Edvard Grieg – Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46 (Analysis)

Peer Gynt travelling between a golden dawn, grief, dance, and the dark mountain hall in Grieg’s Suite No. 1.
In Suite No. 1, Grieg distils Peer Gynt’s wandering world into four sharply contrasted scenes: dawn, grief, dance, and a demonic chase.

Grieg’s First Peer Gynt Suite begins as though an immeasurable horizon were opening before us, and ends as though every route of escape had been sealed. Between those extremes come a slow withdrawal from life and a dance of poised, ambiguous lightness. Four brief pieces organise musical time in four distinct ways: as awakening, fading, suspended motion, and relentless accumulation.

The music originated in the extensive score Grieg composed in 1874–75 for the first stage production of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem. That production opened in Christiania, now Oslo, on 24 February 1876. More than a decade later, Grieg returned to the score and reshaped selected numbers for the concert hall. The autograph orchestral manuscript of Suite No. 1 is dated January 1888, and C. F. Peters issued the first edition in Leipzig later that year.

The sequence of movements abandons the chronology of the drama. “Morning Mood” comes from Act IV, “The Death of Åse” from Act III, “Anitra’s Dance” returns to Act IV, and “In the Hall of the Mountain King” takes us back to Act II. The order IV–III–IV–II reveals Grieg’s real purpose. He was not attempting a miniature synopsis of Ibsen’s drama; he was creating a new concert cycle, held together by contrasts of character, colour, and motion.

Removal from the theatre also changed the way these pieces would be heard. “Morning Mood” lost its immediate connection with a North African stage setting and entered the popular imagination as a vision of Norway. “The Death of Åse” acquired an independent life as an elegy for strings. “Anitra’s Dance” shed its words and much of its theatrical irony, while the removal of the troll chorus from “In the Hall of the Mountain King” exposed the sheer force of Grieg’s orchestral process.

Each movement surrendered part of its original dramatic function and gained a wider significance. Dawn became an almost universal image of light; Åse’s grief expanded beyond one character; Anitra became a study in elusive dance; and the pursuit of the trolls became a model of musical intensification. The memory of the theatre remains inside the score, though knowledge of the drama is no longer required for the music to work.

The suite’s unity grows from this carefully controlled discontinuity. Grieg moves from E major to B minor, then to A minor, before returning to B minor. At the same time the orchestra continually changes its dimensions: the fine pastoral colours of the opening give way to grieving strings, then to triangle and a fragile dance texture, and finally to the explosive weight of brass and percussion. Orchestration becomes the suite’s deepest architecture, defining every alteration of space, character, and emotional temperature.

Movements / Structure

I. Morning Mood — Allegretto pastorale

In E major and 6/8 metre, the opening movement builds a pastoral scene from the exchange between flute and oboe, the transparency of a pentatonic melody, and the gradual widening of the orchestral texture. A broad ternary design with a brief coda carries the music from simplicity to radiance and back towards stillness. Its place at the head of the suite establishes an open horizon from which every subsequent movement will recede.

II. The Death of Åse — Andante doloroso

B minor and strings alone create an enclosed, darkened sound world. The movement unfolds in two large expressive curves: its principal thought returns under greater pressure, then declines through chromatic descents, small silences, and a progressive thinning of texture. After the expansive light of the opening, time suddenly becomes heavier, private, and irreversible.

III. Anitra’s Dance — Tempo di Mazurka

Set in A minor and 3/4 metre, this delicate miniature uses strings and triangle to sustain a constantly flexible motion. Ternary form, displaced mazurka accents, brief ornaments, and the interplay of bowed and pizzicato articulation keep the dance poised above the ground. Its elegance offers release after Åse’s death, while retaining the dramatic ambiguity of the encounter between Peer and Anitra.

IV. In the Hall of the Mountain King — Alla marcia e molto marcato

The finale, in B minor, grows almost entirely from one compact theme and its transfer into new pitches, dynamics, and instrumental combinations. Tempo increases by stages, texture thickens, and the full orchestra turns a furtive low-voiced procession into a grotesque explosion. The suite ends at the opposite pole from its beginning: dawn’s open landscape has become a hall crowded with noise, bodies, and suffocating energy.

