The offer of an honorary grave was made by the city of Vienna, and he has found resting place near Beethoven and Mozart, just as he had wished.

Memorial tablets have been placed on the houses in which Brahms lived in Vienna, Ischl and Thun, also on the house of his birth, in Hamburg.

XIX

EDWARD GRIEG

“From every point of view Grieg is one of the most original geniuses in the musical world of the present or past.  His songs are a mine of melody, surpassed in wealth only by Schubert, and that only because there are more of Schubert’s.  In originality of harmony and modulation he has only six equals.  Bach, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Wagner and Liszt.  In rhythmic invention and combination he is inexhaustible, and as orchestrator he ranks among the most fascinating.”

HENRY T. FINCK

Edward Hargarup Grieg, “the Chopin of the North,” was a unique personality, as well as an exceptional musician and composer.  While not a “wonder child,” in the sense that Mozart, Chopin and Liszt were, he early showed his love for music and his rapt enjoyment of the music of the home circle.  Fortunately he lived and breathed in a musical atmosphere from his earliest babyhood.  His mother was a fine musician and singer herself, and with loving care she fostered the desire for it and the early studies of it in her son.  She was his first teacher, for she kept up her own musical studies after her marriage, and continued to appear in concerts in Bergen, where the family lived.  Little Edward, one of five children, seemed to inherit the mother’s musical talent and had vivid recollections of the rhythmic animation and spirit with which she played the works of Weber, who was one of her favorite composers.

The piano was a world of mystery to the sensitive musical child.  His baby fingers explored the white keys to see what they sounded like.  When he found two notes together, forming an interval of a third, they pleased him better than one alone.  Afterwards three keys as a triad, were better yet, and when he could grasp a chord of four or five tones with both hands, he was overjoyed.  Meanwhile there was much music to hear.  His mother practised daily herself, and entertained her musical friends in weekly soirees.  Here the best classics were performed with zeal and true feeling, while little Edward listened and absorbed music in every pore.

When he was six years old piano lessons began.  Mme. Grieg proved a strict teacher, who did not allow any trifling; the dreamy child found he could not idle away his time.  As he wrote later:  “Only too soon it became clear to me I had to practise just what was unpleasant.  Had I not inherited my mother’s irrepressible energy as well as her musical capacity, I should never have succeeded in passing from dreams to deeds.”