Peer Gynt (Grieg)

Peer Gynt, Op. 23 is the incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's 1867 play of the same name, written by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg in 1875. It premiered along with the play on 24 February 1876 in Christiania (now Oslo).

Later, in 1888 and 1891, Grieg extracted eight movements to make two four-movement suites: Suite No. 1, Op. 46, and Suite No. 2, Op. 55. Some of these movements have received coverage in popular culture; see Grieg's music in popular culture.

Original score, Op. 23

When Ibsen asked Grieg to write music for the play in 1874, the latter enthusiastically agreed. However, it was much more difficult for Grieg than he imagined. "Peer Gynt progresses slowly," he wrote to a friend in August 1874, “and there is no possibility of having it finished by autumn. It is a terribly unmanageable subject.”

"The more he saturated his mind with the powerful poem, the more clearly he saw that he was the right man for a work of such witchery and so permeated with the Norwegian spirit," his wife wrote of him and his music. Even though the premiere was a "triumphant success", it prompted Grieg to complain bitterly that the Swedish management of the theater had given him specifications as to the duration of each number and its order: "I was thus compelled to do patchwork ... In no case had I opportunity to write as I wanted ... Hence the brevity of the pieces," he said.

Peer Gynt

Peer Gynt (/ˈpɪər ˈɡɪnt/; Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈpæːr ˈjʏnt]) is a five-act play in verse by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. Written in the Bokmål form of Norwegian, it is one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays. Ibsen believed Per Gynt, the Norwegian fairy tale on which the play is loosely based, to be rooted in fact, and several of the characters are modelled after Ibsen's own family, notably his parents Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg. He was also generally inspired by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen's collection of Norwegian fairy tales, published in 1845 (Huldre-Eventyr og Folkesagn).

According to Klaus Van Den Berg, the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones".Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance. A first edition of 1,250 copies was published on 14 November 1867 in Copenhagen. Although the first edition swiftly sold out, a reprint of two thousand copies, which followed after only fourteen days, didn't sell out until seven years later.

Peer Gynt (disambiguation)

Peer Gynt is a play by Henrik Ibsen named for its main character, based on the fairy tale Per Gynt.

Peer Gynt may also refer to:

See also

Peer Gynt (1934 film)

Peer Gynt is a 1934 German drama film directed by Fritz Wendhausen and starring Hans Albers, Lucie Höflich and Marieluise Claudius. It is based on the play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. It was one of the most expensive productions made by Bavaria Film and involved location shooting in Norway.

Cast

References

Bibliography