Musical Analysis

I. Morning Mood — Light as an Orchestral Process

The beginning of “Morning Mood” is so familiar that its precision can easily pass unnoticed. A short flute melody draws primarily on pentatonic material, stepwise motion, and open intervals. Its modest range makes the phrase instantly recognisable, while the 6/8 metre gives it a gentle pulse suggestive of breathing or a quiet rocking motion.

The oboe replies with the same material. This alternation between two woodwind colours creates distance, as though a call were travelling between separate points in the landscape. The melody scarcely changes, yet its new timbre makes the answer sound like the continuation of an awakening. With remarkably little thematic material, Grieg has begun to create space.

Beneath the melody, harmony moves slowly and preserves the clarity of E major. Tonic and dominant functions keep orientation secure, while sustained notes and the restrained string accompaniment leave air around each phrase. The main drama lies less in harmonic wandering than in the changing light within the orchestra.

The broad ternary design is perceived chiefly through changes of colour and density. After the first presentation, the strings acquire greater weight and open a more expansive lyrical span. Phrases rise, dynamics grow, and the melody ceases to belong to one solitary voice. Dawn becomes a collective orchestral radiance.

Grieg himself associated the first forte with the sun breaking through the clouds. That image helps explain why the principal climax arrives comparatively early. The purpose of the movement is the revelation of light rather than a prolonged symphonic conflict. Once the landscape reaches its greatest brilliance, intensity begins to recede; the woodwinds return, and the music withdraws gently from the glow it has created.

When the opening material comes back, it carries the memory of that climax. Small changes in scoring and dynamic weight allow the familiar melody to sound altered even though its outline remains unmistakable. The brief coda settles the motion and leaves the listener within a luminous world that now feels fully formed.

The celebrated “Norwegian” landscape attached to this music is a product of its long concert life. In Ibsen’s drama, dawn rises on the North African coast while Peer is perched in a tree, fending off monkeys. Grieg’s pastoral style and pentatonic clarity easily outgrew that specific scene because they communicate sunrise as a gradual transformation of atmosphere.

The music may therefore evoke palms, acacias, or fjords without belonging exclusively to any of them. Grieg paints less a recognisable location than the instant at which a landscape begins to become visible.

II. The Death of Åse — Intensity Held in Restraint

With “The Death of Åse,” the opening horizon disappears. Grieg restricts the scoring to strings and settles the music in B minor, creating a dark, inward, almost indivisible sonority. Without winds or percussion, attention concentrates on phrase, harmonic breath, and the gradual erosion of intensity.

The principal idea moves with a slow, nearly processional tread. First violins emerge from a chordal texture, supported and shaded by the other string groups. Short rises, falls, and pauses seem to measure time with growing difficulty.

This is not the regular pulse of a formal funeral march. The sense of walking is repeatedly interrupted by the breathing of the phrases and by moments in which the music holds back before continuing. Such uncertainty makes the motion fragile and human: time proceeds, yet every next step requires greater effort.

The movement forms two large curves. In the first, the melody rises through successive harmonic shifts and gathers dynamic pressure. When the material returns at a higher level, it is already transformed. Placement, intensity, and harmonic weight are enough to give the repeated thought a deeper emotional force.

The inner string parts are crucial. Chromatic movements and suspensions delay complete resolution, often placing the expressive tension in a note carried briefly into the next harmony or in a descending line beneath a melody that still tries to rise. This friction between movement and stillness supplies the movement’s inward pressure.

After the highest point, direction reverses. Lines descend, dynamics diminish, and the spaces between phrases become increasingly meaningful. The music loses weight and approaches silence without idealised release. Its ending retains the shadow of B minor and leaves an impression of quiet, irreversible departure.

In the drama, Peer accompanies his dying mother by inventing one last journey. Her poor bed becomes a sleigh, and the approach of death is recast as an arrival at a splendid kingdom. Imagination, so often the instrument of Peer’s evasion and vanity, becomes here an act of tenderness. The orchestra holds the emotional time of the scene open for his words and for Åse’s gradual fading.

Heard independently, the movement’s restraint remains its essential strength. Grief is expressed through the precision of duration: how long a chord is allowed to remain, where a phrase breathes, and when sound finally permits silence to take its place.

