Edvard Grieg - Peer Gynt, Suite No. 2, Op. 55 (Analysis)

Solveig waiting beside a moonlit Norwegian fjord, evoking memory and return in Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 2.
From lament and theatrical splendour to the storm of homecoming, Suite No. 2 finally reaches Solveig: the voice that preserved memory when everything else had fallen away.

Peer Gynt Suite No. 2 begins with an act of violence and ends with a voice that seems to arrive from an immeasurable distance. Between them lie the bright theatre of Peer’s self-invention and a sea powerful enough to strip that theatre away. The Suite travels less from scene to scene than from action into memory: from abduction and lament to dance, from dance to storm, and at last to Solveig.

Its music comes from the extensive score Grieg composed in 1874–75 for the first staging of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem. The production opened in Christiania, now Oslo, on 24 February 1876. Grieg’s original music encompassed songs, dances, choruses, transitions, and short cues designed to fit speech and changing stage action. When he revisited the score for the concert hall, he did not attempt a miniature retelling of the whole drama. He chose episodes whose new order could sustain an independent dramatic trajectory.

The Suite itself did not reach its final shape in a single step. An initial four-movement form had been performed in 1891. The version printed in January 1893, however, also contained the Dance of the Mountain King’s Daughter. Following a Leipzig performance on 7 February, Grieg decided to remove it, and in March he authorised the four-movement design known today. This was more than a minor editorial adjustment. The deletion protected the passage from the homeward storm into Solveig’s Song, allowing the entire work to come to rest in the expressive world of the human voice.

The sequence follows a concert logic rather than the chronology of Ibsen’s play. Ingrid’s abduction belongs to the opening part of the drama. The Arabian Dance and Solveig’s song come from Act Four, whereas Peer’s storm-bound return occurs in Act Five. Grieg therefore places Solveig after the storm, transforming what had been a distant song within the theatre into the Suite’s final place of arrival.

This rearrangement also changes the way Peer is perceived. In the first movement, the consequences of his conduct are heard through Ingrid’s rage and grief. In the Arabian Dance, he places himself at the centre of another brilliant self-created spectacle. The storm then destroys the illusion that he can remain master of every situation. When Solveig’s melody finally appears, Peer is no longer defined by his own restless motion. He exists within another person’s remembrance.

The orchestra makes this inward change audible. The Suite opens with violent attacks, abrupt metric contrasts, and sharply divided characters. It then rises into the high light of piccolo, flutes, and percussion, expands into a full symphonic tempest, and withdraws at the end towards harp, muted strings, and an almost weightless melodic line. Each movement alters not only the landscape, but the distance from which that landscape is heard.

Suite No. 2 is therefore far more than the less familiar companion to Suite No. 1. The first collection offers four immediately recognisable worlds and ends in grotesque orchestral frenzy. The second is more concerned with aftermath: what remains after flight, after spectacle, after the storm. Its surface can be dazzling, but its deepest motion is inward. As the end approaches, the orchestra gradually ceases to describe and begins to remember.


Movements / Structure

I. The Abduction of the Bride – Ingrid’s Lament

In G minor, the opening movement sets a furious 2/4 Allegro against an Andante doloroso in 3/4. The violent momentum of the abduction and Ingrid’s broad lament return in alternation, remaining emotionally irreconcilable. The movement ends quietly, allowing grief rather than Peer’s escape to determine the final perspective.

II. Arabian Dance

This Allegretto vivace in C major and 4/4 creates a bright theatrical world from piccolo, flutes, percussion, and quick recurring phrases. Its clear ternary design moves between agile dance and more expansive lyricism without losing the sense of spectacle. The women’s voices of the original stage scene are absent from the Suite, yet the orchestra continues to suggest collective movement, ceremony, and glittering display.

III. Peer Gynt’s Homecoming – Stormy Evening on the Sea

The Allegro agitato in F-sharp minor and 3/8 forms the symphonic centre of gravity. Trembling strings, chromatic lines, cutting wind figures, and eruptions from brass and percussion turn the journey home into a struggle for survival. A specially fashioned coda reaches the dominant of A minor and leads attacca into the finale.

