Written in 1867, Henrik Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt— the story of the downfall and redemption of a Norwegian peasant—was not initially intended for stage performance. Ibsen had second thoughts in 1874, however, and asked his compatriot Edvard Grieg to compose music for a production. While Grieg accepted enthusiastically, he struggled with the project. “Peer Gynt progresses slowly,” he wrote to a friend in August 1874, “and there is no possibility of having it finished by autumn. It is a terribly unmanageable subject.” Grieg eventually immersed himself in the project, however, and his wife reported, “the more he saturated his mind with the powerful poem, the more clearly he saw that he was the right man for a work of such witchery and so permeated with the Norwegian spirit.” Grieg completed work in the fall of 1875, and the composer conducted the premiere on February 24, 1876. As the famous movement “In the Hall of the Mountain King” illustrates, Peer Gynt is one of Grieg’s most beloved and well-known orchestral compositions.