5. Anitra’s Dance
Anitra, the light-limbed and dark-eyed daughter of the chief, has won the especial favor of the prophet, and dances alone before him after her companions have retired. Peer is enraptured and promises to make her an houri in paradise, and to give her a soul, a very little one, in return for her love and service. She is not much tempted by the soul, but finally consents to fly to the desert with him for the gift of the large opal from his turban. Anitra’s dance is more warmly subjective, more distinctly personal in character than the preceding, at once lighter and more rapid, more tender and winningly graceful, full of arch defiance, playful witcheries, and the coquettish confidence of the high-born maiden and practised solo-danseuse, certain of her power and bent on using it to the full, for the complete subjugation of their prophet guest. We can almost feel her smoothly undulating movements, her swift, but seductive, changes of pose, and those sharp, stolen side-glances, skilfully blended of shyness and fire, flashing from beneath her drooping black lashes, fascinating, but dangerous, like lightning gleams from a fringe of somber cloud.
6. Solveig’s Song
Solveig, a Norwegian maiden of Peer’s own village, the earliest and only worthy love of his life, whom he has deserted in a spasm of virtue, feeling himself unfit to remain with her, sits spinning at the door of a log hut, in a forest far up in the North. She is now a middle-aged woman, fair and comely, and as she spins she sings of her unfailing faith in Peer’s return, her own ever-constant love, and her prayers to God to strengthen and gladden her lover on earth or in heaven. In the music to this song Grieg has admirably depicted the character of Solveig: beautiful, tender, joyous, and full of hope. The English translation of the words, which is but a poor and inadequate representation of the original, runs as follows:
“Though winter departeth,
And fadeth the May;
Though summer, too, may vanish,
The year pass away;
Yet thou’lt return, my darling,
For thou, love, art mine.