“Oh, all the things one has to do” : - a study of Agathe Backer Grøndahl’s piano suite I Blåfjellet op. 44 in relation to her life as a woman composer in the late nineteenth century

Sammanfattning

This study situates Agathe Backer Grøndahl’s piano suite I Blaafjellet, Op. 44 within the broader history of the piano suite and the persistent underrepresentation of women composers, whose contributions were long obscured by nineteenth‑century social biases and by the scarcity of preserved sources. The thesis aims to examine I Blaafjellet through combined analytical and performative perspectives in order to illuminate Backer Grøndahl’s individual musical language and clarify her contribution to the piano‑suite tradition from a gender‑aware music‑historical standpoint. The research draws on a multi‑layered musical analysis of each movement and of the suite as a whole, complemented by practice‑based inquiry involving technical and interpretive work, performances, recordings, and reflective documentation of the interpretive process. The results show that I Blaafjellet reveals a distinctive compositional voice characterized by modal inflections, rich harmonic colour, orchestral textures, and a strong sense of narrative atmosphere, while the performance process highlighted specific pianistic challenges such as wide jumps, layered textures, agogic flexibility, and the shaping of colouristic sound worlds, all of which informed the development of a more coherent interpretation. The discussion indicates that the suite not only reflects Backer Grøndahl’s mature compositional style but also exemplifies how women composers of the nineteenth century negotiated artistic identity within restrictive social frameworks, and how performance‑based research together with analysis can reveal expressive and structural nuances not fully accessible through a basic practicing process. The study concludes that I Blaafjellet, Op. 44 offers significant insight into BackerGrøndahl’s musical language and pianistic writing, demonstrates her underrated place within the piano‑repertoire tradition, and underscores the importance of integrating works by women composers into contemporary performance and scholarship in order to enrich our musical knowledge and performance culture, free from the social biases of the past.