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.

Grieg: Nineteen Norwegian Folk Tunes, Op. 66

Yester-day, I listened to what excerpts I have of Grieg's Nineteen Norwegian Folk Tunes, Op. 66.  One of the phrases in the sixth piece (Cow-call and Lullaby) sounded familiar, and it didn't take too long to place it.  A similar phrase is in the fourth of Grieg's Symphonic Dances on Norwegian Themes, Op. 64.

I looked up the notation for both pieces, and I was actually surprised by how similar they are:

(click the image to enlarge it)

(notation found here [Op. 64] and here [Op. 66])

In the selections above, that phrase starts in the fourth measure of each (I included only the string parts of the symphonic dance).  They're in the same key and have at least a dozen notes in common.

It pretty clearly illustrates the Norwegian influence on Grieg (as the titles for both pieces also indicate), but I'm having trouble determining which came first.  I should think it's the Symphonic Dances because they have an earlier opus number, but one of my books on Grieg lists the dates for the Symphonic Dances as 1896-1898 (in a letter dated 30 September 1898, Grieg says that the symphonic dances "have just been published") and that of the Nineteen Norwegian Folk Tunes as 1896.  In any case, they were composed at around the same time, so it's interesting to find Grieg using such a similar phrase in both.