An epic journey

When asked to write music for Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, Grieg thought he was facing an impossible challenge. But, as Terry Blain relates, the composer's perseverance resulted in a masterpiece of matchless character and colour

- By Terry Blain

Dear Mr Grieg: I am writing to you in connection with a plan that I propose to implement, and in which I wish to invite your participation.’ The tone is impeccably formal and businesslike, but the letter sent in January 1874 by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen to his compatriot Edvard Grieg planted the seed for one of the most consequential artistic collaborations of the 19th century. The first ever staging of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt was being mooted, and Ibsen wanted Grieg to write the incidental music which he envisaged accompanying the action. ‘Please let me know if you are willing to undertake this task,’ Ibsen’s letter ended.

Grieg hesitated, not least because his first impressions of Ibsen had not been entirely positive. The pair initially met in Rome nine years earlier, when Grieg noted that Ibsen had been ‘dead drunk’ at a party. A few months later, the playwright was in dubiously high spirits again, demanding that the chairs be cleared for dancing and carousal after a chamber music recital. ‘A few glasses of Foglietti had gone to his head,' Grieg recorded. It was 'strange', he thought, that 'so great a man can be so tactless and in this one area so obtuse'.

Soon enough, however, Grieg replied to Ibsen in a 'friendly' fashion – swayed, as he later acknowledged, by a generous half-share in the fee payable for the new production. The plan was for Grieg to write the Peer Gynt music in the summer of 1874, with the play's premiere tentatively scheduled for early 1875. But from the outset Grieg found the project tricky. 'The work on Peer Gynt is proceeding very slowly, there is no possibility that I can finish it by autumn,' he wrote on 27 August. 'It is a terribly difficult play for which to write music.'

The difficulties Grieg encountered came primarily from the multifaceted nature of Ibsen's play, and its blurring of the distinction between reality and the world of dreams and the subconscious.