Edvard Grieg

• Born: June 15, 1843, Bergen, Norway
• Died: September 4, 1907, Bergen, Norway

Photo: Elliot and Fry

Peer Gynt

• Composed: Grieg composed the original work in 1874–75.
• Premiere: The original premiered on February 24, 1876 in Oslo, conducted by Johan Hennum. The Barclay adaptation premiered on October 19, 2017, Ken-David Masur conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 
• Instrumentation: SAB vocal soloists, SATB chorus, solo Hardanger fiddle, 3 flutes (incl. 3 piccolos), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, chimes, crash cymbals, snare drum, tam-tam, tambour de Basque, triangle, xylophone, harp, organ, piano, strings
• CSO notable performances: These performances are the CSO premiere of Bill Barclay’s adaptation of Peer Gynt.
• Duration: approx. 75 minutes

Music by Edvard Grieg 
Written and directed by Bill Barclay
Adapted from the play by Henrik Ibsen 
Produced by Concert Theatre Works

Originally commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

CAST and Production Credits
Solveig: Camilla Tilling
Hardanger violin: Pekka Kuusisto
Peer Gynt: Caleb Mayo
Åse: Marya Lowry
The Button Molder: Robert Walsh
Ingrid, Anitra, Ensemble: Kortney Adams
Aslak, Begriffenfeldt, Ensemble: Daniel Berger-Jones
The Woman in Green, Ensemble: Caroline Lawton
The Dovre King of the Trolls, Mads Moen, Ensemble: Risher Reddick
Voice of the Boygen: Will Lyman
Scenic Designer: Cristina Todesco
Costume and Puppet Designer: Charles Schoonmaker
Puppet Co-Designer and Puppet Realization: Maura Gahan
Assistant Costume Designer: Rachel Padula-Shufelt
Costume construction: Stephanie Macklin
Dance Choreography: Nicole Pierce
Sound Designer: David Reiffel
Properties: Justin Seward and Cristina Todesco
Stage Manager: Rebecca Monroe
Associate Producer: Kimberly Schuette
Production Manager: Justin Seward

In January 1874, Grieg received a letter from the playwright Henrik Ibsen asking him to provide incidental music for a revival in Oslo of Peer Gynt, a philosophical fantasy with moralistic overtones to which the composer was not immediately attracted. Grieg was, however, rather badly in need of money at the time, and Ibsen’s offer of a sizeable share of the proceeds from the production proved irresistible. Grieg thought at first that he would need to compose no more than a few short sections of music, but he failed to take into account the contemporary Norwegian taste in theatrical productions, which demanded an entertainment not unlike a modern musical comedy, with extended musical selections separated by spoken dialogue. Ibsen accordingly shortened the text of the original 1867 version of the play to accommodate the new music. As it turned out, Grieg’s score contained some 23 separate numbers and cost him nearly two years of work. His effort bore fruit. The music for Peer Gynt, in the form of two orchestral suites, won him international fame and personal economic security, and raised him to the highest position in Scandinavian music.

Peer Gynt (George Bernard Shaw suggested that “Pare Yoont” is about as close to the Norwegian pronunciation as it was possible to come in English) is the central character of Ibsen’s play. The work is ostensibly a fantasy, but Ibsen used the genre as a thinly veiled essay upon the apathy and vacillation that he felt were characteristic of the Norwegian people. Grieg at first disagreed with Ibsen’s thesis—the main reason for his initial reluctance to become involved with the project—but he later changed his opinion. “How shockingly true to life the poet sketched our national character,” he wrote after Ibsen’s death. Most of the play’s characters assume allegorical functions: they are more Jungian archetypes than true individuals. The death of Åse, Peer’s mother, for example, represents not just the loss of a loved one but, on Ibsen’s allegorical plane, also evokes “the dying of nature in the autumn, far up in the North—the disappearance of the sun for months, leaving this globe in a ruddy darkness,” according to Henry T. Finck.

Grieg outlined the plot of the play in the preface to the score of the Second Suite, though it needs to be pointed out that, as with Åse, the episodes and characters he mentions have a deeper, symbolic significance than is apparent from this brief précis:

Peer Gynt, the only son of poor peasants, is drawn by the poet as a character of morbidly developed fancy and a prey to megalomania. In his youth, he has many wild adventures—comes, for instance, to a peasants’ wedding where he carries the bride up to the mountain peaks. There he leaves her so that he may roam about with wild cowherd girls. He then enters the land of the Mountain King, whose daughter falls in love with him and dances for him. But he laughs at the dance and its droll music, whereupon the enraged mountain folk wish to kill him. But he succeeds in escaping and wanders to foreign countries, among others to Morocco, where he appears as a prophet and is greeted by Arab girls. After many wonderful guidings of Fate, he at last returns as an old man, after suffering shipwreck on his way to his home, which is as poor as he left it. There the sweetheart of his youth, Solvejg, who has stayed true to him for all these years, meets him, and his weary head at last finds rest in her lap.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda

A Note from the Writer/Director 
Henrik Ibsen’s sprawling verse play has always been intimidating to stage. His protagonist encounters a who’s who of Scandinavian folklore across three continents, 40 scenes and 60 years. As a contrast, Grieg’s original incidental score survives neatly in two concert suites, fashioned by the composer after the 1876 Oslo premiere. This new adaptation tonight tries to tame the story while going back to the wilder incidental score, mining for fresh bits of Grieg you’ve probably not heard before.

It’s hard to identify a more exuberant writer than Ibsen in 1867. In its grab bag of genres from fantasy to naturalism, Peer Gynt is said to anticipate the literary modernism of the First World War. I rather think it anticipates film, cutting from place to place, exploring fantastical imagery, and using comedy to connect us to Peer the person (who many believed had actually lived). Those innovations still amaze readers today, and all this before he wrote his greatest plays: Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, The Wild Duck and The Master Builder.

Like the play that barely contains him, Peer has a foot in both romantic and modernist impulses. A dreamer and an opportunist, he pursues the world’s temptations in the mold of the self-made man, only to realize at death’s door the hollowing consequences of individualism. In all the translations I’ve read, the word “Self” reigns supreme in Peer Gynt. His simple aim is to be who he is above all else. After all, didn’t Shakespeare counsel us to be true to thyself “above all”? Peer dares us to criticize him for this. What is amazingly insightful is, in the decades since Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt, our global industrialized economy has only increasingly spun on this idea, as does our social media, celebritizing the Self one Instagram photo at a time. But where does compassion factor in? Where meaning? Is pleasure all? Peer’s cautionary tale of hedonism becomes more relevant with each passing day.

It is a joy to bring theatrical tools so fully into the concert hall with this iconic score. Too often, Peer Gynt is only known to us through Grieg’s greatest hits. I have labored to find homes for as many unfamiliar movements from the original score as I could. To serve the music, the text had to be written from scratch, economizing the narrative while retaining the spirit of Ibsen’s many different meters and rhyme schemes. We have committed to a rare fully staged presentation in the concert hall so that Grieg’s iconic music can reunite with the grandeur of the story and the caprice of its characters. Above all, we have stayed true to the spirit of equal partnership between Ibsen and Grieg in our “concert-theatre” approach. I hope we are honoring these legends most, however, in making something that feels true to us, too.

—Bill Barclay