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

172 Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen
and Arts Exhibition in Helsinki together with an imperial gala performance
at the New Theatre for the Russian tsar, Alexander II and his family. A
group of five members from the Board took over, with Ferdinand Wahlberg
as the first chairman during the summer. Later, Wilhelm Grefberg took over
as the director from August 1876. J.A. Estlander described the Board as “a
Board of competition” (en konkurrensens styrelse) in his letter to Kiseleff; he
feared that it would steer the theatre in the wrong direction. 34
By the middle of the 1870s the New Theatre’s self-appointed position
as a national theatre was being questioned by the mere existence of the
Finnish <strong>Opera</strong> Company in the neighbourhood. The Board members of the
New Theatre were naturally concerned about the audience and were eager
to show their patriotic and national position, although they were not able to
change the language of the theatre. 35
Touring Artists from Christiania in Helsinki in the Summer of
1876: A New <strong>Opera</strong>tic Era Begins at the New Theatre
The Industrial and Arts Exhibition in Helsinki in the summer of 1876 (arranged
for the first time in Finland) aroused a great deal of interest, not only
among the Finns, but also among visitors from abroad. The foreign press
covered the exhibition; for instance, the young Carl Larsson published his
drawings from the exhibition in Ny Illustrerad Tidning on a regular basis.
(Klinge 1997, pp. 269–271.)The exhibition gave Helsinki an opportunity to
present itself as a modern and industrialised urban capital, and for a summer
the city turned into a tourist attraction and entertainment centre. Both
theatres prepared themselves to perform regularly throughout the summer
with reinforced troupes. As it happened, the core of the Christiania
opera troupe visited both of Helsinki’s stages that summer, although not
as a troupe, but as individual performers. The year before, in November
1875, Ida Basilier had been visiting the Christiania opera, and she might
have actively advertised the summer events. The first sign of interest in an
engagement at the Finnish opera for the upcoming summer is a letter from
Ida Basilier to Emilie Bergbom (25 November 1875), mentioning that Fritz
Arlberg had expressed a desire to come to Helsinki the following summer.
The tenor Julius Saloman had even decided to leave Christiania altogether
34 Estlander to Kiseleff, “annandag påsk” [Easter Monday] 1876, The Swedish Theatre’s
archive/SLC.
35 The Finland-Swedish language was actually not accepted on the theatre’s stage until
the early twentieth century.