Maiden ot the North in Lahti (Small Theatre), the 14th of October, 2017

When somebody finally brings to the stage the first opera that was ever composed to Finnish text (composed in 1898, first night in 1908), it is a must to go see it. Lahti Opera Society is showing till the 8th of November in the Lahti Pikkuteatteri (Small Theatre) Oskar Merikanto’s Pohjan Neiti (Maiden of the North). Pohjan Neiti was not the first Finnish opera, but there had been others – in Swedish. The first Finnish opera was Kung Karls Jakt (King Carl’s Hunt) in 1852 by Fredrik Pacius. This opera has been performed a few times in recent years even by the Finnish National Opera.  

The story of Pohjan Neiti is based in Kalevala and libretto is by Antti Rytkönen. Väinö (Väinämöinen) wanders to Pohjola, has a crush on the daughter of the mistress of Pohjola. The mistress (Louhi) promises her daughter (Pohjan Neiti) to Väinö, if he forges Sampo, the well of eternal wealth, to Pohjola. Since Väinö is no blacksmith, he recruits his brother Ilmari (Ilmarinen), who is a smith, to the job. Ilmari makes Sampo, falls in love himself with Pohjan Neiti and after some hassle they get each other.  

The music of the opera is beautiful, typical Merikanto, The accompanist was pianist Jenna Ristilä, who was the star of the evening. Even though it would have been great to hear the music played by an orchestra, everybody who knows Merikanto’s piano music and solo songs, can guess that the piano score worked well, too.

The director of the opera was Jermo Grundström and at least partly due to the smallness of the stage and the number of people in the performance, his work seemed to be a bit on a school play level. The opera had also members of Lauletaan Viittoen ry (Society of Singing in Sign Language), whose members sang the songs in sign language next the chorus and the soloists, so that there were always two Väinös and two Louhis etc on the stage at the same time. This was the first time I saw an opera in sign language. There were several hearing-impaired people in the audience, sitting even next to me and I noticed that they were following the signers using sign language very keenly, though I am not quite sure how easy that was all the time, since lights were sometimes very dim and there were occasionally other people partly in front of the signers.    

From the point of view of singing, the evening was not super great. In my opinion the best performance was given by Juha-Pekka Mitjonen in the role of Väinö, but even he was just recovering from a flu. Also Kimmo Turunen in the role of Ilmari did occasionally flash his talent, but his voice started to break down badly in the third act; the same flu had started to bother him, too.  

Despite all, it was great to hear the first opera made in Finnish and therefore I can recommend a trip to Lahti. When we after all these years in honour of Finland’s centenary finally got to hear this opera, would it be too much to ask that somebody took the next step and performed it with a full orchestra? Sure, it will probably require extra money to transcribe the orchestra score, but this opera would definitely deserve some extra input from e.g. some cultural fund.