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

128 Pentti Paavolainen
struction of a nation-state as a given. A return to a strictly chronological
presentation has also proved very fruitful as has an effort to avoid drawing
conclusions that are too dramatic or hasty. A kind of “neo-chronological” approach
should help a great deal of theatre historical as well as musicological
research, which often tends to explain or conceptualise a priori. The arguments
are valid only when interpreted in the specific context where they
can be verified as having occurred.
A third area of interest here concerns contra-factual assumptions: Could
something else have happened? If the answer is yes, then we must ask
when was some other outcome still possible and when had the time passed
for such a possibility? As a fourth interest in the tradition of theatre scholarship,
we have Tom Postlewait’s 12 Cruxes, which are still worthy of attention.
(Postlewait 1991) In Postelwait’s view the scholar has to struggle
through several layers or filters that have already delineated and transformed
the original event into something else. To be able to look at events
“as they occurred” means that we must become aware of the filters that
still modify what we see and what we do not.
Bergbom’s proposal for a domestic opera department in the New
Theatre (1869–1870)
Kaarlo Bergbom (1843–1906) was an ardent student of history, literature
and drama, he was a frequent opera-goer and would-be poet, and he had
made his debut as a promising playwright. In the early 1860s Bergbom became
a close friend to the brother of Yrjö-Koskinen, the well-known leader
of the Fennoman party. Jaakko Forsman encouraged him to concentrate on
studying Finnish. Bergbom did not have the advantage of speaking Finnish
from childhood, as several in this political jungfennomaner group had done.
These bilingual party supporters were mostly sons of priests from the Ostrobothnian
countryside who wanted to make their careers by assuming
elite positions in Helsinki. At the end of the 1860s, Kaarlo Bergbom suddenly
emerged as the energetic organiser who arranged cultural events in
the Finnish language. He had grown up with the writings in Swedish of J. L.
Runeberg and Zacharias Topelius, two key Finnish figures who had articulated
the virtues and beauties of the fatherland. Like many others, Bergbom
performed Runeberg’s poems as part of patriotic tableaux vivants.
On 10 May 1869, Bergbom arranged an event in Helsinki that included
the first operatic excerpt sung in the Finnish language: Act II of Friedrich