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