This book concerns Grieg's music and its relationship with landscape, the role which music and landscape played in the formation of Norwegian cultural identity in the nineteenth century, and the function that landscape has performed in the critical reception of Grieg's work. It is not intended as a comprehensive history of Norwegian music, nor as a life-and-works study of Grieg. Critical reconsideration of Grieg's work, however, is timely for a number of reasons. Grieg's music continues to enjoy a prominent place in the concert hall and recording catalogues, but has yet to attract sustained analytical attention in Anglo-American scholarship. Historians such as Benedict Anderson and John Hutchinson have stressed the constructed (or imagined) nature of nationalist discourses, encouraging a more theoretical and contextualised engagement with the issue of national identity in music. Similarly, though representations of landscape have long been a focus for study in cultural geography and other disciplines, they are only just beginning to be the subject of musicological criticism. Previously, landscape has often been associated loosely with programme music, a problematic trend given the historical emphasis on the autonomy of the musical work that has shaped much musicological writing. But just as the notion of aesthetic autonomy seems increasingly untenable, so the idea of landscape in music becomes a more discursive concept. Grieg's music offers an especially compelling and hitherto underexplored area for such research. Furthermore, recent work in musicology has stressed the way in which music histories have been written along exclusive and canonic (especially Austro-German) lines, so that a reappraisal of supposedly peripheral repertoires such as Norwegian music can be undertaken in a more pluralistic disciplinary context.