Wilhelm Peterson-Berger was among the most influential Swedish musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A man of many parts, he was a skilled organist, pianist, composer, journalist – and stage manager (at the Stockholm Opera from 1908 to 1910). Apart from two sojourns in Dresden, first as a student, later as a teacher, and another in Italy (1920-21), he spent the whole of his professional life in Sweden. For thirty-four years he was the often outspoken music critic of the Dagens Nyheter, his arrival there coinciding with the publication of the present piano works. He was also an opera composer, of Wagnerian stamp (writing all his own texts), and a polished symphonist.

Peterson-Berger was predominantly a lyrical composer, a fact immediately evident in his songs and piano pieces, which have held their place near the centre of Swedish musical life to this day. Like Grieg and Sibelius in their own piano miniatures, he scorned empty virtuosity in favour of delicately crafted character pieces, some of them suggesting Schumann as a model.