After his holiday with Paulsen in Bayreuth and the Tyrol, and concerts in Sweden with Nina to earn some money, Grieg returned to Christiania early in 1877. Life in the capital was becoming unbearable; he spent all his time there teaching, rehearsing and, as he said in a letter to Max Abraham of Peters, looking forward to the summer when he could ‘go away to the country and work’. Abraham invited Grieg to Leipzig and August Winding asked him to Copenhagen, but he needed more than short periods away. What he wanted was the peace and quiet of a home on Norway's west coast and he was particularly attracted by the emptiness of the Hardanger area.

Towards the end of June the Griegs went to Ullensvang, near the head of the Sorfjord, the Hardanger fjord's southern arm, to a farm at Ovre (Upper) Borve which Grieg loved. The thought that he had left Christiania for good delighted him. He rented the little school-house to work in, but realized that because of the weather it would be impossible to use it, or indeed to stay up in Ovre Borve, during the winter. Accordingly the Griegs moved to Lofthus, a little further north along the Sorfjord, where the composer had a small hut built in which he could write.

In September and October 1877 Grieg gave two concerts in Bergen which provided enough money for him to spend the winter at Lofthus. The music coming from the hut – called ‘Komposten’, a pun on the words for ‘tune’ and ‘compost’ – began to attract some attention, so Grieg arranged for it to be moved to a site nearer the edge of the fjord, where he had more privacy. This was done in the traditional way, called in dialect dugnad, complete on rollers moved by about fifty of the local people, a day-long task, which involved supplying the workers with suitable refreshment and even musical entertainment from the composer. Grieg's friend, the artist Wilhelm Peters, wrote and illustrated an amusing account of the operation, sketches for which are in Bergen Public Library. The hut was sold by Grieg in 1880 and was put to a number of uses until, in 1949, it was bought back by the Lofthus community; it is now kept as a miniature Grieg museum in the grounds of the Hotel Ullensvang.