Morning Mood

Grieg wrote the music for Henrik Ibsen's verse play Peer Gynt in 1875, and the play opened in Christiania, now Oslo, in February 1876. Morning Mood is the prelude to the fourth act. By then Peer has left Norway far behind, made and lost a fortune, and the sun it describes is coming up over the Moroccan desert. Nearly everyone who hears it pictures a Norwegian fjord instead.

In 1888 Grieg gathered four numbers from the play into the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46, and put Morning Mood first. He also arranged the suite for piano himself, which is how the music reached parlors that had never seen the play. Cartoons, commercials and films have used it as shorthand for waking up ever since.

The whole movement is built on one small figure, a falling and rising turn of five notes. The flute plays it, the oboe answers an octave lower, and then the pair move it up to a new key and trade again, climbing until the full orchestra takes it. This page carries the first two rounds of that trade, sixteen bars, stopping where the climb starts.

Moved down a step to D, the flute's lines sit on the E course and the oboe's on the A and D courses, all in first position. The notes are easy to find. The work is in the evenness: six eighths to a bar, rocking in two, with the long note at the end of each phrase held for its full length. The sharps in the second half are all one fret below a note in the key. Play the flute phrases a little brighter than the oboe ones and the conversation comes through on one instrument.