Landås Court

The Grieg family’s summer house at the foot of Ulriken Hill possessed extensive grounds, with herb and flower gardens. The family used to live here from April to October. It was inherited at the beginning of the nineteenth century on the distaff side by the Hagerup family, before passing to Edvard’s mother, Gesine. At Landås, the fifteen-year-old Edvard first met the legendary violin virtuoso Ole Bull, who called one summer’s day on a wonderful Arabian horse. Grieg remembered that when they shook hands he felt an electric shock run through his body. Bull did not bring his violin with him, but he told fascinating stories about his concert travels, particularly in America, which aroused the young composer’s imagination. When he heard that Edvard composed, the violinist asked him to play one of his early works. After the rendition and a quiet talk with his parents, he approached Edvard and said: ‘You’re going to Leipzig to become an artist’. Later in life, Grieg’s thoughts travelled back many times to that visit of Ole Bull’s to Landås, which determined his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory and his future career. On returning from his studies, Grieg often spent time at Landås, where he would compose. Among the more important works to be written during the summer of 1870 spent on the family estate were four songs, three of them to words by Bjørnson: ‘Good Morning’, Op. 21 No. 2, ‘The First Meeting’, Op. 21 No. 1 and ‘From Monte Pincio’, Op. 39 No. 1; the fourth song, ‘The Odalisque’, was not published until after the composer’s death, as CW 125. In 1871, he also composed here the Scenes of Country Life, Op. 19, one of his first piano cycles, which displays clear influences from Norwegian folk music and Grieg’s original harmonic language. The musical material of one of the works from that cycle, ‘Mountain Dance’, resembles the folk melody of ‘Brita Valaas’, jotted down by the Norwegian song collector Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, although in this instance Grieg deployed his own compositional inventiveness. A couple of years later, this led to a misunderstanding, when the French composer Edouard Lalo, convinced that this was an original Norwegian melody, used it in his Rapsodie norvégienne for orchestra. Grieg’s parents sold this property in 1872 and moved to the Sandviken district of Bergen.