The Maiden in the Tower

Emmy Achté, who recruited Sibelius for the lottery, created the role of the Chatelaine at the 1896 premiere.

On 25 April 1896 Sibelius promised the Finnish mezzo-soprano Emmy Achté that he would write a one-act stage work[3] for a lottery soirée to benefit Robert Kajanus's Helsinki Philharmonic Society and music school.[4] It was a curious moment in his career for Sibelius to agree to an opera-like project: since August 1894, he had labored to convert his abandoned, Finnish-language grand opera The Building of the Boat (Veneen luominen) into the tone poems The Wood Nymph (Skogsrået, Op. 15) and the four-movement The Lemminkäinen Suite (Op. 22); their respective premieres on 17 April 1895 and 13 April 1896 were the culmination of his metamorphosis from Wagner acolyte to "tone painter" in the tradition of Liszt.[5][6] But Sibelius probably thought the lottery soirée was a good cause, and moreover, a critical tool of the Finnish resistance. The musicologist and Sibelius biographer Glenda Dawn Goss describes these evenings as follows:

The faintly distasteful act of giving money to gamble for prizes was masked by the elaborate spectacle ... which proved to be an ideal device for raising money in support of national causes and ... promoting social cohesion and Finnish identity in a guise that the imperial censors would approve ... These entertainments ... with music, drama, dancing, drinking, and eating mingled with the fund-raising ... [comprised] lavish tableaux vivants in which key events from Finland's myths, landscapes, and history were colorfully dramatized ... Choruses, orchestras, and other musicians were brought to sing, play dance music, and perform new works, which the country's composers were prevailed upon to compose ... The very spectacle was enough to take one's breath away.[7]

Achté had earlier contracted the Finnish author Rafael Hertzberg to serve as librettist.[3] Although little is known about Hertzberg's writing process,[8] he produced a Swedish-language libretto based on a popular,[9] traditional Karelian,[10] Finnish-language folk ballad, Neitsyt kammiossa (In a Maiden's Bower),[11] which he described as "the oldest known Finnish drama—or rather an opera, because everything is sung".[12][lower-alpha 3] Sibelius began composing in August, and met Hertzberg on 24 September—a month that found Sibelius overworked, as he had taken on teaching responsibilities at the Imperial Alexander's University of Finland following the retirement of Richard Faltin.[14] According to Achté, by the time rehearsals began a fortnight before the premiere, Sibelius had not yet finished the finale: "I constantly have to ... give him a very necessary reminder that we can't guess what his music is; we need the notes on the page".[15]

Sibelius met his deadline, and The Maiden in the Tower premiered on 7 November 1896[lower-alpha 4] at a sold-out concert [17] in the ballroom of the Helsinki Society Hall.[18] Ironically given Sibelius's repudiation of Wagner, the soirée began with the Helsinki Philharmonic Society—in the stands and directed by Kajanus—playing the march from the overture to Tannhäuser.[17] Afterwards, Sibelius assumed conducting duties, with the twenty-person orchestra[13] now positioned in the pit and, for dramatic effect, the amateur chorus behind the stage.[19] The four soloists, who sang before a "striking" backdrop of a towered castle to the right of a springtime birch forest,[17] were: the soprano Ida Flodin as the Maiden, the baritone Abraham Ojanperä as the Bailiff, the tenor E. Eklund as the Lover,[lower-alpha 5] and Achté as the Chatelaine. At the end of the opera, the audience cheered Sibelius and the soloists to several curtain calls;[17] the evening continued with the lottery as well as additional tableaux.[lower-alpha 6] The Maiden in the Tower was repeated on 9 and 16 November—the former for the benefit of the orchestra and music school, while the latter raised funds for Sibelius.[21]

Abraham Ojanperä and Ida Flodin created, respectively, the roles of the Bailiff and the Maiden at the 1896 premiere.

