Röntgen’s Aus Jotunheim

by Paul van Zelm

For several seasons around the year 2000, I played a beautiful program with the oboist Maarten Karres and his wife Ariane, based on the friendship between Julius Röntgen and Edvard Grieg. We played Röntgen's oboe sonata, several songs, and some piano works by Grieg, including the piece Sehnsucht nach Julius, dedicated to Röntgen (later called Resignation op. 73 no. 1). As the main work for horn, I played the suite Aus Jotunheim for horn and piano, a five-part work based on Norwegian folk music. To explain the friendship between Grieg and Röntgen, we read aloud letters and fragments from a biography.

The two composers met in Leipzig in 1875. When Grieg visited Amsterdam in 1883, Röntgen invited him to stay with him. The plan was for Grieg to stay for one day, but Grieg wrote to Röntgen: "I am looking forward to seeing you and your wife again. Please make sure that this one day lasts 48 hours!" Things went differently, and Grieg ended up staying with Röntgen for a whole month. From that point, the two composers were connected by a warm friendship until Grieg's death in 1907.

In the years that followed, Röntgen would travel to Norway to visit Grieg no fewer than 14 times, usually in the summer. They undertook days-long hikes in the Jotunheimen mountains, always using the occasions to listen to Norwegian folk songs and commit them to paper. Röntgen wrote about this: "Jotunheim is a world of its own, inhabited only by shepherds in the summer. The journey with Grieg was by horse-drawn carriage and rowboat across the Sognefjord to Skjolden. These were warm afternoons in August, and lying on hay bales, we let the grand landscape pass us by." Later, Franz Beyer, a friend and traveling companion of Röntgen, wrote: "After spending the night in a mountain hut, we were allowed to go to the meadow to milk cows. Naturally, the Norwegian folk songs were sung during this activity, transcribed holding the manuscript paper on the backs of the animals, so they were 'almost fresh from the cow!'"

From these songs and melodies, the Suite "Aus Jotunheim" was created in 1892, initially for violin and piano as a gift for Grieg and his wife Nina's 25th wedding anniversary. In 1901, the version for horn and piano was written for the well-known Viennese hornist Luis Savart. Röntgen also wrote another work for Savart: Variations and Finale on Sankt Nepomuk.

In the concerts previously mentioned, I played the piece from the manuscript, which is currently located at the Dutch Music Institute in The Hague.

In 2003, a printed version was released by John Smit (who happened to be my first horn teacher). When I recorded a number of short videos to publish on the internet in the fall of 2022, it was a logical choice for me to include some parts of the Jotunheim Suite: in its genre (high Romanticism), the piece is a valuable addition to our repertoire.