Opera on the Move in the Nordic Countries during the Long 19th ...

Two <strong>Opera</strong>s or One –
or None
Crucial Moments in the Competition for <strong>Opera</strong>tic Audiences in
Helsinki in the 1870s
Pentti Paavolainen
125
The birth and development of Finland’s Finnish-language cultural institutions
took place during the last four decades of the nineteenth century,
thanks to a consistent national programme to be followed in the Grand
Duchy of Finland. That programme defined the Finnish language as the only
possible national language, to be spoken by the majority of the population,
which also had to create a cultural space between Swedish, spoken mostly
by the upper-class bourgeoisie and merchants, and Russian, used along with
Swedish at the highest levels of administration. The Fennoman party, led
from the 1860s by Prof. Georg Zacharias Forsman (who later called himself
Yrjö S. Yrjö-Koskinen) saw an enemy in anyone who spoke Swedish. Yet
Swedish was the language of academic, educated, urban and literary life. In
the 1870s the Svecomans set out to defend their mother tongue and their
cultural institutions, not least their theatre. It was housed in the brand-new
(1866), well-equipped stone building called Nya Teatern (The New Theatre),
which a Warrants Society hired to run a Swedish Theatre Company.