Haugtussa (Grieg)
song cycle composed by Edvard Grieg
Haugtussa, Op. 67, or The Mountain Maid, is a song cycle for soprano and piano composed by Edvard Grieg in 1895 and published in 1898. Even though Grieg wrote a total of 181 songs, this is the only song cycle in his entire output. The text was written by the Norwegian writer Arne Garborg, an excerpt from his book of poetry Haugtussa. It tells the story of Haugtussa, a young herding girl, and her first love affair with a boy, her first heartache. Both the lyrics, which brim over with imagery of gurgling brooks and tasty blueberries, and the music that mimics this imagery, intertwine the main character’s personal story and the mystic spring-like landscape that surrounds her, which may even motivate it.
Song cycle project
Edvard Grieg read Arne Garborg's Haugtussa in May 1895, and was so inspired that he composed twelve songs in a month, four of which he rejected. He then spent three years completing the project. He first conceived it as a larger work with orchestra, but in 1898 decided to set just a cycle of eight songs for voice and piano, and gave them a final polish before they were printed in September that year. Grieg wanted Haugtussa to reflect Garborg's poems, but by using only a few selected poems was able to give a true and complete new image to Haugtussa, thus creating a new whole.
“Haugtussa (Grieg)” enters the record as song cycle composed by Edvard Grieg. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Haugtussa, Grieg and song can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5682503. The Library of Congress control number is n88613103. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “Haugtussa (Grieg)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.