9278 A photo of the old wooden buildings of Bergen just so you know I wasn’t kidding.
9299 Grieg’s home. You can see the balcony and the widow’s walk. Great for getting views of the water.
9313 Diana with a life sized statue of Grieg an she’s not standing on the 1.5 inch base like he is. I’m pretty sure he’s not even close to 5 feet tall.
9314 The stair step roofs of the concert hall.
9317 The interior of the concert hall. You can see how the roofs work. In the widow behind the stage you see Geig’s Composing Hut. He loved working down there.
9338 Our tablemates. From left to right, Lou, Shelley, Diana, Joan and Anna. They were great to share dinner with.
July 18 – Bergen, Norway. Today it’s really raining and misty. The bus tour of downtown was taken looking through wet, streaked windows. Pictures, forget it, especially since I don’t have use of the screen to make adjustments. I took some anyway, the eternal optimist.
Bergen has about 269,700 making Bergen the second-largest city in Norway. Trading in Bergen started as early as the 1020s. It was Norway's capital in the 1200s and from the end of that century it was a member of the Hanseatic League. From then until 1789 Bergen served as the exclusive trade link between Northern Norway and foreign counties. The quays, Bryggen, of that period are a World Heritage Site.
The first royal coronation in Norway was in the city's cathedral in the 1150s. It remained the site of coronations throughout the 1200s. Oslo became the capital during the reign of King Haakon V (1299–1319). In the mid1300s German merchants who had been her since the 1200s founded one of the four kontors of the Hanseatic League at Bryggen.
The principal export traded from Bergen was dried cod from the northern Norwegian coast which started around 1100. The Hanseatic merchants had their own are of the city where German was spoken.
In 1349, the Black Plague was inadvertently brought to Norway by the crew of an English ship arriving in Bergen. In the 14 & 1500s Bergen remained one of the largest cities in Scandinavia, and was Norway's biggest city until the 1830s. Then Oslo took over the title. In the 1750s the Hanseatic Kontor finally closed but Bergen retained its monopoly on trade with Northern Norway until 1789.
Our tour today is taking us to the Paradise area of Bergen, an area that’s a nice as the name would indicate. It’s a hilly area next to the water that allows for lots with really nice views. Our ultimate objective is the home of Edvard Grieg’s home.
His full name is Edvard Hagerup Grieg and he was born on June 15, 1843 and died on Sept. 4, 1907. He was a composer and pianist. He is one of the foremost Romantic era composers, and his music performed throughout the world. He used local folk music themes and motifs in his compositions. This helped to popularize Norwegian music around the world. Grieg’s "Peer Gynt Suite - In the Hall of the Mountain King" is probably his most widely known work. I remember hearing it in 1964, one of my earliest exposures to classical music. Of course, growing up near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it was impossible to avoid the music of J.S. Bach. Their Bach Choir has been performing since 1898 and is famous around the world. Fortunately Bach was my first exposure to classical music. His music is so precise and mathematical that it appeals to logical minds.
In a letter to his friend Frants Beyer, Grieg expressed his unhappiness with In the Hall of the Mountain King, one of his compositions from Peer Gynt. He said that he couldn’t bear to listen to it “because it absolutely reeks of cow-pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism and trollish self-satisfaction”. But he also said, “I have a hunch that the irony will be discernible.” He wrote the music to accompany the play Peer Gynt. Grieg also wrote music for poems by von Goethe, Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Kipling and others. Many of his works are based on Norwegian folk music and were written for piano.
The house is wooden with shiplap sided and has a square tower with a widow’s walk on top. It also has a second story balcony and an enclosed porch at the back. A well designed home for an area where you have great views out over the water. Inside there are many photographs and awards on the walls as well as artifacts from Grieg’s life. His favorite fly-fishing rod and reel for example. A very comfortable place.
After touring the house we went into a multiroof concert hall on the property that follows the contour of the hillside. Instead of a sloped roof it has a series of horizontal gabled roofs arranged like stairs going down. The front façade, behind the stage is glass and when you look through the window you see his composing hut that was down overlooking the water. Our pianist was Jens Harald Bratlie. He was fantastic. He played selections from most of the types of music that Grieg had written. It was a great performance and the audience responded appropriately with a standing ovation.
The rain had slowed while we were in the concert and the walk back down the narrow street to the bus was fairly dry.
Our sail away from Bergen was rainy, foggy and cloudy. Appropriate for out last day in Norway.
July 19 – At Sea. Wouldn’t you know, today is blue skies and sun, first time since we had our day at sea headed to Norway. At dinner tonight all six of us were here Anna, Joan, Shelley, Lou, Diana and I. We took a photo that turned out pretty well.
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