to play the onstage piano used to accompany the tarantella Nora dances at a crucial moment in Ibsen's drama.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Shaw describes preparing himself for ‘the worst’, expecting an amateur rendition of a parlour favourite such as The Maiden's Prayer, only to be taken aback by the lady's performance of a piece she had composed herself.Footnote ¹¹⁹ After pronouncing her ‘one of the greatest pianists in Europe’, Shaw claims that the lady invited him to hear her play Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto with the London Philharmonic Society orchestra.Footnote ¹²⁰ Finally introducing Backer-Grøndahl to his readers by name, Shaw describes her as a ‘great artist – a serious artist – a beautiful, incomparable, unique artist’ who ‘played upon Helmer's pianoforte as it was never played upon before, and perhaps never will be again’.Footnote ¹²¹

Shaw's surprise at the quality of Backer-Grøndahl's playing was, revealingly, contrived for deliberate rhetorical effect; he had actually heard her play Beethoven's concerto ten days previously, praising her performance in an unsigned review.Footnote ¹²² The critic's account of the Doll's House party cannily uses its theatrical setting to dramatize Backer-Grøndahl's status as a great artist: she turns the Helmers’ parlour back into a public stage, transcending the role of domestic amateur just as Nora transcends the role of domestic wife at the end of Ibsen's play.Footnote ¹²³ From this perspective, Shaw's anecdote anticipated and challenged the association with amateur playing that so often prevented professional female pianists from being accorded the same artistic status as their male counterparts. The following year, for example, one critic listed Backer-Grøndahl among what they patronizingly considered a ‘goodly show of “petticoat” pianists’ able to ‘charm the eye as well as the ear’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Shaw was not alone in resisting such a pejoratively feminized characterization of Backer-Grøndahl. Hildegard Werner's article promoting the pianist's London debut describes how her playing and compositions had eventually impressed even Hans von Bülow, whose sexism was (even then) widely mocked in the British press.Footnote ¹²⁵ Tellingly, however, Werner countered the idea Backer-Grøndahl was a mere ‘petticoat pianist’ by explicitly praising the ‘manliness’ of her playing.Footnote ¹²⁶ This compliment reveals the extent to which Backer-Grøndahl's supporters affirmed her artistic credibility by suggesting that she fulfilled the expectations set by her male colleagues rather than by challenging the negative stereotypes so frequently applied to female pianists.Footnote ¹²⁷

To Shaw's frustration, however, Backer-Grøndahl's choice of repertoire often flouted his conception of pianistic merit and good taste, featuring Grieg's ‘national’ music as well as the ‘international’ classics he preferred. In a profile of the pianist published a month after they first met, Shaw offered her performance of Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto as conclusive evidence that she was an ‘artist of genius’ but conceded that he found her admiration for Grieg ‘infuriating’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Unfortunately for Shaw, Grieg's music featured prominently in Backer-Grøndahl's repertoire during her time in London. She had first appeared in the city on 28 March 1889 with a highly acclaimed performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto under the baton of the composer himself, whom she had asked to facilitate her introduction to the British public.Footnote ¹²⁹ After giving the performance of Beethoven's ‘Emperor’ Concerto that Shaw so admired on 6 June, Backer-Grøndahl returned to Grieg, opening her recital at Princes Hall on 13 July with his Third Violin Sonata.Footnote ¹³⁰ While the programme also included works by Schumann, Chopin, and the pianist herself, Shaw insisted that she ‘should have played a Beethoven sonata instead of Grieg's violin sonata’.Footnote ¹³¹ The critic nonetheless declared that Backer-Grøndahl had justly ended the season with a reputation as ‘a great Beethoven player, a great Schumann player, a great Chopin player, and, consequently, a great pianoforte player’.Footnote ¹³² Despite the centrality of Grieg to Backer-Grøndahl's repertoire, Shaw believed that pianistic greatness could only be achieved by performing the classics (a category he conceived broadly as older, canonical music).

