In the Hall of the Mountain King: Trolls, Metal, and The Social Network

In the Hall of the Mountain King begins with a tiny tune in the low strings and ends with what sounds like the orchestra being overrun.

Grieg wrote it for Peer Gynt, where Peer arrives at the Mountain King’s court on a giant pig, considers marrying the king’s daughter, and discovers that the trolls would quite like to boil him. The music follows the scene perfectly: the melody barely changes, but it gets faster, louder, and more crowded. Grieg simply keeps admitting more trolls.

This episode follows that little tune after it escaped the theatre. It becomes a murderer’s whistle in Fritz Lang’s M, a Duke Ellington big-band number, a rock instrumental for Nero and the Gladiators, an experiment by The Who and ELO, metal with Savatage and Apocalyptica, synth-pop with Erasure, mounting electronic pressure in The Social Network, and finally, inevitably, music for actual animated trolls.

The tune survives because it is almost absurdly efficient. You hear it once. You know it. Then it starts coming closer.