Peer Gynt to this book." Despite this defense of his poetic achievement in "Peer Gynt", the play was his last to employ verse; from "The League of Youth" (1869) onwards, Ibsen was to write drama only in prose. Ibsen wrote "Peer Gynt" in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism. Raymond Williams compares "Peer Gynt" with August Strindberg's early drama "Lucky Peter's Journey" (1882) and argues that both explore a new kind
Peer Gynt of dramatic action that was beyond the capacities of the theatre of the day; both created "a sequence of images in language and visual composition" that "became technically possible only in film." "Peer Gynt" was first performed in Christiania (now Oslo) on 24 February 1876, with original music composed by Edvard Grieg that includes some of today's most recognized classical pieces, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and "Morning Mood". It was published in German translation in 1881, in English in 1892, and in French in 1896. The contemporary influence of the play continues into the twenty-first century. "Peer