Recently, it’s been my habit, during my morning writing sessions, to tune my TV to some kind of classical music collection from out of the great variety available on YouTube.

Edvard Grieg is always a good choice for me, and I’ve found a couple really weird Grieg collections lately. One of them is posted above. The quotations it features seem dubious to me, and the art was obviously created by AI. Yet the resulting dreamlike concoction seems to suit my so-called creative process.

If you take the time to watch this video, you’ll notice a couple odd images featuring large frogs. I did some web searches about “Grieg’s frog,” and discovered that the composer did, in fact, have a frog, which he kept in his pocket. It was (I was relieved to learn) not a living frog, but a toy frog (rubber, apparently). It was his good luck charm, and he liked to rub it before performing in public.

I learned of that fact in this article, which goes on to tell a truly bizarre story – one that seems to me absolutely too good to be true. I can’t find it mentioned anywhere else online, so I reserve the right to doubt it. But it goes like this (excerpted as published):

Once, the great Norwegian composer was giving a splendid concert in Oslo. In the beginning, he decided to make a programme including only his own compositions, but then he changed his mind and replaced the finishing number with a composition by Beethoven.

As it was usual, the following day, the concert reviews were published in newspapers. It should be remembered that Edvard Grieg, as many talented people, had a lot of ill-wising critics. And one of them, he had an especially strong dislike for Edvard Grieg’s music, wrote a humiliating critic article about the composer’s concert. The number which drew particular attention of the critic was the last one, he disliked that the most. The critic mentioned venomously that the composition was simply ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable.

Having read the critical article, Edvard Grieg called the critic on the phone and said:
– This is Beethoven’s spirit disturbing you. I should tell you that it was me who had composed the finishing composition of Edvard Grieg’s concert!

The disgraced critic felt far too awful as it was, and the joke became the last drop, he died from a heart attack. (Credit: CMuse)

It’s always sad when anyone dies, of course, but I don’t think any artist can help feeling a little wistful as he reads that anecdote.