IV. Solveig’s Song

The instrumental version of Solveig’s song alternates an Andante in A minor with an Allegretto tranquillamente in A major. Reduced orchestral forces, harp, and muted strings create a private, almost immaterial space. Sorrow and brighter recollection coexist, closing the Suite in tenderness, expectancy, and inward continuity.


Musical Analysis

I. The Abduction of the Bride – Two Kinds of Time

The first movement erupts without preparation. Its Allegro furioso is driven by terse rhythmic attacks, racing string figures, and forceful orchestral contrasts. G minor supplies a dark centre, but the deeper instability comes from the way phrases are launched and broken off. The music seems to move more quickly than thought, like an action completed before its consequences can be understood.

In Ibsen’s drama, Peer has carried Ingrid away from her wedding and soon abandons her. Grieg does not make the episode revolve around a heroic fugitive. The hard chords and headlong motion possess an unsettled, almost panicked quality. The abduction is heard as rupture, not as an adventure asking for admiration.

The arrival of the Andante doloroso transforms the experience of time. The metre changes to 3/4, the pace recedes, and the orchestral texture opens around a broad grieving line. Where the first material had advanced in abrupt surges, Ingrid’s music breathes in longer arcs. Attention shifts from the act itself to the person left to bear it.

This is more than a contrast of tempo. The two episodes inhabit different psychological scales. The dense movement and strong dynamics of the Allegro press relentlessly forward. In the Andante, suspensions, descending phrases, and harmonic delay allow every tone to carry more weight. The listener can recognise the change as a sudden shift of viewpoint: the scene stops following Peer and turns towards Ingrid.

When the furious material returns, it cannot erase what has been heard. Its repetition sounds harsher because the lament has exposed the human cost of Peer’s flight. Grieg keeps the two worlds apart and lets their alternation become the argument of the form. One belongs to restless movement; the other to the time of injury, which cannot simply be hurried past.

The final return of the Andante is decisive. The movement closes with Ingrid’s voice receding, rather than with the violence that began it. Its last impression is not restoration, but an unresolved phrase. Peer has already gone, while the music remains where the shadow of his action fell.


II. Arabian Dance – The Brilliance of an Invented World

After the darkness of the opening movement, the Arabian Dance appears like a stage suddenly flooded with light. Piccolo and flutes move in the upper range, while tambourine, triangle, and the rest of the percussion give the pulse a clear edge. C major strengthens the atmosphere of brightness and display. Nothing feels heavy; every sound seems designed to move, gleam, and disappear.

The music was written for Act Four, where Peer is in North Africa presenting himself as a prophet. Its language belongs to the conventions of nineteenth-century European theatrical orientalism, rather than to any faithful representation of Arab musical practice. Reiterated rhythms, percussion, agile woodwind lines, and chromatic ornaments construct an image of elsewhere as the European stage imagined it. Recognising that historical distance allows the music’s attraction to be heard without mistaking theatrical convention for ethnographic authenticity.

The original scene involved women’s voices and the presence of Anitra and her companions. In the concert suite, words and bodies have vanished. The orchestra must preserve the stage’s physical energy: short phrases pass rapidly among instruments, percussion accents suggest the dancers’ movements, and the high woodwind writing lends the scene an almost weightless radiance.

The form is lucid and symmetrical. The principal section establishes the quick dance character; the middle broadens the phrase and briefly softens the energy. When the opening returns, its brightness has acquired the faint shadow of that lyrical contrast. The spectacle remains seductive and slightly artificial, like a scene fully aware of its power to impress.

The connection with Peer runs deeper than geography. He is most comfortable when life can be turned into performance and he can occupy its centre. The music participates in that fantasy, yet its elegant repetitions also suggest fragility. This world glitters only for as long as the dance continues. It has neither the weight of memory nor the endurance of a genuine relationship.

Listen especially to the way the percussion avoids imposing a heavy symphonic tread. Its sounds are flashes around the phrases, keeping the surface in motion. Grieg’s skill lies in the lightness of the construction: numerous colours pass before the ear, but the texture never loses transparency. The stage is crowded, while air continues to circulate between its voices.


