Peer Gynt

By -
Peer Gynt, by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen's play Peer Gynt is probably not as famous in the US as Grieg's suite of the same name, but apparently they were first performed together, with some of the music accompanying the play.  It is a fairly early play, and is written in verse--it was the last time Ibsen wrote a verse play.  The story is based on a hunter character from Norwegian folklore named Per Gynt (why did Ibsen change the spelling?  I must say I quite like the name Per, I have a friend named Per, but I don't like Peer), but it's set in the 19th century.

I peeked at the original text for a minute (I'll look at it more) because Wikipedia says it's written in "Dano-Norwegian," which seems to mean that it's not so much in what we would call Norwegian as sort of mostly Danish but not entirely.  Both languages have changed in the last 100 years so it's not easy for me to tell, since my Danish is pretty rusty anyway, but the online text was pretty readable for me. 

Peer Gynt is a rascally young man.  He doesn't help his mother run the farm, he tells tall tales, he steals, he's a mischief-maker and he has grandiose ideas about himself.  He's become unpopular, in fact.  After pulling a particularly rotten stunt, he runs off and has adventures all over the world.  The settings change from fairy-tale to reality and back again, as Peer spends his life cheating and procrastinating.  In the end, he returns home in a sorry state, but his true love Solveig has been waiting for him and he finds redemption in her arms.

WHY Solveig has waited for him all this time is a mystery to me, but it's probably symbolic or something.  There's a lot to dig out in this play, about selfishness, individuality, and forgiveness.  At the same time, it's often funny. Peer gets into scrapes all over the place, and mostly he does not behave the way he should.


I've been humming bits of the Peer Gynt music for 2 or 3 days now...

Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 20, 2012 at 12:58 PM

    I'm going to have to look up the music, because I know I know it, but can't muster up the tune. Also, very interesting notation about the language and potential language difference. I always learn new things from your reviews! -Sarah

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more