"Peer Gynt" - Suite No.1, Op. 46
1. Morning Mood
2. The Death of Åse
3. Anitra’s Dance
4. In the Hall of the Mountain King
"The most remarkable thing he did" writes The Bluffer’s Guide to Music of Edvard Grieg "was to write incidental music to Ibsen’s weird play Peer Gynt. The pleasantness of the music must have induced many people to go and see Peer Gynt and to get a bit of a shock". There’s more than a grain of truth in this. Although Peer Gynt is one of the lightest in tone of Ibsen’s plays, it contains its fair share of the darkness and psychological probing so characteristic of the greatest Nordic playwright - certainly not something we associate with Grieg, whose music was memorably dismissed by Debussy as "bon-bons wrapped in snow". But to dismiss the music on these grounds would be unfair. Perfectly crafted, evocative miniatures were a field in which Grieg excelled, a skill ideal for writing incidental music for a play, and Grieg responded to the moods and scenes of the drama with a string of characterful and memorable tone-pictures. While play and music have long since parted company, it’s unquestionably the case that the music has remained the better-known, and has shown itself to have a life outside its initial dramatic context. Grieg remained as true to himself in his music as Ibsen did in his drama - that his whole artistic temperament was at odds with Ibsen’s does not in any way diminish the beauty and memorability of his music in its own right.
The incidental music to Peer Gynt was written in 1875, and first performed, with the play, in February 1876. It comprised some 23 movements, written for a small theatre orchestra and chorus. Grieg extracted 8 of these in 1888 and 1891, after it had become evident that the play in its original form would not be frequently revived, and re-orchestrated them for full orchestra in two Suites, the first of which we will hear tonight. Peer Gynt, a sort of Nordic Everyman-figure with a mischeivous streak, travels through his life encountering a range of allegorical adventures, until, after years of wandering he realises the sterile selfishness of his existence and finds peace in the arms of his beloved Solveig. The four movements depict characters and scenes in the play:
Morning Mood - Robbed and deserted by the seductress Anitra, Peer wakes in the Arabian desert. Grieg gives us a radiant portrayal of a crisp, sunlit morning, more redolent of a fresh northern landscape than a desert, and more rapturous than disillusioned - but no less beautiful for it.
The Death of Åse - A tender lament for strings, based on an old Norwegian melody, accompanies the death of Peer Gynt’s aged mother. Ibsen makes this scene portray Peer’s frivolous insensitivity; Grieg cannot but let real feeling show.
Anitra’s Dance - Grieg captures the seductive Anitra in a deliciously sinuous oriental dance, very much in the spirit of Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saens. The wonderfully pale orchestral colours match the mirage-like nature of this scene in the play to perfection.
In the Hall of the Mountain King - Peer witnesses a dance of pig-faced trolls in a mountain cavern. Ibsen was tongue-in-cheek about Norwegian folklore, and so is Grieg, building this vigorous dance on a grotesque, angular ostinato, scored to sound intentionally ridiculous and bizarre.
R.G.Bratby
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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