Composing landscapes: Musical memories from nineteenth-century Norwegian mountain-scapes

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the Norwegian mountain-scape gradually grew in popularity as a destination for foreign and domestic touristic discovery, while simultaneously acquiring a status as object(s) of artistic value and national significance. This article explores how musical responses (here by Franz Berwald, Edvard Grieg and Julius Röntgen) to this mountain-scape can be understood to both feed off and into the ideological rhetoric around the mountain-scape by creating various reminiscences which are conditioned by distance and (actual or imagined) memorisation, and narrated through a nostalgic construction of idealised longing. © 2013 Society for Landscape Studies.