Issue 3

An opera boom in Sweden: three new operas by Swedish composers were premiered this summer.

By Birgitta Huldt

Castrati

HOW CAN IT BE that we never cease to be fascinated by the eighteenth century? Perhaps it’s because the effects of the historical events at the end of that century are still influencing our view of life today, our ideals in politics and culture and, not least, our view of humanity. To study the eighteenth century is in other words to study our own time, to reflect our present-day attitudes, to see similarities and differences. What would someone from the past be able to identify with in our own time? What problems are we still struggling with?

Regardless of time and place, humanity remains very similar with its whole contradictory mix of qualities, high and low. Who better than the wielders of power can demonstrate the whole scale from the magnificent all the way down to the endlessly cruel and perverted? In Sven Delblanc’s Castrati, originally a novel, then a play acted at Dramaten in 1977 in the recently deceased Per Verner Carlsson’s production, the Swedish charmer-king Gustaf III is travelling in Italy with Baron Armfelt. In December 1783 in Florence they visit the British pretender to the throne Charles Edward Stuart, a man in ruinous decline, and meet the celebrated castrato singer of the age, Marchesi. Moreover, the greatest castrato singer of all time, Farinelli, born Carlo Broschi, plays an important role in the play from which Miklós Maros’ new opera in three acts, Castrati, commissioned by the Royal Swedish Opera, takes its plot. Lasse Zilliacus has leached out a libretto that must have suited Miklós Maros like a glove.

Together with the stage designer Lennart Mörk, the lighting designer Hans-Åke Sjöquist and the choreographer Ivo Cramér, the director Ann-Margret Pettersson has scored a palpable hit in the production that played to a full house at the Drottningholm Theatre in June. It doesn’t have a boring second, a single longueur: everything happens at a perfectly conceived pace that permits both nervously quick sequences of events and random stoppages of the relentless passage of time. All this swathed in a powerful robe of sound, as splendiferous as Baron Armfelt’s cloak or the castrato Marchesi’s peacock-adorned coat.

The excitement already begins with the tumultuous orchestral chord of the overture, ominous and charged with tension. And there is no falling-off when the singers take over! Miklós Maros scalpels the multifaceted values of the text with the unerringly assured hand of a sound-surgeon. It is a virtuoso achievement, to say the least, to get both timeplanes in the music – the eighteenth century and our own time – to co-exist with an interconnected blood circulation as if there were no boundaries between then and now.

Maros (born in 1943 in Hungary, but has lived since 1968 in Sweden) has hitherto mainly composed instrumental music. That he has such psychological and linguistic sensitivity in his music creation is at least for me an almost dizzying surprise. Why hasn’t he written opera until now? A master has emerged here – it must be said. Maros has all the resources necessary to realize his musical intentions and the result, as already noted, is brilliant. Text and music find each other in a supple mutual understanding, both when the story is borne forward in more spoken-language passages and when it stops for solo roles and ensemble singing. In the end, when the story has exhausted its content, the music is also drained of its energy and dies out gently in frail harpsichord notes.

Much more could be said about Maros’ music, against which original sounds by Gluck and other eighteenth-century composers surge in virtuosic cascades of notes. Susann Végh’s/ Farinelli’s breakneck aria in Act One also draws applause from an audience that sits constantly enthralled through all three acts of the performance. They are astonished by the singers’ vocal feats, which however never make them forget the acting. This is very much the case with Gabriel Suovanen’s brutally arrogant Armfelt character, Jonas Degerfelt’s anxious Gustaf III, Katarina Nilsson’s assured Marchesi, as with Per-Arne Wahlgren’s dissolute Charles Edward and Martti Wallén’s kilted gillie MacIvor.

