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The piano concerto was completed in the summer of 1868, while Grieg was on holiday in Denmark. The 25-year-old composer was staying near Copenhagen, and had deliberately set time aside for composition work. By now he had become interested in the folk music of Norway, and his music was beginning to show more nationalist romanticism and fewer traces of the influence of Schumann. Nonetheless, when he came to plan the concerto, it was Schumann's A Minor Piano Concerto of 1841 that provided the structural basis for his own lyrical masterpiece, and this has led critics to deride the work as a weak imitation of the earlier concerto. However, generations of pianists and music lovers have decided otherwise.