Morning Mood (Peer Gynt Suite no. 1, op. 46)

Ibsen wrote to Grieg in January 1874 asking him to provide music for a stage version of Peer Gynt, a dramatic poem written to be read rather than played. Grieg accepted, found the task harder than he expected and complained about it for two years; the production opened in Christiania on 24 February 1876. In 1888 he selected four movements from the incidental music and reordered them for concert use as the first suite, op. 46 — Morning Mood, Åse's Death, Anitra's Dance, In the Hall of the Mountain King. The sequence follows no narrative: the morning music belongs to Morocco.