Shaw may have hoped that Backer-Grøndahl planned to use her national association with Norway's most famous composer to make her name in London before focusing on classical repertoire when she returned the following season. However, the programmes the pianist devised for her concerts in 1890 displayed an even greater emphasis on ‘national’ music from Norway and other Scandinavian countries, most notably works by Grieg. It was Grieg's concerto rather than Beethoven's that Backer-Grøndahl chose to reprise in her first concert of the season at the Crystal Palace on 1 March, following it with Chopin's Fantasy in F minor Op. 49. ‘Madame Gröndahl's powers of interpretation are wasted on a scrappy work like Grieg's’, Shaw grumbled, complaining that ‘when you are longing for Mozart in D minor or Beethoven in G, or the E flat over again, then Grieg is an impertinence’.Footnote ¹³³ Contrary to the critic's hopes, it seems that Backer-Grøndahl had planned to gain esteem by playing familiar classics before shifting the public's attention to her performances of ‘national’ music rather than the other way around.

The simmering conflict between Backer-Grøndahl's probable creative intentions and Shaw's critical expectations finally boiled over in his response to her Steinway Hall recital on 5 March, which opened with Grieg's version of Mozart's Fantasy. ‘[I]f the [Crystal Palace] concert left me discontented’, the critic explained, ‘the recital threw me into a perfect frenzy of exasperation’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Although horrified by the unusual treatment of Mozart's Fantasy, Shaw's broader complaint was that the programme consisted primarily of ‘drawing-room music’ rather than ‘the classics of the pianoforte’ (Table 1).Footnote ¹³⁵ The critic was not alone: the Musical Times, for instance, considered the programme ‘miscellaneous and peculiar, the names of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Mendelssohn being conspicuous by their absence’.Footnote ¹³⁶ Shaw attributed Backer-Grøndahl's partiality for music he considered trivial to the provincial tastes of audiences in her native country, suggesting while it might be necessary to ‘extenuate the crime of playing serious music’ in Norway this was not the case in England.Footnote ¹³⁷

Table 1.

The programme of Backer-Grøndahl's recital at Steinway Hall, 5 March 1890, reconstructed from an advertisement in the Morning Post (4 March 1890): 1

It is significant that much of the music in Backer-Grøndahl's programme that Shaw and other critics dismissed as trivial was in some way connected with her native country. Of the eight composers featured in the recital, half were Norwegian (Grieg, Edmund Neupert, Ole Olsen, and Backer-Grøndahl herself) and, including Grieg's additions to Mozart's Fantasy, they were responsible for 14 of its 18 items. Some of these works were explicitly ‘national’ in the sense disparaged by Shaw, using exoticized stylistic features along with descriptive titles to evoke folk culture within a picturesque Norwegian setting.Footnote ¹³⁸ Backer-Grøndahl's own composition Huldreslaat (1887), with which she concluded her recital, is typical of this genre. Advertised as ‘The Dance of the Mountain Spirits’, the piece's modal (principally mixolydian) inflections and pounding ‘bare’ fifths – especially prominent in its final bars – are typical of the conventionalized folk topics that Shaw associated with ‘national’ music (Example 3).Footnote ¹³⁹ The green and gold fjord scene that appeared on the cover of Huldreslaat when it was published in Britain three years later as Danse Norvégienne resembles the images of Norwegian landscape that the critic had suggested Grieg's augmented chords conjured in the minds of sighing female listeners (Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁴⁰ While Shaw may have mocked such picturesque associations, this edition of Huldreslaat and its inclusion as an insert in the Strand Magazine in 1895 attest to the exotic appeal that such ‘national’ compositions held for many domestic amateur pianists.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Example 3.

Final bars of Backer-Grøndahl, Danse Norvégienne (Huldreslaat) (London and Leipzig: Lucas, Weber, Pitt, & Hatzfeld, 1893)

Figure 1.

