The Building of the Boat

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The Building of the Boat
Abandoned opera by Jean Sibelius
The composer (c. 1891)
Native nameVeneen luominen
CatalogueNone
Text
LanguageFinnish
Composed
  • July 1893 to late-Aug. 1894[1]
  • (abandoned, material reused)
To seduce the moon goddess Kuutar, Väinämöinen tries to build a boat with magic.[a]
Sibelius's co-librettist for the opera was to have been the Finnish writer J. H. Erkko.

The Building of the Boat (in

tone painter" in the Lisztian mold
.

As with other aborted projects—for example, the oratorio Marjatta (1905) and the orchestral song The Raven (Der Rabe, 1910)[b]—Sibelius did not discard, but rather repurposed, the fruits of his labor. In this case, he incorporated material from The Building of the Boat into several subsequent compositions, most conclusively: The Wood Nymph (Op. 15, 1895) and The Swan of Tuonela (from the Lemminkäinen Suite, Op. 22). Sibelius never again attempted a large-scale opera, making it one of the few genres in which he did not produce a viable work.[c]

History

From the 1870s to the 1890s, the politics of Finland

Fennomans. Whereas the former sought to preserve the privileged position of the Swedish language, the latter desired to promote Finnish as a means of inventing a distinctive national identity.[3][4] High on the "agenda" for the Fennomans was to develop vernacular opera, which they "understood as a symbol of a proper nation"; to do so, they would need a permanent company with an opera house and a Finnish-language repertoire at its disposal.[5] Swedish-speaking Helsinki already had a permanent theatre company housed at the Swedish Theatre, and thanks to Fredrik Pacius, two notable, Swedish-language operas: King Charles's Hunt (Kung Karls jakt, 1852) and The Princess of Cyprus (Princessan af Cypern, 1860).[6][7][d] Success was hard-won: in 1872, the Fennoman Kaarlo Bergbom founded the Finnish Theatre Company, and a year later it named its singing branch the Finnish Opera Company. This was a small group that, without an opera house as residence, toured the country performing "the best of the foreign repertoire", albeit translated into Finnish. However, the Fennomans still remained without an opera written to a Finnish libretto, and in 1879 the Finnish Opera Company folded due to financial difficulties.[9]

Acting as a catalyst, in 1891 the Finnish Literature Society organized a competition that provided domestic composers with the following brief: submit before the end of 1896 a Finnish-language opera about Finland's history or mythology; the winning composer and librettist receive 2000 and 400 markka, respectively.[10] Sibelius had seemed an obvious candidate to inaugurate a new vernacular era, given his role in the 1890s as an artist at the center of the nationalist cause in Finland: first, he had married into an aristocratic family identified with the Finnish resistance;[11] second, he had joined the Päivälehti circle of liberal artists and writers;[12] and third, he had become the darling of the Fennomans with his Finnish-language masterpiece Kullervo, a setting of The Kalevala for soloists, male choir, and orchestra.[13] The competition was the "initial impulse" for The Building of the Boat, the 1893–1894 project in which Sibelius had aspired to write a mythological, Finnish-language Gesamtkunstwerk on the subject of Väinämöinen. But Sibelius's opera foundered on the shoals of self-doubt and artistic evolution.[1] In the end, the Society received no submissions,[14] and when Sibelius finally emerged with his first opera, it was 1896's The Maiden in the Tower to a Swedish libretto.

Notes, references, and sources

Notes

  1. ^
    incomplete short citation
    ]
  2. musicologist Fabian Dahlström [fi] does not, in his authoritative supplementary JS numbering system, provide The Building of the Boat, Marjatta, and The Raven with catalogue designations. This is in contrast to Sibelius's most notorious abandoned project, the Eighth Symphony
    (mid 1920s–c. late 1930s–1945), which Dahlström labels JS 190. Dahlström finalized his list in 2003 with the publication of Jean Sibelius: A Thematic Bibliographic Index of His Works. It runs from JS 1 to 225 and includes not only compositions Sibelius demoted from his opus list but also those that never held an opus number at any point during his career.
  3. ^ Sibelius's only completed opera is 1896's the small-scale, one-act The Maiden in the Tower (Jungfrun i tornet, JS 101), which he withdrew after three performances.
  4. ^ A third Swedish-language opera is The Junker's Guardian (Junkerns förmyndare), written in 1853 by the Finnish composer Axel Gabriel Ingelius [fi]. However, it was never performed and only partially survives. Finally, in 1887, Fredrik Pacius composed his final opera, Loreley (Die Loreley), to a German-language libretto.[8]

References

  1. ^ a b Tawaststjerna 2008, pp. 141–143, 158–160.
  2. ^ Tawaststjerna 2008, pp. 141–142.
  3. ^ Hannikainen 2018, pp. 116–118.
  4. ^ Goss 2009, pp. 39, 117, 135–136, 144, 192.
  5. ^ Hautsalo 2015, pp. 181, 185.
  6. ^ Hautsalo 2015, p. 181.
  7. ^ Korhonen 2007, pp. 25–26.
  8. ^ Korhonen 2007, p. 26.
  9. ^ Hautsalo 2015, pp. 175, 182.
  10. ^ Päivälehti, No. 274 1891, p. 4.
  11. ^ Tawaststjerna 2008, pp. 42–43.
  12. ^ Tawaststjerna 2008, pp. 29–30.
  13. ^ Tawaststjerna 2008, pp. 100, 102–103, 106.
  14. ^ Ketomäki 2017, pp. 271–272.

Sources

Further reading

  • Barnett, Andrew (2007). Sibelius. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
    ISBN 978-0-300-16397-1
    .
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