One of our goals as we meander is to learn as much as we can about the places we live. This means hanging out in bars a lot, obviously. But also reading (or, in the case of music, listening) up on the greats of a particular country. In Norway we’ve come to appreciate what we’ll call ‘The Big Three’. These are the three internationally renowned nineteenth-century artists in each of the major arts: Munch, Grieg, and Ibsen (visual, musical, literary).
We’ve already said something about Edvard Munch, born in 1863 and living in Christiania (Oslo) for most of his life. His work ‘The Scream’ is one of the iconic images of modern art. He meant it (and its many variations) to express the modern condition. We visited not only the new museum named for him, where we got to explore the range of his work, and the several paintings in the National Museum in Oslo, but also his grave in the Cemetery of Our Saviour, just a few minutes’ walk from our flat.
What we love most about this modest grave is that people leave tributes there. Not flowers but works of art: here you can see many small screams. Munch worked in an enormous number of media, and his style is sometimes naturalist, sometimes impressionist. He eventually began ‘soul painting’, trying to express his own psychological states through art.
The other Norwegian artist whom we’ve come to appreciate more on this trip is Edvard Grieg (1843–1907), the great Romantic composer. Our knowledge of classical music is rudimentary, not much above the ‘I know what I like’ variety, though we do know a Romantic when we hear one, and he is one of our favourites. He is most associated with Bergen; his home Troldhaugen is about five miles outside the city. A recent recording of his Lyric Pieces, played by Ayako Kitahama, is (as they say) in heavy rotation on our Spotify playlist. Like many Norwegians of his time, he was keenly interested in Norwegian identity. He recorded and popularised many traditional tunes (e.g. the music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and several ballads and dances). Our favourite might be ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, which you certainly will recognize even if you don’t think you know it.
Finally, we’ve been enjoying re-reading the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Born in 1828, he brought a new realism to the late 19th century stage. He’s supposedly performed more often than any playwright besides Shakespeare. We knew Peer Gynt and A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, but the rest are good too!
We would love to have seen a performance in the National Theatre (Ibsen was its director from 1858 to 1862). But nothing was on during our stay, what with the whole country being away in cabins. Then again, we wouldn’t have understood a word! Ibsen wrote in Danish, which was the language of Norway in his time. (Our Danish is even worse than our Norwegian.) Even reading them in English, though, is exciting, and despite their familiarity they still pack a punch. Ibsen died in 1906 in Christiania. Like Munch, his remains rest in the Cemetery of Our Saviour, though his grave is more elaborate.
Each of these three, we are told, has an outsize influence on his field in Norway. Even contemporary Norwegian writers and artists and composers have to take them into account. The novelist Erlend Loe, for instance, has a character named Nora in his Doppler, after the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In case you didn’t get the reference, the narrator notes that her mother wanted to show how Norwegian she was by giving their daughter that name. (More on Norwegian literature coming soon!)
To complement our reading of the classics, we’ve also been reading contemporary Norwegian literature, but we’ll report on that in a later post.
