In the years before the First World War, Grainger was all over Scandinavia giving piano recitals, vacationing with his Danish girlfriend Karen Holten, and collecting Scandinavian folk songs. But the melodies employed in the Scandinavian Suite—two Swedish, two Norwegian, and one Danish—predate those adventures, having been provided by his Hoch Conservatory classmate, Danish cellist Herman Sandby. Among Grainger's fellow students at the Hoch—including Cyril Scott, Norman O'Neill, Roger Quilter, and Balfour Gardiner (all to become distinctive minor composers)—Sandby was the first to grasp that the vivacity, directness, and freshly ongoing invention (eschewing academic development) of Grainger's music were not clumsiness, or failure to master the curriculum, but deliberate utterances of great originality. When Sandby confided as much, he and Grainger became close friends, touring Denmark together in 1904. A Scandinavian Suite figured prominently in Grainger's concert tours with Sandby between 1902 and 1906, and in Grainger's tour of Australasia, with contralto Ada Crossley, over 1903-1904, though the published version seems to be a selection from a number of pieces performed ad hoc as the tours progressed. For the Australasian venture, Grainger's partner was cellist Jacques Jacobs, though he often alternated such warhorses as Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12, Liszt's Rákóczy March, Liszt's transcription of Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, Chopin's Fantasia, Op. 49, or Brahms' Rhapsody, Op. 119, reserving the Song from Vermeland, of the Scandinavian Suite, as an encore. The immediate appeal and impassioned melancholy of the Vermeland tune is, indeed, the standout of the suite, leaving the remaining pieces—including a Norwegian Polka—seeming either cloying or fecklessly elfin. Dedicated to Sandby's teacher at the Hoch, Hugo Becker, five numbers of the Scandinavian Suite were, owing to Becker's good offices, published by B. Schott Söhne in 1902. Grainger was 20 years old. The enduring popularity of the Vermeland tune is attested by Billy Mayerl's hearing it in a Stockholm café in 1922. An astute businessman, as well as a star pianist and distinguished composer, Mayerl's first concern was to ask if the tune had been copyrighted. Assured that it was not, he composed the brief piano novelty Song of the Fir Tree, whose initial third is, fortuitously, virtually Grainger's arrangement verbatim. Posterity should be grateful that the Grainger version—certainly copyrighted by Schott—was unknown or forgotten, for Song of the Fir Tree, as it lifts into suavely syncopated swing, is quintessential Mayerl. Grainger made a choral setting of the Vermeland tune over 1903-1904.

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide