Grieg: Peer Gynt Suites; Six Orchestral Songs

Copy at Case Memorial Library
Grieg wrote this summary of Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, for which he wrote the incidental music that is the source of the two suites: "Peer Gynt, the only son of poor peasants, is drawn by the poet as a character of morbidly developed fancy and a prey to megalomania. In his youth he has many wild adventures — comes, for instance, to a peasants' wedding where he carries off the bride up to the mountain peaks. Here he leaves her to roam about with wild cowherd girls. He then enters the kingdom of the mountain king, whose daughter falls in love with him and dances to him. But he laughs at the dance and the droll music, whereupon the enraged mountain folk wish to kill him. But he succeeds in escaping and wanders to foreign countries, among others to Morocco, where he appears as a prophet and is greeted by Arab girls. After many wonderful guidings of Fate he at last returns as an old man, after suffering shipwreck on his way to his home as poor as he left it. Here the sweetheart of his youth … meets him, and his weary head at last finds rest in her lap" (quoted in Bagar and Biancolli, The Concert Companion, p. 303).