Presented at the Grieg Conference in Copenhagen August 11, 2011
Rune J. Andersen, Sweden
Assistant Professor
AN ”AUTHENTIC” PEER GYNT-MUSIC? A SOURCE-CRITICAL STUDY OF EDVARD GRIEG’S OPUS 23 – SOME ASPECTS
Reading the title of the Edvard Grieg Congress, Copenhagen 2011, I was more or less automatically drawn to the staging of Peer Gynt at the Dagmar Theatre in Copenhagen January 1886. Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt had been a subject during several years spent preparing vol. 18 of Edvard Grieg Complete Works (GGA). In 1886 no one knew that Grieg would never succeed in publishing a score to Peer Gynt. As we shall see later, he expressed his regret for this on more than one occasion. In 1983, nearly 100 years after the production at the Dagmar Theater, Finn Benestad and I started the work investigating the possibillity of publishing an authentic score to Peer Gynt, i. e. a score in accordance with Grieg’s own intentions. One of the sources, the score used at the production in 1886, now preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, turned out to be of great importance.
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Paper Rune Andersen 2011