Edvard Grieg: What Price Immortality?

A curious mix of sophistication and simple-mindedness, subtle nuance and ham-fisted clumsiness, Edvard Grieg: What Price Immortality? aims not so much to dramatize the great Norwegian composer's life as to offer an impressionistic illustration of it. As we watch the elder Grieg (pianist Staffan Scheja) audition two of his G minor masterpieces--the Ballade Op. 24 and the String Quartet in G minor--for his music publisher, his memories come flooding back, acted out in pantomime as the music throbs and thunders. There is some brief narration presumably culled from letters and journals, read with understated but touching emotionalism by Derek Jacobi, but no spoken dialogue. As a result, some crucial information is inevitably lost on the viewer unfamiliar with Grieg's biography; even worse, what is given gets played out in a histrionic, grotesquely melodramatic acting style. In its portrait of the life, the film is scarcely an improvement over the notorious Song of Norway; one hasn't seen boon companions gleefully spinning on a mountaintop or married couples miming a discordant argument with this much to-the-rafters overstatement since the early silent film era. Ironically, the best thespian by far is Scheja; while he doesn't bear much resemblance to Grieg, he brings to the part a weary prickliness that feels just right. His performance of the pained, multifaceted Ballade is equally lovely, as is the Auryn Quartet's reading of Op. 27, whose dramatic, searching innovations they reveal with a slashing urgency. --Bruce Reid

Movie Details

Cast: Staffan Scheja, Philipp Brammer, Sabine Oberhorner, Michael Baral, Hanne Fjerdingstad, Lasse Kolsrud, Tor Plaha, Kai Ole Taule
Running time: 71 min
DVD Aspect Ratios: 1.33:1

DVD International release dates:
North America: Feb 6, 01