The critics penned mixed reviews, skewering Hertzberg's libretto but mostly complimenting Sibelius's music. Hufvudstadsbladet printed an unsigned review that found the opera had a "genuinely Sibelian mood" and "virtuoso instrumentation", especially for the woodwinds.[20] In Nya Pressen, 'Felicien' wrote that the "beautiful" music was "interesting ... and finely orchestrated", if "wasted" on such an underwhelming story.[17] In the same paper, Karl Flodin faulted Hertzberg's "uncomplicated" libretto as "too naive to captivate", but praised Sibelius's "glowing ... peculiar" music for having transformed the opera into an "outstanding work of domestic musical art". In particular, Flodin described Scene 1 as "poignant", with vocal writing for the Bailiff that "breathes insistent, hot longing" and for the Maiden that shows "disgust and trembling fear". He also enjoyed Scene 3's "utterly captivating" and "master[fully] paint[ed]" spring music, as well the "tender, erotic mood" of Scene 5's duet for the Maiden and the Lover; nevertheless, the Overture was "rather long" and the Maiden's prayer was "probably too drawn out", given that the balcony limited Ida Flodin's acting.[21]

In Päivälehti, Oskar Merikanto echoed Flodin: Hertzberg's libretto was "monotonous" and lacking in action, and Sibelius's music—though "masterful[ly]" orchestrated—exacerbated this "dull[ness]" with "interludes that were too long ... [leaving] the stage completely empty". Nevertheless, he found the arias for the Maiden and for the Lover "very successful and beautiful", although each could have benefited from concision. "It is natural that the first attempt is not always the best, and so it is here," Merikanto concluded. "[But] may [Sibelius] soon follow this work with a new, bigger opera in Finnish soon!"[22][lower-alpha 7] Uusi Suometar ran an anonymous column that also noted The Maiden in the Tower's "Finnish stamp", before proclaiming its "pan-Europeanness", which the reviewer thought would be to the work's "great advantage ... because it has the opportunity to become a sensation even beyond our borders". However, like Merikanto, Uusi Suometar hoped that Sibelius would write a Finnish opera next.[23] Finally, in terms of the four soloists, all critics wrote glowingly of their singing (if not always their acting), although there was a sense that the production was under-rehearsed.[23][22]

Jalmari Finne and Aino Ackté were unsuccessful in trying to revive Sibelius's opera (respectively, for 1908 and 1914).

Sibelius withdrew The Maiden in the Tower after three performances, claiming that he wanted to revise the score.[24][25] As a result, several near-term productions of the opera had to be abandoned, the first of which was a probable performance at the Royal Swedish Opera at the end of 1896 or beginning of 1897.[3] Second, at the behest of Achté, Sibelius and the vocalists had agreed to mount The Maiden in the Tower for the Mikkeli (S:t Michel)[lower-alpha 8] Song Festival in the summer of 1897.[24] This too was cancelled, as Sibelius had not yet finished his revisions—indeed, there is no evidence he ever began reworking the piece.[26] Additionally, Hertzberg was unavailable to overhaul his libretto, having died on 5 December 1896.[27] In a sketchbook, Sibelius jotted a sad waltz in F minor below the inscription: "Now Rafael is dead".[28]

Sibelius's thoughts returned to The Maiden in the Tower on several occasions. In 1900, he arranged a 12-minute concert overture that incorporated material from five of the opera's nine numbers and conducted it twice in Turku (Åbo)[lower-alpha 8] in early April. A few years later, in June 1905 and October 1906, the Finnish writer Jalmari Finne—who was then director of the Viipuri (Vyborg)[lower-alpha 8] rural theatre—wrote to Sibelius with a two-part plan to program The Maiden in the Tower: first for 1907, Scene 3 as a stand-alone piece at the Viipuri Song Festival; and second for February 1908, the entire opera. Finne would translate the libretto into Finnish. Sibelius agreed to the proposal, but for unknown reasons Finne's efforts never came to fruition.[29]

Sibelius had not given up on The Maiden in the Tower, however. First, his diary from the beginning of 1910, lists the opera—and parenthetically singles out the chorus's spring music from Scene 3—under the title "Old Pieces to be Revised".[30] Second, Sibelius's opus list from August 1911 places the overture to The Maiden in the Tower next to Kullervo (Op. 7, 1892) and connects the two with the inscription "reworkable". Sibelius may have considered uniting them into one piece, with the opera's concert overture from 1900 joining Kullervo's Movements II–V.[31] Yet, Sibelius never overhauled any part of the opera—as he put it later in life, "The maiden may remain in her tower".[25] When Emmy's daughter, the soprano Aino Ackté, wrote to him in November 1913 requesting to program The Maiden in the Tower in Finnish for the 1914 Mikkeli Song Festival,[lower-alpha 9] Sibelius refused to budge: "With all my soul, I would like to be at your service ... But—it is absolutely impossible! ...The text!! As for the music, it should be reworked. But, I'm sorry, there is no time for that".[32]

