Concert Stories · Peer Gynt
An illustrated montage of the principal figures of Peer Gynt — Peer at the centre, with his mother Åse, Solveig, the Troll King, Anitra, a bride, a mountain cottage and a storm at sea.

Grieg Ibsen Rackham

Peer Gynt: The Play Inside the Music

Peer Gynt began as an 1867 play by Henrik Ibsen: a wild, comic and unsettling story about a boastful Norwegian dreamer who spends his life running from responsibility.

You may know Morning Mood as “that sunrise music”, or In the Hall of the Mountain King as “that Pi song”. But both began as theatre music for Ibsen’s strange play about Peer Gynt — a charming, reckless man who spends his life inventing stories about himself rather than becoming a truthful self. This guide explains the play, the music, the characters, and the scenes behind Grieg’s famous suite.

Start the journey Watch the suite

Prelude

The Story Behind the Suite

Start here if Peer Gynt is only a name, or if you know only the tune of Morning Mood. The story begins not with a concert piece, but with Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play: a wild dramatic poem about Peer Gynt, a boastful Norwegian dreamer who runs from responsibility, love, death, and finally himself. Edvard Grieg later wrote music for the play’s first stage production in 1876. Some of that theatre music became the two Peer Gynt concert suites, which is how most audiences know it today. Arthur Rackham’s 1936 illustrations came later still, giving visual form to the trolls, deathbeds, deserts and moral reckonings inside the play.

There are three names to keep straight. Ibsen wrote the play. Grieg wrote the music for the play, then turned some of it into concert pieces. Rackham illustrated the story decades later. This page brings those three things back together: the drama, the music, and the images.

Ibsen: the playwright behind the story

Henrik Ibsen is often called the father of modern drama. A Doll’s House gave theatre one of its defining images of social rebellion — yet Peer Gynt, written earlier in 1867, is a different beast: a sprawling verse-play of folklore, fantasy, trolls, deserts and spiritual reckoning. Its hero is not a noble adventurer but a brilliant evader — a man who keeps turning life into performance rather than responsibility.

Grieg: the composer behind the suite

Edvard Grieg, Norway’s best-known composer, was invited by Ibsen in 1874 to write music for the play’s first staged production, which opened in 1876. He later drew the most popular numbers into two concert suites — the way most audiences meet the music today. Grieg’s reach extends well beyond these famous miniatures: the Piano Concerto in A minor, the Holberg Suite, the Lyric Pieces for piano, songs and chamber music, all shaped by Norwegian folk melody and dance. In Peer Gynt, that gift for atmosphere becomes theatrical — a mountain kingdom, a deathbed, a sunrise or a dance, sketched with astonishing economy.

The result became one of the great meeting-points between theatre and the orchestral canon. Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King are now among the most recognisable short pieces in classical music: concert-hall favourites, school-orchestra staples, film-and-advertising shorthand, and gateways into nineteenth-century orchestral colour. Their familiarity can make them seem like free-standing mood pictures, but they are sharper and stranger when heard as theatre music: music attached to a selfish hero, a moral fable, and a play about what it means to become a real self.

For many listeners, Peer Gynt is a doorway into classical music itself. Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King are short, vivid, memorable, and instantly recognisable — the kind of pieces people hear in films, cartoons, advertisements and school concerts long before they know Grieg’s name. But their popularity has also separated them from the story they were written to serve. Reconnecting them to Ibsen’s play makes familiar music feel strange again.

Rackham: the illustrator behind these images

Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was the leading English book-illustrator of the Edwardian age. He shaped famous editions of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Rip Van Winkle, 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.

The play inside the music

What is Peer Gynt about?

Before it became a concert suite, Peer Gynt was a five-act dramatic poem: part folk tale, part satire, part spiritual reckoning. It follows Peer from reckless youth to old age, asking whether a person who keeps inventing himself can ever become truly himself.

