Grieg's music in popular culture Piano Concerto in a sketch on the 1971 Morecambe and Wise Christmas special that featured Andre Previn. Grieg's music in popular culture The music of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg has been used extensively in media, music education, and popular music. For the 150th anniversary of his birth, Norway organized a huge celebration, "Grieg in the Schools", which included programs for children from pre-school to secondary school in 1993. The programs were repeated in 1996 in Germany, and called "Grieg in der Schule", in which over a thousand students participated. There were Grieg observances in 39 countries, from Mexico to
Edvard Grieg indicated the tempo mapping for many of his pieces. In 1899, Grieg cancelled his concerts in France in protest of the Dreyfus Affair, an anti-semitic scandal that was then roiling French politics. Regarding this scandal, Grieg had written that he hoped that the French might, "Soon return to the spirit of 1789, when the French republic declared that it would defend basic human rights." As a result of his position on the affair, he became the target of much French hate mail of that day. In 1906, he met the composer and pianist Percy Grainger in London. Grainger was a