After the middle of the nineteenth century an effort becomes noticeable in many nations to inject some freshness or newness into music by employing harmonies, turns of melodies and odd rhythms of a distinctly local or national flavor. Awaiting the advent of a new genius of international significance who should revolutionize music, or resurrect it from a stagnation little better than death, such an effort toward national expression was the most successful safeguard against imitation and subservience. Moreover, it was productive of enthusiasm, which is a quality of youth in music. Accepting forms and technique as matters of course, composers threw themselves with joy into the expression of the spirit of their beloved land. Naturally in those countries which had inherited from the ages a store of folk-music the new movement was the most striking. Scandinavia and Russia were especially rich in such an endowment. Their folk-songs were strongly marked and individual, and in so far as their composers drew upon them the new music was differentiated from music founded upon the classical German examples. In both Scandinavia and Russia composers were divided. Some regarded this folk-material with disdain and adhered to a faith in the inexhaustibleness of traditional inspiration. Others threw themselves heart and soul into the music of their nation, with a flaming ambition to reveal its unique beauties and power to the world. Among the Scandinavians Niels Gade (1817-1890) first claims attention as a composer for the pianoforte. And yet only for a moment. His pianoforte pieces, including several sets of short pieces--_Frühlingsblumen_, opus 2, _Aquarellen_, opus 19, and _Volkstänze_, opus 31, one _Arabesque_, opus 27, and a sonata, opus 28--have but the faintest touch of the music of Denmark. Even the _Volkstänze_ are urbane and refined. It was against this subservience to Mendelssohn that Edvard Grieg rebelled. Grieg, therefore, who had no more skill than Gade, and perhaps was fundamentally no more richly gifted, stands out somewhat brilliantly among the composers for the pianoforte since the time of Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. His music is sharply defined by national idioms. Whatever the value of his own personality may be, his music is thus given a definite shape and an independence, those signs of character which are unfortunately but very feebly displayed in the music of most of the German post-romanticists.