Marianne Häggander appears wrapped in grey rags as the beggar Cigolante, Mark Bartholsson as an officer. The Opera Academy in Stockholm has lent out the promising soprano Silvia Moi in the role of the innocent servant-girl Katie, belonging to the social group of the disadvantaged and oppressed on whom the powerful can do violence with no pangs of conscience, or whip to death if the lust to do so should suddenly arise. It shimmers and glitters, it screams and howls when the Royal Swedish Orchestra with Anna Lindal as leader and with Joakim Unander conducting interpret the score with everything from the delicately expressive to fiery dramatic playing. The opera production Castrati offers excitement, drama, musical and vocal acrobatics, but also so much more. Not since The Magic Flute was shown at Drottningholm have the theatre’s boards been enlivened, besides the singers, by so many awesome animal physiognomies and frightening visions.

Dancers and mimes, even a couple of small children fill the stage. For everything seems to happen in Castrati, both fantasy and reality, both then and now. Last but not least, praise must be lavished on the almost inconceivably efficient and quick scene changes with the aid of sets that are hoisted up and down. Lightning changes of scenery of the traditional kind at Drottningholm are also used of course, and never cease to fascinate. Even the trapdoor in the middle of the stage finds a use. How much one could do in the eighteenth-century theatre! And all of it still functional today. Our Swedish national treasure could not have been put to better use than Miklós Maros’ opera Castrati. The opera is a declaration of love – to the theatre, to art and to music.

Cecilia and the Monkey King

Reine Jönsson was responsible for the second premiere of the season at Drottningholm Theatre on 10th July with his opera Cecilia and the Monkey King. There wasn’t enough money for more than two premieres this season – there have only been a total of sixteen performances. The Theatre Director Per-Erik Örn is concerned about this harsher financial climate. State support is wavering and the sponsors are cutting back on their contributions.

The theatre has had to manage with the same state subsidy since 1992, and this means that it is now forced to halve the number of productions – despite the fact that visitors from all over the world queue up to witness a performance in the world’s only eighteenth-century theatre preserved with all its inventory intact. Together with Drottningholm Palace, the Chinese Palace Castle and the grounds, the Drottningholm Theatre is one of UNESCO’s cultural heritage sites.

It was Queen Lovisa Ulrika who had the Drottningholm Palace Theatre built according to drawings by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz. The building was ready for use in 1766. A foyer was completed in 1791, the so-called Dejeuner Salon where the then staff of the Theatre were served breakfast. One didn’t only work at the Theatre, one also lived there, in rooms and dressingrooms, simply but tastefully furnished in the light rustic Swedish style of the day with a touch of French finesse. It is all accessible and usable today.

Both Miklós Maros’ Castrati and Reine Jönsson’s Cecilia and the Monkey King perfectly suit the milieu at Drottningholm with the Chinese Palace within reach. Maros’ opera brings the ‘Theatre King’ Gustaf III himself into focus with Italy as the setting. The plot of Jönsson’s opera is set partly in eighteenth-century Gothenburg and partly in far-off China, and in Drottningholm. The story is played out in two worlds at once, but it was by no means uncomplicated to place both stories side by side on the Drottningholm Theatre’s narrow, deep stage.

One tale is about Cecilia, a young woman working in the East India Company in Gothenburg Harbour. To avoid the attentions of a wealthy baron she escapes on board a ship disguised as a sailor. She ends up in China, where she comes into contact with the Chinese opera and an actor who plays the Monkey King in the fable of the impudent monkey who is born from a stone egg. Cecilia and the Monkey King travel together to Sweden. East and West are eventually united at Drottningholm Palace.

The mass media interest in Reine Jönsson’s opera has been great, and the premiere was preceded by interviews and reports in newspapers and on radio and TV. But then it isn’t an everyday thing for an opera to have a libretto (by Peter Bull-Simonsen) written in a nonsense language that imitates Swedish, Italian, French and Chinese. In other words, the audience is spared the effort of trying to catch what the singers are saying, and can instead concentrate their attention on other elements in the production. “Opera can consist of lots of things. It can be music, dance, text and movement. I want to strengthen the elements that are not text, and if you take away the text the other things become more important”, says the composer Reine Jönsson.

One must admit he’s right to some extent. The question is, I suppose, whether the audience is really able to completely disregard the consonants and vowels that help the singers to perform their roles. In an earlier operatic collaboration in Vadstena in 2001 between Reine Jönsson and Patrik Sörling, this experimental textless opera concept with integrated dance seems to have worked well, but then the opera Strändernas svall (The Surge of the Beaches) was about something more familiar, tales from The Odyssey taken from Eyvind Johnson’s novel.

