This perhaps belongs in my "Emptying the Desk Drawer" series, except that the material here has not been sitting around cluttering the desk for long at all - and a surprising coincidence last night made the content seem a little more purposeful. This journey began when a friend mentioned in a group chat that Grieg's oft-played Holberg Suite for strings began its life as a suite of piano pieces, although the string version is much better known. I commented that I had written program notes (p.4 here) about this music once, and there I had discussed 1) the work's origin as a nod to older musical styles, and 2) Grieg's added second-piano parts to Mozart piano sonatas which put a late 19th-century spin on late 18th century style. We'll start with #2 and get back to #1 a little later.
I have performed the Mozart-Grieg version of the famous "Easy" Sonata in C Major. It is charming, and definitely adds a lot of outside-the-box details which make me smile. But I don't remember listening to Grieg's additions to Mozart Fantasia in C Minor (K.475), a much more musically substantial canvas. An important point here is that Grieg's process is not to re-arrange from scratch (as, for example, Busoni does with Bach), but rather to create something new which is played over and around an otherwise unchanged original. He is literally dueting with the past.
Mozart's Fantasia is one of his most forward-looking works, full of dramatic chromatics and structured in an unsettled, improvisatory fashion. One could both argue that it deserves more respect than to be artificially enhanced - and that its futuristic qualities call out for future updates. From the start, Grieg's simple decision to add a rumbling tonic pedal point signals that we're working with an expanded palette of colors; he is clearly not interested in recreating Classical Era elegance. The dissonant countermelodies and the continuation of the C pedal when Mozart switches to forte B-flats were quietly startling enough that I double-checked to be sure I only had one tab playing on my browser. Grieg is taking Mozart back to the future.
I was kind of half-listening while doing other work when the passage starting at 6:00 gave me a true LOL reaction. The score excerpt below shows Mozart's original on top, a melodramatic new section with silent-movie-style diminished figurations above angry half-steps in the bass. [You may hear Mozart alone at 5:30 here.] Below that, you can see a repeated chromatic pattern added by Grieg with slashing 8th notes that creates quite a counterpoint above the bass.
Although it makes its own kind of sense, it definitely sounds like something from the late Romantic Era. In fact, my mind almost immediately went to Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, the opening of which features twisting chromaticism and slashing 8th notes. Even more interesting, as someone with very imperfect pitch who's always surprised when my brain seems to make a specific pitch connection, is that Mussorgsky's main theme begins by alternating the same E-F half-step in the bass as is emphasized by Mozart above. [showing a piano version of Mussorgsky for simplicity.] Perhaps that's what led me ear here.
Whatever you think of that, the takeaway I shared with my friends in response to the brazenness of Grieg's decorations, was this: "I think, if nothing else, it should give us all carte blanche to do whatever we want to Grieg's music." What he does to Mozart, we might as well do to Grieg. Knowing me all too well, a friend logically replied, "should we expect to see/hear an example of such?" [I will admit that I also enjoy seeing Grieg's mildly mischievous mindset as an endorsement of my own musing mission.*]
Of course, I couldn't resist this challenge. My first thought was to fill in some of the empty spaces in the iconic opening of Grieg's piano concerto. There are two pauses as the soloist rains octaves down the keyboard, so I inserted some brass fanfares, and tossed in some silly trumpet chromatics as Grieg's soloist arpeggiates back up the keys. I think this is a reasonable - if exaggerated - homage to Grieg's Mozartiana. And in that spirit, I have left the original as is with new musical ideas (which you may hear but not see) added as a kind of conversation.
But then my mind went back to "Holberg's Time." [If you're curious, Grieg's suite is named after a famous 18th century Norwegian poet.] After all, this experiment had begun with consideration of Grieg's orchestration of his own piano piece, and we had chatted about how Grieg converted his own pianistic arpeggios into a dashing string rhythm - a rhythm made most famous by Rossini and the Lone Ranger.
Thus, the approach I should take became clear. Along the way, we also hear the english horn solo from earlier in Rossini's William Tell Overture, with a passing reference to a Grieg flute melody which sounds kind of like that morning-ish english horn tune.
And I figured that was as far my Grieg encounters would go this weekend. Then yesterday, I happened to go see a live community theater performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Perhaps if you know the show well, you'll know what happened next. Near the end of Act One, as J. Pierpont Finch is declaring his newly discovered love for co-worker Rosemary, he sings (starting from 0:40 below]: "Just imagine / If we kissed / What a crescendo..." And, we suddenly hear the opening cadenza of the Grieg Piano Concerto! A little later in the song [starting from 2:30], when he repeats those lyrics to Rosemary herself, we get the same cadenza plus a little dance scene to Grieg's primary tune. This showbiz treatment of Grieg is actually pretty respectful, without much being changed other than an unusually sprightly tempo. But it's funny to hear it interpolated into such a context. The price of success.
I don't know anything about how Grieg's music ended up in this scene, but I wonder if the famous use of Rachmaninoff's second concerto in The Seven-Year Itch had some influence. Both scenes feature an enterprising, but not particularly leading-man type caught up in big emotions all of a sudden. Tom Ewell (Marilyn Monroe's Seven-Year Itch co-star) even looks kind of like Robert Morse (the original J. Pierpont Finch).
* Speaking of composers deserving invasive treatment from the future, Mozart himself is famous for his "modernized" orchestration of Handel's Messiah, which is probably one of the first pieces to be treated like "classical music." So maybe Mozart deserved what Grieg did. And Handel also borrowed a lot and re-worked music of previous composers, etc.
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