by Edvard Grieg
Sunrise music from a play — over the Moroccan desert, not a Norwegian fjord.
Ibsen asked Grieg to write music for his verse play Peer Gynt in 1874, and Grieg — who found the commission a struggle and complained about it for months — delivered it for the 1876 premiere. Twelve years later he picked four movements and published them as a concert suite, Op. 46, opening with Morgenstemning, morning mood. In the play it belongs to the fourth act, and the sunrise it paints is over the Moroccan desert, where Peer has washed up after a life of running away. Almost everyone hears a Norwegian dawn instead.
The tune is pentatonic — five notes, the pattern that makes so much folk music sound open — and in the orchestra it passes back and forth between flute and oboe, gathering strings underneath until the sun is fully up, then settling again. Grieg’s own piano arrangements of the Peer Gynt music are how the piece reached most homes in the nineteenth century, and they are still how it is usually played.
Written for orchestra as incidental music. Grieg made piano arrangements of the Peer Gynt music himself, and a piano version is what you play.
A piano version has to speak for a whole orchestra, and that shapes the difficulty. The melody passes between the hands the way it passes between instruments, so you need to know at every moment which fingers own the tune. The swelling middle needs a rolling accompaniment kept even underneath long, sustained melody notes — legato lines that must not break where the hand has to move. The notes themselves are gentle; the balance and the pedalling are not.
Take it in sections and one hand at a time, which makes the hand-overs obvious, and resist adding speed. The piece is a sunrise; it does not benefit from being hurried.
No levelled arrangement for this one yet — you play the score as it stands, with the app's tempo control, wait mode and one-hand practice to get you there. Levelled arrangements are added a curated batch at a time. See the Library
