To those outside Scandinavia, classical music in Norway generally means Edvard Grieg. Sadly the composer is still chiefly known to the general public only through his Piano Concerto and the two orchestral suites from the incidental music to Peer Gynt, although many pianists and singers, professional and amateur, will have performed some of his smaller works. Unfortunately, because of his lack of output in the larger forms, Grieg has frequently been dismissed as a miniaturist and, as with any composer known by a handful of popular compositions but not generally in greater depth, that very popularity is often maligned. Debussy was referring to the Elegiac Melodies – and possibly even to the famous pink covers of the Peters Edition – when he made his famous remark, ‘on a dans la bouche le gout bizarre et charmant d’un bonbon rose qui serait fourre de neige’ (in a review in Gil Blas, Paris 1903), but it is a view of Grieg's music still all too widely held. Grieg's life and works have also been subjected to crass popular image-making in the American musicals Norwegian Nights, produced in New York in 1936, and Song of Norway, New York 1951.

This book is concerned with Grieg as a composer of songs, of all his music still the least appreciated. One of the most famous, Jeg elsker dig (I love you), is from a group entitled Hjertets Melodier (Melodies of the Heart), a description that epitomizes all Grieg's songs, for here more than anywhere else his development both as artist and human being is most closely reflected. The result is an extremely varied repertoire for any singer, which contains many excellent songs and a number of truly great ones, yet this book remains the only complete study. Prior to its first publication in 1990, the most comprehensive surveys were Astra Desmond's article in Grieg: A Symposium (1948) and John Horton 's chapter in his biography of Grieg (1974), although these necessarily comprise only brief descriptions of the principal opus numbers with comments on the most interesting musical points, translations and editions. More detailed analyses of a number of the songs were given by Finn Benestad and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe in Edvard Grieg , mennesket og kunstneren (… the Man and the Artist) (Oslo, 1980), but here too, some of them are cursorily dismissed and several are not mentioned at all.