Composers and their stage works 

Love's Comedy

(Kjaerlighedens komedie)

Henrik Ibsen - written. 1862, prod. 1873.

Three-act verse satire on the middle-class courtships and marriages of Ibsen's day.

The young bachelor poet Falk, living in the Christiania suburbs, views with mingled disdain and amused detachment the trivial married lives of those around him. At the engagement party of his close friend Lind, he delivers a tirade against marriage, denouncing it as a mausoleum of love, and, together with his own like-minded sweetheart Svanhild, who has been courted by the wealthy, practical merchant Guldstad, resolves to seek "the ideal." When Guldstad convinces them that their own passion is doomed to the same mediocre fate as that of the others, Falk and Svanhild decide to part, accepting that only in memory can their love remain fresh and beautiful. Falk, the free spirit, joins a chorus of singers departing for the mountains. Svanhild, however, decides to marry Guldstad and accept the inevitable.