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Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th Century Anne Sivuoja, Owe Ander, Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Jens Hesselager (editors) Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th Century ISBN 978-952-5959-45-1 Anne Sivuoja, Owe Ander, Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Jens Hesselager (editors): Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th Century DocMus-tohtorikoulun julkaisuja 4 // Docmus Research Publications 4 ISSN-L 2242-6418 ISSN 2242-6418 (printed publication) ISSN 2242-6426 (e-publication) Cover: Tiina Laino Layout: Henri Terho Printed in Unigrafia, Helsinki, Finland 2012 Contents Anne Sivuoja with Owe Ander, Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Jens Hesselager Introduction 7 Voices Juvas Marianne Liljas The Björling ‘Opera’. A children’s Nursery Academy and an Italian Conservatory in Miniature 17 Marianne Tråvén Formed to Perform. Educating Students at the Opera School in Stockholm 1773–1850 50 Ingela Tägil Jenny Lind’s Vocal Strain 83 Theaters Anne Reese Willén Music at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm during the Mid- nineteenth Century . The Musical Repertoire and Contemporary Criticism of the Position of the Opera as a Music Institution within the Musical Life of Stockholm 95 6 Pentti Paavolainen Two Operas or One – or None. Crucial Moments in the Competition for Operatic Audiences in Helsinki in the 1870s 125 Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen Staging a National Language. Opera in Christiania and Helsinki in the 1870s 155 Performances Joakim Tillman The Introduction of Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas in Stockholm. The Reception of Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre 195 Jens Hesselager Rachel the Jewess in Copenhagen 221 Kristel Pappel Performative Elements and Sources. Verdi and Wagner in a Nineteenth-century City Theatre 250 Camilla Hambro Gendered Agendas and the Representation of Gender in Women Composers’ Operas and Theatre Music at the Dawn of the “Women’s Century”. Case studies of Helena Munktell’s In Florence (1889) and Tekla Griebel’s The Rose Time (1895) 271 7 Introduction Anne Sivuoja with Owe Ander, Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Jens Hesselager The long nineteenth century (1780–1918) was the Golden Age of opera all over Europe, both for composition and for performance. Opera became entertainment for the new bourgeoisie and the educated classes after hav- ing been for centuries mainly, although not exclusively, a courtly pleasure. The architectural spaces where operas were performed were amongst the largest secularised rooms in bourgeois society. Always centrally located, the opera theatres offered performance possibilities, not only for opera, but also for other types of musical performances (as Anne Reese Willén shows in this volume). Accelerating urbanisation and societal and social changes affected the themes, settings and also the censorship of operas; Verdi’s operas, for example, were important for the Risorgimento in Italy (and often under the censor’s tight control). Elsewhere too opera became an important polit- ico-cultural tool for creating and transmitting appropriate national pasts, presents and futures of different European nations and nation-states, as well as a means of criticising the existing social order. Opera also served as a means to hide politically sensitive issues by re-channelling public at- tention. All of this could be done in a more disguised form in opera than in 8 the spoken theatre, where words would provoke the authorities and the public too openly. Opera’s overwhelming vocality exceeds the rationale of contents expressed by words alone. All in all, opera as an institution played an important role in the shaping of cultural identities at large, and not just musical identities, but also urban, bourgeois, religious, secular, national and international identities. Many opera composers in vogue dealt with the themes of nation, language, religion and class in their works, for example, Gioachino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, Fromental Halévy, Carl Maria von Weber, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Giuseppe Verdi and later, Richard Wagner. Although many Nordic composers canonised today as the main ‘national’ composers of their time did not, in fact, take to opera as a central genre (men such as Niels W. Gade, Edvard Grieg and Jean Sibelius), this does not mean that opera played no role in the Nordic countries as a medium for articulat- ing national and other concerns. Imported operas by foreign composers (including those with spoken dialogue – opéras comiques and Singspiele in translation) may have dominated in this respect, but many Nordic composers, such as Franz Berwald, J.P.E. Hartmann, Henrik Rung, Peter He- ise, Waldemar Thrane, Wilhelm