Danish Folk-Music Suite: “The Nightingale and the Two Sisters”

Composer: GRAINGER, Percy
  • Percy Grainger composed this suite in 1928. He dedicated it to his friend, Danish writer and folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen, with whom he made several trips collecting folk music in Denmark.1
  • Grainger created many different scorings for this suite between 1928-1941 (as he did with many of his works).2
  • The Nightingale and the Two Sisters in the third of the suite’s four movements.3 It is based on two Danish folk songs.4
    • “The Nightingale” is a Danish folk song about a girl who has been transformed into a nightingale by her evil stepmother and is rescued by a knight.
    • “The Two Sisters” is a Danish folk song of two sisters who love the same man. The older sister murders the younger, and her crime is discovered when one of the fiddlers at her wedding is playing a fiddle strung with the younger sister’s hair.

Sources

  1. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, “Grainger, (George) Percy,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed October 10, 2019, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000011596.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Barry Peter Ould, liner notes to Grainger: Vol. 11 – Works for Chorus & Orchestra 4, Pamela Helen Stephen, Johan Reuter, Danish National Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Jesper Grove Jorgensen, Richard Hickox, Chandos 9721, CD, 1999.

Cut IDs

17269