III. Peer Gynt’s Homecoming – When the Sea Takes Control

The third movement begins with motion that offers no secure ground. Its 3/8 metre, rapidly reiterated strings, and uneasy chromatic lines create a surface in constant change. F-sharp minor functions as a dark centre, yet the harmony is continually pressed by shifts, diminished chords, and sharp tonal friction. The sea is not presented as scenery. It becomes the state of the music itself.

In Act Five, an ageing Peer is returning to Norway after decades of wandering. His ship meets a storm and is wrecked. The scene carries a severe dramatic irony. A man who has spent his life altering identities and locations is finally caught inside a force he cannot turn into another flattering story about himself. The orchestra gradually removes every impression of mastery.

The strings supply continuous agitation, but the true scale of the tempest emerges as the other orchestral groups enter. Woodwinds cut through with short, penetrating lines. Brass statements rise above the surface like massive waves. Percussion enlarges each climax, turning rhythmic instability into physical shock. Orchestration does more than increase volume; it repeatedly changes the dimensions of the threat.

Grieg shapes the storm in waves. Intensity rises, briefly recedes, and returns with greater density. These moments of comparative release are essential. Without them, the music would soon reach its loudest point and have nowhere to go. Each retreat instead creates a fragile hope of recovery, making the next impact feel still more inevitable.

Individual lines occasionally rise through the general turbulence and immediately vanish. They can be followed like objects that appear for a moment on the crest of a wave. A melody’s inability to retain a stable position is central to the movement’s force. The music produces material, engulfs it, and replaces it before it can become a dependable point of reference.

Near the end, the storm does not simply stop. Its energy drains away while the music searches for a new direction. Grieg added a coda whose concert function differs from the original theatrical sequence. The harmony turns towards the dominant of A minor, preparing Solveig’s melody without a break. The join is technically precise, but its effect is immediately human: through the remains of the storm, a place of memory begins to emerge.

The attacca changes the meaning of both movements. The tempest ceases to be a self-contained orchestral showpiece and becomes the threshold of homecoming. Solveig’s song does not feel like an unrelated new picture. It sounds like something that had always existed behind the noise, waiting to become audible again.


IV. Solveig’s Song – Memory as a Place of Return

After the full orchestral force of the storm, Solveig’s Song radically alters the scale. The texture becomes delicate, the harp takes on special prominence, and muted strings surround the melody with a calm, distant light. This does not feel like an ordinary scene change. It is a passage from the external world into a space where time is measured by waiting.

The opening Andante in A minor retains the character of song even without words. Its melody unfolds in clear, breathing phrases, with modest high points and gentle descents. The accompaniment avoids unnecessary density, leaving each turn of the line distinct. No knowledge of the text is required to sense that this music addresses someone who is absent.

The Allegretto tranquillamente moves into A major and lightly transforms the mood. Motion becomes freer, almost like the recollection of a dance or the return of spring. Major mode does not cancel the sorrow that preceded it. It illuminates sorrow from within, creating the double sense that expectation may be both consolation and trial.

The alternation between these tonal regions gives the movement its form. A minor is associated with absence and faithful waiting; A major opens a window towards hope and renewal. Because both states return, neither becomes absolute. Solveig sounds less like an emblem of motionless purity than a human being living through the recurring seasons of grief and hope.

In the incidental music, this is a vocal number from Act Four. Solveig sings of passing seasons and her faith in Peer’s return. It should not be confused with her final Act Five lullaby, when she holds the ageing Peer in her arms. By moving the earlier song to the end of the Suite, Grieg gives it something of the final encounter’s emotional weight while preserving the distinction between the two scenes.

The missing voice creates a subtle paradox. The melody keeps its vocal ancestry, but no specific words now confine its meaning. The instruments do not merely imitate a singer. They carry the line from an individual character into memory, allowing Solveig to exist at once as a person, a distant presence, and an inner voice.

