Like the play from which it derived, the film tells of the early struggles of composer Edvard Grieg and his attempts to develop an authentic Norwegian national music.

It stars Toralv Maurstad as Grieg and features an international cast including Florence Henderson, Christina Schollin, Robert Morley, Harry Secombe, Oskar Homolka, Edward G. Robinson, and Frank Porretta (as Rikard Nordraak).

Filmgoers' appetites for a musical revival had been completely misjudged, and it ultimately was to join other box-office failures of the same period, such as Darling Lili, Mame, Paint Your Wagon, and Lost Horizon.

In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote: "The movie is of an unbelievable badness; it brings back clichés you didn’t know you knew - they’re practically from the unconscious of moviegoers.

"[12] Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote that the film "is no ordinary movie kitsch, but a display to turn Guy Lombardo livid with envy," adding that "the film, conceived as a living postcard, is so full of waterfalls, blossoms, lambs, glaciers, folk dancers, mountains, children, suns, fjords and churches, that it raises kitsch to the status of a kind of art, not without its own peculiar integrity and crazy fascination.

"[13][14][15] Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News gave it two stars out of four, writing that "Edvard Grieg may well have had his struggles as a young composer but he'd have to sit through the movie based on his life to know real depression.

"[17] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called the film "inoffensive but unsatisfying" and compared it unfavorably to The Sound of Music, which "had a strong narrative line and generated a good deal of suspense.

"[18] Critics also cited the uninspired cinematography, clumsy editing and a ham-fisted insertion of cartoon trolls (supervised by former Disney animator Jack Kinney).

Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film had "next to no plot" and "beautiful scenery or not, people are going to lose interest as slowly but surely as they do when watching the neighbors' slides of their trip to Europe.