Towards a Harmonic Grammar of Grieg's Late Piano Music: Nature and Nationalism

The music of Edvard Grieg is justly celebrated for its harmonic richness, a feature especially apparent in the piano works written in the last decades of his life. Grieg was enchanted by what he styled the ’dreamworld’ of harmony, a magical realm whose principles the composer felt remained a mystery even to himself, and he was not alone, in that the complex nature of late-Romantic harmony around 1900 has proved a keen source of debate up to the present day. Grieg’s music forms a particularl...