He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide.

[6][7] The family name, originally spelled Greig, is associated with the Scottish Clann Ghriogair (Clan Gregor).

[8] After the Battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746, Grieg's great-grandfather, Alexander Greig (1739–1803),[9] travelled widely before settling in Norway about 1770 and establishing business interests in Bergen.

Grieg's paternal great-great-grandparents, John (1702–1774) and Anne (1704–1784),[10] are buried in the abandoned churchyard of the ruined Church of St Ethernan in Rathen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

[14] Bull recognized the 15-year-old boy's talent and persuaded his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory,[13] the piano department of which was directed by Ignaz Moscheles.

Throughout his life, Grieg's health was impaired by a destroyed left lung and considerable deformity of his thoracic spine.

On his second visit in April, Grieg brought with him the manuscript of his Piano Concerto, which Liszt proceeded to sightread (including the orchestral arrangement).

[22] Eventually, they decided on an opera based on King Olav Trygvason, but a dispute as to whether the music or lyrics should be created first led to Grieg being diverted to working on incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, which naturally offended Bjørnson.

[25] On 6 December 1897, Grieg and his wife performed some of his music at a private concert at Windsor Castle for Queen Victoria and her court.

In 1899, Grieg cancelled his concerts in France in protest of the Dreyfus affair, an antisemitic scandal that was roiling French politics at the time.

"[30] Edvard Grieg died at the Municipal Hospital in Bergen, Norway on 4 September 1907 at age 64 from heart failure.

Obeying his wish, his own Funeral March in Memory of Rikard Nordraak was played with orchestration by his friend Johan Halvorsen, who had married Grieg's niece.

Grieg was cremated in the first Norwegian crematorium opened in Bergen just that year, and his ashes were entombed in a mountain crypt near his house, Troldhaugen.

[6] Grieg composed the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, which includes the excerpts "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and "Morning Mood."

In an 1874 letter to his friend Frants Beyer, Grieg expressed his unhappiness with "Dance of the Mountain King's Daughter," one of the movements in the Peer Gynt incidental music, writing "I have also written something for the scene in the hall of the mountain King – something that I literally can't bear listening to because it absolutely reeks of cow-pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism, and trollish self-satisfaction!

Grieg wrote songs in which he set lyrics by poets Heinrich Heine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henrik Ibsen, Hans Christian Andersen, Rudyard Kipling and others.

Russian composer Nikolai Myaskovsky used a theme by Grieg for the variations with which he closed his Third String Quartet.

Pianist Bertha Tapper edited Grieg's piano works for publication in America by Oliver Ditson.