Morning Mood from ‘Peer Gynt’ Suite No. 1, Op. 46

Program notes

About the Work

In 1874 Henrik Ibsen asked Grieg to write incidental music for a stage production of Peer Gynt, his sprawling verse drama about a boastful, restless Norwegian peasant lad who roams the world, from the halls of the mountain troll king to the deserts of North Africa, in search of himself. Grieg found the task daunting, but the music he produced turned out to be his most famous. The production opened in Christiania, today’s Oslo, on 24 February 1876. More than a decade later Grieg gathered the best numbers into two concert suites, and it is through these, above all the first, published in 1888, that the music has travelled the world.

Morning Mood opens Suite No. 1. Almost everyone knows it from films, advertisements and cartoons, where it has become shorthand for a sunrise over a fjord. The irony is that it is nothing of the kind. In the play, the music introduces the fourth act, where Peer, now a prosperous and none-too-scrupulous adventurer, wakes up on the coast of Morocco. The sunrise is a desert sunrise. Grieg, though, could not help writing out of his own landscape, and the music is so full of Nordic freshness that audiences have always heard Norway in it.

What to Listen For

The whole piece grows from a single, gently rocking phrase, passed back and forth between flute and oboe over sustained strings, a melody built largely on the notes of the pentatonic scale, which gives it its open, pastoral simplicity. Listen as it is taken up by ever larger forces: the strings and then the full orchestra carry it to a glowing climax, a moment of full sunrise. Then the light softens. Towards the close, listen for the horn’s calm statement of the tune and the delicate birdsong touches in the woodwind, as the morning settles into stillness.