The front of the card is a photogravure portrait in deep black and glowing white, printed full bleed with slightly rounded corners on stiff card stock. A man sits outdoors in a wooden chair, holding the lapel of his dark overcoat, loosely arranged to show a full suit, waistcoat, and bowtie. A white hat sits lightly on a head of wild silver hair. His mustache is full, his gaze lifted and distant. He looks content, a man six weeks from death.
Stylized script in the upper left identifies the subject and moment: Dr. Ed. Grieg / Troldhougen 25.7.07. The photographer’s credit in the lower right reads: E. Hoenisch Phat. 1907. The back carries the publisher’s imprint: Breitkopf & Härtel, 51 Great Marlborough Street London W. A stamp box reads Printed in Germany. The card is unposted and unwritten, with amber flocking on the reverse and damage to the lower left corner.
The photogravure production quality is exceptional, revealing the highlights of Grieg’s white hat and the deep shadows of his coat, detail and dimensionality from century’s old technology. Breitkopf & Härtel were not postcard publishers. They were Grieg’s music publisher, one of the oldest and most prestigious houses in Europe, with Leipzig roots and a London office at the address printed on this card’s back. Their choice of photogravure signals deliberate intent. This is a prestige object, a rare souvenir of a celebrated composer.
Troldhaugen, Troll Hill, sits on a small wooded peninsula jutting into Nordåsvannet, a freshwater lake south of Bergen. Grieg built his pale wooden villa there in 1885, with a panoramic tower and large windows opening onto the water. He called it his best opus so far. By 1891 he had added a small composing hut at the lake’s edge: a piano, a desk, a rocking chair, a view over the water that he described as essential to his work. When he left it for the day he placed a handwritten note on the desk, a humble request.
If anyone should break in here, please leave the musical scores, since they have no value to anyone except Edvard Grieg.
Late July in Bergen is the city’s warmest season, though warm is a relative term. Long northern light persisting until nearly ten at night, the lake surface holding the soft diffuse luminescence of a Bergen summer afternoon.
Nina Grieg, Edvard’s wife and the foremost interpreter of his songs, presided over evenings in the living room around the 1892 Steinway. The house was full that summer. Julius Röntgen was there, the Dutch-German composer who had been Grieg’s closest musical confidant for twenty-four years. Their friendship is exhibited through more than two hundred letters, a deep enough connection that Grieg composed a short piece the previous year titled Sehnsucht nach Julius.
Percy Grainger, twenty-four years old and already an electrifying pianist, had arrived for what would become ten extraordinary days. Grieg had encountered Grainger in London the previous year and noted it in his diary.
I had to become sixty-four years old to hear Norwegian piano music interpreted so understandingly and brilliantly. He breaks new ground for himself, for me, and for Norway.
Ernst Hoenisch was thirty-two years old and already the leading musical photographer in Leipzig. He opened his atelier in 1903, and held the designation Hoffotograf, a court photographer’s appointment conferred by royal warrant. His roster of subjects over the following decades includes masters of musical life: Max Reger, Zoltán Kodály, and a young Kurt Weill.
The publishers Breitkopf & Härtel were also a Leipzig institution. The city’s musical world was compact and interconnected, its photographers, publishers, and performers in continuous orbit around one another. Hoenisch was almost certainly sent through the publisher to document Grieg in his final summer at the home where so much of his music had been written. He arrived into one of the most extraordinary musical gatherings of the era.
On July 25, that light fell across the garden where Hoenisch set up his camera. Edvard and Nina Grieg, Röntgen, and Grainger gathered at a garden table. An image from the National Library of Norway Bergen Library Grieg Archives captures them together. Grieg is wearing the identical suit, overcoat, and white hat that is visible on our card. Perhaps Hoenisch made the casual group image and then later captured the iconic portrait. A man alone and at rest in the place he loved most, surrounded by the people who understood his music best.
Grieg had been ill for years. A collapsed lung from tuberculosis contracted as a teenager at the Leipzig Conservatory shadowed his entire adult life. By 1907 his condition had deteriorated into combined lung and heart failure, with repeated hospitalizations. When Röntgen said his final farewell at Troldhaugen that summer, he knew they may not meet again.
In September, Grieg prepared to travel to England, where Grainger was to perform his Piano Concerto at the Leeds Festival. He collapsed in Bergen on the way to the ferry, was admitted to hospital, and died the following morning, September 4, 1907. His last words were: Well, if it must be so.
Forty thousand people filled the streets of Bergen for his funeral. His ashes were interred in a grotto in the cliff face above Nordåsvannet, at a spot he had chosen years earlier while fishing with a friend, where the last light of the day touched the rock. Here I want to rest forever, he said.
To Read More
Edvard Grieg — Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edvard-Grieg
Bergen Public Library Grieg Archive — Flickr collection: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/collections/72157617382486774/
Bergen Public Library Grieg Archive catalog: https://mitt.bergenbibliotek.no/cgi-bin/websok-grieg
Röntgen and Grieg — Julius Röntgen Foundation: https://www.juliusrontgen.nl/en/life/rontgen-and-grieg/
Grieg and Grainger — Piano Concerto site: http://griegpianoconcerto.com/grainger/biog.cfm
Ernst Hoenisch — Deutsche Fotothek professional record: https://www.deutschefotothek.de/documents/kue/90056238
The Posted Past 