Peer Gynt figure quite so exuberant, outrageous, vitalistic as Peer Gynt. He merely "seems" initially to be an unlikely candidate for such eminence: "What is he", we say, "except a kind of Norwegian roaring boy?" – marvelously attractive to women, a kind of bogus poet, a narcissist, absurd self-idolator, a liar, seducer, bombastic self-deceiver. But this is paltry moralizing – all too much like the scholarly chorus that rants against Falstaff. True, Peer, unlike Falstaff, is not a great wit. But in the Yahwistic, biblical sense, Peer the scamp bears the blessing: More life. On 5 January 1867 Ibsen wrote to Frederik
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