The incidental music Edvard Grieg composed for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (1867) stands, along with his Holberg Suite and Piano Concerto, among his most universally popular orchestral works. By common consent, the music itself achieved far more for Ibsen's vast and bewildering dramatic poem than any mere stage performance alone could have done, and therein lies a problem. For as Ibsen's English biographer Michael Meyer writes, Grieg's music "turns the play into a jolly Hans Andersen fairy tale," one thing its author would certainly never have wished for. And the critic and playwright George Bernard Shaw, a fervent advocate of Ibsen's works, similarly concluded that in his music Grieg "could only catch a few superficial points in the play instead of getting to the very heart and brain of it." That may well be the case, but Grieg's Peer Gynt incidental music has nevertheless become a universal favorite, and it is not difficult to understand why.

Ibsen decided to adapt his verse drama for performance at the Christiana (Oslo) Theatre in 1874, recognizing that his sprawling five-act play would benefit greatly from the addition of a musical score. Grieg's music was first heard there in February 1876, but the initial production run was radically curtailed after fire destroyed the sets and costumes. The score, however, was enthusiastically received by the critics, and Grieg subsequently saw an opportunity to establish a separate identity for the music itself and drew from the more than two dozen numbers of the complete work two concert suites, Opp. 46 and 54. Conductors sometimes assemble ad hoc suites of their own as well.

The most popular numbers are "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (a textbook example of the dramatic potency of cumulative crescendo and accelerando, illustrating Grieg's fondness for Germanic orchestral effects), in which Peer Gynt bargains for his life after the assembled Trolls call for his blood, and the highly evocative "Morning Mood" with its lovely flute solo and expansive orchestral language—the music depicts, incidentally, not a fresh Nordic sunrise, but rather a Saharan dawn in Act IV of Ibsen's drama! Other memorable moments include the fragile lyric utterances of "Solveig's Song," the beguiling "Anitra's Dance," the poignant "Death of Åse," "Peer Gynt's Homecoming: Stormy Evening at Sea," and his eventual "Shipwreck." As Anthony Burton writes, "the curtain falls as Peer's long and eventful journey finally comes to its end."

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