Edvard Grieg wrote In the Hall of the Mountain King as a satirical parody of Norwegian folklore and privately confessed he could not stand listening to it, yet it became the sound of Norway. Born in Bergen in 1843 to a family with Scottish roots, Grieg was sent to the Leipzig Conservatory after violinist Ole Bull heard him play at fifteen. He hated its rigid German discipline, and in 1860 pleurisy and tuberculosis left him with a destroyed lung and a deformed spine for life.

This episode follows his meeting with Rikard Nordraak in Copenhagen, which turned him toward Norwegian folk sources, the death of his infant daughter Alexandra, the 1868 Piano Concerto in A minor, and his 1870 meeting with Franz Liszt, who sight-read the entire concerto and offered advice Grieg politely refused. We cover the Peer Gynt collaboration with Ibsen, his 1899  ...