Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play “Peer Gynt” is a 40-scene epic written in Danish verse and filled with characters from Norwegian mythology. This isn’t the easiest recipe for box office gold in the 21st-century United States.
It helps that the music Edvard Grieg wrote for Ibsen’s play is some of the best-known music in the world, even if many listeners first heard its highlights far from the concert hall, watching Saturday morning cartoons.
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra will present a fresh take on Ibsen’s play and Grieg’s music at the Stifel Theatre this weekend under the baton of Music Director Stéphane Denève.
The production seeks to reshuffle the source material into a highly accessible, family-friendly show.
This two-act “Peer Gynt” is crafted by multi-hyphenate artist Bill Barclay. It requires 150 people onstage: full orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony Chorus under the direction of Erin Freeman, guest soloists, a troupe of seven actors from Barclay’s New York-based Concert Theatre Works and one puppet Troll King.
“It's a fusion of music and story that aims to create a sort of egalitarian framework for all of the artists,” Barclay said of this and his other adaptations in which he seeks to fully integrate the work of musicians and actors.
The colorful title character of “Peer Gynt” is a figure from Norwegian mythology. The play spans decades and continents, as Peer Gynt explores the world in search of pleasure with little regard for anyone else. By the end of the story, he regrets his selfishness and the good works he left undone.
Words and music = church and state?
Musicians sometimes work on Broadway musicals for years without ever interacting with the actors, Barclay said. Even during performances, musical actors typically take cues from the conductor — hidden out of sight, in the orchestra pit — by watching a live feed on a small monitor.
When dramatists integrate music into their plays, they often bring the musicians into the process near the end of rehearsals and then, for the show, stash them out of sight or somewhere upstage.
Worse, Barclay said, is when music is prerecorded and musicians aren’t necessarily identified or even paid.
“Music is a midwife to theater. Having spent 15 years [working in the worlds of theater and music], I just started to dream of a different solution,” said Barclay, 44, an accomplished composer, lecturer and actor. “It's a very church and state operation [between actors and musicians] in the commercial theater. I see a real enticing way to change that.”
The Massachusetts native was director of music at the prestigious London theater Shakespeare’s Globe for seven years and is now artistic director of the long-running Music Before 1800 concert series in New York, in addition to his work with Concert Theatre Works, which he founded. The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned his adaptation of “Peer Gynt” in 2017, though the version this weekend is expanded.
“He’s a great artistic force in our times,” Denève said of Barclay.
Denève conducted Barclay’s adaptation of “The Seven Deadly Sins” by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in October at New World Symphony in Miami, where Denève also serves as artistic director.
In “Peer Gynt” at the Stifel, actors and orchestra members will be on the same stage, able to make eye contact and play off each other. And rather than present Grieg’s sumptuous music as a standalone concert piece, Barclay’s adaptation blends music and spoken dialogue in a way that is now unusual but was once common — the performance form is the origin of the word melodrama.
“I think it's wonderful to have the music accompanying what they say. It really adds a new layer of emotion to it,” Denève said. “I have to follow that. So I will adjust a lot of music to what they say and the way they say it. I will be very attentive to the actors and will dialogue with them in music.”
Oh, that song!
Grieg, the Norwegian composer, collected excerpts from the incidental music he wrote for Ibsen’s five-act play and condensed them into two extended suites. They remain favorites of the concert hall repertory. The music has also proved popular with animators, television producers and other crafters of pop culture.
In Warner Bros. cartoons, Bugs Bunny sometimes wakes up to the dreamy sound of “Morning Mood.”
The propulsive “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” which creates tension through an extended acceleration, has appeared in an untold number of TV commercials. Film directors D.W. Griffith and Fritz Lang used it in their work. Duke Ellington, the Who and Electric Light Orchestra performed their own arrangements. It inspired composer Shuki Levy’s theme song for the animated series “Inspector Gadget.”
It is simply one of the most hummable and recognizable tunes ever written.
“It’s super famous for good reasons, because it's so wonderful,” Denève said of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” before breaking into a quick vocal take on a bit of the main theme. “It has a permanent crescendo. It's exhilarating.”
Denève has returned to “Peer Gynt” repeatedly, performing assorted adaptations with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Brussels Philharmonic and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. He included excerpts of the music in programs with the Philadelphia Orchestra and again in Brussels.
While the most recognizable bits of Grieg’s work always offer a friendly welcome to concert hall novices, the version of “Peer Gynt” that will be performed in St. Louis this weekend includes treasures for the experienced listener.
Barclay tracked down and included parts of the original composition that Grieg left out of his iconic suites. The material resurfaced in the 1980s and has rarely been recorded.
“I discovered all this new Grieg, and I thought I've got to smuggle into my adaptation as much of this as I can. This is the opportunity to deviate from the suites and to open it up and unpick the stitching and realize all the hidden gems that Greig left on the cutting room floor,” he said.
Laughs, then a lesson
The original “Peer Gynt” is an unwieldy piece to perform in a word-for-word translation and is typically shortened or otherwise adapted. Barclay maintained that tradition by rewriting all the text in rhyming couplets, building from the characters and situations in Ibsen’s original.
The result is a fast-moving, comic story that leaves the audience with plenty to think about once the story’s antihero comes to regret his life of self-absorption.
“He comes to realize at the end what all of us should be thinking about as we go — which is that his authentic self is revealed in his care and attention toward others,” Barclay said.
“It drills down to the most important takeaway of our existence, I think, which is that as soon as you stop worrying about your own foibles and problems and you start looking after other people,” he added, “a lot of your own foibles and problems work themselves out and happiness is right around the corner.”
In Peer Gynt’s pursuit of pleasure, Denève sees questions about one’s identity in relation to the rest of the world.
“What does it mean to be yourself? Does that mean that you don’t follow the social rules,” Denève asked, “the civilization rules? How free are we in life? What is the price to pay for voicing what you think, for being yourself?”
