North Stars

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Opera, which touches on every commandment and sin described in any holy book but adds great music and theater, is my religion. When a new opera house opens, I’m there. And if that new Valhalla is in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Denmark) or its spikily independent Nordic cousin, Finland, I have even more motivation to go: The design is sure to be extraordinary and up-to-the-minute.

The talk of the opera world is the Norwegian firm Snøhetta’s brandnew Den Norske Opera, which opened in Oslo last April. With its prominent position in the harbor and its fascinatingly idiosyncratic design, this building is expected to do for Oslo what the Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao and the Sydney Opera House did for Australia’s largest city. Snøhetta’s house is so inventive and welcoming that even people who know nothing about opera will travel to Norway to see it.

When I was invited to be a speaker about classical music on the aptly named Crystal Symphony, I leapt at the opportunity not only to sail on that elegant ship but also to use our calls in the ports of Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm to visit the musical cathedrals of the North. The Nordic countries see their opera houses as expressions of their egalitarian values and their love of design, in which form and function are as inextricably linked as words and music are in opera.

Many of opera’s great singers have come from the Nordic countries. Sweden is probably the number one exporter of them. Legendary artists such as Jenny Lind, Birgit Nilsson, Elisabeth Söderström, Jussi Björling, Set Svanholm, Nicolai Gedda, Gösta Windbergh, and Ingvar Wixell have modern contemporaries in Anne Sofie von Otter, Katarina Dalayman, Nina Stemme, Peter Mattei, and Hakan Hagegard, who all reign on the world’s most important stages. With Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior, Norway and Denmark combined to give Wagner lovers the best soprano-tenor pairing ever. Finland, a young country (independence came in 1917) with a deeply rooted opera tradition, turns out an astonishing number of world-class opera singers, conductors, and composers. Soprano Karita Mattila, known as the Finnish Venus, drives audiences wild with her thrilling singing and Oscar-caliber acting.

Although Norway produced Scandinavia’s greatest painter (Munch) and playwright (Ibsen) and one of its finest composers (Edvard Grieg, who didn’t write any operas), it doesn’t have a deep opera tradition. The Norwegian National Opera wasn’t founded until 1959, and before the opening of the new opera house, the company performed in a cinema. I saw Tosca there once, and the space was deficient in almost every way.

When the Crystal Symphony sailed into Oslo on a clear day in June, I went to the top deck and saw, right in the harbor, the astonishing sight of what looked like a snow-covered ski jump with a glass-and-wood column crashing through the middle of it. The Norske Opera is as much a landscape as a building in that it invites people, and even expects them, to climb on the roof. By being on top of the building, the reasoning goes, the people will feel ownership of it. “With this new building, which anyone can walk through or on top of, something phenomenal has happened,” says Tom Remlov, the house’s chief executive. “Overnight it became the possession and the pride of the entire nation.”

A product of a collaboration among exterior and interior architects, landscape architects, and visual artists, the building is a collective expression of Norwegian identity—and, at $840 million, its wealth. Scenery shops and rehearsal rooms are transparent, so passersby can observe the work that’s being partly funded by their government.

The building comprises an eclectic mix of materials. Some lobby benches are covered in gray sheepskin. One lobby wall is made of aluminum. Poles for hanging coats—unguarded in a nation where there’s a common sense of trust—double as torchiere lamps. Beautiful glass elevators receive external light. Some interior hallways are Ferrari red. The auditorium’s outer walls are carved oak, giving the sense that a tree is growing in the lobby amid the glass and marble. There are 1,369 red velour seats. The upper part of the auditorium is surrounded by a glass cube that soars through the marble roof, making the auditorium’s exterior visible to anyone who’s up there for a climb.

While the Oslo building is the result of a collaboration between public and private entities, the new Copenhagen Opera, an overnight sail away, is the result of a single vision. Maersk McKinney Møller, Denmark’s wealthiest man, provided the $442 million needed to build this house, which opened in 2005. It’s highly unusual in this part of the world for such a project to be funded entirely from a private gift.

Danish opera fans had long hungered for a proper theater. The Royal Danish Theatre (known locally as the Old Stage), an intimate space that was periodically modernized, had presented opera, ballet, and plays since the 1870s. The backstage areas were too small for elaborate, compelling opera productions, but the theater was, and is, perfect for ballet, in which Denmark has always rivaled Russia and France for preeminence.

From architect Henning Larsen, Møller requested—and got—a design-oriented opera house that showcases rich materials and national brands: Georg Jensen silverware, Royal Copenhagen porcelain, Erik Bagger glassware, Sorenson furniture. The building itself is sleek and elegant, more gratifying than challenging to the eye. A flat roof projects over a public square like the wing of an airplane. After Oslo, I had to remind myself that not every opera house roof is meant to be climbed on.