A life of evasion

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, then escaping into the mountains. There he meets trolls, temptations and distorted versions of his own selfishness. Later he wanders the world as trader, dreamer, seducer, false prophet and fraud — always remaking himself, never quite becoming a self. Ibsen’s play is not a straightforward fairy tale: it is a life seen as a sequence of evasions, and behind the comedy and fantasy lies one central question — what remains of a person who has spent his whole life dodging the truth?

The key figures

Peer is the centre of the story: charming, inventive, cowardly, funny and morally evasive. Åse is his mother, whom he loves and disappoints. Solveig is the young woman whose constancy becomes the play’s moral still point. The Troll King offers Peer a grotesque version of selfish freedom. Anitra later flatters and deceives him, exposing how easily his vanity can be played.

Solveig: the still point

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, inwardly strong. She is not simply a love interest, but the play’s great counterpoint: where Peer evades, she remains; where he improvises, she endures; where he scatters himself across the world, she quietly keeps faith.

Why the concert order matters

Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 is usually heard in concert order: Morning Mood, The Death of Åse, Anitra’s Dance, and In the Hall of the Mountain King. That order makes a satisfying concert miniature, beginning with sunrise and ending with a spectacular chase. Ibsen’s drama, however, places the scenes differently. In story order, Peer first enters the troll hall, then sits with his dying mother, then wakes to the North African dawn, and finally lets himself be dazzled by Anitra. This guide lets you move between those two orders, because each tells a different truth: the suite is a musical shape, while the play is a moral journey.

Four illusions, four pieces of music

The four pieces work almost like four tests of Peer’s character:

  • In the Hall of the Mountain King: Peer is tempted by a world where selfishness becomes a philosophy.
  • Åse’s Death: his gift for fantasy becomes, briefly, an act of love.
  • Morning Mood: nature offers radiance and renewal, but Peer himself has not changed.
  • Anitra’s Dance: charm, vanity and performance draw him back into illusion.

Grieg does not merely decorate these scenes. He reveals the emotional pressure underneath them: the troll music accumulates like a trap, Åse’s death is stripped down to muted strings, Morning Mood opens a vast calm around an unsettled man, and Anitra’s Dance sparkles because its charm is all surface.

As you listen, follow two stories at once: the surface — trolls, deathbed, sunrise, dance — and the deeper story of Peer’s self, always asking the world to confirm his fantasy while the music keeps testing it.

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.

Arthur Rackham's drawing of Peer Gynt and Solveig meeting at the Hegstad wedding.
Solveig and Peer at the Hegstad wedding — the still point in Peer’s fugitive life.
Arthur Rackham, from the 1936 Peer Gynt.

The concert sequence

The Illustrated Concert Sequence

The four cards below connect each famous movement of Grieg’s first suite to its original moment in Ibsen’s play. Use the running-order switch to hear them either as Grieg published them for the concert hall, or as they unfold in Peer’s story.

Running order
Arthur Rackham's drawing of Peer Gynt before the crowned King of the Dovre-Trolls, surrounded by a jeering crowd of troll-courtiers and imps.
Peer before the King of the Dovre-Trolls.
Arthur Rackham, from the 1936 Peer Gynt.

Ibsen · Act II, Scene 6

Grieg’s Suite No. 1 · Movement IV

In the Hall of the Mountain King

Peer enters the troll world beneath the Dovre mountains.

At a glance B minor · Alla marcia e molto marcato · full orchestra (theme low in bassoons & cellos) · ~2½ min

Early in the play, after disgracing himself in the human world, Peer escapes into the mountains and stumbles into the underground court of the Dovre-Trolls. The Troll King is not simply threatening him; he is offering Peer a way of life — be sufficient to yourself, take the easy indulgent path, accept ugliness as beauty. Peer is being courted, not just menaced. The danger is not that the trolls will kill him at once, but that he might consent to become like them.

