Edvard Grieg photo by Elliot and Fry

World Premiere: February 24, 1876 (as part of the full opera)

Most Recent HSO Performance: May 1993

Instrumentation: 2 flutes with first flute doubling on piccolo, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, tambourine, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 25'

Suite from the Incidental Music to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Opp. 46 and 55 (1874-1875)

Edvard Grieg

(Born June 15, 1843 in Bergen, Norway Died there on September 4, 1907

The premiere of the revival of the fantastical allegory Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) in February 1876 for which Grieg provided a raft of incidental music was one of the greatest successes of the composer’s life. The event marked the beginning of his international renown and his financial security. Grieg outlined the plot of the play, though it needs to be pointed out that 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.”

The selections on this concert are drawn from the two concert suites Grieg extracted from the complete score in 1888 and 1891. The Abduction of the Bride and Ingrid’s Lament portrays Peer’s kidnapping of the bride at a village wedding and her grief at later being discarded by him. Peer Gynt’s Homeward Journey is a stormy seascape. Morning is one of the most famous evocations of dawn in the entire musical repertory. The music occurs not at the beginning of the play, however, but in Act IV, when Peer is in Africa. Åse’s Death serves as the poignant background for the passing of Peer’s mother. Anitra’s Dance is a lithe number of exotic character performed for Peer during his adventures in Morocco by the daughter of a Bedouin chief. In the Hall of the Mountain King accompanies Peer’s terrified escape from the abode of the most fearsome of Norway’s trolls. 

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda