Edvard Grieg - Peer Gynt (Work Guide)

Peer Gynt facing a winding road linking Norway, the mountains, the desert, and a stormy sea
From the Norwegian valleys and shadowed mountains to the desert and the storm-tossed sea, Peer’s road crosses both real and imagined worlds. At the end of his wandering, Solveig’s distant light remains the steadfast point of memory and the path back toward his true self.

The Story of a Man Who Never Stopped Escaping

The dawn is serene. A melody passes from flute to oboe, and the horizon seems to brighten by degrees. Most listeners picture a Norwegian fjord. On stage, however, Peer Gynt is on the North African coast, perched in a tree and trying to fend off a troop of monkeys. The distance between the music we know and the theatre from which it came offers the ideal point of entry into the work.

Today, Peer Gynt survives chiefly through eight orchestral excerpts: Morning Mood, The Death of Åse, Anitra’s Dance, In the Hall of the Mountain King, and the four movements of the Second Suite. In the theatre of 1876, these pieces were only moments within a far broader journey in sound. The complete incidental music contained 26 musical numbers: songs, choral interventions, brief transitions, dances, offstage music, and orchestral episodes linking places and times.

The play came first. Henrik Ibsen wrote his five-act dramatic poem in Italy in 1867, drawing its protagonist’s name and several episodes from Norwegian folk tales. Yet his hero quickly exceeds the world of legend. Peer is an indefatigable storyteller—charming, irresponsible, and able to turn every failure into a fresh tale. He wanders from the Norwegian mountains to North Africa, from the desert to the Cairo madhouse, before returning home as an old man and being forced to ask what remains beneath all the roles he has assumed.

On 23 January 1874, Ibsen sent Grieg a long and remarkably detailed letter. He was preparing Peer Gynt for the stage and identified precisely where music was required: at the wedding, in the realm of the trolls, at Åse’s death, in the dawn scene that opens Act Four, in the Arabian scene, and during the final return. Grieg accepted the commission with a mixture of honour and apprehension. The financial reward mattered, but he found the subject extraordinarily intractable. That summer he complained to his friend Frants Beyer that progress was slow and that the play resisted every easy musical solution.

First page of Henrik Ibsen’s 1874 letter to Edvard Grieg
The first page of Henrik Ibsen’s letter to Edvard Grieg (Dresden, 23 January 1874), which initiated their collaboration on Peer Gynt.

The difficulty was genuine. Grieg had to serve a text that continually changes scale and register: folk comedy, romantic episode, grotesque fairy tale, family drama, travel satire, and philosophical allegory. At the same time, the score had to answer practical theatrical needs, dances of variable duration, and action continuing above the orchestra. He completed the music in late July 1875 at August Winding’s country house in Fredensborg, Denmark. Soon afterwards, both of Grieg’s parents died. Grief kept him away from the premiere on 24 February 1876; he did not hear his music in the theatre until November.

The production was a major success. Its run ended when a fire destroyed the scenery and costumes in January 1877, but the collaboration between Ibsen and Grieg had already transformed the play’s afterlife. Grieg returned to the score whenever a new production required different orchestration, cuts, or rearrangements. He never published a complete orchestral score himself. The first posthumous edition of 1908, prepared by Johan Halvorsen, contained 23 numbers. Only twentieth-century source-critical research restored the original sequence of 26.

The two orchestral suites gave the music a second, independent existence. Suite No. 1, Op. 46, appeared in 1888. Suite No. 2, Op. 55, took shape in the early 1890s and reached its definitive four-movement form in 1893. Through these selections, Grieg created two concert cycles with balances of their own. The famous melodies simultaneously moved away from the characters, words, and dramatic irony of the stage. This Guide returns them to that lost theatrical setting.

Characters and Dramatic Forces

The figures in Peer Gynt work both as characters and as different answers to the question of identity. Some offer Peer a path towards relationship and responsibility; others reflect his compulsion to enlarge his own image.

Peer Gynt

A young man filled with imagination, energy, and excess. His stories lend brilliance to a life with no settled form, while each new adventure postpones his encounter with the consequences of his actions. His journey is no hero’s progress towards conquest. It is the perpetual displacement of someone who fears staying long enough to know himself.

Solveig

The young woman who recognises in Peer a possibility beyond his flamboyant self-image. Her constancy is distinct from passive waiting: she leaves her family, seeks him out, and chooses to live in the forest hut he has built. Within the drama, she becomes the memory of a relationship Peer never managed to inhabit. In Grieg’s music, she is given one of the work’s clearest and most recognisable voices.

Åse

Peer’s mother knows his weaknesses and also participates in his world of stories. Their relationship moves between exasperation, tenderness, and a shared imaginative game. In her death scene, Peer turns a room marked by poverty into a royal journey. For once, invention does not serve his escape; it becomes a way of accompanying someone he loves to the end.

Ingrid

The bride whom Peer abducts from her wedding and abandons the following day. Her lament opens Act Two and later the Second Suite. The music gives duration to the wound of someone Peer immediately tries to leave behind.

The Woman in Green

The Mountain King’s daughter presents Peer with a world where desire can be renamed grandeur and self-sufficiency treated as virtue. Her appearance changes according to the gaze directed at her. She is therefore the ideal partner for a hero who is also forever inventing his own image.

The Mountain King

He rules the realm of the trolls and offers Peer an alternative version of life. His world’s maxim—to be sufficient unto oneself—first resembles freedom and ultimately closes into egoism. Their encounter reveals how dangerously close Peer already stands to this philosophy.

The Bøyg

An indefinite, formless presence that blocks Peer without offering him a clearly defined opponent. Its counsel is to go roundabout. If the Mountain King gives Peer’s egocentrism a philosophy, the Bøyg supplies a method for his flight: instead of passing through difficulty, Peer learns to move around it.

Anitra

The daughter of a Bedouin chief appears in Act Four, where the now middle-aged Peer presents himself as a wealthy traveller and prophet. He believes he can stage-manage his charm and power. Anitra reverses the game, secures the jewels and riches she can take, and abandons him in the desert.

The Button Moulder

He arrives as no terrifying judge, but as a quiet craftsman examining whether Peer’s life ever acquired a definite form. If Peer was neither truly himself nor fully someone else, he will be melted back into the great ladle like a defective button. The figure’s mildness makes the threat still more unsettling.

The Lean One

This discreetly diabolical figure will accept Peer only if he can prove himself a genuine, unrepentant sinner. Even that identity eludes him. Peer discovers that he has spent his life evading both virtue and the coherence that authentic evil would require.

Movements / Structure

The complete incidental music follows the dramatic poem’s five acts. Its 26 numbers do not all possess the scale or autonomy of the familiar concert pieces: some are brief stage cues, others accompany speech or movement, while several develop into complete orchestral or vocal scenes.

Act One — The Community, the Wedding, and the First Rupture

The Prelude At the Wedding, the halling, and the springar establish the Norwegian social world through rhythm and dance. The music does more than present picturesque scenery: it creates the community towards which Peer feels both attraction and shame.

Act Two — The Abduction, the Trolls, and the Art of Going Roundabout

Ingrid’s lament opens the act before the music passes to the dairymaids, the Woman in Green, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter, and the trolls’ pursuit. The encounter with the Bøyg moves the drama from physical danger to a far less tangible confrontation: Peer learns to survive by going round obstacles.

Act Three — The Hut, the Abandonment, and Åse’s Death

The forest might become a place to remain, for Solveig arrives determined to share Peer’s life. His past returns in the form of the Woman in Green and their child. Peer flees once more and returns to his mother; there, The Death of Åse turns an intimate family scene into one of the work’s deepest emotional centres.

Act Four — Wealth, Exoticism, and Multiple Masks

Many years later, Morning Mood opens a new geographical and psychological horizon on the North African coast. The Thief and the Receiver follow, then Arabian Dance, Anitra’s Dance, Peer’s Serenade, and his abandonment. Solveig’s Song sounds like a voice from another time before the wanderings continue into Egypt and the Cairo madhouse.

Act Five — The Storm, the Reckoning, and the Return

The storm prelude, the shipwreck, the auction, the night scene, and the Pentecost hymn dismantle Peer’s final certainties. The Button Moulder turns the question of identity into a judgement, while Solveig’s Lullaby offers musical repose without completely closing Ibsen’s dramatic uncertainty.

The Story

Act One — A World Made of Stories

Peer returns to the impoverished home he shares with his mother and tells her a reckless tale: he rode a reindeer over a mountain ridge. Åse quickly recognises a familiar folk story that her son is presenting as a personal exploit. The scene reveals from the outset both his gift and his weakness. Peer can create a more thrilling world through words, yet he cannot build the real life his stories promise.

Åse reproaches him for losing the chance to marry Ingrid, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, who is marrying someone else that day. Peer decides to appear at the wedding. There he meets Solveig, a shy young woman newly arrived in the district with her family. His attraction is immediate, but his reputation and aggressive behaviour frighten her.

The bridegroom, desperate because Ingrid has locked herself in her room, asks Peer for help. Peer climbs onto the roof, seizes the bride, and escapes with her into the mountains. The community turns against him. What might resemble an act of romantic rebellion is quickly exposed as one more impulse with no future.

Act Two — In the Realm of Those Sufficient unto Themselves

By the following morning, Peer has already tired of Ingrid. He rejects her and sends her back alone, although her life has been overturned. Hunted, he ventures deeper into the mountains. He meets three dairymaids and pursues a momentary pleasure before encountering a mysterious woman dressed in green.

She claims to be the Mountain King’s daughter. Peer presents himself as a king’s son, and the pair begin transforming one another through gaze and fantasy. He follows her into the trolls’ palace, where everything appears differently to those who belong to their world. The King offers to accept him if he will abandon human vision and embrace the central principle of troll existence: to be wholly sufficient unto himself.

Peer is attracted by the prospect of becoming a ruler, but recoils when he realises the transformation will be permanent. The trolls turn upon him. The hall fills with threats, cries, and frenzied movement until distant church bells dispel the imaginary world.

Alone in the darkness, Peer encounters the Bøyg. He cannot discern its shape or find any point to attack. The voice tells him to go roundabout. Peer follows the advice and escapes, acquiring at the same time the principle that will determine the rest of his life.

Act Three — The Door Left Open

Condemned by the community, Peer builds a hut in the forest. Solveig suddenly appears and tells him that she has left her family to live with him. For the first time, life offers him a genuine beginning: a place, a relationship, and the possibility of remaining.

Artistic depiction of Solveig beside the wooden hut in Peer Gynt
An artistic depiction of Solveig, the figure who connects constancy, memory, and the hope of return in Peer Gynt.

As he approaches the hut, the Woman in Green appears with a deformed child and confronts him with the consequences of their former union. She declares that she will stand between Peer and Solveig whenever he tries to look at her. Peer could speak, accept responsibility, and ask Solveig to decide with full knowledge of the truth. Once again, he chooses the roundabout way. He says that he must leave briefly and abandons the hut.

He returns to Åse, who is nearing death. The room is poor and the bed uncomfortable. Peer sits beside her and begins one final story. He turns the bed into a sleigh and describes a journey to a radiant kingdom, where his mother will be received with honour. Åse dies within his tale. Peer departs for foreign lands.

Act Four — The Man Who Can Become Anything

Years later, Peer appears on the North African coast as a wealthy middle-aged man. He tells his European companions that he accumulated his fortune through commercial ventures of dubious morality. He presents each reversal as proof of adaptability and every contradiction as personal freedom. When he announces his intention of becoming emperor, his companions seize his yacht and abandon him. The vessel explodes soon afterwards, and Peer interprets his survival as evidence of a chosen destiny.

In the desert, he finds a horse and clothes belonging to thieves. In his new guise, he presents himself to a Bedouin tribe as a prophet. Anitra dances for him, and Peer projects another fantasy onto her. He believes he will win her with jewels, promises, and a serenade. She manipulates his vanity, takes what she can, and leaves him alone.

The scene moves to Egypt. Before the Sphinx, Peer meets Begriffenfeldt, director of the Cairo madhouse. Its inmates appear as people entirely enclosed within themselves—an extreme version of the trolls’ principle. They proclaim Peer “Emperor of the Self.” The dream of absolute sovereignty is fulfilled as madness.

Far away in the Norwegian hut, Solveig’s song is heard. Music joins two points the theatre keeps apart: the man who continually changes his face and the woman who preserves the memory of what he might have become.

Act Five — When the Masks Return without a Face

The elderly Peer sails towards Norway. A violent storm breaks and the ship sinks. Clinging to an overturned boat, Peer refuses to share his chance of survival with the ship’s cook and lets him drown. His homecoming begins with an act revealing how little he has changed.

In the village, Peer hears people auctioning Åse’s possessions. He watches a wedding and realises that time has continued without him. In the forest, he meets figures that give voice to all that never came into being: balls of thread claiming to be the thoughts he never thought, leaves representing the words he never spoke, and dewdrops embodying the tears he never wept.

Then the Button Moulder appears. He has orders to melt Peer down because his life never acquired a sufficiently distinct form. Peer asks for time to find evidence that he was himself. He appeals to the Mountain King, who reminds him that he lived largely according to the trolls’ principle. He even seeks out the Lean One, hoping to prove that he was at least a consummate sinner. That identity cannot be sustained either.

Artistic depiction of the Button Moulder with his ladle in Peer Gynt
An artistic depiction of the Button Moulder, the enigmatic figure who asks whether Peer’s life ever acquired a distinct and recognisable form.

As the Pentecost hymn is heard, Peer reaches the hut. Solveig, now elderly and nearly blind, welcomes him. He asks where his true self has been throughout all these years. Her answer locates him in her faith, hope, and love. She holds him and sings a lullaby.

The music offers repose, yet Ibsen leaves the Button Moulder waiting outside. Does Solveig’s love save Peer, or merely preserve the image she kept of him? The ending allows both readings.

Analysis

Act One — The Rhythm of the Community and the Man Who Does Not Belong

Music enters Peer Gynt through a social space. The Prelude At the Wedding is no grand symphonic overture. It is flexible theatre music, preparing the movement, noise, and expectancy of a celebration. Short motifs, clearly articulated rhythms, and bright orchestral colours evoke a world already organised before Peer arrives.

The two dances, halling and springar, move the action from a generic image of “Norwegianness” to specific bodily energy. The halling is traditionally associated with virtuosic male figures and sudden leaps. The springar uses a triple metre with uneven internal accents, which loses its character when smoothed into a conventional European waltz. Where a Hardanger fiddle is used, its brilliant timbre and sympathetic strings strengthen the sense of a local sound world.

Listeners may notice that Act One does not yet give Peer a personal lyrical theme. We hear him through his collisions with the wedding music, the dances, and the community. He tries to force his way into the celebration’s rhythm, attract every gaze, and turn social awkwardness into spectacle. Ingrid’s abduction grows from this urge to impose a dazzling image at the very moment social reality rejects him.

Act Two — From Ingrid’s Wound to the Troll Machine

The Prelude to Act Two, The Abduction of the Bride (Ingrid’s Lament), first makes room for the wound Peer has left behind. The abduction’s dramatic momentum recedes, and a dark, lamenting line brings the abandoned woman’s voice into focus. The contrast between agitated passages and sorrowful melody condenses the entire episode: impulse for Peer, irreversible loss for Ingrid.

The path towards the trolls passes through increasingly unstable episodes. The dairymaids, the Woman in Green, and the strange ride to the palace create a world in which desire continually changes its object. Grieg moves among song, dance, orchestral commentary, and grotesque colour without attempting to bind everything into one symphonic narrative. Discontinuity belongs to Peer’s psychology.

In In the Hall of the Mountain King, a short theme emerges low and almost furtively in the cellos, double basses, and bassoons. The construction depends upon insistent repetition. The melodic material remains recognisable while tempo, dynamics, register, and orchestral density change around it. New instruments enter, rhythmic values tighten, percussion and brass sharpen the danger, and the music becomes a machine that seems unable to stop.

In the concert suite, the scene sounds like a model orchestral crescendo. In the theatre, the troll chorus also takes part. Their voices call for the intruder to be torn apart or maimed, converting abstract excitement into collective frenzy. It is worth following how Grieg creates an enormous climax from minimal initial material: the danger grows chiefly through accumulation, rather than the arrival of a new melody.

After the Mountain King’s daughter dances and the trolls pursue Peer, the encounter with the Bøyg changes the very nature of danger. The orchestra no longer confronts a colourful mob. Texture thins, phrases lose a clear direction, and tension arises from the inability to locate a centre. The music evades cathartic confrontation, just as the Bøyg advises Peer to evade the obstacle. The episode forms a negative mirror to In the Hall: there, repetition led inexorably to explosion; here, formlessness prevents any conclusion.

Act Three — When Imagination Learns to Say Farewell

In Act Three, the score leaves noisy spectacle behind and approaches two intimate human spaces: Solveig’s hut and Åse’s room. The forest is no longer an arena for adventure; it might become a home. Solveig’s arrival counterbalances Peer’s unceasing movement because her music rests on the clarity of the vocal line, repetition, and a sense of return.

The Death of Åse avoids the rhetoric of a grand death scene. The strings form a confined, dark sound world. The music moves with a processional tread, while phrases breathe through small descents and silences. This austerity leaves space for Peer’s words and his mother’s gradual fading.

The most important dramatic element lies in the relationship between speech and music. Peer tells one more imaginary journey, but this time his story has a recipient. He is not trying to glorify himself. He uses invention to transform Åse’s fear into travel and her poor bed into a royal vehicle. The orchestra does not illustrate each detail; it contains the emotional time, as though protecting the scene from excess.

Listen for the absence of a brilliant climax. Intensity resides in repetitions, inner string parts, and the way harmony delays repose. The music does not automatically redeem Peer. It does reveal that his imagination could become a form of love once it ceases to serve his self-image alone.

Act Four — Dawn, Anitra, and a Stage of New Masks

Morning Mood opens with a pentatonic melody in E major, set in a tranquil 6/8. The flute presents the phrase and the oboe answers, while strings create a softly pulsing surface. The exchange between woodwinds resembles a call travelling across space. As instruments and dynamic weight are added, light seems to acquire physical presence; the intensity then recedes, and the opening purity returns transformed.

Collective imagination often hears this music as an image of Norwegian nature. Ibsen’s stage direction places the dawn among acacias and palms on the North African coast. The discrepancy does not invalidate the sense of landscape. It reminds us that Grieg is creating above all a state of awakening, not a geographical map. The orchestral serenity even acquires a fine thread of irony when joined to Peer, who wakes in a tree while defending himself from monkeys.

The Thief and the Receiver abruptly changes the atmosphere. Short phrases, angular accents, and theatrical economy summon two comic-grotesque figures without extended development. In Arabian Dance, chorus, percussion, repeated rhythmic patterns, and brilliant orchestral colours construct the European fantasy of a spectacular, sensual “East.”

Anitra’s Dance is subtler. The strings move lightly and the triangle adds a cool gleam. Short phrases, pauses, and elastic shifts of emphasis create a dance that approaches and withdraws. Seduction does not depend on orchestral weight: it grows from precision, expectancy, and the sense that Anitra fully controls the scene’s time.

Peer’s Serenade exposes the other side of the episode. He assumes the mask of lover and exotic prophet, but the music allows us to hear the theatricality of his self-presentation. Anitra is not taken in by his performance. When she abandons him, her action strips bare the distance between the role he played and his actual position.

Solveig’s Song opens one of the drama’s most important fissures in time. Its simple strophic vocal line, gentle shifts between shade and light, and lullaby quality bring a cyclical time onto the stage. Seasons may pass; return remains possible. Heard within the complete act, Solveig is more than a lyrical respite. Her voice interrupts the succession of masks and recalls the identity Peer left unfinished.

Act Five — The Storm of Return and the Music of Recognition

The Prelude Peer Gynt’s Return Home (Stormy Evening on the Sea) begins with restless orchestral motion. Strings generate waves of energy, woodwinds pierce the texture, and brass intensify the sense of danger. The storm is both a real theatrical event and the collapse of Peer’s confidence that he can direct every journey.

In The Shipwreck, music compresses catastrophe into a short episode. Theatrical function demands immediacy: this is no large-scale symphonic seascape, but a violent transition that casts Peer from the world of possessions and travel into a bare struggle for survival. His refusal to save the cook prevents any easy moral account of his return.

In the Night Scene, the past acquires voices and shadows. The orchestra works through fragments, dark timbres, sudden apparitions, and silences. It needs no new grand theme, because the dramatic substance lies in disintegration: Peer meets everything he never lived fully enough to give complete form.

The Pentecost Hymn introduces a collective human voice where the hero had remained enclosed within his reckoning. From that voice, the drama leads to Solveig’s Lullaby. Melodic simplicity and quiet repetition offer no philosophical refutation of the Button Moulder. They offer Peer a place within another person’s memory.

The final listening must hold two contrary experiences together. The music subsides as if the homecoming were complete; the stage keeps judgement open. Solveig’s voice can sound like salvation, mercy, or the most beautiful of the stories in which Peer has hidden. The ending draws its power from our inability to choose one interpretation with certainty.

The following filmed production presents Peer Gynt as a narrative ballet, choreographed by Ben Stevenson with Grieg’s music arranged by John Lanchbery. It is not a reconstruction of the complete 1876 incidental music, but it offers a coherent theatrical reading of Peer’s wandering, his successive masks, and his return.

Watch the complete production on YouTube

The Incidental Music as a Second Narrator

Grieg does not treat music as a continuous symphonic background. He uses it as a second narrator who knows when to describe, when to contradict the image, and when to leave speech alone. This function explains the enormous variation in the numbers’ length. Complete pieces stand beside transitions of only a few seconds, scene-change cues, dances adaptable to stage movement, and music continuing beneath dialogue.

Voices are essential. The troll chorus turns In the Hall of the Mountain King from an orchestral crescendo into a scene of collective violence. Arabian Dance acquires ritual and spectacle. Solveig’s singing connects the hut with places where she is not physically present. The Pentecost Hymn brings the community into Peer’s loneliest night.

The placement of sound matters just as much. Music onstage, offstage, or heard at a distance creates different levels of reality. The bells that dissolve the trolls’ world belong to a human realm that can be heard but not seen. Solveig’s voice often functions as an acoustic memory. The orchestra does more than join episodes; it discloses relationships the characters themselves cannot see.

This architecture explains why the complete incidental music cannot be judged by the same criteria as a symphony. Interruption, repetition, and practical adaptability belong to the genre. Grieg wrote for precise entrances, movements, and lines of speech. The suites gained their freedom later, when he selected and reshaped numbers to function without a stage.

The Norwegian Element: Dances, Sounds, and Invention

Peer Gynt became so closely associated with Norwegian musical identity that the entire score can easily be mistaken for a collection of arranged folk tunes. That picture needs correction. Grieg knew the rhythms, modal inflections, and timbres of folk tradition profoundly, yet insisted that the music belonging to Peer Gynt should be original.

Source-critical research has uncovered a revealing episode. Some productions used the Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, and Bridal Procession Passes, from Scenes from Folk Life, Op. 19. These additions answered practical theatrical needs; they were never permanent parts of the original score. In an 1892 letter, Grieg rejected the inclusion of one of the Norwegian Dances precisely because its theme came from a folk melody. For him, the “Norwegian” could emerge from the manner of composition without requiring direct quotation.

The halling and springar of Act One demonstrate this process. Local identity resides in rhythmic behaviour, asymmetrical phrasing, the relationship between music and the dancing body, and the distinctive sound of the Hardanger fiddle. Grieg does not display a folk object in a symphonic showcase. He composes a living social space.

The Norwegian element also acquires an ironic dimension. The trolls’ world is more than dark folklore. It distorts ideas of self-sufficiency, national particularity, and closed identity. The score can sound thrillingly “northern” while satirising complacent isolation. Grieg thus serves Ibsen’s double vision: love for Norway’s landscape and language, joined to a sharp critique of the myths a society creates about itself.

The Work’s Imagined “East”

Act Four takes Peer to North Africa and Egypt. In nineteenth-century European theatre, these places often merged into a single imagined “East”: a realm of luxury, sensuality, danger, and irrationality. Grieg’s music uses conventions familiar to his audience—percussion, repeated rhythmic figures, chromatic ornament, choral brilliance, and light dance textures—without offering an ethnographic representation of any particular Arab tradition.

From a present-day perspective, this distinction is essential. Anitra and the tribe surrounding Peer are seen through the eyes of two European creators and through the conventions of their time. “Exoticism” describes the music’s operation more accurately than any general claim to “Eastern authenticity.”

The theatrical irony adds another layer. Peer enters already disguised and eager to perform the prophet. He sees Anitra through his private scenario, just as he once saw the Woman in Green as a princess. The act’s exotic world is therefore also an extension of his fantasy: one more stage on which he imagines himself the protagonist.

Morning Mood creatively complicates that picture. Its pentatonic melody and pastoral manner do not specify a geographical location with precision. They generate atmosphere. The piece could therefore detach so easily from its North African setting and become associated with imagined Norwegian landscapes. The same music can illuminate acacias, palms, or fjords because its true subject is the experience of dawn.

From Incidental Music to the Two Orchestral Suites

Creating the suites involved more than transferring eight excerpts from theatre to concert hall. Grieg revised orchestration, reworked endings, removed voices, and established new sequences. Each suite acquired its own dramatic curve, independent of the play’s chronology.

Suite No. 1, Op. 46 contains:

  1. Morning Mood

  2. The Death of Åse

  3. Anitra’s Dance

  4. In the Hall of the Mountain King

The sequence travels from light to grief, from subtle seduction to manic climax. In the play, the four numbers belong to three separate acts and do not follow this chronology. The concert version creates a new narrative through contrasting moods.

Suite No. 2, Op. 55 contains:

  1. The Abduction of the Bride (Ingrid’s Lament)

  2. Arabian Dance

  3. Peer Gynt’s Return Home (Stormy Evening on the Coast)

  4. Solveig’s Song

Here the curve leads from Peer’s first great flight to exotic self-staging, from the storm of return to the voice that waited. The quiet close does not reproduce Ibsen’s ambiguous ending, but it does offer a concert-hall sense of homecoming.

The transformation brought both loss and gain. Without the troll chorus, In the Hall of the Mountain King becomes a purer orchestral construction. Without the ridiculous Peer in his tree, Morning Mood loses its dramatic irony and gains universality. Without Anitra’s words, her dance sounds like an elegant miniature. The suites are not impoverished versions of the incidental music. They are different works, best heard with an awareness of what they left behind.

💡 Musical Insight

The Pages That Had to Be Cut

Early in 1893, inside the C. F. Peters printing works in Leipzig, the Second Peer Gynt Suite already existed on paper. It had not yet assumed the form we know today. After Solveig’s Song came a fifth movement: Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter.

The path to that edition had begun two years earlier. In 1891, Grieg completed and conducted an initial four-movement version, in which the dance stood second. His publisher, Max Abraham, considered the work too short and requested another movement. Grieg added Arabian Dance, moved the Mountain King’s daughter to the end, and allowed the five-movement edition to proceed.

On 7 February 1893, Grieg conducted the Suite in Leipzig. He might have regarded it as finished: the orchestra had played it, the audience had heard it, and the score had been printed. Something, however, in the succession of the final two movements continued to trouble him.

Solveig’s Song ended slowly, like a distant voice that had never ceased waiting. Then came the troll-realm dance—lively, grotesque, and wholly theatrical. The new climax changed the meaning of the entire journey. The Suite no longer closed by returning towards Solveig; it ended with one final leap back into the Mountain King’s spectacle.

Twelve days after the concert, Grieg wrote to his friend Julius Röntgen. His decision was now clear: the Suite had to end quietly, with the song in A minor. The Mountain King’s daughter belonged to the theatre, not the concert hall.

The problem was physical. This was no longer a manuscript that could simply be amended or a new instruction sent to the engraver. Orchestral scores of the five-movement version had already been printed. The publisher adopted the most literal solution: it removed the pages of the fifth movement from the finished copies. In the new two- and four-hand piano editions issued in February and March, the dance had already vanished.