Grieg’s music does not present this as noble danger. It is sly, grubby, creeping temptation — bassoons and cellos giving the trolls their earthy, comic menace. The trap is incremental: not one grand bad decision, but a slow surrender. Peer sits at the centre, half-amused and half-changed, while the troll world closes around him.

View the score & parts (IMSLP)

What to listen for

  • A low, quiet, almost comic beginning.
  • The famous theme returning obsessively.
  • Repetition becoming a trap.
  • The music getting faster, louder and more crowded.
  • The troll court moving from coaxing to swarming.
  • A joke becoming frighteningly real.
Arthur Rackham's drawing of Peer leaning over his mother Åse as she lies dying in a box-bed, a cat curled on a chair beside them.
The Death of Åse.
Arthur Rackham, from the 1936 Peer Gynt.

Ibsen · Act III, Scene 4

Grieg’s Suite No. 1 · Movement II

Death of Åse

Peer turns storytelling, for once, into an act of mercy.

At a glance B minor · Andante doloroso · muted strings alone · ~4 min

Åse is Peer’s mother: poor, long-suffering, sharp-tongued and loving, the person who knows both his charm and his failures most intimately. Peer returns to the poor cottage where she lies dying. Instead of confronting death directly, he does what he has always done: he tells a story. This time, though, his gift for invention is not a boast or an escape for himself. It becomes an act of mercy. Sitting beside Åse, Peer transforms the small, dark room into a journey toward Soria Moria, the golden castle of fairy tale, carrying his mother in words toward warmth, welcome, and release.

Rackham’s drawing holds the scene at its quietest. Åse lies frail in the box-bed, her face worn by poverty, love, and exhaustion; Peer leans in over her, not as the swaggering adventurer but as a son trying to comfort his mother at the edge of death. A cat dozes on the chair, the cottage is bare — and yet the whole imagined sleigh-ride to Soria-Moria is happening in that small dark room, a last kindness woven out of words.

Grieg reflects this scene not with drama but with restraint. The tenderness is in what is held back — as though the room itself were growing still around mother and son.

View the score & parts (IMSLP)

What to listen for

  • A slow string lament.
  • Long phrases that breathe, rise and fall.
  • Restraint rather than melodrama.
  • A single emotional crest.
  • The music slowly withdrawing.
  • The final fading away.
The opening page of Edvard Grieg's 1888 autograph manuscript of Morning Mood, written in ink on ruled music paper.
Grieg’s autograph manuscript of Morning Mood (Morgenstemning), 1888 — the sunrise in the composer’s own hand.
Edvard Grieg holograph manuscript.

Ibsen · Act IV, daybreak

Grieg’s Suite No. 1 · Movement I

Morning Mood

A beautiful dawn after another of Peer’s illusions collapses.

At a glance E major · Allegretto pastorale · flute & oboe over strings and horns · ~3½–4 min

Although audiences often imagine Morning Mood as a pure Nordic sunrise, in the play it belongs to Peer’s wanderings in North Africa. Peer finds himself after another grand illusion has collapsed. He emerges into dawn as if the world has begun again without him — though in Ibsen’s play that famous sunrise breaks on a distinctly unheroic sight, with Peer up an acacia tree swatting at apes. Beside the music here is a page from Grieg’s own 1888 holograph manuscript — that radiant dawn in the composer’s own ink.

That is why the piece is so often misunderstood. It sounds like innocence, but in the play it follows confusion, vanity and collapse; the beauty is real, but it does not mean Peer has become good.

This is sunrise not as spectacle but as release: after panic, exhaustion and disorientation, the world breathes out. Peer is not transformed — still evasive, self-dramatising, spiritually unsettled. What Grieg gives us is subtler and more moving: a moment in which nature is calm, luminous and complete, while Peer, for a brief time, is small enough to stand inside it.