III. Anitra’s Dance — A Mazurka in Delicate Balance

“Anitra’s Dance” changes the sensation of weight completely. The orchestra is reduced to strings and triangle, while the marking Tempo di Mazurka places the music within a triple-metre dance world. It is a European mazurka with theatrical exotic colouring, shaped by nineteenth-century stage conventions rather than by an attempt to reproduce a particular North African or Arabic tradition.

The mazurka carries its weight differently from a waltz. Accents often lean towards the second or third beat, leaving the first with a lightly propulsive role. Grieg cultivates that instability through compact rhythmic figures, pauses, and small melodic ornaments. The music touches the ground only to shift its centre elsewhere.

Pizzicato lower strings form a dry, discreet foundation. Above them, violin lines move with the bow—at times muted—so that the colour retains a fine and slightly distant quality. The alternation of bowed and plucked sound creates an internal dialogue: one group sings, while another comments or contains the pulse.

The triangle is used sparingly. Isolated strokes and brief tremolos add brightness without burdening the texture. Within such economical scoring, a slender metallic glint is sufficient to define Anitra’s theatrical world.

The movement follows a clear ternary design. The opening material establishes the dance in A minor. A central section turns towards E minor and brings the dialogue among the string groups into sharper focus, varying articulation and the distribution of melodic material. The return restores the first section’s elegance with subtle differences, as if the dance were revisiting familiar steps after its relationship with the spectator had already changed.

The dramatic irony remains beneath the grace. Peer imagines that he can seduce Anitra by playing the wealthy prophet. She recognises his vanity, takes his jewels, and leaves him. The music’s flexibility, sudden withdrawals, and finely distanced texture suit a figure who controls the scene while keeping her full design concealed.

The ending slips away with the same lightness as the entrance. Between Åse’s slow lament and the approaching frenzy of the trolls, the dance becomes a moment of mobile, deceptive equilibrium.

IV. In the Hall of the Mountain King — Repetition Becomes a Trap

The finale begins low and almost out of sight. Bassoons, cellos, and double basses present the theme in the orchestra’s depths, with sparse texture and very soft dynamics. The direction Alla marcia e molto marcato gives it a sharply articulated tread that sounds sly before it becomes openly threatening.

The theme consists of two compact, readily recognisable phrases. The first establishes B minor; the second shifts towards F-sharp major, the dominant region, and introduces notes that sharpen the grotesque flavour. Small irregularities keep the melody strange, while its clear outline allows the listener to recognise every return.

The initial accompaniment reinforces a mechanical character. Pizzicato bass strings and persistent bassoon notes suggest a procession already underway before danger has been fully perceived. The melodic outline changes little. Each return is transformed chiefly through pitch level, timbre, dynamic force, and density.

The composition therefore rests on a sequence of orchestral transfers. The theme moves through different instruments, climbs into higher regions, doubles in octaves, and gathers an increasingly dense accompaniment. Early repetitions sound like separate statements; as the intervals between them contract, they become parts of a single mechanism that has acquired momentum of its own.

Tempo and dynamics rise in successive levels. Each stage begins where the pressure of the previous stage ended, pushing the material another step forward. This terraced construction preserves rhythmic definition even as the music approaches frenzy. Beneath the impression of chaos lies a rigorously calculated trajectory.

As the theme ascends through the orchestra, the dramatic perspective changes. What began in the depths seems to move steadily closer. New groups enter, octaves multiply, and harmonic stability changes from a point of orientation into a form of confinement. The music remains trapped in the same narrow world, while every circuit becomes more intense.

The entry of brass and percussion alters the scale of the episode. Horns and trumpets harden the rhythmic profile; trombones and tuba add weight below; timpani, bass drum, and cymbals turn pulse into physical pressure. A texture that began as a whisper eventually occupies the full orchestral spectrum.

In the original stage music, the troll chorus hurled threats at Peer. The voices disappear from the suite, yet their energy survives within the repetitions and orchestral accumulation. We hear a wordless crowd: every new entry seems to add another body to the pursuit.

The grotesque element is fundamental. Ibsen’s trolls form a distorted mirror of human society and of Peer’s self-satisfied image. Grieg’s exaggeration carries more than the anxiety of a chase; it also communicates something absurd, swollen, and almost comically monstrous, allowing menace and irony to coexist.

At the climax the theme is still recognisable, though its first stealth has vanished beneath the force of the full orchestra. Final chords abruptly break the process, as if the hall itself were collapsing. The movement ends in the explosion of an obsession that has exhausted every remaining possibility.

Four Different Shapes of Musical Time

Although the movements are not linked by dramatic chronology, they trace a remarkably clear path through contrasting experiences of time. In “Morning Mood,” time expands: a small melody passes between instruments as the acoustic space fills with light. In “The Death of Åse,” time grows heavy and fades, as recurring phrases move ever closer to silence.

In “Anitra’s Dance,” time becomes agile and unstable. Displaced accents, pauses, and the exchange of pizzicato and bowed sound prevent the music from acquiring permanent weight. The dance belongs to the present moment and seems prepared to withdraw whenever we try to hold it.

“In the Hall of the Mountain King” reverses that condition. Time contracts, thematic returns crowd together, and the music gradually loses its capacity to stop. Repetition becomes a trap because each circuit leads inescapably to the next, at greater speed, volume, and density.

This trajectory explains why the suite feels complete without telling Peer’s story. Its coherence lies in the progressive transformation of musical energy. The first movement opens space; the second empties it; the third moves lightly within it; and the fourth fills it to the point of suffocation.

The tonal plan supports that evolution. The E major of the opening yields to B minor, which returns in the finale, while the dance’s A minor stands between them. The luminous starting point recedes, and the suite ends in a world darker, denser, and more enclosed than the one in which it began.

Grieg creates this enormous contrast with striking economy. Themes are brief, forms readily grasped, and orchestral choices exact. The immediacy of the result can conceal its technical refinement. Each movement knows precisely how much material it needs and how long it can keep that material alive.

🪶 A Chapter in the Life of the Work

The Student Returns to Leipzig

In January 1888, Grieg was once again in Leipzig, the city he had first entered three decades earlier as a fifteen-year-old student. At the Conservatory he had studied composition with Carl Reinecke, attended concerts at the Gewandhaus, and encountered a musical world far broader than the one he had known in Bergen. Leipzig helped form his European education, even as it strengthened his later desire to find a more personal and distinctly Norwegian language.

His relationship with the city was never simple. Grieg sometimes spoke sharply about the Conservatory’s academic conservatism, yet he also understood what Leipzig had given him: discipline, knowledge of the repertory, contact with important musicians, and an entry into Europe’s publishing network. By 1888 he was no longer a young student trying to discover his voice. The Piano Concerto, the Peer Gynt music, chamber works, songs, and dozens of lyric pieces had made him an internationally recognised composer.

C. F. Peters placed a small room at Grieg’s disposal on the upper floor of its building at Talstraße 10. During visits to Leipzig he could live and work close to the people responsible for publishing and circulating his music. Here he prepared the concert form of the First Suite. The old theatre score was passing through a second act of composition: selection, revision, reordered sequence, and adjustment to the autonomy of concert listening.

That transformation was taking place in the city where the young Grieg had learned the principles of form and orchestration. Once he had written exercises under the supervision of his teachers; now he was deciding how four scenes from different acts could stand together and create a new cycle. Thirty years of distance were contained within a few Leipzig buildings—the Conservatory, the Gewandhaus, and the offices of his publisher.

On New Year’s Day 1888, Grieg met Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the home of the violinist Adolph Brodsky. Mutual sympathy was immediate. Tchaikovsky later left a vivid portrait of the Norwegian composer’s appearance and personality, while Grieg attended rehearsals for the concert the Russian was to conduct at the Gewandhaus. Their encounters were brief but warm, filled with conversation, music, and songs performed by Nina Grieg.

Later that year, Grieg promised to send Tchaikovsky a copy of the new Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. The score did indeed become part of the music preserved in Tchaikovsky’s library. A work begun for a Norwegian theatrical production was already entering the wider network of European musical friendship.

On 1 November 1888, the First Suite was performed at the Gewandhaus. On the podium stood Carl Reinecke, Grieg’s former composition teacher and the orchestra’s conductor. The man who had once assessed the young student’s exercises was now presenting a deeply individual work, coloured by Norwegian imagination and far removed from much of the academic language that had surrounded Grieg’s education.

