Edvard Grieg composed some excellent incidental music for Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt, of which eight pieces were extracted to form two suites for concert performance. Richard Strauss describes his Don Quixote inspired by Cervantes’s eponymous epic as “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character,” in which every section depicts a scene in the story, vividly capturing the wild imagination and dreams of the down-and-out cavalier. Both of these great romantic masters tell wonderful stories about their chosen characters.