Opera reborn in Oslo’s new house on the water
Patrons crowding through the glass doors of the Four Seasons Centre Saturday night have reason to feel thankful; they will be attending a new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto in a real opera house.
They certainly had to wait long enough for the experience. The Canadian Opera Company spent virtually a decade at the Royal Alexandra Theatre and 46 years more at the Sony Centre (or the O’Keefe Centre as it was then known) before moving in 2006 into Jack Diamond’s admired pleasure palace at the corner of University Ave. and Queen St. W.
It might be argued that the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet had to wait even longer to occupy a proper house, about 200 years from opera’s first performances in the Nordic nation. This is the country’s first opera house.
We in North America — perhaps fearing to sound undemocratic — do not seem to want to call our opera houses opera houses these days. But the Four Seasons Centre is surely a real one, as is the Kauffman Center in Kansas City. In Europe, spades are still called spades.
That is why the most striking modern building in the capital of Norway proudly identifies itself as the Oslo Opera House. Yet a more democratically accessible building in this hereditary kingdom would be difficult to imagine.
When I paid my first visit last year, young people were dangling their feet in the water from its roof. Yes, its roof. In an audacious move, the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta extended the roof line right into the city’s harbour, creating an enormous sloping public space, regularly inhabited by citizens and non-citizens alike.
The building is, of course, huge, dwarfing Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre with a gross area of 49,000 square metres and an astonishing 1,100 rooms. Small wonder it cost £500 million and took five years to build.
Just under 10 years after its April 12, 2008 opening, if there are any voices still complaining about the cost they can scarcely be heard over the choruses of praise heaped on the project. This place is exceptional.
Part of what makes it exceptional is its site.
Like most opera houses, Toronto’s occupies an admirably central but spacially tight site as, for example, does Jack Diamond’s other opera house, the Mariinsky II in Saint Petersburg.
And unlike other leading opera houses of the Nordic region, Toronto’s lacks the visual bonus of a waterside setting (although one of its originally proposed sites would have seen it abut Lake Ontario).
Like Copenhagen’s modern house, Oslo’s juts into the water (Hamburg’s equally aquatic modern con- cert hall complex, the Elbphilharmonie, even resembles a ship, poking into the harbour).
Constructed on a recently barren stretch of downtown waterfront, scheduled as well to house a new public library and the Edvard Munch museum, it promises to help spearhead a major urban redevelopment, much as Lincoln Center did for the Upper West Side of New York City.
Already it has become arguably Oslo’s most popular tourist attraction and no wonder: outdoor events can accommodate audiences in the thousands on that remarkable roof (the major indoor venue seats a maximum of 1,400).
The roof is open to visitors all day, as is the house itself, with its restaurants and shopping area. Far from a symbol of opera’s so-called elitism, it makes a strong case for the art form’s potential inclusiveness.
It has long been a tradition for opera houses to occupy a central rather than peripheral position in the cityscape; witness the great houses of Paris, Vienna and Milan.
What Oslo’s house argues is its comparably valuable role in a modern democratic society as a truly public building. People have quickly taken ownership of this place.
Not that its traditional role as a home for the classical performing arts is in any way diminished.
On succeeding nights during my visit, the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet presented a wildly innovative production of Puccini’s La Bohème and a highly traditional Rudolf Nureyev production of Don Quixote, both performed at an international standard. On making my way into the massive building I couldn’t help noticing a statue on the outdoor plaza of Kirsten Flagstad. Norway’s greatest opera singer was appointed director of the opera company in 1957. For decades thereafter her company had to operate out of a cramped old theatre, highly unsuited to its task.
And just as the Canadian Opera Company experienced something approaching a rebirth by moving into the Four Seasons Centre, so its Norwegian counterpart has found a new and better lease on life in this magnificent facility, poetically described by Richard Morrison of the London Times as “an amazing marble and granite vision that rises out of the fiord like a giant ice floe.”