ABSTRACT
The significance of such a remark, given Grieg’s propensity for stacking up thirds into chords of the ninth, eleventh, or even thirteenth in much of his later music, has hardly been missed on subsequent writers. David Monrad Johansen finds this comment ‘extremely characteristic’, Benestad and Schjelderup-Ebbe note that ‘it seems symptomatic of Grieg’s later development that it was not a melody but a chord – and quite a dissonant one – that gave him such great pleasure at that early age’, while Ekkehard Kreft begins a historical survey of the development of Grieg’s harmony with this same quotation.2 Such a remark also seems revealing in that it is symptomatic of Grieg’s privileging of harmony over counterpoint or even melody. Schjelderup-Ebbe has argued elsewhere that one of Grieg’s characteristics, observable even in his earliest works, is this very ‘preoccupation with harmony at the relative expense of melody’.3 We might start then, like the young Grieg – or indeed
the opening of Op. 66’s ‘Kulokk’ – with revelling in sonority for its own sake. For in contrast to a common reading of late-nineteenth-century music as being more concerned with polyphony (such as is suggested by Schoenberg), whereby altered harmonies are the accidental byproduct of a web of chromatic lines, Grieg often appears pre-eminently concerned with vertical sonority, with Klang in its own right.
