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

200 Joakim Tillman
The reaction to Harald Viking showed the influential role of the critic’s
knowledge and horizons of expectations in the reception of a new work. The
critic writing in Post och Inrikes Tidningar (19/2 1884) claimed that Hallén
had gone further than Wagner in breaking with traditional opera. Another
reviewer (StD 21/2 1884), who pointed out that he had seen the Ring, expressed
the opposite view, suggesting that Hallén had not yet reached the
later Wagner of the music dramas. The truth lay somewhere in-between.
The alliterative verse is constructed in the style of the Ring, and so is Hallén’s
setting of it. The result is musical prose, and as in Wagner’s music
dramas the orchestral network of recurring leitmotifs provides continuity.
However, there are also periodic sections in which the leitmotifs are assigned
a purely dramatic function.
The reception of Die Meistersinger
After the first Swedish performance of Die Meistersinger on 2 April 1887 no
critic completely dismissed Wagner and his work in the same way as Bauck
had done in the previous decades. Of the eight reviews examined in this
article four are mainly negative (AB, NDA, PIT, StD), even if they point out
some merits, and four are mainly positive (DN, GHT, Svd, VL). 10
With the exception of Adolf Lindgren’s in Aftonbladet, the negative reviews
are not signed. On the other hand, three of the positive reviews are
signed: Fredrik Vult von Steijern (1851-1919) in Dagens Nyheter (signed Gt),
Karl Valentin (1853-1918) in Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning (K.
Valentin), and Andreas Hallén (the composer of Harald Viking) in Vårt Land
(signed A.H.). Thus, the authors of three of the positive reviews were Wagnerians
who had acquired abundant knowledge of his works during studies
and travels on the European continent. 11 Praising the Swedish performance
and writing in Svenska Dagbladet, the fourth positive critic points out that
although he had not seen Wagner’s operas on the German stage, he dared
boasted that he had also met Wagner, but there is no evidence to confirm this claim.
However, he did meet Liszt, who praised Harald der Wiking. The work was premiered
by the Leipzig opera in 1881, staged by Angelo Neumann and conducted by Artur
Nikisch.
9 Tegen 1960 and Knust 2011 are the two most detailed studies of the work and its
creation. My forthcoming study about Wagner’s influence on Hallén gives a more
thorough examination of this aspect.
10 In most of the papers the reviews were published in three installments: an introduction
before the premiere, and two articles after the premiere that evaluated the work, the
staging and the performance.