This was how the definitive Second Suite emerged. The story is more than an eccentric detail of publishing history. It shows how deeply Grieg considered the memory left by the final sound. The fifth movement was effective, colourful, and well liked. It still had to go, because it spoke the last word in the wrong voice.

In the copies of that first edition, the Suite’s ending was not rewritten. It was restored with a pair of scissors.

🔎 Explore the Work

The complete incidental music, the two concert suites, and the individual excerpts offer different entrances into the world of Peer Gynt. This Guide serves as the central reference point for a series of analyses that will gradually be revised and expanded.

  • Peer Gynt — Suite No. 1, Op. 46: An existing analysis scheduled for revision under the new editorial standard. It considers Morning Mood, The Death of Åse, Anitra’s Dance, and In the Hall of the Mountain King as a new concert cycle.

  • Peer Gynt — Suite No. 2, Op. 55: An existing analysis also scheduled for a full revision. It follows the journey from Ingrid’s abduction to Solveig’s Song.

  • Morning Mood: Melodic economy, pentatonic writing, the orchestration of dawn, and the distance between the North African stage setting and the work’s later “Norwegian” reception.

  • In the Hall of the Mountain King: Repetition, acceleration, orchestral accumulation, and the original presence of the troll chorus.

  • Solveig’s Song: Strophic form, vocal simplicity, the time of waiting, and the song’s transformation into dramatic memory.

  • Peer Gynt — Identity, Flight, and Return: An independent reflective reading of Peer, the Bøyg, the Button Moulder, and the ambiguous final meeting with Solveig.

This section will be updated as the two existing analyses are revised and the new articles are published.

🎧 Listening Guide

The fullest encounter with Peer Gynt begins when we listen beyond the two Suites and seek out a recording of the incidental music with voices and chorus.

  • Begin at the wedding: Hear how the halling and springar create social space and physical movement. Notice the uneven accents and the distinctive timbre of the Hardanger fiddle where one is used.

  • Follow Ingrid after the abduction: In the Prelude to Act Two, distinguish the episode’s agitation from the lamenting line that expresses its consequences.

  • Measure the accumulation in the Mountain King’s hall: The main theme changes very little. Notice how increasing tempo, dynamics, register, and orchestral layers create the climax.

  • Hear the complete version with chorus: The trolls’ voices turn a famous orchestral showpiece into a threatening theatrical crowd.

  • Compare the trolls with the Bøyg: In the first scene, danger grows increasingly solid; in the second, it remains formless. Hear how the orchestra replaces escalation with hesitation and uncertainty.

  • Stay with the austerity of The Death of Åse: Follow the string phrases and the silences between them. Emotion arises from restraint, not symphonic grandeur.

  • Place Morning Mood in its true scene: Imagine acacias, palms, and Peer in the tree. Knowledge of the theatrical setting adds irony without diminishing the music’s serenity.

  • Distinguish the two Act Four dances: Arabian Dance is collective and spectacular; Anitra’s Dance is delicate, controlled, and filled with pauses.

  • Trace Solveig’s returns: Hear her Act Four song, the voice from the hut, and the final lullaby as three stages of the same acoustic memory.

  • Compare the drama’s ending with the close of Suite No. 2: Both arrive at Solveig, but the theatre leaves the Button Moulder waiting. The Suite offers a clearer concert-hall repose.

🎶 Further Listening

The following recordings illuminate different aspects of the score: the complete theatrical experience, the clarity of the restored music, and the spatial function of voices, folk instruments, and orchestra.

  • Ole Kristian Ruud — Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Choir, and soloists (BIS): The most extensive theatrical account in this selection, including Norwegian speech, song, and music. The performers’ familiarity with the language, dance rhythms, and Grieg’s idiom helps the listener hear the score as drama rather than an enlarged collection of orchestral excerpts.

  • Herbert Blomstedt — San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus; Mary-Anne Häggander, Wendy White, Urban Malmberg (Decca): A compact presentation of the critical edition, lasting approximately 73 minutes. Transparent orchestral writing, carefully integrated voices, and a lucid dramatic arc make this particularly suitable for a first complete listening.

  • Bjarte Engeset — Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Malmö Chamber Choir, children’s choir, soloists, and actors (Naxos): A production with a strong sense of theatrical space. Placing actors, chorus, and folk musicians on and behind the stage reveals how Grieg uses distance and direction of sound as dramatic resources.

📚 Further Reading

  • Finn Benestad & Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe — Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist: The fundamental large-scale biographical and work-based study of Grieg. It is especially valuable for the genesis of Peer Gynt, the correspondence, the theatrical productions, and the composer’s relationship with his publishers.

