On a frigid night in 1970, high above a fjord in western Norway, the farmstead of the composer Geirr Tveitt caught fire. As flames tore through the wooden buildings, family members rushed into a shed crammed with his unpublished scores. Using fruit crates, they hauled burning manuscripts into the open and used snow to extinguish the flames. By the time the fire was under control, roughly 80 percent of Tveitt’s compositions had been destroyed.
The loss hastened the eclipse of one of the most prominent and original voices in Norwegian music since Edvard Grieg.
Now a new album by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is helping bring Tveitt (1908-1981) to the attention of a wider international audience. “He was a sort of wild talent,” Andsnes said in an interview. “His music sometimes has a neurotic energy, mixed with a very local feeling and at the same time enormous knowledge of what was going on internationally. It’s a world unto itself.”
Born in Bergen and trained in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, Tveitt (pronounced TVAYT) wrote prolifically across genres including chamber works, popular songs, orchestrations of folk tunes, concertos — including for Norway’s national folk instrument, the Hardanger fiddle — and a ballet on a subject from Norse mythology. For a time, Tveitt was a central figure in the country’s musical life. He anchored a radio program and toured internationally as a pianist. But his final decades were spent largely isolated, his reputation tarnished by his nationalist beliefs and his wartime service in the puppet government of Nazi-occupied Norway. Even before the fire, his music was fading from view.
The centerpiece of the new recording, “Geirr Tveitt,” is the composer’s only surviving piano sonata, No. 29, titled “etere,” Italian for ethereal. (Andsnes performed it at Carnegie Hall last year.) Its conception is boldly austere with just two themes elaborated over the course of three movements. The first skittish, roving theme evokes Nordic folk idioms; the second, questioning and mystical, seems to open onto a vast, frigid space. The third movement reworks the first theme as a brilliant and angular dance.
A transfixing moment occurs at the opening of the second, “ethereal” movement, when Tveitt has the pianist silently depress a row of low keys with the left forearm while hammering out crisp notes above, so that a halo of overtones appears to rise from the released strings.
Andsnes, who grew up in the same part of rural Norway where Tveitt had his farm, said he recognized the acoustics of the landscape in that passage. “Something in that music is connected to how things resonate there,” Andsnes said, “the echoes, how things sound when you walk in nature, close to stone mountains.”
Just as striking as that echo is a marking that accompanies it in the score: during a held pause, when only the fading resonance of the chord hangs in the air, Tveitt asks for the sound to swell and taper, as if trying to animate the aftersound itself. But a piano can’t do that: Once a note is struck, it begins to decay. In a footnote, Tveitt suggests that during radio performances, an engineer might raise and lower the volume manually during this moment. Andsnes said that even in performance, without amplification, something of Tveitt’s intention comes through. Just having the marking, Andsnes said, “draws attention to the resonance; it’s very mysterious.”
Tveitt’s sound world was the product of a wide-ranging musical education. After attending conservatory in Leipzig, he took lessons in Paris with Arthur Honegger, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Nadia Boulanger; and in Vienna with Egon Wellesz, a former pupil of Arnold Schoenberg. The French influence often comes in his Impressionist, refined sound palette.
The Norwegian conductor Tabita Berglund described the sound like “the most rural countryside in Norway meets the most elevated parts of Paris.” At a recent concert with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg, Berglund programmed the opening movement of the first suite of Tveitt’s “100 Folk Tunes From Hardanger” — his most popular orchestral work, celebrating the nature and myths of southwestern Norway. Airy and tender, it unfurls a simple melody across different instruments.
“The use of color is extraordinary,” Berglund said in an interview before the concert. “It has this light in it. I can almost hear the waves on the Hardanger fjord” near Tveitt’s farmstead. At one point in the piece, Tveitt has an oboe and a piccolo trade undulating lines. The oscillating semitones create an effect of animated brightness. “If any other composer had done that, it would have sounded like an alarm,” Berglund said, “but here it just blends beautifully and creates this wavering, shimmering light.”
