During the years leading up to the beginning of the 20th century, Edvard Grieg was the most significant Scandinavian composer. He was educated at the Leipzig Conservatory, where his early influences were Schubert and Schumann. Like all of his fellow countrymen of that generation, he was orientated towards Denmark, the Danish language and Danish culture in general. He spent much time in Copenhagen. Later, in his early 20s, he developed an affinity for Norwegian peasant culture thanks to the influence of the great Norwegian musician Ole Bull. That effected a major change in his musical outlook, and for the rest of his life he immersed himself in Norwegian literature and folk music. It became a major part of his artistic philosophy and placed him firmly in the ranks of the nationalist composers that characterised the second half of the 19th century.

The 4 Norwegian Dances, op.35, are arrangements for piano four-hands of old folk tunes that Grieg took from a collection published by the musician and researcher Ludvig Mathias Lindeman. The composition was sketched in Copenhagen in January 1880 and brought to completion in the summer of the following year during a holiday in Lofthus.

Grieg’s Symphony in C minor, EG119, was composed in 1863–64, when Grieg was 20, and the melodies of its second and third movements later came to be known in the present arrangement for piano duet known as 2 Symphonic Pieces, op.14.

Grieg’s name is notably tied to important stage works, among them Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, one of the most performed plays in Norway. Grieg composed a score for the play of some 90 minutes of incidental music, from which he selcted the most beautiful numbers for two orchestral suites which he arranged in versions for piano solo and piano four-hands.

Grieg wrote the 2 Walzer-Capricen, op.37, for piano four hands in 1883, after he and his lyric soprano wife, Nina, had reconciled after an estrangement and were once again happy together, travelling and performing in Germany and Rome.

The 2 Nordic Melodies, op.63, were originally written for string orchestra in 1895 and published the following year along with arrangements for piano solo and piano duet. The work is dedicated to the Norwegian and Swedish ambassador to Paris Frederik Due, an enthusiastic amateur musician and composer and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Due sent Grieg some compositions for violin and piano, and one of his melodies appears in the first piece: ‘In Folk Style’. The second piece, comprising the ‘Cow-Call’ and ‘Peasant Dance’, is a reworking of two pieces (nos. 18 and 22) from Grieg’s op.17 (25 Norwegian Folk Ballads and Dances).