The Troll March Its Composer Couldn't Stand

Ibsen's request

In 1874 the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote to the young composer Grieg. He wanted to stage his dramatic poem Peer Gynt and asked Grieg to write the music for it. Grieg accepted the request from Norway's leading writer, but the work proved harder than he expected. The play was first staged in 1876 at a theater in the Norwegian capital.

Its hero, Peer, is a country lad given to bragging and lies. Wandering, he enters the trolls' kingdom in the mountains and tries to marry the Mountain King's daughter. In return he nearly agrees to live like a troll, to wear a tail and even to have his eyes changed into troll eyes. This piece is the music for the scene in which the trolls surround Peer and grow more and more frenzied.

A confession about cow pies

Grieg, it seems, didn't much like it. In a letter to a friend he wrote that the music he had composed for the Hall of the Mountain King was something he could hardly bear to listen to, reeking, as he put it, of cow pies, exaggerated Norwegian nationalism and trollish self-satisfaction.

Surprising, to run down your own work like that. Yet that very "trollishness" became the piece's charm. The clumsy, stubborn power of one tune hammered again and again is impossible to forget once heard. Today it turns up endlessly in films, adverts and games, and has become one of Grieg's most widely known pieces.

When you listen

From start to finish, it is essentially one short tune. It begins in the low instruments and climbs into higher ones, while the speed and volume keep rising. Right up to the moment at the end when the orchestra bursts out like the trolls' shouts, notice your body leaning forward on its own.