In the spring of 1893, Edvard Grieg was forced to cancel a scheduled tour of England due to ill health. Grieg's publisher Max Abraham came to the rescue, booking Grieg in a small number of concerts held in the climate-friendly south of Europe. Grieg, his wife Nina, and Abraham finally settled in Menton, located in southern France along the opulent Côte d'Azur, so that the composer could recover. A photograph of the party taken at this time shows Grieg with a baggy, oversize suit hanging off his perilously thin frame. Grieg was also soon to turn 50 and beginning to focus on thoughts of death, though this was not to come for another 14 years. The sixth book of Lyric Pieces, Op. 57, was written while Grieg was in Menton.

The first piece, "Svunne dager" (Vanished Days) is one of the longest and most fully developed of all Grieg's Lyric Pieces. To the ear, "Vanished Days" seems to contain several sections developed along the lines of a sonata movement, but is actually cast in simple ternary form and is based around a motive of a rising and falling third. The second section consists of an exuberant dance melody. "Gade," a tribute to Grieg's friend and fellow composer Niels Gade, follows. In it a Norwegian folk melody is woven into a fabric of proper music-school counterpoint that would pass muster as a Conservatoire exercise. "Illusjon" (Illusion) is another somber minor key piece that works around a motive, this time stated in sixths. Grieg introduces a "falling off" figure that he attenuates by adding a bar of 9/8 into the 6/8 texture. He further extends the "falling off" idea in the following piece, "Secret." This piece is structurally interesting in that it consists of three brief phrases that are repeated three times, yet the entry of each part is cleverly disguised from the others, so that you get the impression of hearing something through-composed. An analogous scenario would be Nina tells Grieg a secret; Grieg mulls it over in his mind; gets agitated about it; Nina tells Grieg another secret, etc.

"Hun danser" (She Dances) hearkens back to "Anitra's Dance" from Peer Gynt, except that this is much livelier and rife with between-the-beat sixteenths. The closing movement, "Hjemve" (Homesickness) is, in certain ways, the most effective piece of the set. As in the first, third, and fourth pieces, Grieg starts out with a slow, somber tune, but here it is harmonized in a spare, four-part texture. In the second section, Grieg sets a folk melody with both hands in the treble registers of the piano, colored in a Lydian modality. This effect is similar to devices favored by so-called "New Age" pianists; in the context of Grieg, the passage is both highly attractive and surprisingly "modern" sounding.

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6.Homesickness

As Grieg mavens are aware, the ten books in his series of 66 piano works called Lyric Pieces nearly spanned the entire length of his career, the first published in 1867 and the last in 1901. The last six volumes were actually written in the period 1890-1901, the composer apparently having grown increasingly fond of the idea of writing light piano works that generally dealt with a specific feeling or scene. Here, in the last work in Book VI, Grieg depicts the former, perfectly conveying a sense of homesickness in music brilliantly atmospheric and also quite subtle in its melodic invention. The work opens in a tentative manner, a sense of gloom pervading the slow-pacing. Rachmaninov comes to mind here, but the writing is quite lean and without complexity as the theme wallows in the doldrums. Suddenly, the music turns playful and lively, bright and brimming with childlike wonder. Soon, however, its vigor is sapped and the sweet melancholy from the opening returns. While there is an icy feeling to the music here, there is also a sense of longing, of reflecting on some past memory or place. This lovely work typically has a duration of five minutes.

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