A glance at the score of Cecilia and the Monkey King – no separate libretto exists – shows that the nonsense text is built up around real meaning-bearing words in the different languages that the nonsense text imitates. But if you try to “keep up” with the text it is impossible, because the real words are surrounded by syllables with no meaning, written for onomatopoeic purposes. There seems to be no syntax. You can only guess at the kind of difficulties the singers had to wrestle with when they learned these strings of sounds with no content!

So if the audience, with the blessing of the composer, has to give up the attempt to understand what the singers are singing, it is able to concentrate on other things. The tempo of the production is very hectic. I would go so far as to say that the music is what you notice least: it ends up in the shadow of the dancing, the acting and the play of colours on the stage. In the Swedish parts of the plot the colours are subdued in light grey and gentle blue while the Chinese parts blaze with yellow, red, black, silver and gold. The make-up and costumes (by Jon Morell, who is also responsible for the sets) all contribute with the sophisticated lighting design (Torkel Blomkvist) to the sense impressions that are reinforced by the dance numbers. You hardly have time to register all that happens on the stage; you have your hands full trying to keep track of all these characters, dances, movements, motley costumes, events, lighting effects and scene changes. The director Patrik Sörling, with a past as a dancer and choreographer, has charged the production with an almost all-consuming energy.

As if it wasn’t enough that there are two parallel plots at once on stage, the roles of the main characters are expanded in the sense that Cecilia is represented vocally by a singer, the soprano Kerstin Avemo, and by a dancer, Sara Larsson, so that the character can be more multifaceted. The two women are amazingly similar in appearance. The Monkey King is embodied by no fewer than three people, a singer, a dancer and a violinist: the bass Åke Zetterström, the dancer Josef Tran and the violinist Eva Lindal, all three very convincing in their interpretations of the role.

Reine Jönsson (born in 1960) uses an orchestra with original instruments from the eighteenth century supplemented by a modern banjo (sounding Chinese), the unusual wind instrument sarrusophone (instead of the far-too-loud Chinese trumpet) and a wealth of percussion, including bamboo bells and a Peking opera gong. The music has an eighteenth-century feel, the melodies are simple and often based on pentatonic scales. The orchestra of the Drottningholm Theatre, here with Anna Lindal as leader and Staffan Larsson as an assured conductor, supports the singers and dancers with great sensitivity. When in the end Buddha in the shape of Kristina Hammarström steps out of her eighteenth-century costume, east is united with west, and calm finally descends over the stage, one is perhaps not quite clear about what it is one has been involved in – indeed that would be asking too much, and perhaps it isn’t even the point.

All over the world, surtitling machines are now helping opera audiences to understand what the singers are singing. In spite of everything it feels strange not to be allowed to understand. When song is deprived of the important function that text provides, one’s attention, just as Reine Jönsson predicted, turns to other elements, first and foremost the dancing. Say what you like, this much pace, colour and form has rarely if ever been seen on the venerable stage of the Drottningholm Theatre.

The Scar

The small town of Vadstena, where Vadstena Academy is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year, lies in beautiful natural surroundings on the eastern shore of Lake Vättern. People come here from all over the world to visit St. Birgitta’s Church and the convent museum. The convent church was build according to the instructions of St. Birgitta and was consecrated in 1430. But they also come to participate in all the other activities at Vadstena Academy: workshops, seminars, lectures and opera performances. New operas alternate with old (often newly-discovered) operas. One aim of Vadstena Academy is to be a meeting-place where singers, musicians and other people who work with opera, with their different kinds of experience, can learn and develop together in innovative productions.

The composer Paula af Malmborg Ward was born in 1962. She made her debut as an opera composer in 1996 with The Bomb Party for the Gothenburg Opera. The one-acter Would you like a frozen pear? was commissioned by Vadstena Academy and was performed in the summer of 2002 at Vadstena Castle. This year it was time for a new opera again, based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s tale The Heart of a Dog, which in Kerstin Perski’s free adaptaton was called The Scar. The premiere was on 4th July at Vadstena Old Theatre. The Scar is Paula af Malmborg Ward’s fifth opera so far.

