In the Hall of the Mountain King

Edvard Grieg could not stand it. He composed the piece in 1875 as incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt, for the scene in which Peer, in a dream-like fantasy, stumbles into the hall of the Dovregubbe, the troll king of the Dovre mountains, surrounded by a howling court of trolls, gnomes and goblins. Grieg wrote that he had produced something that reeked of cowpats, ultra-Norwegianism and smug self-sufficiency so strongly that he could not bear to hear it, though he hoped the irony would come across. The irony was the point. Ibsen's play is a satire, and the trolls' motto, to be enough unto yourself rather than true to yourself, is exactly what the king and Peer discuss in the scene that follows. Grieg's music captures the mob: a simple theme creeps in at the bottom of the orchestra on cellos, basses and bassoons, then keeps returning, louder and faster, until it ends in a frantic prestissimo. Originally part of the full incidental score, it was later placed as the finale of the first Peer Gynt Suite. The tune soon escaped the theatre. D. W. Griffith used it in The Birth of a Nation, and in Fritz Lang's film M the child murderer whistles it whenever the urge to kill comes over him, actually whistled by Lang himself, since Peter Lorre could not whistle. Since then it has turned up in rock covers, cartoons and theme parks. A piece its composer considered an embarrassing caricature of Norwegian self-satisfaction became Norway's most recognised music.