  • Daniel M. Grimley — Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity: A study of the connections among music, landscape, and the formation of Norwegian cultural identity. It supplies the context needed to move beyond a simple identification of Grieg with “picturesque” images of nature.

  • Toril Moi — Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy: Moi places Ibsen within the transition to modernity and clarifies why Peer’s instability, multiple masks, and unresolved ending extend beyond the frame of a Romantic fairy tale.

  • Daniel M. Grimley — “In the Mood: Peer Gynt and the Affective Landscapes of Grieg’s Stemninger, Op. 73”: A specialised article on mood and landscape in Grieg’s music. Its point of departure in Morning Mood illuminates the difference between the actual stage location and the images produced by the music’s later reception.

  • Rune J. Andersen — “An ‘Authentic’ Peer Gynt Music? A Source-Critical Study of Edvard Grieg’s Opus 23”: A concise account of the research that restored the 26 musical numbers. Andersen explains why the 1908 edition did not represent the whole original score and how authentic numbers were distinguished from later production additions.

🔗 Related Works

  • Felix Mendelssohn — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: Incidental music that acquired a powerful independent concert life. Its combination of fairy-tale theatre, brief stage numbers, and symphonic orchestration offers a fruitful parallel to Peer Gynt.

  • Georges Bizet — L’Arlésienne: Music for Alphonse Daudet’s drama, now known chiefly through two orchestral suites. As in Grieg, the move from stage to concert hall changed both the sequence and function of the excerpts.

  • Edvard Grieg — Sigurd Jorsalfar, Op. 22 / Suite, Op. 56: Another major encounter between Grieg and Norwegian historical theatre. The later suite demonstrates a different approach to selecting and reshaping incidental music for concert use.

  • Jean Sibelius — Pelléas et Mélisande, Op. 46: Incidental music in which brief orchestral pieces create psychological space, atmosphere, and suggestion. The concert suite preserves the theatre’s quiet tension even without the text.

  • Carl Nielsen — Aladdin, Op. 34: Extensive incidental music combining theatrical function, dance, and European exotic conventions. It offers a useful comparative context for the “East” of Peer Gynt’s fourth act.

🎼 Closing Reflection

Peer crossed mountains, deserts, and seas, yet the largest space in the drama fits inside a hut. What awaits him there is no proof that he was ever great, but a voice remembering who he might have become.

The music falls quiet. The question stays awake.

📖 References & Sources

This Guide draws on the restored critical score of the 26 musical numbers, Ibsen’s dramatic poem, the author’s and composer’s correspondence, and source-critical studies of the work’s different theatrical and published forms. Its dramatic and aesthetic interpretation is informed by scholarship on Ibsen, Norwegian identity, musical landscape, and nineteenth-century European exoticism. Particular attention has been paid to distinguishing the original incidental music from later production additions and from the two concert suites.

Scores and Critical Editions

  • Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt, Op. 23. In Edvard Grieg Complete Works, Vol. 18: Dramatic Music — Peer Gynt. Edited by Finn Benestad. Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1988.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt Suites Nos. 1 and 2, Opp. 46 and 55. Urtext edition. Edited by Ernst-Günter Heinemann and Einar Steen-Nøkleberg. Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2015.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt, Op. 23. First posthumous complete edition, edited by Johan Halvorsen. Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1908.

Primary Sources

  • Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem. 1867.

  • Ibsen, Henrik. Letter to Edvard Grieg, 23 January 1874.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Letter to Johan Hennum, 14 December 1875.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Letter to Frants Beyer, 27 August 1874.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Letter to Julius Röntgen, 19 February 1893.

  • Grieg, Edvard. Letters to Max Abraham and C. F. Peters concerning the incidental music and the two Suites.

Secondary Sources

  • Andersen, Rune J. “An ‘Authentic’ Peer Gynt Music? A Source-Critical Study of Edvard Grieg’s Opus 23 — Some Aspects.” International Edvard Grieg Society, 2011.

  • Benestad, Finn, and Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe. Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist. Translated by William H. Halverson and Leland B. Sateren. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

  • Grimley, Daniel M. Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006.

  • Grimley, Daniel M. “‘In the Mood’: Peer Gynt and the Affective Landscapes of Grieg’s Stemninger, Op. 73.” 19th-Century Music 40, no. 2 (2016): 106–130.

  • Moi, Toril. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Digital Resources

  • International Edvard Grieg Society — source-critical studies and materials relating to Grieg.

  • Henrik Ibsens skrifter, University of Oslo — digital critical edition, correspondence, and documentary material on Ibsen’s work.

  • IMSLP — digitised historical scores and listings of the musical numbers in different editions of Peer Gynt.

  • G. Henle Verlag — introduction to the Urtext edition of the two Suites and documentation of their editorial history.

  • Naxos and BIS Records — recording data, casts, and the sequence of numbers in the complete incidental music.