Solveig's Song (Peer Gynt Suite no. 2)

Ibsen asked Grieg in 1874 to provide music for a stage version of Peer Gynt, a dramatic poem written nine years earlier with no theatre in mind. Grieg took eighteen months over it and complained about the task throughout; the play opened in Christiania on 24 February 1876 with some ninety minutes of music. He later drew two orchestral suites from the score, the second published in 1893. Solveig's Song closes it — the woman who stays behind, singing through the winters and springs of Peer's absence, in a Norwegian folk idiom that is Grieg's own invention.