Grieg: From Holberg's Time, Op. 40

Last month, I listened to Grieg's Op. 40 a few times, both the orchestrated version and the solo piano version.  As the title page notes, From Holberg's Time was purposely written in an older style ("im alten Style"):

The Holberg in the title is Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754), a Norwegian man of letters.

While listening to the piano version, I noticed a phrase in the first movement:

(click the image to enlarge it)
(notation found here)

When I heard this it sounded familiar to me, although I had to look up the notation to figure out what was going on and why it sounded familiar.  Starting in the forty-ninth measure, the bass part starts descending, but after every two notes, it alternates octaves and repeats the last note from the previous pair.  Or, at least, it alternates octaves to some degree, since the notes are also doubled in octaves.  (This is in the orchestrated version too, although the notes aren't doubled by octaves.)

This sounded familiar because this same type of figure is in the continuo parts of two Bach works that I looked into recently, Christ lag in Todes Banden (BWV 4) and the Third Orchestral Suite in D major (BWV 1068).

(notation found here [BWV 4] and here [BWV 1068])

For the past year and a half (I finished it yester-day), I'd been reading a book of Edvard Grieg's letters (Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, Benestad and Halverson, eds.), and I recently read a letter he wrote to August Winding on 4 February 1875 saying that

recently in St. Thomas Church [in Leipzig] I heard the first concert by a Bach Association under the leadership of Volkland, von Holstein and Spitta (the author of an excellent book on Bach).  The concert included three cantatas by Bach that had not been performed publicly before.  I have never heard anything so beautiful by Bach; they are marvelous, great, profound, childlike and fervent.

I'm not sure if Christ lag in Todes Banden is one of the cantatas that Grieg heard, but that letter at least illustrates that Grieg was fairly familiar with Bach's works.

From Holberg's Time is from 1884, almost ten years after Grieg heard those Bach cantatas in Leipzig.  So between Grieg's documented familiarity with Bach's works and the close historical time period between Holberg (1684-1754) and Bach (1685-1750), it seems like Grieg might have taken that particular phrase from Bach's suite and/or cantata and used it to evoke that particular time period in his own work.

Bach's Gavottes

In listening to pieces from my Classical Music Queue (explained here), I recently listened to Bach's partitas for solo violin.  Or at least I listened to what excerpts I have; I have complete recordings of the first and third, but only one movement from the second.  In listening to the gavotte en rondeau of the third partita, I found a similarity to the gavotte in Bach's third orchestral suite:

(notation found here and here)

There are three groups of trills (with the first two notes as eighth notes and the third as a quarter note), and while the note groups of the two works aren't in the same intervals, the general position pitch-wise is the same.  That is: in both works, the first group of notes is the highest; the second is the lowest; and the third is in between the first two.  Both are capped with a (relatively) lower half-note.

There are a lot of threes here - the number of notes in each group, the number of groups, the movement number, and the classification number (No. 3).  Apparently, Bach didn't put the suites in a set though, so the "No. 3" part of "Suite No. 3" is just a coincidence.

In researching the pieces, I haven't found any dates of composition that agree with each other (the partita seems to be 1720, but I've found both 1717 and 1730 for the third orchestral suite), so I can't tell whether the partita or the orchestral suite was written first.

When I add a piece to the Classical Music Queue, I also write down where I found a reference to it.  Interestingly, the partitas were mentioned in some interviews given during a performance of all four of the orchestral suites that I listened to on NPR in November.  However, neither of the times it was mentioned was really a comparison between the partitas and the orchestral suites.