The ending avoids a large symphonic conclusion. Dynamics recede, phrases become more fragile, and the orchestra leaves space around the final notes. We hear neither Peer’s triumphant return nor a conclusive resolution of Ibsen’s contradictions. What remains is quieter: the endurance of a presence that survived absence.


The Orchestra’s Dramaturgy – From Event to Memory

The four movements may be heard as four ways in which the orchestra organises human experience. In the abduction, sound is conflict: metres, groups, and characters collide. In the Arabian Dance, it becomes surface and spectacle. During the homecoming it turns into a force greater than the individual. In Solveig’s song, it remains as the medium of memory.

This evolution is expressed through the distribution of orchestral weight. The first movement depends on interruption and contrast. The second highlights high woodwinds and brief flashes of percussion. The third mobilises the entire orchestra and reaches the Suite’s greatest density. In the fourth, power is withdrawn and detail becomes more significant than mass.

The tonal journey runs from G minor to C major, then to F-sharp minor, and finally between A minor and A major. It is not a conventional symphonic plan that establishes unity through close tonal relationships. Its coherence is dramatic. Each region answers the preceding one with a new light, density, and relation between the individual and the surrounding world.

The most telling arc is a gradual alteration of distance. Ingrid stands before us in immediate conflict. The Arabian Dance is presented as spectacle. The storm surrounds the listener and abolishes the safety of observation. Solveig is heard from a space that cannot be precisely located. At the end, the greatest strength belongs not to what is closest, but to what endured at a distance.


The Voice without Words

Two movements are directly connected with women’s voices: the Arabian Dance originally involved singing, while Solveig’s Song is the instrumental form of a vocal number. Even the first movement, though not based on a song, shapes its lyrical section as human lament. The concert suite has removed the words, yet the memory of voice remains throughout.

It is present in the form of the phrases. Melodies breathe, rise, and recede in ways shaped by the singer’s body. Accompaniments leave space around the main line, while changes of timbre act like changes of utterance. Orchestration does not bury melody. It places it at a new psychological distance each time.

The disappearance of text gives the concert work greater autonomy, though it also removes some theatrical specificity. In the Arabian Dance, irony and the stage relationship with Peer become less immediate. In Solveig’s song, however, the lack of words broadens the expressive field: waiting no longer belongs to one character alone, but becomes recognisable as a shared human experience.

The Suite therefore ends with a melody that remembers having once been sung. The singer has withdrawn from the stage, but her breath continues through the instruments. Much of the ending’s emotion lies in that invisible presence: the orchestra does not give us Solveig’s words; it allows us to hear the space they opened.


💡 Musical Insight

The Tambourines That Had to Come onto the Stage

Imagine the setting in Act Four. Peer is far from Norway, surrounded by cushions, coffee, and pipes, dressed as a prophet and ready to believe yet another version of himself. Young women dance and sing around him. The scene must feel brilliant and alive, persuasive enough to carry the audience into another world — or, more exactly, into the “Orient” as a nineteenth-century European theatre imagined it.

Grieg already had an orchestra at his disposal. Piccolo and flutes could trace the brightest lines, strings could maintain quick motion, and percussion could define the dance pulse. Yet something would remain missing if all the rhythm stayed below the stage in the orchestra pit. The visible dance and the sound that propelled it would seem to belong to separate spaces.

Grieg’s solution was practical, simple, and intensely theatrical: each dancer was to carry her own tambourine. Rhythm would no longer emerge only from a fixed point in front of the stage. It would rise onto the stage itself, distributed among moving bodies and travelling with them.

One can almost picture the rehearsal. The dancers test their steps; the tambourines do not strike with machine-like uniformity, and their bright sounds spread through the space in tiny irregularities. One accent comes from the left, another from the centre, a third follows the turn of a figure. That natural unevenness gives the scene life. Rhythm acquires direction, distance, and a visible source.

The detail reveals Grieg as a composer of theatre, not merely a creator of beautiful orchestral colour. He considered where a sound was located, who produced it, and how it changed when the body creating it moved before the audience. The tambourine was not simply another timbre. It joined hearing to sight and made the dance appear to generate its own music.

