About the work
Henrik Ibsen's drama in five acts was published as a closet drama in 1867 and first staged only in 1876 in Christiania (Oslo) — with Edvard Grieg's incidental music, which made the play internationally famous. „Peer Gynt" is Ibsen's principal fantastic-philosophical work and unique in his oeuvre for its alternation between folk poetry, troll legend and ironic philosophical life-reckoning.
Plot
In the Norwegian mountains Peer Gynt is a young idler and liar. He abducts a rival's bride on her wedding day, abandons her in the mountains, finds his way to the trolls in the Dovre realm, but refuses to marry the troll king's daughter because doing so would turn him into a troll. He flees. At home he meets the faithful Solveig, who gives up everything to live with him — but he must flee again as his old crime catches up. His mother Aase dies; famous is the scene in which Peer fantasises her dying moment as a sleigh ride to King St Peter. Middle section: Peer roams the world — as a slave trader in Morocco, as a prophet in the desert, as Anitra the Bedouin's lover, as an inmate of the Cairo madhouse (where the inmates crown him „Emperor of Self"). Old Peer returns to Norway. The Button-Moulder threatens him: Peer has been „neither good nor evil" — material for the melting pot, where he is to be dissolved. Peer rushes about in search of proof that he has been a „self". Finally he finds Solveig, who has waited for him faithfully all this time. In her lap he dies — she has kept his „true self" for him.
Cultural significance
Peer Gynt is Ibsen's most imaginative work and, through Grieg's incidental music (with the concert classics „Morning Mood", „Anitra's Dance", „In the Hall of the Mountain King" and „Solveig's Song"), internationally popular. The work is at once a Norwegian national saga and an ironic dismantling of the Romantic hero myth. Productions by Peter Stein (1971, Schaubühne) and Frank Castorf showed its modernity. Britten's song cycles and many film adaptations extend to the 1957 animated version.