From Holberg’s Time, Suite in the old style for string orchestra, Opus 40

Edvard Grieg was born in Bergen, Norway, on June 15, 1843, and died in Bergen September 4, 1907. He completed his Holberg Suite (initially called Holbergiana) for piano solo in July 1884 for celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Ludvig Holberg’s birth, and it was premiered in this form on December 3, 1884. He completed the string orchestra version by March 1885 and conducted its premiere that month in Bergen. The score is dedicated to the pianist Erika Lie-Nissen.

The score for the Holberg Suite calls for an orchestra of strings—first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses.

The year 1884 marked the bicentennial of Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), a playwright, essayist, and historian who has long been considered the founding father of Norwegian letters. Commemorative plans were concentrated in Bergen, where the freethinking Holberg was born and raised, and it was only natural that the bicentennial celebrants enlisted Edvard Grieg to compose music to accompany the unveiling of a Holberg monument. Not only had Grieg come to fame in the 1870s as Norway’s chief proponent of folklore-inflected musical nationalism, but he too had grown up in Bergen, the so-called “gateway to the fjords,” and he contributed resources for the statue’s construction. But while Holberg spent most of his professional life in Danish-speaking Copenhagen, which served as the political seat and center of cultural gravity of the Danish-Norwegian union that lasted until its dissolution during the Napoleonic Wars, Grieg always returned to Bergen (if sometimes begrudgingly). By 1884, when the prospect of Norwegian independence—now from Sweden—was gaining traction, Holberg had become an important emblem of Norwegian identity. However, the fact that he produced all his important work while based in Copenhagen was a bitter symbol for the nationalists, and the bicentennial festivities represented an important moment in the ongoing process of “reclaiming” Holberg for the Norwegian cause.

In addition to his music for the Bergen statue’s dedication—a chest-thumpingly patriotic Holberg Cantata for unaccompanied male voices—Grieg wrote a second piece for the Holberg anniversary. That score, From Holberg’s Time, was composed for piano and arranged the following year for string orchestra, which is the version that has long been best known. As Grieg’s title suggests, the piece evokes the music of Holberg’s age, the age of J.S. Bach and Handel—appropriately enough, given that Holberg was, as one scholar writes, a music lover who “played the recorder, organized soirées, and attended concerts where astonished guests could observe the normally so gruff Holberg moved to tears.” Grieg described From Holberg’s Time as “a good exercise for concealing one’s own personality,” and it has often been characterized as a “neoclassical” score long before that stylistic label was in use.

Admittedly, Grieg wrote his Suite at a time when the music of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods was being rediscovered across Europe through, for example, the publication of popular editions that helped to contribute to the solidification of the very concept of a compositional “canon.” But unlike the neoclassicism proper of the 1920s, which saw composers turn to older models by Bach and Mozart to produce modernist effects of irony and estrangement, Grieg’s homage to the music of Holberg’s period was entirely affectionate. It may instead be that Grieg was inspired by the proliferation of now-little-known pieces “in the old style” by Austro-German salon composers in the final decades of the 19th century, a trend exemplified in the 1870s by a revival of interest in the Baroque gavotte dance form, when it sometimes served as an antique symbol of musical “Germanness.” By breathing fresh life into the galant dance forms that “Father Holberg” would have known, Grieg made available a correspondingly usable Norwegian musical past. The twist was that Grieg, who was very much known as a “composer of the people,” was obliged to take his cue from dance forms associated with the 18th-century European aristocracy.

From Holberg’s Time is cast as a French Baroque dance suite, in which an introductory piece precedes a series of stylized dance movements. When arranging the music for strings, Grieg considerably reimagined the spirited Praeludium, transforming the piano version’s broken-chord figuration into galloping, repeated note textures more suitable for violins and violas. The Praeludium is followed by a Sarabande, which emulates the dance as it was known in Holberg’s day—as a slow dance in triple meter of serious, patrician bearing, often with an emphasis on the second beat.

In Baroque dance suites, gavottes often came after sarabandes, and that is the case with From Holberg’s Time. Grieg’s meticulously accented duple meter Gavotte preserves what the musicologist Wye Jamison Allanbrook describes as the dance’s characteristic fusion of “elegant-ordinary” or “refined bucolic.” It does so in the outer sections by leavening highly posed, choreographed string gestures with earthy bow-strokes, and in the contrasting central Musette, by gracefully simulating the drone of a bagpipe (this was a sonority Grieg also favored in his scores informed by Norwegian folk music).

While the tempo marking of the long-breathed G-minor Air (Andante religioso) suggests that it may have been intended as an imitation of a Baroque sacred aria, its sighing melodic figures and poignant harmonic suspensions point to Italianate sources—not exactly Vivaldi, who had not yet been “rediscovered” as of 1884, but rather, Vivaldi as filtered through Bach’s assimilation of his music. Notably, Grieg lets both the upper and lower strings partake of the main melody, and a middle section in the relative major makes full use of the richer sonorities afforded by Romantic-era string forces. Last comes a cheeky Rigaudon, a fast, sprightly dance of French extraction with prominent upbeats and rustic, pastoral connotations. In a Poco meno mosso section in the parallel minor, the Rigaudon’s closing melodic gesture blooms into a delicate, questioning chorale, after which comes an emphatic reprise of the rustic main dance.

Matthew Mendez

The first American performance of the Holberg Suite may have been given by the Wilhelmj Club of Washington, DC, in the 1887-88 season. 

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of the Holberg Suite was led by Wilhelm Gericke on April 13, 1889.