In the concert suite, dancers and voices disappear. The listener sees only the orchestra, or sees nothing at all when hearing a recording. Yet the scene’s physical energy remains in the score: in the quick flashes of percussion, the light woodwind entries, and the way phrases seem to change position.

That may be why the Arabian Dance still evokes a stage alive with motion even when no one is dancing. Behind its orchestral elegance survives the memory of a straightforward theatrical idea: a line of dancers entering the light, each carrying rhythm in her own hands.

🎧 Listening Guide

Suite No. 2 becomes especially clear when the ear follows changes of time, distance, and orchestral weight. The landmarks below trace its larger movement from outward action to inward recollection.

  • The first break between 2/4 and 3/4: Notice how the rushing abduction music stops and makes room for Ingrid’s slower line. The metric change immediately alters the listener’s experience of time.
  • The final return of the lament: The movement chooses to end in the quiet grieving world rather than in its opening violence. That decision reveals whose perspective Grieg ultimately allows to remain.
  • The opening of the Arabian Dance: Compare the preceding G minor darkness with clear C major, high woodwinds, and bright percussion. The effect resembles stage lights being switched on at once.
  • The mobile flashes of percussion: Hear tambourine and triangle as points of movement rather than continuous accompaniment. Their brief appearances make the rhythmic surface glint.
  • The waves within the storm: Do not follow volume alone. Identify successive climaxes and partial retreats, then listen to the way each new brass or percussion entry enlarges the dimensions of danger.
  • The coda before Solveig: As the storm spends its force, the harmony begins to orient itself towards A minor. The attacca allows the song to emerge from the silence left by the sea.
  • The alternation of A minor and A major: This is not a simple transition from sadness to happiness. Hear the major section as a luminous memory within waiting, returning without erasing absence.
  • The vocal breath of an instrumental melody: Follow where each phrase rises, where it seems to breathe, and how the orchestra leaves space around it. The singer is absent, while the physical shape of singing remains.

🎶 Further Listening

These recordings offer contrasting balances of theatrical character, symphonic weight, and transparency. Comparison is particularly rewarding in the storm and in Solveig’s Song, where tempo, line, and the audibility of inner parts can reshape the entire final trajectory.

  • Herbert von Karajan — Berliner Philharmoniker, 1971 (Deutsche Grammophon): A richly symphonic reading, with deep strings, long dynamic arcs, and a powerful sense of orchestral space. The storm assumes monumental weight, while Solveig’s melody unfolds in sustained, warmly vocal phrases.
  • Vernon Handley — Ulster Orchestra, 1989 (Chandos): Theatrically alert and cleanly articulated, with close attention to contrasts between movements. The Arabian Dance retains lightness and rhythmic precision, while the tempest rises in clearly shaped waves without obscuring inner detail.
  • Bjarte Engeset — Malmö Symphony Orchestra, 2007 (Naxos): A transparent, balanced account closely connected with the complete incidental score and Norwegian performance tradition. It is especially valuable for analytical listening and for comparing the orchestral suite with the vocal numbers from which part of its material derives.

📚 Further Reading

Understanding Suite No. 2 draws together three histories: the composition of the incidental music, the editorial shaping of the concert work, and the cultural interpretation of its theatrical images. The following sources provide complementary routes into those subjects.

  • Finn Benestad & Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe — Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist: The major full-length biography, grounded in correspondence, diaries, and publication history. Its discussion of Peer Gynt follows the difficult theatrical collaboration, later revisions, and the afterlife of the two suites.
  • Daniel M. Grimley — Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity: A study of music, landscape, and Norwegian cultural identity that helps move beyond simplified ideas of picturesque description or national colour.
  • Ursula Kramer — “Grieg’s Peer Gynt and the Problem of Irony in Music”: A specialised examination of irony in the incidental score, particularly useful for the Arabian Dance and the relationship between orchestral attraction and Ibsen’s satire.
  • Edvard Grieg — Letters to Colleagues and Friends, edited by Finn Benestad: The correspondence illuminates the practical demands of theatrical production, dealings with publishers and conductors, and Grieg’s continuing reassessment of the music after early performances.

