The piece
Grieg wrote the incidental music for Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt for its first staging in Christiania (Oslo) in 1876. In the Hall of the Mountain King, the trolls surround Peer and the march swells into an uproar. Grieg put it into his first orchestral suite, Op. 46, and made a piano version of it himself. This easy version, arranged for Noctave after The University Society edition (1918), keeps the theme in Grieg's order, in B minor, first low and then an octave higher, its answer on F-sharp, the build-up and the ending.
It all comes down to the tempo, which keeps speeding up: the score goes from 88 to 126 quarter notes per minute, nearly the speed at which Grieg begins (138). Learn the theme slowly first, detached, every eighth note crisp, then let Noctave push the tempo little by little. The E-sharp and the C-natural in the second bar of the theme are the two notes to watch. The left hand alternates B and F-sharp in quarter notes, like the strings' pizzicato; at the end it walks down B, A, G, F-sharp under the theme, louder and louder.