The cover of Backer-Grøndahl, Danse Norvégienne (Huldreslaat) (London and Leipzig: Lucas, Weber, Pitt, & Hatzfeld, 1893)

Backer-Grøndahl's recital included several ‘national’ pieces of this kind, which were particularly popular with the audience at large even if critics remained unconvinced. The ‘Bridal Procession’ from Grieg's Scenes from Country Life Op. 19 received an encore, as did Ole Olsen's Fanitull, which the Musical Times described as a ‘weird Scandinavian dance’ that had ‘roused the audience to enthusiasm’.Footnote ¹⁴² Although most critics were sceptical of this music's artistic worth, the Pall Mall Gazette noted such ‘Scandinavian national airs’ as an unusual and interesting feature of the programme.Footnote ¹⁴³ The Swedish newspaper Stockholms Dagblad, moreover, published a telling riposte to Shaw's complaint that Backer-Grøndahl had performed ‘national’ music rather than the classics, claiming that he ignored the tastes and interests of the audience while the pianist did not.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The paper argued that the pianist's largely female English audience were particularly fond of character pieces and she felt a duty to nurture their appreciation of works in this genre by her compatriot Grieg. Backer-Grøndahl's programme also featured music by Norwegian composers that were not overtly ‘national’ in character, such as her own concert études. However, the focus provided by evocative pieces such as Huldreslaat, Fanitull, and the ‘Bridal Procession’ ensured that critics perceived a distinctly ‘national’ flavour in the recital as a whole. The Daily News, for example, stated that the concert ‘relied chiefly on Scandinavian music’, while the Times claimed that ‘the influence of Grieg was felt on nearly every piece’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Unlike the picturesque character pieces in Backer-Grøndahl's programme, the additional piano part that Grieg composed for Mozart's Fantasy lacks the descriptive title and explicit use of folk topics most commonly associated with ‘national’ music. However, Grieg's reputation as a ‘national’ composer has led some scholars to argue that the addition is distinctively Norwegian in character and to hear echoes of the country's folk music in its apparently commonplace dynamic contrasts.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The idea that Grieg's addition was particularly Norwegian was probably even more compelling to those who heard it as part of Backer-Grøndahl's recital, in which explicitly ‘national’ music played so prominent a role. The addition certainly allowed Mozart's Fantasy to blend in with such repertoire rather than remaining distinct from it. The Magazine of Music noted that as ‘the one classical piece of the afternoon’ the Fantasy ‘would have afforded a striking contrast to the rest of the music, but for the fact it was presented in a strange form’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In this context, critics such as Shaw might well have interpreted Backer-Grøndahl's use of the addition as an undesirable ‘national’ appropriation of an ‘international’ classic. For example, this sentiment appears to inform the way that the Athenaeum drew attention to Grieg's nationality when condemning his additions: ‘it has pleased Grieg, the Scandinavian composer, to whom we are indebted for much charming music, to lay violent hands upon Mozart's familiar Fantasia’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Conversely, however, the perceived Norwegian character of the addition might have contributed to the applause it reportedly received from other concertgoers, for many of whom Grieg's more explicitly ‘national’ pieces would have held an exotic appeal.

It is worth noting that Grieg himself appears to have intended his additions to situate Mozart's music within an ongoing Austro-German tradition rather than adapting to Norwegianize them. In his essay on the composer, Grieg claimed that Mozart's ‘splendid chromaticism’ anticipated ‘modern’ music, specifically that of Wagner.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It may have been this conviction that drew Grieg to the Fantasy in C minor; his addition intensifies the work's already striking level of chromaticism and dissonance as if to highlight its progressive credentials.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This understanding of Grieg's addition as a response to the history of Austro-German music was not necessarily incompatible with the potentially Norwegian character emphasized by Backer-Grøndahl's recital programme. As Daniel Grimley has argued, the cultural nationalism of Grieg's music was potentially ‘progressive’, looking forward to Norway's future international significance as much as back to the idealized image of the past evoked by folklorism.Footnote ¹⁵¹ From this perspective, Grieg's addition negotiates the relationship between Norwegian music and the developing Austro-German tradition from Mozart to Wagner rather than merely celebrating national particularity and isolation. It is possible that Backer-Grøndahl's decision to use the addition was influenced by this more complex form of cultural nationalism, even if listeners in London simplistically perceived the Norwegian theme of her recital (positively or negatively) as exotic.

