Edvard Grieg - Morning Mood

"Morning Mood", (Norwegian: Morgenstemning), more popularly known as just "Morning", is a composition belonging to Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt, Op. 23, written in 1875 as incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play of the same name, and was also included as the first of four movements in Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. The melody in the piece is alternating between flute and oboe.

Setting

The piece depicts the rising of the sun during act 4, scene 4, of Ibsen's play, which finds the  hero stranded in the Moroccan desert after his companions took his yacht and abandoned him there while he slept. The scene begins with the following description:

Dawn. Acacias and palm trees. Peer [Gynt] is sitting in his tree using a wrenched-off branch to defend himself against a group of monkeys.

As the Peer Gynt suites take their pieces out of the original context of the play, "Morning Mood" is not widely known in its original setting, and images of Grieg's Scandinavian origins more frequently spring to the minds of its listeners than those of the desert it was written to depict.