Peer Gynt: a play by Henrik Ibsen with music by Edvard Grieg
‘Dear Mr Grieg: I am writing to you in connection with a plan that I propose to implement, and in which I wish to invite your participation.’ The tone is impeccably formal and business-like, but the letter sent in January 1874 by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen to his compatriot Edvard Grieg planted the seed for one of the most consequential artistic collaborations of the 19th century. The first ever staging of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt was being mooted, and Ibsen wanted Grieg to write the incidental music which he envisaged accompanying the action. ‘Please let me know if you are willing to undertake this task,’ Ibsen’s letter ended.
Grieg hesitated, not least because his first impressions of Ibsen had not been entirely positive. The pair initially met in Rome nine years earlier, when Grieg noted that Ibsen had been ‘dead drunk’ at a party. A few months later, the playwright was in dubiously high spirits again, demanding that the chairs be cleared for dancing and carousal after a chamber music recital. ‘A few glasses of Foglietti had gone to his head,’ Grieg recorded. It was ‘strange’, he thought, that ‘so great a man can be so tactless and in this one area so obtuse’.
Soon enough, however, Grieg replied to Ibsen in a ‘friendly’ fashion – swayed, as he later acknowledged, by a generous half-share in the fee payable for the new production. The plan was for Grieg to write the Peer Gynt music in the summer of 1874, with the play’s premiere tentatively scheduled for early 1875.
What is Peer Gynt about?
But from the outset Grieg found the project tricky. ‘The work on Peer Gynt is proceeding very slowly, there is no possibility that I can finish it by autumn,’ he wrote on 27 August. ‘It is a terribly difficult play for which to write music.’
The difficulties Grieg encountered came primarily from the multi-faceted nature of Ibsen’s play, and its blurring of the distinction between reality and the world of dreams and the subconscious. Originally published in 1867 as a ‘dramatic poem’ designed for reading rather than staging, Peer Gynt centres on the exploits of the ruinously self-seeking, braggadocious Peer, a character from folklore.
Following Peer on his vertiginously unpredictable journeys through Morocco, Egypt and Norway – in the course of which he abducts a bride, trades slaves, and is hailed as ‘Emperor of the Self’ in a madhouse – Ibsen’s drama abounds in startling, proto-cinematic scene-shifts and sharp satire of the Norwegian national character. The text also bristles with a sense of existential insecurity fuelled by the central character’s dangerously impulsive behaviour. Ibsen himself at one point called the play ‘wild and formless, written recklessly and without regard to consequences’. All of which, Grieg noted, made it the ‘most unmusical of all subjects’.
Grieg's reservations about the play... and his score
Ibsen had, though, plenty of ideas of his own for the music. For the Act I wedding, he told Grieg, a ‘special dance melody’ should be written; the herd girls’ scene should have ‘devilry’ in it; and Peer’s encounter with the gnome-like Bøyg required that ‘bird calls must be sung, and church bells and hymns must be heard in the distance’. Grieg accepted some of these suggestions, but continued to struggle with the project as a whole. There was, he said, ‘much more music than I had ever dreamed of’, and ‘it doesn’t interest me’.
By July 1875, however, he had completed the 26 numbers which would accompany the action of Peer Gynt, and forwarded the score to the Christiania Theatre (in present-day Oslo), where the play would be presented. Ibsen was delighted. ‘That you yourself will be present for the music rehearsals is, naturally, a foregone conclusion’, he wrote. Having previously expressed concerns about the theatre’s orchestra, Grieg would certainly have wanted to oversee preparations. Instead, a heavy blow intervened: within three months, both of Grieg’s parents died in Bergen. In mourning, he felt unable to go to Christiania for either the rehearsals or the opening night performance.
Peer Gynt: a triumphant premiere, despite Grieg's criticisms
He also continued to have reservations about the score – too much of it, he reckoned, skated on ‘the thin ice of caricature’, and ‘only in a few places is the music just music’. But the premiere, on 24 February 1876, was wildly successful, and critics immediately highlighted the vital contribution Grieg’s music made to Ibsen’s visceral drama. ‘In totality’, one wrote, Grieg’s contribution was ‘a most exceptional piece of work’, evincing ‘a special gift as a dramatic composer’. There was, the review continued, ‘a bold originality in the whole musical treatment’.
Grieg himself had worried that his music too slavishly mimicked the fine detail of Ibsen’s text, and was too ‘programmatic’ in nature. He famously castigated the orgiastic ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, subsequently one of the score’s best-known numbers, for all-too-accurately mirroring Ibsen’s warts-and-all depiction of the unpleasantly self-serving monarch. ‘Something that I literally can’t bear listening to’, is how he described the piece, ‘because it absolutely reeks of cow-pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism and trollish self-satisfaction’.
But it was precisely this ability to render evocatively nuances of character, scene and situation that caught the imagination of Grieg’s early listeners. ‘Anitra’s Dance’, ‘Solveig’s Song’ and ‘Peer Gynt’s Serenade’ also quickly became popular, and were published in piano arrangements. Grieg finally saw the Christiania production of Peer Gynt in November 1876, when the audience gave him a ‘rapturous’ ovation. It ran for 38 performances, before being halted by a fire which almost totally destroyed the theatre in January 1877.
Pee Gynt: from incidental music to two Suites
But that was not the end of the story. Ten years later, in 1886, when Peer Gynt was staged in an abbreviated version in Copenhagen – the Christiania premiere lasted five hours – Grieg took the opportunity of thoroughly revising the music. It was, he said, ‘almost totally reconceptualised and reorchestrated’, and four new movements were added. ‘I am bombarded by copyists and music directors who grab the pages from me one by one as soon as I’ve completed them’. This time, Grieg was also present at rehearsals, conducting, coaching singers, directing actors and generally enjoying himself enormously. ‘The music was a great success,’ he reported, and the play’s satiric content emerged in even sharper profile than in Christiania.
With the Peer Gynt music now pleasingly refurbished, Grieg finally felt able to let some of it be published. In 1888, he took four movements – ‘Morning Mood’, ‘The Death of Åse’, ‘Anitra’s Dance’, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ – and published them as his Op. 46. The Suite proved ragingly popular in Norway and beyond. At the London premiere, something close to pandemonium erupted – ‘a jubilant demonstration that was like a pack of animals!’, Grieg recorded. A further Suite (Op. 55) of four numbers – ‘The Abduction of the Bride’, ‘Arabian Dance’, ‘Peer Gynt’s Homecoming’, ‘Solveig’s Song’ – followed in 1893, and proved equally successful.
Peer Gynt: the full score is finally published
Partly because the two Suites slaked the appetite of concert-goers for Peer Gynt’s music, and partly because Grieg continued tinkering with the piece, the full score was never published in his lifetime. The year after his death in 1907, however, an edition purporting to be complete was printed. But several numbers were missing, and it was not until 1988 that a definitive score was published. This finally enabled conductors to examine the Peer Gynt music in its entirety, and excellent recordings of it have been made since, with excerpts from Ibsen’s play spoken by actors.
Where the two Suites had previously given only a partial impression of the Peer Gynt music, these recordings enabled the totality and sweep of Grieg’s achievement to be fully appreciated. ‘To write music depicting Norwegian scenery, the life of the people, the country’s history, and folk poetry,’ Grieg commented in 1875, ‘appears to me to be a calling in which I feel I could achieve something.’ These objectives were handsomely realised in Peer Gynt, which alongside other works by Grieg – the Piano Concerto and Lyric Pieces, in particular – earned Norway an international reputation it had never had before in classical music. ‘It was through his art that music lovers all over the world got their first glimpse of Norway’s indigenous culture,’ as one biographer puts it.
Grieg and Ibsen... and enduring friendship
And what of Grieg’s relationship with Ibsen in the post-Peer Gynt period? For a while it looked as though further joint projects might be possible. Ibsen initially offered to turn an early play of his, Olaf Liljekrans, into an opera libretto for Grieg, but nothing came of it. Years later, in 1893, he made a similar offer to adapt another play, The Vikings at Helgeland, but this too was aborted. And yet the bonds of friendship forged in creating Peer Gynt together lasted. When Ibsen died in 1906, aged 78, Grieg’s enduring affection for his old collaborator movingly surfaced. ‘How much I owe him! Poor, great Ibsen!’, he wrote. ‘It is as if he carried within him a chunk of ice that would not melt. But under this chunk of ice lay a fervent love of humanity.’
Peer Gynt: key moments
Spanning a period of many years, Peer Gynt’s journey also covers a great distance, his wanderings from Norwegian mountains to north African deserts giving Grieg a unique opportunity to indulge in a rich palette of musical colours. It’s time, then, to explore the key moments and how the composer applied his genius to them…
Prelude: At the Wedding
Before the curtain rises, Grieg provides an orchestral Prelude. It opens in bristling fashion, with edgy rhythms adumbrating both the wedding Peer attends in Act I, and the restless nature of his character. A solo clarinet and oboe preview the lovelorn song performed in Act IV by Solveig, who attracts Peer’s attention at the wedding. Grieg also includes two solos for viola, written in the style of the Norwegian halling and springar folk dances. ‘They must sound as if from afar, but sharply accented and authentic,’ he wrote.
The Abduction of the Bride: Ingrid’s Lament
A predominantly desolate movement, describing the plight of Ingrid, the bride whom Peer abducted at her wedding. Because the two have since slept together, she wishes to marry Peer. But he has already tired of Ingrid, and abandons her. Grieg wanted a strong contrast to be drawn between Ingrid’s slow-moving music and the ‘furious’ passages describing Peer.
Peer Gynt and the Herd Girls
On the run in the mountains, Peer encounters three feisty dairymaids, with whom he gets drunk and spends the night. Grieg depicts their antics with a swirling vitality which stylistically recalls Wagner’s opera The flying Dutchman, with sung parts for the maids and a spoken role for Peer. Grieg expected the scene to make ‘an altogether splendid, wild, devilish and sensuous’ impression.
Peer Gynt and the Woman in Green
In a meadow, Peer meets a ‘woman dressed in green’, who claims to be a troll king’s daughter. He is immediately smitten by her, and the pair ride off on an enormous pig to the troll king’s mountain lair. The twirling oboe arabesques portray the green woman, while scampering double bass and cello lines trace Peer’s excited response to her exotic, alluring appearance.
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Peer enters the hall of the mountain king, where there is a large gathering of troll-courtiers, gnomes and sprites. As Peer approaches the king’s throne, a pair of snorting bassoons depicts the crowd of retainers milling around him. Their threats of violence are mirrored in Grieg’s increasingly frenzied music. ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, the choir screams, as the commotion reaches orgiastic levels. ‘The bass drum and cymbals must thunder and crash for all they’re worth,’ Grieg advises.
The Death of Åse
Fleeing the consequences of his philandering past, Peer visits his mother Åse in her cabin, and finds her dying. Scored for muted strings, Grieg’s music for this scene is based on the poignant three-note motif heard at the outset. The tone is that of a sorrowful lament, rising in intensity before ebbing away to nothing. ‘Rarely has a deathbed scene been painted so movingly in sound,’ as one Grieg biography puts it.
Morning Mood
It is years later, and Peer is now a ‘distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman’ involved in shady business dealings. For many, Grieg’s prelude to Act IV is synonymous with the magnificence of a Norwegian fjord, but it actually depicts sunrise on the west coast of Morocco. ‘I think of the sun breaking through the clouds at the point in the score where the forte first appears,’ Grieg wrote.
Arabian Dance
Peer is robbed, dons Bedouin clothing and is mistaken for a prophet by a local tribe. Reclining on ‘long, low cushions’, he drinks coffee and smokes a long pipe as a group of girls sings and dances in his honour. A sinuous flute and piccolo melody, lightly tapped cymbals, and throbbing bass drum are among the details intended by Grieg to create a ‘genuinely Turkish’ impression. He hoped the dancing girls would each have a tambourine, ‘for that is the only way to get the sound I have in mind’.
Anitra’s Dance
Anitra, the tribal chieftain’s daughter, dances for Peer, who is instantly enamoured when ‘her legs twiddle as fast as drumsticks’. Grieg described Anitra’s music as ‘a delicate little dance that I hope will sound lovely and beautiful’, and gave it the delicately traipsing rhythm of a mazurka. The first violins spin a seductive melody, with en pointe pizzicato punctuation from the lower strings. ‘I would be grateful if you would treat this piece with special affection,’ Grieg added.
Solveig’s Song
Solveig is now ‘a middle-aged woman, fair-haired and comely’. She sits outside her cabin, spinning and singing, still believing that one day Peer will return to be with her. Her song is sorrowful in tone, although the airy chorus of vocalise appended to each of the two verses reflects her enduring hope that a reunion will happen. ‘One day you will come,’ she sings. ‘I know that in my heart.’ The song ‘reveals Solveig’s character,’ Grieg commented. ‘A folk-song style must be preserved throughout.’
Peer Gynt’s Homecoming
Finally, Peer, ‘a sturdy old man with ice-grey hair and beard’, returns to his native Norway. As though to symbolise the turbulent life that he has led, a storm is raging as his ship approaches the coast. Shrieking woodwind and thwacks of timpani evoke the howling gale and waves crashing, with dramatic contrasts of dynamic. ‘Every crescendo and diminuendo must be strongly emphasised,’ Grieg recommended, ‘and the tempo must be very agitated.’
Solveig’s Cradle Song
Peer surveys the detritus of his life and realises he is a ‘lost’ individual whose sins are ‘numbered in wild throngs’. He encounters Solveig, who is now almost blind. Peer is racked with guilt, but she assures him that he has done her no wrong. As Peer buries his head in her lap and the sun rises, Solveig begins a moving lullaby of comfort and absolution, with an offstage choir assisting – ‘a poetic effect using simple means’, as Grieg put it. ‘I will rock you and awake you,’ Solveig sings. ‘So sleep and dream, my own dear boy.’
