Grieg

Trained in Germany at Leipzig, and spent the rest of his life shaking that training off after returning to Norway. Working alongside the folk collector Lindeman, he wrote the melodies of the Norwegian mountains and the sound of the Hardanger fiddle into piano and orchestral music.

What he valued most were the sixty-six Lyric Pieces, ten books written across thirty-four years, like an intermittent diary. The Peer Gynt music made him world-famous, though he disliked parts of it and said In the Hall of the Mountain King reeked of cow dung. Certain habits in his harmony — descending chromatic lines, modal cadences — fed directly into Debussy and Ravel.