Trivia

One of the founders of the Norwegian nationalist school of music.

He composed the incidental music for the original 1876 stage production of "Peer Gynt", at the invitation of the play's author, Henrik Ibsen. The complete score plays for about ninety minutes, but the music became so popular that Grieg fashioned two fifteen-minute orchestral suites from it, and these suites are now far more frequently performed than either the complete score or Ibsen's own play. The "Peer Gynt" Suites became, along with his Piano Concerto in A Minor, Grieg's most often-performed works.

As of 2004, there has still never been a major English-language film or television version of "Peer Gynt" with Grieg's music, though it has been used in a 1986 Norwegian TV version of it, and in Charlton Heston's silent, student-made 1941 film version of the play.