Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen on 15 June 1843. His parents were Alexander Grieg (1806–1875), a merchant and vice consul in Bergen, and Gesine Hagerup (1814–1875), a music teacher. I was interested to learn that the family name was originally spelled Greig, and has Scottish origins. Evidently after the Battle of Culloden (1746), Grieg's great-grandfather travelled widely and settled in Norway about 1770, establishing business interests in Bergen.
Grieg was taught to play the piano by his Mother from the age of 6 and by 15 he was an accomplished pianist and attending the Leipzig Conservatory.
In the spring of 1860, Grieg survived pleurisy and tuberculosis but for the rest of his life, his health was impaired by a destroyed left lung and a deformity of his thoracic spine. He suffered numerous respiratory infections, and ultimately developed combined lung and heart failure. Despite these health problems he regularly walked with his friend Frants Beyer in the mountains around Bergen.
On 11 June 1867, Grieg married his first cousin, Nina Hagerup and the next year, their only child, Alexandra, was born but she sadly died in 1869 from meningitis. Coincidently the UK news yesterday reported that a vaccine against Meningitis B has now been successfully tested. Although it protects individuals the vaccine is not going to be widely available since it is not clear if it will prevent the bacteria from being transmitted from person to person.
Grieg died in the late summer of 1907, aged 64, after a long period of illness. He was cremated, and his ashes were entombed in a mountain crypt near the house. The grave is in a tranquil spot close to the lake edge where the sun sparkled on the water as it gently lapped against the shoreline. It is said that one evening when Grieg and his best friend Frants Beyer were out fishing on the lake and the last rays of the sunset hit a spot of rock he said "There I would like to rest forever”.
After the death of her husband in 1907, Nina Grieg moved to Denmark where she spent the remainder of her life but her ashes were laid to rest inside a mountain tomb next to her husband.
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