he was lent to the Austrian army on the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, and served as a general officer of artillery. The siege of Glatz and the defence of Schweidnitz were his principal exploits. The empress Maria Theresa rewarded him for his work with the rank of lieutenant field-marshal and the cross of the Maria Theresa order. On his return to France he was made maréchal de camp, in 1764 inspector of artillery, and in 1765 lieutenant-general and commander of the order of St Louis. For some years after this he was in disfavour at court, and he became first inspector of artillery only in 1776, in which year also he received the grand cross of the St Louis order. He was now able to carry out the reforms in the artillery arm which are his chief title to fame. See Artillery; and for full details Gribeauval’s own Table des constructions des principaux attirails de l’artillerie . . . de M. de Gribeauval, and the règlement for the French artillery issued in 1776. He died in 1789.
See Puységur in Journal de Paris, supplement of the 8th of July 1789; Chevalier de Passac, Précis sur M. de Gribeauval (Paris, 1816); Veyrines, Gribeauval (Paris, 1889), and Hennébert, Gribeauval, lieutenant-général des armées du roy (Paris, 1896).
GRIBOYEDOV, ALEXANDER SERGUEEVICH (1795–1829),
Russian dramatic author, was born in 1795 at Moscow, where
he studied at the university from 1810 to 1812. He then obtained
a commission in a hussar regiment, but resigned it in 1816.
Next year he entered the civil service, and in 1818 was appointed
secretary of the Russian legation in Persia, whence he was
transferred to Georgia. He had commenced writing early, and
had produced on the stage at St Petersburg in 1816 a comedy
in verse, translated from the French, called The Young Spouses,
which was followed by other pieces of the same kind. But
neither these nor the essays and verses which he wrote would
have been long remembered but for the immense success gained
by his comedy in verse, Goré ot uma, or “Misfortune from
Intelligence” (Eng. trans. by N. Benardaky, 1857). A satire
upon Russian society, or, as a high official styled it, “A pasquinade
on Moscow,” its plot is slight, its merits consisting in its
accurate representation of certain social and official types—such
as Famousoff, the lover of old abuses, the hater of reforms;
his secretary, Molchanin, servile fawner upon all in office; the
aristocratic young liberal and Anglomaniac, Repetiloff; contrasted
with whom is the hero of the piece, Tchatsky, the ironical
satirist, just returned from the west of Europe, who exposes and
ridicules the weaknesses of the rest, his words echoing that outcry
of the young generation of 1820 which reached its climax in the
military insurrection of 1825, and was then sternly silenced by
Nicholas. Griboyedov spent the summer of 1823 in Russia,
completed his play and took it to St Petersburg. There it was
rejected by the censorship. Many copies were made and privately
circulated, but Griboyedov never saw it published. The first
edition was printed in 1833, four years after his death. Only
once did he see it on the stage, when it was acted by the officers
of the garrison at Erivan. Soured by disappointment he returned
to Georgia, made himself useful by his linguistic knowledge to
his relative Count Paskievitch-Erivansky during a campaign
against Persia, and was sent to St Petersburg with the treaty
of 1828. Brilliantly received there, he thought of devoting
himself to literature, and commenced a romantic drama, A
Georgian Night. But he was suddenly sent to Persia as minister-plenipotentiary.
Soon after his arrival at Teheran a tumult
arose, caused by the anger of the populace against some Georgian
and Armenian captives—Russian subjects—who had taken
refuge in the Russian embassy. It was stormed, Griboyedov was
killed (February 11, 1829), and his body was for three days so
ill-treated by the mob that it was at last recognized only by an
old scar on the hand, due to a wound received in a duel. It was
taken to Tiflis, and buried in the monastery of St David. There
a monument was erected to his memory by his widow, to whom
he had been but a few months married.
