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His Music Captured Norway’s Colors. His Life Reflected Its Shadows.

It’s a world unto itself.” Born in Bergen and trained in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, Tveitt... (Andsnes performed it at Carnegie Hall last year.) Its conception is boldly austere with just two...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.04.28 18:05 0

His Music Captured Norway’s Colors. His Life Reflected Its Shadows.

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His Music Captured Norway’s Colors. His Life Reflected Its Shadows.

Geirr Tveitt’s reputation was tarnished by his nationalist politics. But a new generation of musicians is bringing this composer’s music to an international audience.

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The Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt in 1973, a few years after he lost about 80 percent of his compositions in a fire.

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Aage Storløkken/Alamy

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

April 28, 2026,

5:03 a.m. ET

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On a frigid night in 1970, high above a fjord in western Norway, the farmstead of the composer Geirr Tveitt caught fire. As flames tore through the wooden buildings, family members rushed into a shed crammed with his unpublished scores. Using fruit crates, they hauled burning manuscripts into the open and used snow to extinguish the flames. By the time the fire was under control, roughly 80 percent of Tveitt’s compositions had been destroyed.

The loss hastened the eclipse of one of the most prominent and original voices in Norwegian music since Edvard Grieg.

Now a new album by the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is helping bring Tveitt (1908-1981) to the attention of a wider international audience. “He was a sort of wild talent,” Andsnes said in an interview. “His music sometimes has a neurotic energy, mixed with a very local feeling and at the same time enormous knowledge of what was going on internationally. It’s a world unto itself.”

Born in Bergen and trained in Leipzig, Paris and Vienna, Tveitt (pronounced TVAYT) wrote prolifically across genres including chamber works, popular songs, orchestrations of folk tunes, concertos — including for Norway’s national folk instrument, the

Hardanger fiddle

— and a ballet on a subject from Norse mythology. For a time, Tveitt was a central figure in the country’s musical life. He anchored a radio program and toured internationally as a pianist. But his final decades were spent largely isolated, his reputation tarnished by his nationalist beliefs and his wartime service in the puppet government of Nazi-occupied Norway. Even before the fire, his music was fading from view.

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The pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, photographed at Tveitt’s farmhouse in western Norway. “He was a sort of wild talent,” Andsnes said.

Credit...

Helge Hansen

The centerpiece of the new recording,

“Geirr Tveitt,”

is the composer’s only surviving piano sonata, No. 29, titled “etere,” Italian for ethereal. (Andsnes performed it at Carnegie Hall last year.) Its conception is boldly austere with just two themes elaborated over the course of three movements. The first

skittish, roving theme

evokes Nordic folk idioms; the second, questioning and mystical, seems to open onto a vast, frigid space. The third movement reworks the first theme as a brilliant and angular dance.

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