Edvard Grieg's (1843-1907) place as Norway's foremost composer is undoubted. Born in Bergen of Scottish descent, his music is deeply romantic and heavily influenced by folksong traditions of his homeland. At a very early stage in his career, his music become associated with a patrotic expression of the Norwegian national character and landscape.

Grieg studied at Leipzig from 1858-62 and with Niels W Gade in Copenhagen from 1862-66. There he founded the music association 'Euterpe' (to promote Scandinavian music) with fellow musicians Rikard Nordraak, Emil Hornemann and Gottfred Matthison-Hansen. Rikard Nordraak (1842-1866) is the composer of the Norwegian National Anthem, 'Ja, vi elsker dette landet', the words of which are written by his cousin the poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson who later collaborated with Grieg on the play Sigurd Jorsalfar.

Grieg's earliest influences had been the German Romanticists. On his return to Norway in 1866 he settled in Christiania (Oslo). The nationalist movement within Norway was gaining ground and the search for a national cultural identity affected Grieg profoundly. He quickly became one of a group of young composers (most notable of whom is Otto Winter-Hjelm (1837-1931)) who were interested in Norwegian folk music and in developing a distinct Norwegian 'sound'.

Shedding his Germanic tonality and formalism, his music began to adopt lighter chromatic harmonies. From the 1870s onwards, his music in fact grew more and more impressionistic. Maurice Ravel, visiting Oslo in 1926, acknowledged that Grieg's influence on the French impressionist composers of the early twentieth century such as Debussy and himself had been considerable. The ten volumes of intimate Lyric Pieces for piano, a work which earned him the name of 'The Chopin of the North', are an example of his progression as a composer towards a 'Norwegian' national music.