View the score & parts (IMSLP)

What to listen for

  • The opening flute melody.
  • The oboe echo.
  • The gradual widening of the orchestral texture.
  • The horizon seeming to open.
  • A surge of brightness.
  • The tension between serene nature and Peer’s unsettled self.
Arthur Rackham's drawing of Anitra dancing, arms raised, her veil sweeping behind her.
Anitra’s Dance.
Arthur Rackham, from the 1936 Peer Gynt.

Ibsen · Act IV, Scene 6

Grieg’s Suite No. 1 · Movement III

Anitra’s Dance

Peer meets charm, performance and another form of self-deception.

At a glance A minor · Tempo di mazurka (3/4) · strings with triangle · ~3½ min

Later in Act IV, Peer has reinvented himself yet again, this time as a wealthy prophet-like figure in an oasis tent — a role he half-believes. Anitra dances before him in warmth, luxury, music and flickering lamplight; this is not a sincere romance but a polished performance. Peer’s vanity makes him vulnerable: he wants to be admired, desired, and believed, and Anitra understands that perfectly.

Rackham gives the whole scene to Anitra alone: arms raised, veil sweeping, caught mid-turn against a dark ground. Graceful, glittering, controlled and elusive, she is all performance — and that is exactly the point. Peer, unseen here, is the audience she is playing to: deceived in plain sight while he imagines himself adored. What the dance offers is not pleasure freely given but pleasure as bait.

Grieg reflects this with wonderful lightness. The piece is not a sensual spectacle but something delicate, pointed and slightly ironic — the dance dazzles Peer, and by the time the spell is over, the joke is on him.

View the score & parts (IMSLP)

What to listen for

  • Light, delicate orchestral writing.
  • Small teasing dance rhythm.
  • Plucked textures.
  • Triangle flashes like jewellery catching lamplight.
  • Graceful lilt.
  • A smile that never quite gives itself away.
  • Charm that is slippery rather than trustworthy.

Where was I, as myself, as the whole man, the true man?

Peer Gynt, Act V

Closing reckoning

Faith, Hope and Love

The Button-Molder

The suite leaves Peer in the desert, dazzled by Anitra and still clinging to his illusions. Ibsen’s play does not let him off so easily. The final act strips away every mask Peer has ever worn — now an old man, robbed of his wealth by a shipwreck, he finally returns to the rocky shores of Norway.

There, he is confronted not by grand demons, but by a chilling figure: the Button-Molder, who tells Peer that his soul is to be melted down. Because Peer spent his life dodging choices—never truly good nor truly wicked, always taking the easy way around—he has no core self. He is a defective button, a man who lived as a shadow. The tragedy of the “troll motto”—be sufficient to yourself—is finally revealed: by living only for himself, Peer has become nothing at all.

At the very end, his only refuge is Solveig, the woman he abandoned in his youth, who has waited for him in the mountains. When he asks her in despair where his real self has been, she answers simply: “In my faith, in my hope, and in my love.” Peer finally stops running, hiding his face in her lap as the play closes.

What the first suite leaves out

The four pieces of music in Grieg’s first Peer Gynt Suite do not take us all the way to that final, quiet reckoning. They capture the great, turbulent middle of Peer’s life — the soundtrack to a man desperately trying to invent himself — and leave him there, before the Button-Molder, before Solveig.

Grieg later drew a second set of numbers into the Peer Gynt Suite No. 2, Op. 55: The Abduction of the Bride. Ingrid’s Lament, the Arabian Dance, Peer Gynt’s Homecoming (a stormy evening at sea), and Solveig’s Song. Performed far less often than the first, and absent from popular memory, it carries the quiet resolution the first suite withholds: Solveig’s Song is the very faith, hope and love in which Peer’s real self was kept safe all along.

As we listen to this brilliant, evasive man running from the truth, we are left to wonder how much of him we recognise in ourselves.

Live performance

Watch the Suite

A complete live performance of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, gathered here as a final companion to the journey.

Hear it live

Upcoming Performances

Concerts featuring Grieg’s Peer Gynt music, listed via OpenConcert.

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