The play follows Peer Gynt from young manhood into old age. He begins in rural Norway as a swaggering fantasist, carrying off a bride from her wedding, disgracing himself and others, abandoning obligations, and escaping into the mountains. There he meets trolls, temptations and distorted versions of his own selfishness. Later he wanders across the world, becoming a trader, dreamer, seducer, false prophet and fraud, always remaking himself but never quite becoming a self. Behind the comedy and fantasy lies the central question of the play: what remains of a person who has spent his whole life dodging the truth?
Young Peer is brilliant, exasperating, full of invention, and already allergic to responsibility. He talks his way through life, making performance out of whatever should have become duty. Into that unsettled world comes Solveig — calm, sincere, and inwardly strong. She is not simply a love interest, but the play’s great counterpoint to Peer: where he evades, she remains; where he improvises, she endures; where he scatters himself across the world, she quietly keeps faith.
Throughout his life Peer boasts, improvises, seduces, bluffs, flees, reinvents himself, and refuses almost every hard claim that love, responsibility, age, grief, or truth might make on him. Ibsen’s play is not a straightforward fairy tale, even though it is full of trolls, mountain halls, desert scenes and dreamlike transformations. It is a life seen as a sequence of evasions: the young man who wants to be grand without becoming good, the son who loves his mother but keeps disappointing her, the wanderer who mistakes sensation and status for selfhood, and the old man who must finally ask whether there is anything real at the core.
Grieg’s music was written for Ibsen’s play, but most audiences now meet it through the concert suites, where the order has been rearranged. For this illustrated concert, we return the four familiar pieces to the order of the drama: first the grotesque temptation and panic of In the Hall of the Mountain King, then the intimate sorrow of his mother’s death, then the strange North African dawn of Morning Mood, and finally the glittering self-deception of Anitra’s Dance. That order matters. It turns the music from a set of attractive orchestral miniatures into a psychological journey: Peer is first swallowed by fantasy, then brought face to face with death, then released into a beautiful but morally ambiguous morning, and then drawn again into performance, vanity and desire.
Note on the concert order: Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 is usually performed in a different order. This illustrated concert follows the order of Ibsen’s play: first the troll hall, then Åse’s death, then the North African morning, and finally Anitra’s dance.
Each scene gives us a different kind of illusion. In the mountain hall, Peer is tempted by the troll world because it offers him everything without the cost of becoming fully human: appetite, power, indulgence, belonging, and the right to be “enough” to himself. In Åse’s death scene, illusion becomes more tender: Peer uses storytelling not to inflate himself, but to comfort his dying mother. In Morning Mood, nature itself seems to offer renewal, but Peer is still the same absurd, evasive man beneath the sunrise. In Anitra’s Dance, illusion becomes social and erotic theatre: Peer imagines himself a prophet and a great man, while Anitra sees jewels, opportunity and advantage.
Grieg’s genius is that he does not simply illustrate the stage action. He reveals the emotional truth underneath it. Hall of the Mountain King is built from repetition and accumulation, as if a whole mob-world is closing in around Peer. Åse’s Death strips almost everything away, leaving muted strings to say what Peer cannot say plainly. Morning Mood gives us one of the most radiant dawns in music, but its beauty is not simple innocence; it sits beside comedy, dislocation and self-deception. Anitra’s Dance sparkles lightly, almost weightlessly, because its charm is all surface: elegant, enticing, and not to be trusted too deeply.
So as you listen, follow two stories at once. One is the story on the surface: trolls, deathbed, sunrise, dance. The other is the deeper story of Peer’s self. He is always asking the world to confirm his fantasy of himself, and the music keeps testing that fantasy. Sometimes it mocks him, sometimes it mourns with him, sometimes it surrounds him with beauty, and sometimes it lets him be dazzled again. These four scenes are not the whole of Peer Gynt, but they give us the shape of the whole problem: how does a person become real, when he has spent his life being brilliant at escape?
About the illustrations: The scenes below are illustrated with the work of Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), the leading English book-illustrator of the Edwardian age, whose pen-and-watercolour fantasy shaped famous editions of Rip Van Winkle, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Alice in Wonderland and the tales of the Brothers Grimm. Among the last works of his life were the plates for a 1936 edition of Peer Gynt — the troll-hall, Åse’s deathbed and Anitra’s dance drawn with the same gnarled, uncanny imagination he brought to folklore all his life. More about him at The Arthur Rackham Society.
Want the whole play? Read Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in full — the William & Charles Archer translation — free at Project Gutenberg Australia. The short extracts beside each scene below are drawn from it.
