Feeling Norwegian: My Grieg Connection

When I was little my older sister used to play this song on the piano for me. According to the "Singing in Harmony"* book that sat on our piano, it was the song that the sphinx sang to Peer when he went to Egypt on his wanderings away from his homeland. The book has lovely line drawings of the whole story behind Peer Gynt, and I still enjoy reading the story and trying out the right hand version of the melodies.

I learned to play a simple version of Morning Song (with both hands!), a couple of years ago, when I first took piano class at the local community college. Shortly after that, I went to visit Oslo and, my father said that he had seen Peer Gynt in the National Theatre in Oslo, at the end of the war (that's WWII, guys).

Up until then I never knew that my father had been to Norway. Turns out he went along as part of Project Norway, or as he said when I asked. "We went to take the Germans home."

That's home, as in the American troops escorted the troops who had been occupying Norway during the war, back to Germany.

Please click on the picture above to see the lovely details.

* The cover of Singing in Harmony appears in an art-journal entry I wrote a few days back.