The materials include German limestone, Chinese granite, maple wood, glass, and a ceiling adorned with 105,000 leaves of 24-karat gold. Three huge, globeshaped chandeliers designed by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson dominate the arching public space. They change color from gold to pink to blue depending on the outside light.

The auditorium is as dark as the lobby is bright, creating a sense of removal from daily life and an immersion in the special realm of opera. The stage is modern, spacious, and functional, and unlike other Nordic opera houses, all the scenery shops are in a separate building that serves the three major theaters of Copenhagen. As in Oslo, the coat check is an open area where people leave their possessions, with seemingly no concern for their safety.

Reaching Helsinki, with its blend of Russian-type onion domes, Art Nouveau, and edgy contemporary design, made me realize that Finland is at once related to its big neighbors and fiercely distinct from them. The nation was contested for centuries by Sweden and Russia, but even when it was controlled by foreigners, its people never yielded their traditions or their language, which they sang as a way of preserving it. Opera was staged in Finland as early as 1873, usually in Italian until the first Finnish-language opera, Oskar Merikanto’s Pohjan Neiti (Maiden of the North), premiered in 1898. At that time Helsinki had a Swedish theater and a Russian theater (the Alexander Theater, built in 1878). Though small (456 seats) and not suited to big productions, the Alexander served as the home of the Finnish National Opera until 1993, when the Nordic country’s first modern opera house opened.

This, the 1,350-seat Finnish National Opera, sits on the edge of a lake like a tall white boat covered in glass. It has a huge backstage area for making costumes and scenery. With typical Nordic frugality, the company recycles its materials and scenery from one opera to the next. The entire building is attractive, airy, and functional.

Where the Finnish character comes to the fore is in the coat check, right at the main entrance and no doubt the biggest I’ve ever seen. During the long, snowy winters, when Finns arrive at the opera house, they remove their heavy coats and take chic two-tone black plastic bags to store their boots. Then they hand the coats and boots to the attendants, who stand guard. After the performance, hundreds of people huddle in this room to bundle up, put their boots back on, and venture into the night.

I arrived in Stockholm with mixed feelings. The cruise was coming to an end, but at least I had plans to stay for a couple of days at the brand-new Hotel Stureplan, with design elements taken from the 18th to 21st centuries. And Sweden does have the longest opera tradition in Scandinavia. Queen Louisa Ulrika (1720–82) created the court theater at Drottningholm Palace, on the grounds of the Swedish monarchy’s summer palace, an hour-long boat ride from the city center. Opened in 1766, it’s one of the world’s oldest opera houses still in use. Ulrika’s son, King Gustav III (1746–92), pioneered opera in Swedish and created the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm. Verdi depicted the King’s assassination at a masked ball in Un Ballo in Maschera.

Part of Drottningholm’s fascination is the degree to which it remains unchanged. Public lobbies and dressing rooms retain their original design. Scenery is old painted flats, and everything is still operated manually. In the 18th century, the theater was a hive of activity. The back of the building housed 150 performers and crew members, who lived there when the royal family was nearby and were expected to create a new production every two weeks to please King Gustav III. To meet this heavy demand, they had approximately 30 different settings (heaven, hell, clouds, gardens, drawing rooms, a grotto, an abbey, a battlefield, a storm at sea ...), kept in the wings and ready to deploy as needed in every new work. They used candles for light, placing colored glass in front of them to create different moods. The height of the candle determined the duration of the show.

At Drottningholm the stage and the auditorium are the same length (66 feet), creating an incredible intimacy. In the past, the room could accommodate only 250 audience members because of the size of women’s dresses. Today it fits 450 people cozily. And while there’s now electrical lighting, 15 of the original settings are still used for performances, each one raised and lowered manually by the stage crew. All the ropes and rigging backstage bring to mind a schooner.

King Gustav III also built an opera house in Stockholm toward the end of the 18th century, though the current Royal Swedish Opera replaced it in 1898. The public rooms are ornate, and the auditorium has a dark opulence more suited to Paris than Scandinavia. The small coat check, with an attendant, would almost make you think it never snows in Sweden. With 1,150 seats, this opera house was the biggest in the Nordic nations until the new Finnish National Opera opened in 1993, but sight lines and acoustics are variable. Yet many Swedes cling to this theater and its ghosts, with their memories of great performances past. To me, however, the greatest attraction of this building is the food: two chic cafés and two of Stockholm’s best restaurants are housed under its roof. No opera house in the world matches the dining experience here, and only Madrid and Munich come close.

It seems only a matter of time before Stockholm, with its fabulous supply of native singing talent, will join its Nordic siblings and build a modern theater of indisputably beautiful design. And I’ll go there, not simply to worship at the newest operatic shrine but also to answer the question that seems to differentiate the various Scandinavian opera houses: Where will I check my coat? "North Stars" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.