Percy Grainger
Percy Aldridge Grainger was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. He played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life.
About Percy Grainger in brief
Percy Aldridge Grainger was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. He played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. He served briefly as a bandsman in the U.S. Army during the First World War through 1917–18, and took American citizenship in 1918. After his mother’s suicide in 1922, he became increasingly involved in educational work. In the 1930s he set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works, and as a future research archive. After the Second World War, ill health reduced his levels of activity, and he considered his career a failure. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death. His father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who had emigrated to Australia in 1877, won recognition for his design of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne. His mother Rose Annie Aldridge was the daughter of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose learned after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before coming to Australia. John’s claims to have discovered Helen Melba are unfounded, although he may have offered her encouragement.
He was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later gained worldwide fame as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. He said that the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong was “the strongest single artistic influence on my life”; he said that it was his “strongest influence” in his later years. He also had a lifelong fascination with Nordic culture; writing late in life, he said: “The Icelandic Saga… was… my strongest influence… in my life” He was a keen fan of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racial or anti-Semitic terms. He became a champion of Nordic culture and music, and often expressed his admiration for the likes of Edvard Grieg and Frederick Delius in letters to his friends. His first known composition is a piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune \”Country Gardens\”. It is dated 1893. At 10, he began studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German immigrant then considered to be Melbourne’s leading piano teacher. At 12, he played works by Bach, Beethoven and Scarlatti, and was warmly complimented in the Melbourne press. He returned to Europe in the autumn of 1894, and played a series of concerts at a venue of enormous size of the Royal Exhibition Building in Adelaide.
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