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Updated: July 21, 2025
To the generation of 1880, Ibsen was not so much the author of the realistic social dramas as of those old but now rediscovered miracles of poetry and wit, The Pretenders, Brand and Peer Gynt. In 1889 Ibsen had been made very pleasantly conscious of this strong personal feeling in his favor among young men and women. Nor did he find it confined to Scandinavia.
You might have seen them at the opera or symphony concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven.
None of the delays which had interfered with the appearance of Brand now afflicted the temper of the poet, and Peer Gynt was published in November, 1867.
It was evening, and twenty or thirty of us were all in a large classroom together, and for many minutes I felt more lonely than I ever had before; I felt cut off from all those around me, and I see that, as Peer Gynt would have said, "I had become myself." As has already been said, I was not frightened, and what I did in those minutes was to work.
"They have discovered," he said, "much more satire in Peer Gynt than was intended by me. Why can they not read the book as a poem? For as such I wrote it."
Here, too, he found the Böig, a monster of Norse superstition, vast and cold, slippery and invisible, capable of infinite contraction and expansion. The conception that this horror would stand in symbol for a certain development of selfish national instability seems to have seized him later, and Peer Gynt, which began as a farce, continued as a fable.
"Or counterfeits. Have you ever read 'Peer Gynt, Dick?" "Yes. Ibsen has a gloomy charm for me. I read all he writes in about the same way a child reads goblin tales. I enjoy the shivers." "You remember the woman who gave Peer permission to marry the one pure love of his life but stipulated that she should forever sit beside them?" "Yes!" Thornly smiled grimly.
Above everything else which we see in Peer Gynt we see its fun and its picturesqueness. Written at different times and in different moods, there is an incoherency in its construction which its most whole-hearted admirers cannot explain away.
"Just listen here's Rossini's 'Barbier de Seville, and Grieg's 'Anitra's Dance' from the 'Peer Gynt Suite, and here's that most entrancing 'Barcarolle' from the 'Contes d'Hoffman' you remember it?" She began to hum the air, then, as the harmony flowed through her soul, sang a few lines, her voice like gold and honey: Belle nuit, o nuit d'amour, souris a nos ivresses!
They were the oddest creatures in the Laundromat, dancing the sangfroid to a cassette recording of Evard Grieg's Peer Gynt with bread and cream cheese gushing in their mouths as they waited for their laundry to dry. One day they went downtown to pay utility bills and afterwards they walked around the campus of Cornell University.
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