The occasion required no ceremonial statement to acquire symbolic force. Music born from a demanding theatrical commission in Norway, under pressure of time and stage requirements, was beginning its independent concert life in the city where Grieg had been trained.

The student had returned to Leipzig with music that had found its path beyond the rules of his school—and his former teacher was the person who first led it into the symphonic hall.

🎧 Listening Guide

The extraordinary familiarity of these themes can conceal the minute changes that keep the suite in motion. Closer listening reveals the relationship among recurring material, altered timbre, and Grieg’s changing treatment of musical time.

  • The first flute–oboe exchange: The melody remains almost unchanged, yet the instrumental change seems to move it through space. The same call now sounds as though it came from another distance.
  • The first forte in “Morning Mood”: Grieg associated this point with sunlight breaking through clouds. Because the climax arrives early, the remainder of the movement can be heard as a gradual withdrawal from its brilliance.
  • The second curve in “The Death of Åse”: The return of the main idea at greater intensity shows how placement and dynamics can deepen the emotional meaning of unchanged material.
  • The inner string parts: In the descent towards the ending, chromatic movement and suspensions make the harmony struggle to find rest. Much of the emotion lives in these inner lines rather than in the principal melody alone.
  • The weaker beats in “Anitra’s Dance”: Mazurka accents and small pauses continually displace the centre of gravity. Triangle supplies momentary flashes, while pizzicato and bowed strings conduct a finely balanced conversation.
  • The opening depth of the Mountain King’s hall: Bassoons and low strings introduce the theme with minimal dynamics and sparse accompaniment. Every later statement can be measured against this almost hidden beginning.
  • The successive levels of acceleration: Tempo and volume rise in stages. Recognising those separate levels reveals how carefully the apparently uncontrolled climax has been designed.
  • The moment when the full orchestra takes possession of the theme: The melody is still the same, but the scale of the experience has changed completely. Here the suite demonstrates one of its central principles: timbre and density can transform the meaning of unchanged musical material.

🎶 Further Listening

These three recordings illuminate different ideas of scale, rhythm, and orchestral colour. Their contrasts are especially revealing in “Morning Mood” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” where choices of tempo and dynamic pacing can reshape the entire inner curve.

  • Sir Thomas Beecham — Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, 1956 (EMI/Warner): A historic performance marked by generous phrasing, flexible rhythm, and a strong theatrical personality. The elegance of “Anitra’s Dance” and the grotesque humour of the Mountain King remain sharply contrasted, as though each movement were being narrated as an independent scene.
  • Neeme Järvi — Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, 1987 (Deutsche Grammophon): Vivid, transparent, and richly coloured, with close attention to inner voices and dance rhythms. The suite gains symphonic breadth while retaining agility and clarity in the woodwind writing.
  • Bjarte Engeset — Malmö Symphony Orchestra, 2007 (Naxos): A detailed, balanced account with natural flow, transparent orchestral layers, and finely graded climaxes. Its clear separation of instrumental groups makes it especially valuable for analytical listening.

📚 Further Reading

Writing on Peer Gynt ranges from Grieg’s biography and correspondence to studies of irony, landscape, and Norwegian cultural identity. The following books and articles offer complementary routes into the music beyond a purely formal reading of the score.

  • Finn Benestad and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe — Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist: The standard comprehensive biography, drawing extensively on letters, diaries, and publishing sources. Its chapters on Peer Gynt clarify the difficult compositional process, the theatrical productions, and the later history of the two suites.
  • Daniel M. Grimley — Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity: A major study of Grieg’s relationship with landscape and cultural identity. It helps move “Morning Mood” beyond picturesque nature painting and shows how musical landscape may carry emotional and cultural meaning.
  • Ursula Kramer — “Grieg’s Peer Gynt and the Problem of Irony in Music”: A focused discussion of irony in the incidental music, particularly valuable for understanding the exaggeration and “hyper-Norwegian” quality of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” as well as the tension between Grieg’s lyricism and Ibsen’s satire.
  • Edvard Grieg — Letters to Colleagues and Friends, edited by Finn Benestad and translated by William H. Halverson: Grieg’s correspondence brings the reader close to his reactions to Ibsen, the commission, his publishers, and the reception of his music. It also preserves the wit, irritation, and enthusiasm with which he discussed works that would later become famous.