🔗 Related Works

Suite No. 2 belongs to a broader tradition of music that carries theatrical or literary material into the concert hall. These works demonstrate different ways in which an orchestra can condense action, preserve the memory of a voice, or transform scenic imagery into autonomous form.

  • Edvard Grieg — Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46: The first concert selection juxtaposes dawn, grief, dance, and grotesque pursuit. Its brighter and more immediate design brings the inward destination of Suite No. 2 into sharper focus.
  • Felix Mendelssohn — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 61: Theatre music with an enduring concert life, conveying character, magic, and dramatic change through exceptionally distinct orchestral colours.
  • Jean Sibelius — The Tempest, Suite No. 2, Op. 109 No. 3: A later northern meeting of theatre and orchestra, arranging maritime force, magic, and fragile lyrical memory into concise concert scenes.
  • Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — Scheherazade, Op. 35: A symphonic work shaped by nineteenth-century orientalism and a recurring narrative voice. The comparison reveals different relationships among exotic colour, storytelling, and orchestral virtuosity.
  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — The Tempest, Op. 18: A Shakespearean symphonic fantasy in which sea, conflict, and lyrical remembrance form one continuous dramatic arc rather than a sequence of separate scenes.

🎼 Closing Reflection

Peer moves through life by changing places, roles, and stories about himself. The Suite follows until the sea breaks apart his final certainty. Then, in the silence that remains, the one voice that never needed to change becomes audible.

Perhaps true homecoming begins when the noise of the journey falls away and we recognise what has been waiting for us inside memory.

📖 References & Sources

This revision draws on the first printed full score, the critical commentary to the Urtext edition, sources for the incidental music, and Grieg’s correspondence. Movement order, the publication changes of 1893, keys, metres, instrumentation, and the attacca link were checked directly against the score. Specialist studies and institutional music sources informed the discussion of dramaturgy, orientalism, and the role of voice, with a consistent distinction between the music’s original theatrical function and its later concert form.

Scores and Critical Editions

  • Grieg, Edvard. Zweite Orchestersuite aus der Musik zu “Peer Gynt”, Op. 55. First edition of the full score. Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1893, plate 7672.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Peer Gynt Suites, Op. 46 and Op. 55. Urtext edition. Edited by Ernst-Günter Heinemann. Munich: G. Henle Verlag.
  • Grieg, Edvard. Samlede verker, Vol. 12: Orkestersuiter. Edited by Finn Benestad. Frankfurt: C. F. Peters, 1985.

Primary Sources

  • Ibsen, Henrik. Peer Gynt. Dramatic poem, 1867; first staging with Grieg’s incidental music, 1876.
  • Ibsen, Henrik. Letter to Edvard Grieg, 23 January 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 & Dag Schjelderup-Ebbe. Edvard Grieg: The Man and the Artist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
  • Fog, Dan, Kirsti Grinde & 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 Interpretive Documentation

  • Karajan, Herbert von — Berliner Philharmoniker. Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites Nos. 1 & 2. Deutsche Grammophon, recorded 1971.
  • Handley, Vernon — Ulster Orchestra. Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites / Norwegian Dances. Chandos, recorded 1989.
  • Engeset, Bjarte — Malmö Symphony Orchestra. Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites / Orchestral Songs. Naxos 8.570236, 2007.

Digital Collections and Institutional Resources

  • Bergen Public Library — Grieg Collection: manuscripts, correspondence, and early editions.
  • Henrik Ibsens skrifter, University of Oslo: critical text, correspondence, and documentation of the early productions.
  • G. Henle Verlag: preface and critical commentary to the Urtext edition of the two Peer Gynt suites.
  • International Music Score Library Project: digitised first edition of the full score of Suite No. 2.
  • Los Angeles Philharmonic: programme notes on the incidental music and concert suites.
  • BBC Music Magazine / Classical-Music.com: historical note on the stage use of tambourines in the Arabian Dance.