Gregory Martin - paper 2007 - Grieg Society

century). Grieg certainly found this work to be musically representative of Old Norse
verse, and referred to it as a stev on the manuscript, as well as in his letters. 51 He wrote to
Finck that Den Bergtekne
has had a special significance in my creative work. I have sought here to emulate
the compact terseness of style that is expressed with such awesome power in the
Old Norse poetry, and I think perhaps that in this little piece I have best succeeded
in doing this. 52
Grieg, significantly, derives the music of Den Bergtekne, the only setting of Old Norse in
his output, from the Ballade. Set in E minor, it begins on a G minor chord with exactly
the same voicing as the last chord of the Ballade, signaling that this music is a
continuation of Op. 24. Den Bergtekne, then, essentially begins in media res, a common
technique in epic construction (witness the Odyssey), and modulates up a chromatic third,
an emotionally charged gesture in 19 th -century musical rhetoric, to arrive at the new
dominant (Ex.10).
The theme that follows, now in the new tonic of E minor, is related to the Ballade’s
theme melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, and metrically (Ex. 11).
51 Beryl Foster, The Songs of Edvard Grieg (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1990), 4, 131.
52 Grieg, Letters, 235.
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