[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRpzxKsSEZg]
WRITER: Edvard Grieg
YEAR WRITTEN: 1875
HOW YOU PROBABLY KNOW THIS TUNE: Employed to punctuate scenes of rising chaos and disorder, its use spans the history of film itself, from Birth of Nation to M to The Social Network.
‘PEER’ PRESSURE: Critics who saw the 1876 premiere of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt had no idea of what they were in for. A modern take on an old Norwegian fairy tale, the play was radical and ambitious in its approach (social satire), structure (five acts), language (the lines were spoken in verse), and staging (40 scenes, from farm to desert and many weird places in between). And it didn’t help that the protagonist, Peer Gynt, was an epic slacker, content to let life pass him by. Initial reviews of the play were unkind, though, in time, it became something of a national treasure. Critics were much more receptive to the accompanying music, composed by Edvard Grieg: two rather different pieces — the soothing “Morning Mood” and the tense “In the Hall of the Mountain King” — proved to be wildly popular. The latter piece plays during Peer’s encounter with a crafty troll, and begins with the a steady beat that mirrors the anxious steps of our lazy hero as he makes his way into the mountain lair.
MEMORABLY USED IN … A never-aired Gap commercial directed by Spike Jonez
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oob5uobmcy8]
LIST: The All-TIME 100 Songs