ABSTRACT
The trolls of Peer Gynt stand for the nineteenth-century Norwegian ultranationalists that were 'dangerously active, in Heinrik Ibsen's mind, in the country he had left in disgust'. Ibsen's trolls occupy a pointedly ambiguous space between the human and the monstrous, the rational and the perverse. Peer accepts this motto and later remarks that the Dovregubben is 'more sensible' than he had imagined. He soon learns, however, that the troll king expects complete compliance, a true change of perspective. Sensing Peer's equivocation, the great troll insists on cutting up the young man's eyes, so that he will see the world of the trolls obliquely, and thus recognize its charms. The grand pauses between the syncopated chords at the end of the piece are frightening in a Jack-in-the-box way; in the theatrical production, the troll children filled in the orchestral silence, screeching out sadistic solutions to the problem of Peer.
