Biography (read more)
Agathe Ursula Backer was born on 1 December 1847 at Holmestrand in Norway, the second youngest of four sisters in a wealthy, art-loving household in which all four were gifted at drawing and music. The family moved to Christiania in 1857, where she studied with Otto Winther-Hjelm, Halfdan Kjerulf and Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, and from 1865 to 1867 she was Theodor Kullak’s pupil at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Berlin, studying composition with Richard Wüerst and sharing lodgings with her sister, the painter Harriet Backer; her Emperor Concerto made her name there. Her parents opposed a performing career as unsuitable for a woman, and she wrote to Kjerulf that she could not understand the objection — that a beautiful, independent future lay in striving to give people something to enjoy, and that she loved art too much for the desire to master it to leave her in peace. She married the conductor and singing teacher Olaus Andreas Grøndahl in 1874, and died on 4 June 1907.
She returned to Norway in 1868 and debuted with the Christiania Philharmonic Society in the Emperor Concerto under the twenty-six-year-old Grieg. A recommendation from Ole Bull took her to Hans von Bülow in Florence in 1871; she played at the Leipzig Gewandhaus later that year and became Liszt’s pupil at Weimar in 1873. Through the second half of the 1870s she built a major career across the Nordic countries and in London and Paris, and after her 1889 and 1890 concerts in London and Birmingham George Bernard Shaw called her one of the century’s greatest pianists and praised the sensitiveness, symmetry and economy of her own compositions. Nerve trouble began around the 1889 Paris World Exhibition, and by the later 1890s she was almost completely deaf; she gave her last concerts in Sweden and Finland in the autumn of 1901 and went on teaching. Her son Fridtjof Backer-Grøndahl, also a pianist and composer, kept her music in his programmes.
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