ABSTRACT
The Norwegian composer David Monrad Johansen introduces his 1934 biography of his most celebrated predecessor with an enigmatic reference to ‘the greatest problem’ modern music presents. Harmony has developed the purely colourful ‘with startling rapidity’ in the nineteenth century; however, the ‘art of line’ or counterpoint has remained stationary since Bach and Handel. The most pressing technical problem that composers have faced since the end of the Romantic era is hence how to create an ‘art of line’ that would not only control and structure but further incorporate and ‘allow free play to all the countless shades of colour which the newly gained knowledge of the whole harmonic system has placed at our disposal’.1 Strangely, Johansen neither explicitly connects Grieg to this issue nor goes on to explain what relevance it holds within the remaining four-hundred pages of his volume, but it is certainly curious and surely significant to read this on the first page of a book about Grieg.
