The "full" Edvard Grieg Peer Gynt

From the 1876 premiere of Grieg's Peer Gynt

 Edvard Grieg's birthday, a good excuse to listen again to Peer Gynt op 23 in the edition by Finn Benestad from 1988, which keeps the order of the composer's score from the premiere performance in 1876, omitting the cuts made in later performances, but including Grieg's fuller orchestration from the 1886 performances in Copenhagen.   The original play by Henrik Ibsen was a Lesedrama, a play meant to be read, as opposed to being watched on stage.  The full text apparently takes five hours to act out, plus another hour or so of music - quite tiring, I presume. But in book form, you can savour the ideas without pressure, reading back and forth. Peer Gynt is an allegory that doesn't exist in real time.  Ibsen was satirizing aspects of Norwegian mentality in the period when the country was a colony of Denmark. Life was hard : the peasants so poor that many did live, like Peer, in rags, scrambling to survive by using their wits. 

Peer uses his imagination to get ahead, but he's also a rascal who scams other people, especially women, and gets scammed himself, also by women.  Peer goes to North Africa, but at heart he's the same local yokel who hangs out with trolls, whose take on reality is defiantly perverse  Whatever the Bøygen is, he doesn't overcome it so much as scam his way past. In the end, he's back where he came from.  Solveig doesn't have much sense either. She still loves the scoundrel.  Not all so different from the Troll King who feasts on cow turds and ox piss, whether bitter or sweet "as long as they're our cow turds and ox piss".  Grieg's music is so wonderful that you can blissfully enjoy fantasies of fjords, mountains and goblins, but knowing the context is even more rewarding.

I first heard the "full" edition with dialogue in 2001 when Manfred Honeck conducted it with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, with Bo Skovhus, who stole the show, even from a star like Barbara Bonney.  In 2011, Marc Minkowski conducted the BBC SO at the Barbican Hall with Miah Persson,  Johannes Weisser and Anita Hallenberg.

There are numerous recordings of Grieg's Peer Gynt suites but extended versions  with text are few.   In 2005, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under  Ole-Kristian Ruud recorded the incidental  music with  dialogue in Norwegian. The following year, Guillaume Tournaire conducted the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande  in the world premiere of the Perroux edition, with texts in English translation.  Hearing the music in context is important, but once you've got the picture, so to speak, it's better to hear the words in Norwegian, since the language fits the music so well. 

The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande have much more stylish polish but the Bergeners are nicely down to earth. The Bergen singers and choir are clearly native speakers, which gives their singing natural verve. On the other hand,  the "Swiss" orchestra used a professional Hardanger player, using a traditional fiddle, as opposed to a violin. This electrifies the performance, giving it a wildness and crazy freedom conventional orchestras can't quite manage.   It shouldn't be too difficult for Bergen to one day record the piece again with an authentic Hardanger fiddle.  They're sounding particularly good these days with Edward Gardner, so maybe they should revisit the full Peer Gynt.
 
Please see my other posts on Grieg, Norway, Norwegian film and Ibsen by following the labels below. 

Das Fest auf Solhaug - Ibsen bei Hugo Wolf

Hugo Wolf's Das Fest auf Solhaug (1890-91) was written for a Vienna production of Henrik Ibsen's Gildet paa Solhaug (1856). Wolf didn't take kindly to working on commission.  "I like the Ibsen play less each day... It is right honestly botched with damned little poetry. I don't know where I shall get the plaster from, with which to clothe in music this home-made carpentry".

Admittedly, Wolf was working from a German translation which may not have captured Ibsen's unique idiom.  Shorn of the inherent music in Ibsen's syntax, the plot may well  be awkward.  Margit is unhappily married to rich old Bengt. Margit's really in love with Gudmund, now an exiled outlaw, but returns to Solhaug.  Margit plans to poison Bengt so she can marry Gudmund, whom she does not realize has fallen in love with her gentle sister Signe, who has been promised by the King to Knut, a brute. Knut kills Bengt. The King learns that Gudmund wasn't a villain at all and lets him marry Signe.  Margit becomes a nun.

Wolf's Das Fest auf Solhaug languished in negativity until the original score was edited and published by Kalmus in 1987.  The first, and only, recording,released in 2006, with Helmuth Froschauer conducting the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln,with Günther Lamprecht as speaker. He's wonderful, and acts so well with his voice that he makes the work come alive, in the tradition of German spoken theatre.  In this version, prepared for performance by Christoph Schwandt, there is no dialogue. The cadences of spoken prose communicate, telling the story in a personal, believable way.  There are only two solo songs, for Margit and Gudmund, the rest scored for chorus and orchestra.  This "new" version of Das Fest auf Solhaug shows that it is much more than the set of three songs from the piece published in 1897.  I've long loved  the lyrical "Gesang Margits" for piano and soprano.  Did Wolf know Grieg's Solvieg's Song (1876)?  He despised copying, as true artists do, but perhaps it had a subliminal effect on his sensibilities. The orchestral version we hear here is something else, though.

Wolf set the scene for the play ambitiously. The orchestral prelude is grand, even panoramic, rising to a sudden crescendo then suddenly breaking off.  On this recording there is descriptive narration, but not dialogue, a good idea since the emphasis here is the music. .  Margit's song "Bergkönig ritt durch die Lande weit"  is intoned heroically, heralded by trumpets and horns, taking up the challenging thrust of the Prelude. The voice lowers with menacing portent,as if Margrit were a character in The Ring.  Perhaps Wolf did intuit the background to the tale,where an anonymous King pulls strings, trading his subjects off as if they were chattels.  "Bei Sang und Speil sind wir vereint" sing the chorus:  Solhaug is celebrating the anniversary of Margit's marriage to Bengt, but the mood is ferocious,more hunt than party,with large, pounding ostinato and the clash of cymbals,and trumpet calls. Now it is night, and the narrator tells us about Margit mixing poison. Gudmund sings , "Ich führ wohl ber Wasser" The mood remains truculent and upbeat, with a vigorous orchestral interlude, haunted by solo clarinet, perhaps symbolizing sinister intent. Swirling figures,interrupted by savage,sharp chords, then a madly merry dance.  The horns blast, and morning comes. And so ends the Fest at Solhaug. Bengt's dead, Knut's in trouble with the King and Margit ends up in a convent.  The choir sings in hushed tones, while the orchestra blasts forth in grand coda. Wolf's Das Fest auf Solhaug isn't half bad. We can imagine Wolf gnashing his teeth in exasperation. Perhaps we can feel his impatience. He'd rather be getting on with The Spanish Liederbook than writing mock medieval slush, which may come from the Vienna translation, which fortunately isn't easy to track down..   

Which is more than can be said for Hans Pfitzner, whose own  Drei Vorspeil zu Henrik Ibsens Das Fest auf Solhaug completes this disc.  The first and last Vorspeils are ponderous, taking nearly 20 minutes to say very little.  At least Hugo Wolf gives us a merry jape !  The middle Vorspeil, only 5 minutes, is livelier. Perhaps he's depicting a party of sorts.  But Ibsen and Wolf had a pretty good idea that the festivities at Solhaug were bluff.  Well played, though, even if the music isn't so good. I've been revisiting Das Fest auf Solhaug  as another musical version is released, Wilhelm Stenhammer's Gillet på Solhaug). The world premiere recording of Wilhelm Stenhammer's opera Gillet pa Solhaug, a significant contribution to Swedish music. Read review here.