Edvard Grieg and His Own Compositions

Probably every composer at times feels dissatisfaction at his own works. Only he knows the goal for which he strove. Only he can tell how far short of that goal his written works are. Something of this is reflected in the following pathetic little passage which Grieg wrote the year he died: "What I have accomplished in large and small works signifies for me personally a continual development, and yet, unfortunately, I am conscious that I have never reached what I have striven for. So to-day I cannot name a single work as truly a first composition. What remains to me is to contemplate the wandering through art and life as the prelude to that true first-work, of which, on earth, I am only able to dream."