This naturalistic observation of landscape distinguishes Tveitt from Grieg: Tveitt’s depictions of landscape and atmospheric conditions feel more depersonalized and forensic than those of his Romantic predecessor. “How silently they row upon the glittering fjord,” also from the “100 Folk Tunes,” proceeds in a gleaming haze of flutes and string harmonics. Tonality is hinted at, unmoored, oblique.
Elsewhere in the “100 Folk Tunes,” Tveitt applies his experimental zest to less pastoral subjects. In “Fylle-snakk” (“Drunken Talk), he calls for a percussionist to smash drinking glasses onstage. “It’s quite dangerous,” said Berglund, who conducted a performance of that work with the Swedish Radio Orchestra. To guard against flying shards, they installed a tall bucket and equipped the percussionist with protective eyewear.
“Tveitt didn’t care about limitations,” she said. “He was sort of larger than life.”
But for Tveitt, this engagement with Norwegian traditions was more than aesthetic. (It also went beyond music: He collected ancient weapons he found on his property, refusing to hand them over to a museum as required by law.) His interest in Nordic folk music, with its modal melodies and archaic tunings, was part of a nationalistic outlook that aligned him with some of the most vociferously right-wing ideologies of the 1930s. His most overtly ideological composition is the ballet “Baldur’s Dream,” first staged in 1938, which is bathed in Norse pathos.
Tveitt never joined the Norwegian pro-Nazi party and opposed the German occupation, but he did serve in the culture ministry of Vidkun Quisling’s pro-Nazi government. (Tveitt’s political beliefs continue to be the subject of debate.)
Tveitt’s theoretical writings make clear that for him, music was part of a wider push for reviving pre-Christian local traditions to shore up a racially defined Norse identity. In place of the major and minor scales that had come to dominate Western music, he proposed four modes, which he named Rir, Sum, Fum and Tyr after Norse gods. In a 1938 article, he decried the hegemony of “civilized” music propagated by what he referred to in a thinly veiled way as “the international parasite race,” shadowy cosmopolitan forces that he felt had destroyed more “natural” Norwegian forms of expression.
In a review published in 1937, the Norwegian composer and music critic Pauline Hall dismissed Tveitt’s scales as nothing more than the old Church modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixolydian) dressed up in Norse clothes and decried the nationalist movement in Norwegian music as chauvinistic and reactionary. She mocked the new obsession with mythology as a “crippling” all-purpose “Troll, just be yourself mentality.”
After the war, Tveitt was exonerated by the denazification authorities but a whiff of racial chauvinism continued to cling to his music, and many performers steered clear of it. Since the 1990s, though, musicians and audiences have begun to embrace Tveitt as an essential musical voice. Scholars have reconstructed some of the lost works using recordings, orchestral parts scattered across archives, and the charred fragments from the house fire, some of which are still held in the banana crates in which they were salvaged in 1970.
“They still smell,” said Kaare Dyvik Husby, a musicologist and librarian who painstakingly reconstructed several works, including scenes from “Baldur’s Dream,” a string symphony, a violin concerto and the piano concerto No. 3 “Hommage à Brahms.”
“Some of the sheets have just three or four legible bars in the middle of the page,” he said. “Others were remarkably intact.” For the piano concerto, he worked mostly by ear using recordings of two different performances by Tveitt. “The score is quite demanding, and in both recordings there are places where the orchestra is clearly not playing correctly,” he said. “Obviously I didn’t write what they played — I wrote what they should have played.”
A growing number of recordings, mostly by Norwegian musicians, now attest to the rising popularity of Tveitt in his home country. On the album, Andsnes is joined by his sister, the vocalist Solveig Andsnes, on some of the popular songs Tveitt wrote for the radio.
“High and low didn’t exist for him,” Leif Ove Andsnes said. “He didn’t really have a sense that these were different musical worlds that he moved in.”
“There are people who feel strange about promoting him,” Andsnes added, recalling reactions in Norway to his decision to program and record the music of Tveitt. “There was a time in the 1930s when a lot of artists had some problematic views. I’m looking for the musical quality.”
“We don’t have to celebrate him as a person,” Berglund said. “But his music needs to be played. It’s just fantastic, and it’s unique. It could have been made nowhere else.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/28/arts/music/geirr-tveitt-leif-ove-andsnes-norway.html
