When all is said, however, Grieg has in these early works made a contribution to music which our sense of his later shortcomings must not make us forget. His Piano Sonata and his Violin Sonatas supply chamber-music with a note of pure lyric enthusiasm, of fresh unthinking animation, not elsewhere to be found. His Peer Gynt Suite fills a similar place among orchestral works. His best piano pieces, and, above all, his lovely and too little known songs, are unique in their delicate voicing of the tenderest, most elusive personal feeling, as well as in their consummate finesse of workmanship. It is a Lilliputian world, if you will, but a fair one. That art of the future which Grieg predicts in his essay on Mozart, which «will unite lines and colors in marriage, and show that it has its roots in all the past, that it draws sustenance from old as well as from new masters,» will acknowledge in Grieg himself the source of one indispensable element--the element of naïve and spontaneous romance.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.--Grieg has had the good sense to publish almost all of his works in the inexpensive and excellent Peters Edition. The amateur will wish to acquaint himself first of all with some such representative pieces as the following: Piano-pieces--Poetic tone-pictures, op. 3, Humoreskes, op. 6, Sonata, op. 7, Northern Dances, op. 17, Albumblatter, op. 28, and the Lyric Pieces, op. 12, 38, 43, and 47 (op. 54, 57, 62, 65, and 68 are inferior). Four hand arrangements--Elegiac Melodies, op. 34, Norwegian Dances, op. 35, and the first Peer Gynt Suite, op. 40. Chamber-music--the three Sonatas for Violin and Piano and the 'Cello Sonata, op. 36. Of the songs, sixty are printed in the five «Albums» of the Peters Edition. The second contains half a dozen of Grieg's most perfect songs, among them «I Love Thee,» «Morning Dew,» «Parting» and «Wood Wanderings.» «To Springtime» in Album I, «A Swan» and «Solvejg's Song» in Album III, and «By the Riverside,» «The Old Mother,» and «On the Way Home» in Album IV, are also characteristic and beautiful. The reader who feels Grieg's charm at all will end by buying all five Albums, though there is little of value in the last.
[A] Thus «4/4 time» is a compound of twos, «6/8 time» is a compound of threes, and the interesting 5/4 measure, so effective in the second movement of Tschaïkowsky's Pathetic Symphony, is a compound of twos and threes regularly alternating.