page_title: Percy Grainger
section_title: Career zenith
hierarchical_section_title: Percy Grainger / Career maturity / Career zenith
caption_attribution_description: Percy Grainger (right) with his mother, Rose (1861–1922)
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: After leaving the army in January 1919, Grainger refused an offer to become conductor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and resumed his career as a concert pianist. He was soon performing around 120 concerts a year, generally to great critical acclaim, and in April 1921 reached a wider audience by performing in a cinema, New York's Capitol Theatre. Grainger commented that the huge audiences at these cinema concerts often showed greater appreciation for his playing than those at established concert venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Aeolian. In the summer of 1919 he led a course in piano technique at Chicago Musical College, the first of many such educational duties he would undertake in later years.
  Amid his concert and teaching duties, Grainger found time to re-score many of his works (a habit he continued throughout his life) and also to compose new pieces: his Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away, and the orchestral version of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart both originated in this period. He also began to develop the technique of elastic scoring, a form of flexible orchestration which enabled works to be performed by different numbers of players and instrument types, from small chamber groups up to full orchestral strength.
  In April 1921 Grainger moved with his mother to a large house in White Plains, New York in what is now known as the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. This was his home for the remainder of his life. From the beginning of 1922 Rose's health deteriorated sharply; she was suffering from delusions and nightmares, and became fearful that her illness would harm her son's career. Because of the closeness of the bond between the two, there had long been rumours that their relationship was incestuous; in April 1922 Rose was directly challenged over this issue by her friend Lotta Hough. From her last letter to Grainger, dated 29 April, it seems that this confrontation unbalanced Rose; on 30 April, while Grainger was touring on the West Coast, she jumped to her death from an office window on the 18th floor of the Aeolian Building in New York City. The letter, which began "I am out of my mind and cannot think properly", asked Grainger if he had ever spoken to Lotta of "improper love". She signed the letter: "Your poor insane mother".
caption: Rose and Percy Grainger, c. 1920
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