page_title: Percy Grainger
section_title: Family background
hierarchical_section_title: Percy Grainger / Early life / Family background
caption_attribution_description: Princes Bridge over the Yarra River, Melbourne, Australia.
context_page_description: Percy Aldridge Grainger was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who lived in the United States from 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long and innovative career, he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune "Country Gardens".
  Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racial or anti-Semitic terms.
context_section_description: Percy Grainger was born on 8 July 1882 in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. His father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who had emigrated to Australia in 1877, won recognition for his design of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne; His mother Rose Annie Aldridge was the daughter of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge.
  John Grainger was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later gained worldwide fame as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. John's claims to have "discovered" her are unfounded, although he may have offered her encouragement. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose learned after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before coming to Australia. His promiscuity placed deep strains upon the relationship. Rose discovered shortly after Percy's birth that she had contracted a form of syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, from her husband. Despite this, the Graingers stayed together until 1890, when John went to England for medical treatment. After his return to Australia, they lived apart. Rose took over the work of raising Percy, while John pursued his career as chief architect to the Western Australian Department of Public Works. He had some private work, designing Nellie Melba's home, Coombe Cottage, at Coldstream.
caption: Princes Bridge, Melbourne, designed by John Grainger
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