Bergen has one of the world’s oldest symphony orchestras, the country’s first national theatre and host several international festivals. Composer Edvard Grieg was born and lived in Bergen.
Troldhaugen, the home of composer Edvard Grieg
Photo: Per Nybø
The Grieg Hall
Photo: Willy Haraldsen
Aside from their commercialinterests, Bergen merchants had a nose for culture. It was they who laid the foundations for Bergen to be the cultural city it is today.
Bergen has one of the world’s oldest symphony orchestras, the country’s first national theatre, a host of international festivals, and a whole range of museums and institutions, which owe their existence to the generosity of merchants.
Also, Bergen was the birthplace of the north’s first comic writer, Ludvig Holberg; Norway’s first major landscape painter, Johan Christian Dahl, and the hugely popular composer, though small in stature, Edvard Grieg.
The dramatist Henrik Ibsen was not born in Bergen, but it was here that he entered the world of theatre. The painter, Edvard Munch, was not Bergen-born either, but it was a Bergen industrialist who ensured that the city now has a unique collection of Munch’s works.
Bergen resounds with music and has some of the country’s best choirs, jazz musicians who improvise through the night, and operatic singers whose arias soar above the fortress walls of Bergenhus. Art can be created on pavement slabs, and even drain covers are turned into works of art – in a city which considers that culture is a part of the every day, and an important expression of Bergen’s variety of life. It is therefore not surprising that Bergen became a European City of Culture in the year 2000.