🔗 Related Works

Suite No. 1 belongs to a wider history of music written for the stage and subsequently granted a second life in the concert hall. These works invite comparison among different methods of selection, compression, and reorganisation.

  • Edvard Grieg — Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55: The direct continuation of Grieg’s concert selection moves from Ingrid’s anguish and the spectacle of the “Arabian Dance” towards the storm of Peer’s return and the voice of Solveig. Its more inward final trajectory forms a revealing counterweight to the explosive ending of Suite No. 1.
  • Georges Bizet — L’Arlésienne Suite No. 1: Bizet reshapes numbers from his music for Alphonse Daudet’s drama into an autonomous concert sequence, allowing orchestration, rhythm, and contrasting character to provide the unity once supplied by stage action.
  • Gabriel Fauré — Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 80: Another transformation of incidental music into orchestral suite, with greater emphasis on suggestion, quiet psychological tension, and refined colour. Beside Grieg, it demonstrates how differently the concise musical image may function when released from spoken drama.
  • Jean Sibelius — Karelia Suite, Op. 11: Three movements drawn from music for historical tableaux and given an independent concert life. Their rhythmic identity, orchestral contrasts, and ties to cultural memory provide a productive parallel with Grieg.
  • Igor Stravinsky — The Firebird Suite (1919): In a later and radically different musical language, the compression of an extended theatrical score shows how selection, reordering, and revised orchestration can create a self-contained dramatic arc.

🎼 Closing Reflection

The suite’s dawn opens a world that seems limitless. By the end, a single melody has occupied the entire space and left no passage through it.

Light gave us room. Repetition revealed how easily that same room can become a trap.

📖 References & Sources

This revision draws on the suite’s autograph and first printed score, the critical edition of Grieg’s orchestral works, his correspondence, and documentation concerning both the original stage production and the concert premiere. Form, tonality, rhythm, and orchestral changes were checked against the score. Specialist studies of irony, landscape, and cultural identity informed the interpretation, while the pieces’ original dramatic functions were kept distinct from their later concert existence.

Scores and Critical Editions

  • Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. Autograph orchestral score, January 1888. Bergen Public Library, Grieg Collection.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Erste Orchestersuite aus der Musik zu “Peer Gynt”, Op. 46. First edition of the full score. Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1888, plate 7188.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Samlede verker, vol. 12: Orkestersuiter. Edited by Finn Benestad. Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1985, pp. 1–37.

Primary Sources

  • Ibsen, Henrik. Letter to Edvard Grieg, 23 January 1874.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Letter to Frants Beyer, 27 August 1874.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Letters to Colleagues and Friends. Edited by Finn Benestad; translated by William H. Halverson. Columbus, Ohio: Peer Gynt Press, 2000.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Diaries, Articles, Speeches. Edited by Finn Benestad; translated by William H. Halverson. Columbus, Ohio: Peer Gynt Press, 2001.

Secondary Sources

  • Benestad, Finn, and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe. Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
  • Fog, Dan, Kirsti Grinde, and Øyvind Norheim, eds. Edvard Grieg: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis. Frankfurt, Leipzig, London, New York: Henry Litolff’s Verlag, 2008.
  • Grimley, Daniel M. Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006.
  • Kramer, Ursula. “Grieg’s Peer Gynt and the Problem of Irony in Music.” Studia Musicologica Norvegica 36 (2010), pp. 73–91.
  • Brock, Hella. Edvard Grieg. Leipzig: Reclam, 1990.

Recordings and Performance Documentation

  • Beecham, Thomas — Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Grieg: Peer Gynt. EMI, recorded 1956.
  • Järvi, Neeme — Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Peer Gynt Suites Nos. 1 and 2. Deutsche Grammophon, recorded 1987.
  • Engeset, Bjarte — Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites / Orchestral Songs. Naxos 8.570236, 2007.

Digital Collections

  • Bergen Public Library — Grieg Collection: autograph manuscripts, letters, and early editions.
  • Henrik Ibsens skrifter, University of Oslo: sources for the drama, correspondence, and early stage productions.
  • International Music Score Library Project: digitised autograph manuscript and first edition of Suite No. 1.