Peer Gynt Prize Peer Gynt Prize The Peer Gynt Prize or the Peer Gynt Award ("Årets Peer Gynt" or "Per Gynt-prisen") is a private Norwegian prize presented annually by the private commercial company "Peer Gynt AS" during the Peer Gynt Festival, also organised by the same company. The Peer Gynt Prize is named after the main character in "Peer Gynt" (1867), a five-act play in verse by Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. The prize is awarded to people or institutions who has marked themselves in a positive way nationally and internationally. However, the prize has received criticism for misrepresenting the Peer Gynt character, who
Peer Gynt Gynt represents the superior Germanic hero, struggling against implicitly Jewish "trolls". Ralph M. Engelman says, "Eckart meant his adaptation of Peer Gynt to represent a racial allegory in which the trolls and Great Boyg represented what [Otto] Weininger conceived to be the Jewish spirit." Eckart's version was one of the best attended productions of the age with more than 600 performances in Berlin alone. Eckart later helped to found the Nazi party. In 1938 German composer Werner Egk finished an opera based on the story. In 1948, the composer Harald Sæverud made a new score for the nynorsk-production at "the