Vadstena Old Theatre has a small stage and a very small orchestral pit with room for just a handful of musicians. In the hall you sit crowded together on simple wooden benches. The room is small and composing for this venue requires sensitivity to the special intimate atmosphere among singers, musicians and audience. In The Scar the orchestra consists of six instrumentalists – there is simply no room for more in the pit. The number of instruments, however, is larger, since almost all the musicians play several instruments. Paula af Malmborg Ward felt that this imposed no constraints on her potential for illustrating, commenting and accompanying – rather, she seems to have been inspired by the specific conditions at Vadstena Old Theatre. For example she thinks that even the excellent conductor David Björkman can do his bit as a musician during the performance. This happens when he takes up his violin and plays a duet with the otherwise sole violinist in the theatre orchestra! This spring, David Björkman won the Swedish Conductor’s Prize 2004; he is originally a violinist and has been leader of the orchestra in both the Norrland Opera in Umeå and at Vadstena Academy.

So what is the two-act opera The Scar about? Even before the curtain rises at Vadstena Old Theatre you hear a wretched dog howling. The fate of the dog is the subject of the opera – in the hope of being fed many titbits it allows itself to be taken home to Professor Gudomlikov, but becomes the victim of a scientific experiment conducted by the Professor and his devoted assistant Ivan. The dog has its own brain replaced by the cerebrum of a recently-dead human being, and is given new testicles into the bargain. The result is a dog with some of the qualities – unfortunately only the unpleasant ones – of a human being. Back in the cosy home of the Professor, nothing is as it was before. The rumour of the surgical feat spreads, reporters and scandalmongers throng in, as do dog-owners who want their dogs operated in one way or another. The housekeeper Zina explodes in fury. Of course the experiment with the dog can only lead to a new operation to put things back the way they were. In the last scene of the opera the pooch lies on the floor, its old humble doggy self once more. The Professor and his assistant breathe a sigh of relief, and the housekeeper again has peace to work and regains her self-control.

In the principal roles the baritone Mikael Axelsson is ideal as the rather wooden Professor, and the baritone Balcarras Crafoord is excellent as a rapacious estate agent. They interact intimately with the tenors Henrik Holmberg, impressive in both his vocal and physical presence as the dog, and Nikola Matisic, priceless as the assistant Ivan. The soprano Catarina Lundgren brings down the house with her coloratura aria, a Baroque pastiche of the most magnificent variety with humorous overtones. All the singers seem to be having a whale of a time in their roles, and it’s all go on the stage almost all of the time, especially when the wildly growling and howling dog is flailing around and turning everything topsy-turvy.

Bulgakov himself trained as a doctor, but worked as an author. Irony was his weapon against the abuse of power and repression in the Soviet Union in Stalinist times, an irony that tips over into the grotesque in the tale of the dog. The librettist Kerstin Perski has dealt with the subject with a light, playful touch, and Nils Spangenberg has directed the production, staged with the aid of the set and costume designer Marika Feinsilber in the 1920s with its late-bourgeois atmosphere. Six doors on the stage see busy use for entrances and exits. The Scar is an easily-digested operatic farce, a piece of entertainment with serious undertones in these times of genetic manipulation. The subtlety, irony and humour of the tale are brought out in Paula af Malmborg Ward’s music. Each instrument in the orchestra is exploited effectively and inventively: organ, harpsichord (exchanged with accordion when required), double-bass, violin, clarinet, whistles and a whole array of percussion. Music styles are mixed frantically in this opera production: Mozart recitative with Baroque aria, pop music with Verdi quotations, counterpoint with liturgy – all cast in a functional musical idiom that permits the text to emerge flexibly.

In The Scar Paula af Malmborg Ward demonstrates that one can compose opera that is traditional, of the old venerable variety, but at the same time offers new devices and sound-sensations.

Birgitta Huldt is a Swedish freelance writer.