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

148 Pentti Paavolainen
operas was the catastrophic economic situation of the Finnish <strong>Opera</strong> Company.
This was true: the Finnish Theatre Warrants Society had not published
its balance sheet for two years, because the truth was that the debts
had become unbearable. Of course, the poor financial situation was partly
a consequence of the competition between the two opera companies, but it
was also due to unrealistic calculations from the very beginning. Even the
Bergboms proposed that the Finnish <strong>Opera</strong> Company should be terminated,
but their own party activists could not imagine their lives or their “conquest
of Helsinki” without it.
To give some taste of what a joining of forces could mean for the music
itself, the conductor Bohuslav Hřímalý organised a concert on 17 February
1877 in which the two theatre orchestras played with amateur musicians.
The evening took place in the University Festival Hall, with half of
the evening dedicated to Wagner. Elsa and Lohengrin’s duet, sung by Josef
Navrátil and Emmy Achté, was accompanied by some “demanding choral
parts.” (Morgonbladet, 19 February1877).
A culmination of the fatal opera competition came in early May of 1877:
Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable was staged both in the New Theatre (as Robert
af Normandie) and in the Arkadia Theatre (as Robert Paholainen) only
a week apart. Two productions of the same grand opera in a city of 25,000
inhabitants was folly. A joint opera was certainly on the minds of many.
The Fennomans had arrived at the opinion that actually it was only the
Finnish <strong>Opera</strong> Company that should be merged with the Swedish Theatre
Company. The Finnish Theatre Company would remain independent of the
merger. As its professional level was not yet very high, it would find more
audiences in the country’s provinces where sufficient numbers of Finnishspeaking
audiences for drama and comedy were found.
The Four Estates (and the press) discussed the merger of the theatres
on the basis of a new petition by the Peasants Estate. The Petition of 1877
endorsed the Fennomans’ plan to merge the Finnish <strong>Opera</strong> Company into
the Swedish Theatre Company. The Peasants’ petition did not even mention
the Finnish Theatre Company or the need to secure its future. It was
a paradoxical, even bizarre situation that the Finnish Peasants representatives
did not have a word to say in defence of the cultural institution that
was closest to them and to their language or about the actors who succeeded
especially well in the characters of popular domestic plays. They simply repeated
the script of Yrjö-Koskinen and his “junta”. Sincere support for the
Finnish Theatre Company came from the liberal-minded Swedish-speaking
representatives, who supported the balanced idea of creating a joint opera