Christian Sinding
Christian Sinding was born in Kongsberg, Norway, on January 11, 1856. After attending the Leipzig Conservatory from 1877 to 1881 he settled in Oslo as a teacher of the piano. His first published composition was a piano quintet in 1884, and in 1885 he directed a concert of his own music in Oslo. Though he wrote in large forms, including symphonies, concertos, suites, tone poems and various chamber-music compositions, he is best known for his smaller pieces for the piano. In 1890 he received an annual subsidy from his government to enable him to devote himself completely to composition. One of Norway’s most significant composers, he was given a handsome life pension in 1915, and in 1916 an additional government gift of 30,000 crowns. In 1921-1922 he visited the United States when he served for one season as a member of the faculty of the Eastman School of Music. He died in Oslo on December 3, 1941.
His smaller pieces for the piano include etudes, waltzes, caprices, intermezzos and various descriptive compositions. It is by one of the last that he is most often remembered, a favorite of young pianists throughout the world, and of salon and pop orchestras in instrumental adaptations. This is the ever-popular Rustle of Spring (Fruehlingsrauschen), probably the most popular piece of music describing the vernal season. This is the second of Six Pieces, for solo piano, Op. 32 (1896). The rustle can be found in the accompaniment, against which moves a soft, sentimental song filled with all the magic of Nature’s rebirth at springtime. In this same suite, a second number of markedly contrasting nature, has also become familiar—the first number, played in a vigorous and picaresque style, the Marche grotesque.