Sigurd Jorsalfar (Grieg) Sigurd Jorsalfar (Grieg) Sigurd Jorsalfar is a work of incidental music composed by Edvard Grieg for a play by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson celebrating King Sigurd I of Norway. The incidental music, published as Op. 22, was first performed in Christiania on 10 April 1872. An orchestral suite compiled by Grieg from the main work and published as Op. 56 was premiered in Oslo on 5 November 1892 and revised by the composer the same year. The full work consists of nine parts; five are purely orchestral, and four are scored for tenor or baritone, male chorus, and orchestra. Three of the
Edvard Grieg up in a mountain surrounded by trolls. The music of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" represents the angry trolls taunting Peer and gets louder each time the theme repeats. The music ends with Peer escaping from the mountain. In an 1874 letter to his friend Frants Beyer, Grieg expressed his unhappiness with Dance of the Mountain King's Daughter, one of the movements he composed for "Peer Gynt", writing "I have also written something for the scene in the hall of the mountain King – something that I literally can't bear listening to because it absolutely reeks of cow-pies,