Before addressing Backer-Grøndahl's own account of her motivations in her letter to Shaw, however, it is fruitful to revisit Hartvigson's concurrent use of Grieg's additions with their potentially ‘national’ connotations in mind. Hartvigson was an early advocate of Grieg's works in England and, although Danish rather than Norwegian, he may have included the composer's additions in his recital in order to promote the music of a fellow Scandinavian.Footnote ¹⁵² In any case, it is significant that Hartvigson, like Backer-Grøndahl, used Grieg's additions to music by Mozart to open a recital in which the Austro-German classics were otherwise absent, instead featuring several picturesque works that evoked exotic locales (Figure 2).Footnote ¹⁵³ Hartvigson's selections from Liszt's Années de Pèlerinage variously summon images of the composer's native Hungary, the Italian cities of Venice and Naples, and Lake Wallenstadt in the Swiss Alps. Similarly, one critic heard the composer's ‘native Danish beech woods’ in Hartvigson's ‘excellent’ performance of In the Woods by his compatriot Niels Gade, an assessment that attests the kinship between exotic and ‘national’ music.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Figure 2.

Programme booklet from Anton Hartvigson's recital at Princes’ Hall, 5 March 1890

In this context, Hartvigson's decision to perform Mozart's Sonata in F major as well as the Fantasy in C minor is worthy of note. Unlike his second piano part for the Fantasy, Grieg's addition to the Sonata introduces the stylized folk topics typically associated with ‘national’ music, particularly in the concluding rondo. Grieg supplements each of the refrain's five appearances with an ‘oom-cha’ accompaniment that sustains a ‘bare’ fifth under Mozart's changing harmonies, transforming it into a rustic dance (Example 4). This impression is enhanced by the countermelody Grieg introduces upon the refrain's second appearance, derived from the D–E–C motif in the left hand of the fourth bar of the first refrain, whose marked articulation and repeated resolution of the leading tone down a major third grants it a folk-like character (Example 5).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In the third refrain Grieg expands the register upwards and decorates alternating beats with glistening acciaccaturas. This glittering effect is maintained at the start of the fourth refrain through a trill on the dominant that continues against Mozart's theme, eventually ascending an octave during a crescendo into a climax (Example 6). At this point Mozart replaces his theme with a series of decorative runs, but Grieg prominently retains a variation of the theme which strongly resembles the folk-like countermelody of the second refrain (Example 7). In this passage, the classical tradition and Norwegian ‘national’ music appear to be refracted through one another in a mutual apotheosis rather than being placed in opposition. Grieg matches the low two-part counterpoint of Mozart's fifth and final refrain by expanding his ‘oom-cha’ accompaniment into the low and high registers and instructing both pianists to steadily fade into quietness.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Example 4.

Opening of the first refrain from Mozart's Sonata in F major, iii Rondo, with Grieg's ‘freely composed additional accompaniment’ (Edition Peters, 1890)

Example 5.

Opening of the second refrain from Mozart's Sonata in F major, iii Rondo, with Grieg's ‘freely composed additional accompaniment’ (Edition Peters, 1890)

Example 6.

Fourth refrain from Mozart's Sonata in F major, iii Rondo, with Grieg's ‘freely composed additional accompaniment’ (Edition Peters, 1890)

Example 7.