GRIEG, EDVARD HAGERUP (1843–1907), Norwegian musical
composer, was born on the 15th of June 1843 in Bergen, where
his father, Alexander Grieg (sic), was English consul. The Grieg
family were of Scottish origin, but the composer’s grandfather,
a supporter of the Pretender, left his home at Aberdeen after
Charles Edward’s defeat at Culloden, and went to Bergen, where
he carried on business. The composer’s mother, Gesine Hagerup,
belonged to a pure Norwegian peasant family; and it is from
the mother rather than from the father that Edvard Grieg
derived his musical talent. She had been educated as a pianist
and began to give her son lessons on the pianoforte when he was
six years of age. His first composition, “Variations on a German
melody,” was written at the age of nine. A summer holiday in
Norway with his father in 1858 seems to have exercised a powerful
influence on the child’s musical imagination, which was easily
kindled at the sight of mountain and fjord. In the autumn of
the same year, at the recommendation of Ole Bull, young Grieg
entered the Leipzig Conservatorium, where he passed, like all
his contemporaries, under the influence of the Mendelssohn and
Schumann school of romantics. But the curriculum of academic
study was too narrow for him. He dreamed half his time away
and overworked during the other half. In 1862 he completed
his Leipzig studies, and appeared as pianist and composer
before his fellow-citizens of Bergen. In 1863 he studied in
Copenhagen for a short time with Gade and Emil Hartmann,
both composers representing a sentimental strain of Scandinavian
temperament, from which Grieg emancipated himself in favour
of the harder inspiration of Richard Nordraak. “The scales
fell from my eyes,” says Grieg of his acquaintance with Nordraak.
“For the first time I learned through him to know the northern
folk tunes and my own nature. We made a pact to combat the
effeminate Gade-Mendelssohn mixture of Scandinavism, and
boldly entered upon the new path along which the northern
school at present pursues its course.” Grieg now made a kind of
crusade in favour of national music. In the winter of 1864–1865
he founded the Copenhagen concert-society Euterpe,
which was intended to produce the works of young Norwegian
composers. During the winters of 1865–1866 and 1869–1870
Grieg was in Rome. In the autumn of 1866 he settled in
Christiania, where from 1867 till 1880 he conducted a musical
union. From 1880 to 1882 he directed the concerts of the
Harmonic Society in Bergen. In 1872 the Royal Musical
Academy of Sweden made Grieg a member; in 1874 the
Norwegian Storthing granted him an annual stipend of 1600
kronen. He had already been decorated with the Olaf order in
1873. In 1888 he played his pianoforte concerto and conducted
his “two melodies for strings” at a Philharmonic concert in
London, and visited England again in 1891, 1894 and 1896,
receiving the degree of Mus.D. from the university of Cambridge
in 1894. He died at Bergen on the 4th of September 1907.
As a composer Grieg’s distinguishing quality is lyrical. Whether his orchestral works or his songs or his best pianoforte works are submitted to examination, it is almost always the note of song that tells. Sometimes, as in the music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, or in the suite for stringed orchestra, Aus Holbergs Zeit, this characteristic is combined with a strong power for raising pictures in the listener’s mind, and the romantic “programme” tendency in Grieg’s music becomes clearer the farther writers like Richard Strauss carry this movement. Grieg’s songs may be said to be generally the more spontaneous the more closely they conform to the simple model of the Volkslied; yet the much sung “Ich liebe dich” is a song of a different kind, which has hardly ever been surpassed for the perfection with which it depicts a strong momentary emotion, and it is difficult to ascribe greater merits to songs of Grieg even so characteristic as “Solvejg’s Lied” and “Ein Schwan.” The pianoforte concerto is brilliant and spontaneous; it has been performed by most pianists of the first rank, but its essential qualities and the pure nationality of its themes have been brought out to their perfection by one player only—the Norwegian pianist Knudsen. The first and second of Grieg’s violin sonatas are agreeable, so free and artless is the flow of their melody. In his numerous piano pieces and in those of his songs which are devoid of a definitely national inspiration the impression made is less permanent. Bülow called Grieg the “Chopin of the North.” The phrase is an exaggeration rather than an expression of the truth, for
