YMMV / Peer Gynt

• Adaptation Displacement: The "In the Hall of the Mountain King" music by Grieg has become a well-known Standard Snippet, and is much more popular and well-known than the play it was written for. The play itself, meanwhile, is much more well known than the original fairy tale of Per Gynt as collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe.
  • Edvard Grieg was asked to write this music by Ibsen himself, but during production, Grieg stated that he found it difficult to make the right kind of music to the play, and ended up writing music that suited him more than Ibsen. Thus, Grieg´s music stood firmly on its own feet, and took on a life of its own. Later, another composer, Harald Sæverud, raised the stakes by making new music for the play, and managed to do some of the things Ibsen had asked for, which Grieg had discarded. His version of the troll sequence goes like this.
• Fridge Logic: Peer Gynt left the wedding in the first act, taking the Ingrid the bride with him. This made him an outlaw, because Ingrid's father had him sentenced. One of the reasons he left, was because Solveig was reluctant to dance with him, and she is therefore partly to blame for his actions - up to and including his entire life, dealing with slaves and so on. Her choice of life, waiting for him to return in the cabin he built, is actually an acknowledgement of this fact - and she atones prominently an entire life for denying a guy one single dance.
  • The other part of the blame lies on society: Solveig was reluctant to dance with him when she learned his name. Obviously, she had heard rumors of him already. Peer Gynt was thoroughly slandered before he met her, and thus, Society Is to Blame as well. That doesn't make Peer Gynt less of an irresponsible jerkass, though.
• Memetic Mutation: If you're in Norway, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know the correct answer to "Peer, du lyger!"
• Moral Event Horizon: Peer secures himself by acting in a way that keeps him from crossing it. This is lampshaded heavily in the fourth act, when he explains his philosophy to his friends. This trait gains him a position on the list of the Button Moulder, however, and Peer gets a Heel Realization, making him cross the Despair Event Horizon instead.
• Parody Displacement:
  • The story Peer tells his mother at the start of the play. He claimed he rode a reindeer buck over a mountain pass, and the buck jumped with him into a nearby lake. His mother is quite savvy on the fact that the story has happened to someone else, because she heard it when she was young. Quite true - it stems from the tales of Asbjørnsen and Moe. Parody Displacement comes in when the public opinion today associates Peer Gynt with this reindeer trip, not Gudbrand Glesne who was said to actually have done it. He is even mentioned in-play.
  • Residents of Oslo will sooner be exposed to Peer Gynt riding a reindeer on a bridge with four statues of fairy tale figures than to this play.

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