Motivic connection between Mozart's refrain theme, Grieg's ‘folk’ motif, and Grieg's combination of the two in the fourth refrain

In moving from a quiet beginning to a boisterous climax and then dying away, Grieg's version of the movement traces the same spatially evocative dynamic contour as his popular ‘Bridal Procession’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Grieg's transformation of Mozart's rondo evokes a similar movement of folk subjects through a musical landscape, first toward the listener and then receding into the distance. Heard after the fusion of Mozart and the folk topic in the fourth refrain, the final diminuendo could suggest not a retreat into an idealized national past, but progression towards a future in which Norway realizes its potential by both drawing on and contributing to a broader ‘international’ culture. It is possible this or a similar interpretation of the movement's dynamic and thematic arc constituted the ‘narrative’ (Geschichte) that Grieg reports so enthused the audience when Lie-Nissen and Rytterager premiered his version of the Sonata in Christiania in 1877.

A nationally inspired ‘narrative’ of this kind may also have informed Backer-Grøndahl's decision to perform Grieg's version of Mozart's Fantasy, even if its musical material was less explicitly ‘national’ in character. At the very least, the pianist's personal response to Shaw's criticisms of her recital suggests that her use of Grieg's additions arose from a conscious effort to balance critical expectation that she should perform classic works with a desire to delight London audiences with less familiar repertoire from her own country. It is worth reading her entire reply to Shaw with this tension in mind.

Although the rest of Backer-Grøndahl's letter remains similarly tactful and polite, she subtly resists Shaw's criticisms of her chosen repertoire. The pianist goes on to contextualize her decision to use Grieg's additions as an attempt to refresh a performance culture fixated on a small canon of classics.

If Backer-Grøndahl really did share Shaw's view of the Fantasy, it is unlikely she would have chosen to perform it; in any case, she evidently understood its novelty value as an asset in the ‘struggle for life’ among pianists in the overcrowded London market. Further, behind her apparent deference to Shaw the pianist implies that he should be less narrow-minded in his artistic tastes:

In contrast to Shaw's stubborn demand for familiar Austro-German works, Backer-Grøndahl espouses a pluralistic conception of artistic value that embraces ‘national’ music such as Grieg's Piano Concerto as well as the supposedly ‘international’ classics. The pianist rounds off by promising to present more traditional repertoire in future, but hints that she will not stop promoting the work of her countryman Grieg.

Overall, the pianist's letter suggests that her decision to perform Mozart's music with the additional piano part by Grieg was part of both a personal artistic project and a prudent commercial strategy. In this respect, Backer-Grøndahl's note offers a telling foil to the numerous press reviews that simply criticized her for being unfaithful to a classical work.

Perhaps in response to Shaw's complaints, Backer-Grøndahl adopted a more balanced repertoire for the rest of the season. Appearing in the Popular Concerts series on 15 March, she played Grieg's Third Violin Sonata with Wilma Neruda, but was sure to follow it with pieces by Schumann, Chopin, and Mendelssohn.Footnote ¹⁶² Shaw welcomed this turn to traditional repertoire, but having his own way proved a hollow experience: the critic admitted feeling ‘snubbed’ by Backer-Grøndahl's more ‘reserved’ and ‘severe’ playing in the concert.Footnote ¹⁶³ ‘Last year’ he lamented, ‘she played so as to let us into all her secrets. This time, having no doubt found out how unworthy a horde of Philistines we are, she has kept us at a certain distance’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Backer-Grøndahl's letter, however, suggests that this distance resulted from disappointed resignation that she would have to satisfy conservative tastes rather than discontent at the reception of her performances of classical works. Shaw presents himself as one of the few listeners to have comprehended the pianist's talents, but, ironically, the listeners that he and other critics regarded as ‘Philistines’ for applauding Grieg's version of the Fantasy may have better appreciated her artistic intentions. It must have been a great disappointment to Backer-Grøndahl that critics like Shaw received her efforts to promote Norwegian music without enthusiasm. She took part in one further concert that season, after which she never performed in London again.Footnote ¹⁶⁵