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

158 Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen
sinki where Finnish dominated, Swedish was not the main language of the
population. The situation in Christiania was very similar, notwithstanding
that Swedish and Norwegian (or Norwegian and Danish for that matter) are
closer to each other than Finnish and Swedish. Neither Riksmål or Landsmål
(the forerunners to Bokmål and Nynorsk) in Norway nor Finnish in Finland
were firmly established in the 1870s, and as standardized languages they
still had a way to go. (Engman 1995; Sørensen 1997, pp. 121–137). The
opera companies were needed to promote the respective vernaculars as
national languages and to establish these tongues as belonging to a civilised
and educated European linguistic family. (See also Pikkanen 2010.) This
situation differs radically from countries such as Sweden, where the opera
houses translated opera librettos into a language that the audience knew
and could read and speak daily. For these opera houses the purpose was not
to “teach” their audiences a new language, but rather to help the audience
understand the operatic drama. At the New Theatre in Helsinki the situation
was slightly different; its stage language was Swedish-Swedish (rikssvenska,
as the actors originally all came from Stockholm). Hence, the stage
language at the New Theatre was close to that of the audience and could
be easily understood. However, Swedish-Swedish was still a reminder of a
history of oppression, at least as purveyed by the Finnish-nationalist historiography
(Engman 2009, p. 31).
The histories of the three opera companies overlap slightly as they all
started at the beginning of the 1870s, although each last a different length
of time and each culminated at slightly different times. The Finnish <strong>Opera</strong>
Company and the Christiania <strong>Opera</strong> Company started in 1873 and 1874 respectively.
The New Theatre’s lyrical department was founded already in
1871, at least according to the theatre (Degerholm 1900). The Christiania
Theatre’s opera history was even shorter than its Finland counterparts; it
literally went up in smoke after only two and a half seasons when the theatre
building was destroyed by fire in January of 1877. Despite the efforts of its
director Ludvig Josephson to revive it, opera at the Christiania Theatre was
not able to rise from the ashes. In Helsinki the New Theatre entered a new
phase in 1876 as competition with the Finnish opera company escalated.
For nearly a whole decade the two opera companies in Helsinki competed
for the Swedish-speaking audience by giving operas in both languages. At
the end of the 1870s both theatres gave up opera performances, not only
because of the financial losses on both sides, but also because in 1880 the
Russian Theatre grandly opened with an Italian opera at the recently built
Alexander Theatre.