Dramatic Music

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Edvard Grieg. Peer Gynt, op. 23: Vollstandige Buhnenmusik. Herausgegeben von Finn Benestad. Studienpartitur nach der Edvard Grieg-Gesamtausgabe (Band 18), herausgegeben vom Edvard-Grieg-Komitee, Oslo. Frankfurt am Main: C. F. Peters, [2000], c1988. [Score, 269 p.; notes in Ger., Eng., Nor., 6 p. ISMN M-014-10540-2; Edition Peters, Nr. 8518b. [member of]34.80.]

"If I am granted a few more years of life, I will perform all of this music [to Peer Gynt] as I have conceived it, and as I am capable of making it sound" (Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, ed. Finn Benestad; trans. William H. Halverson [Columbus, Ohio: Peer Gynt Press, 2000], 91). Edvard Grieg wrote these words on 1 March 1902, two days after the opening of a new production of Peer Gynt at the National Theater in Oslo (then called Christiania). What did Grieg mean by "all of this music"? How did he envision the work that would eventually become one of his most famous compositions? By all estimations, editor Finn Benestad has effectively answered all these questions and more with this laudable new edition of Grieg's Peer Gynt published by C. F. Peters.

For those whose only acquaintance with Peer Gynt is through Grieg's familiar concert suites (opp. 46 and 55), the original music for the play by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) may come as a bit of a surprise. The concert suites include only eight of the incidental music's twenty-six numbers, and as the order of the pieces within the suites does not follow the sequence of events in the play, there is no sense of the work's satirical …