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

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the spoken theatre, where words would provoke the authorities and the
public too openly. <strong>Opera</strong>’s overwhelming vocality exceeds the rationale of
contents expressed by words alone. All in all, opera as an institution played
an important role in the shaping of cultural identities at large, and not just
musical identities, but also urban, bourgeois, religious, secular, national and
international identities.
Many opera composers in vogue dealt with the themes of nation, language,
religion and class in their works, for example, Gioachino Rossini,
Gaetano Donizetti, Fromental Halévy, Carl Maria von Weber, Giacomo
Meyerbeer, Giuseppe Verdi and later, Richard Wagner. Although many
Nordic composers canonised today as the main ‘national’ composers of
their time did not, in fact, take to opera as a central genre (men such as
Niels W. Gade, Edvard Grieg and Jean Sibelius), this does not mean that
opera played no role in the Nordic countries as a medium for articulating
national and other concerns. Imported operas by foreign composers
(including those with spoken dialogue – opéras comiques and Singspiele in
translation) may have dominated in this respect, but many Nordic composers,
such as Franz Berwald, J.P.E. Hartmann, Henrik Rung, Peter Heise,
Waldemar Thrane, Wilhelm Stenhammar, Fredrik Pacius and Oskar
Merikanto, contributed to the repertoire with works that may appear peripheral
today (perhaps in some cases even justly forgotten), but which
nevertheless testify to important cultural processes in the history of the
Nordic countries.
Voices as sonorous phenomena are central to opera and, at an individual
level, also to singers, whose careers depend on vocal competence. In our
visually-orientated culture with its emphasis on written documents, it is all
the more challenging in the midst of the empirical material to look for traces
left by voices that are now forever silenced. The centrality of voices to
opera is not diminished by the fact that very few sound samples were made
or preserved from that period; this makes the research even more complex
and challenging. Several chapters in this volume respond to such challenges
in different ways. Some, for instance, deal with matters of voice training
and education in historiographic perspective (see Marianne Tråvén’s and
Marianne Liljas Juvas’s articles); others examine the careers and problems
of individual singers and their voices (the focus of Ingela Tägil’s and Jens
Hesselager’s contributions).
Re-creating the European opera tradition in the Nordic context meant
manifold adaptations in the performance texts, in staging and in theatrical
technology (e.g. scenery) and was significantly conditioned by the availabil-