Stenhammar, Fredrik Pacius and Oskar Merikanto, contributed to the repertoire with works that may appear pe- ripheral today (perhaps in some cases even justly forgotten), but which nevertheless testify to important cultural processes in the history of the Nordic countries. Voices as sonorous phenomena are central to opera and, at an individual level, also to singers, whose careers depend on vocal competence. In our visually-orientated culture with its emphasis on written documents, it is all the more challenging in the midst of the empirical material to look for trac- es left by voices that are now forever silenced. The centrality of voices to opera is not diminished by the fact that very few sound samples were made or preserved from that period; this makes the research even more complex and challenging. Several chapters in this volume respond to such challeng- es in different ways. Some, for instance, deal with matters of voice training and education in historiographic perspective (see Marianne Tråvén’s and Juvas Marianne Liljas’ articles); others examine the careers and problems of individual singers and their voices (the focus of Ingela Tägil’s and Jens Hesselager’s contributions). Re-creating the European opera tradition in the Nordic context meant manifold adaptations in the performance texts, in staging and in theatrical technology (e.g. scenery) and was significantly conditioned by the availabil- Introduction 9 ity of vocal resources and musicians (for the opera orchestras). Operas from central Europe, often from Paris, were performed in the national languages of the North: Danish, Swedish, Finnish or Norwegian. The translations not only affected the voice-language-musical relationship, but also offered a chance to re-cast the semantic message in a more nuanced way (Marvin 2010; Broman-Kananen 2011). Furthermore, staging an opera in a national language at a local theatre offered a means of enhancing political importance of that particular language, firstly, by making it loudly audible in a public space and secondly, by tying it to central-European urban cultural practice. This tactic was wielded as a cultural instrument in a political power game, for instance, in Kristiania (Oslo) in the conflict between the Norwegian and Danish languages and in Helsinki between Swedish and Finnish (a matter addressed by Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen and Pentti Paavolainen in this volume). Several European cities, such as Paris and St Petersburg, boasted many opera theatres, which not only guaranteed their audiences a constant flow of opera performances, but also offered opportunities for composers, musicians, singers, stage designers, and the like. But in the Nordic countries, such bounty was generally not the case, as only Sweden (Stockholm) and Denmark (Copenhagen) had long traditions with established opera houses. Finland and Norway each had a discontinuous and episodic opera history with short-lived efforts to establish a permanent institution. In practice, this amounted to a few private opera companies, some of them managed by female opera singers (such as Emmy Achté and Emma Engdahl in Finland and Olefine Moe in Norway), and occasional visits either by private opera troupes or companies based in the neighbouring royal opera houses, such as the Royal Swedish Opera. The result was that novelties from central European stages, particularly Paris, were presented to Danish and Swed- ish audiences at a relatively quick pace, whereas Norwegian and Finnish audiences were served new operas much more sporadically, as revealed by comparing the repertoires of national opera theatres. Paradoxical as it may seem, despite national(istic) identity work performed through operas – by institutions such as the Royal Swedish Op- era or the Royal Danish Theatre or the Finnish Opera – the opera performances themselves often required singers, particularly prima donnas and tenors, along with orchestral musicians, conductors, vocal coaches (see Marianne Tråvén’s article) and other professionals from beyond a nation’s borders. Furthermore, as mentioned above, operas performed in the Nordic countries during the long nineteenth century originated to a 10 very large extent outside the Nordic frontiers, particularly in France, Italy and Germany. For artists, the whole of Europe (and beyond) was a plausible working area, as musicians were able to take their professional skills across national boundaries with ease. Jenny Lind, Fritz Arlberg, Algot Lange, Lin- da Roeske-Lund and Ludvig Josephson are a few examples among many. Symptomatically, Jenny Lind’s name was adopted for an English steam locomotive in 1847 (see the cover of this anthology). But even those who made their careers mainly or exclusively in their home countries depend- ed, in one way or another, on an international perspective. For instance, many singers pursued their professional

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