Agathe Backer-Grøndahlaus romantic

Agathe Backer Grøndahl (* 1 December 1847 in Holmestrand, Vestfold; † 4 June 1907 auf Ormøya in Aker) was a Norwegian pianist and composer.

Life

Agathe Ursula Backer was born in Holmestrand in 1847, in a wealthy and art-loving home, as the second youngest of four sisters, all gifted in drawing and music. In 1857 she moved with her family to Christiania, where she studied with Otto Winther-Hjelm, Halfdan Kjerulf and Ludvig Mathias Lindeman. Between 1865 and 1867 she became a pupil of Theodor Kullak and studied composition under Richard Wuerst at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Berlin, where she lived together with her sister Harriet Backer. She won fame there with her interpretation of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto.

In 1868 she debuted with Edvard Grieg, then 26 years old, as conductor of the Philharmonic Society. A recommendation from Ole Bull led to further studies with Hans von Bülow in Florence in 1871. Later the same year she played at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, becoming a pupil of Franz Liszt in Weimar in 1873. In 1875 she was married to the celebrated singing teacher Herr Grondahl of Christiania, and during the second half of the 1870s she built up an outstanding pianist career with a series of concerts in the Nordic countries, also playing with very great success in London and Paris.

In 1889 and 1890 she gave concerts in London and Birmingham with a wide-ranging program, including Grieg’s piano concerto. After that she was proclaimed one of the century’s greatest piano artists by George Bernard Shaw, who also remarked on the sensitiveness, symmetry and artistic economy of her compositions. At the World Exhibition in Paris in 1889, she repeated her success with her brilliant interpretation of Grieg’s piano concerto. It was then that she began suffering from nerve problems, although she eventually resumed her artistic career as a pianist. Later in the 1890s she became almost completely deaf. She gave her last concerts in Sweden and Finland in the autumn of 1901. Then she retired to teaching.
Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agathe_Backer_Grøndahl