Twenty-three years after Sibelius's death, The Maiden in the Tower received its twentieth-century premiere on 28 January 1981, when the composer's son-in-law Jussi Jalas conducted the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra at Finlandia Hall;[33] the four soloists were: MariAnn Häggander as the Maiden, Jorma Hynninen as the Bailiff, Peter Lindroos as the Lover, and Pia-Gunn Anckar as the Chatelaine.[33] The opera, performed as a concert item rather than staged, was broadcast live over Finnish radio.[33] According to Jalas, a proper historical contextualization of The Maiden in the Tower was important to Sibelius: he instructed that it should only be performed if accompanied by a presentation recounting its background, a wish that the musicologist and Sibelius biographer Erik Tawaststjerna's lecture—printed in the program and given by him over the radio—fulfilled.[34][33] Moreover, to resurrect the opera, Jalas commissioned new fair copies of the score, using Sibelius's autograph manuscript and the original orchestral parts by copyist Ernst Röllig.[10] In 1983, Edition Wilhelm Hansen published Jalas's sheet music; an updated edition arrived in 2014.[10]

In 1900, Sibelius arranged a concert overture from the opera. This was rediscovered by Tuomas Hannikainen in 2019.

In 2019, the musicologist and conductor Tuomas Hannikainen deciphered the markings Sibelius had written in blue pencil over the opera's original sheet music.[35] Collectively, they constituted a hidden concert overture lasting about 12 minutes.[36][lower-alpha 2] Sibelius arranged the piece in 1900 for concerts in Turku. He conducted the Turku Musical Society for its premiere at the Fire Brigade Hall on 7 April;[37] also on the program was the five-movement King Christian II Suite (Op. 27), excerpts from the Music for the Press Celebrations Days (JS 137), and The Song of the Athenians (Op. 31/3).[38][lower-alpha 10] The next day, Sibelius repeated this program at the Old Academy Building.[38] Finally, on 10 April at the Fire Brigade Hall, José Eibenschütz conducted a third performance of the Concert Overture.[10] The critical reviews were brief but positive. Uusi Aura and Åbo Underrättelser observed that the Concert Overture was received with, respectively, "great pleasure"[37] and "sympathetic applause".[38] Åbo Tidning wrote that the Overture numbered among "Sibelius’s minor works" despite its "originality and richness of ... invention".[10]

Before Hannikainen's research, scholars had assumed that Sibelius had conducted in Turku the opera's original overture, despite the fact that it would have made an ineffective concert piece due to its short duration and inconclusive ending.[35] In 2019, Fennica Gehrman published as the Concert Overture, reconstructed and edited by Hannikainen. The piece received its world premiere on 23 May 2021, with Hannikainen conducting the chamber orchestra Avanti! at the Finnish House of Nobility.[36] Structurally, the piece incorporates elements from five of the opera's nine numbers, ordered as follows: the Overture (bars 1–238 in the Concert Overture), Scene 4 (bars 239–349), Scene 6 (bars 350–443), Scene 7 (bars 444–500), and Scene 8 (bars 501–639). Of these five numbers, all but Scene 4 are taken from the opera almost in their entirety.[44] While the scoring of the Concert Overture is identical to the opera, the vocal lines are absent—except in their essential moments, when they are replaced with instruments.[35]

Several commentators have discerned within the plot of The Maiden in the Tower a possible allegory for the period's Russo-Finnish relations. This is part due to Sibelius's role in the 1890s as an artist at the center of the nationalist cause in Finland: he not only married into an aristocratic family identified with the Finnish resistance,[71] but also he joined the Päivälehti circle of liberal artists and writers.[72] "Opera was an obvious choice for giving wings to the spirit of national aspirations," Goss writes, "[And] the theme of an innocent maid cruelly incarcerated against her will offered the perfect subtext to the Finnish minded, who had been personifying their beloved country as 'the Maid of Finland' since 1890".[18] Read from this perspective, the story transforms: the Bailiff (Imperial Russia) abducts and imprisons the Maiden (the Grand Duchy of Finland); although she endures hardship, she remains true to herself and is freed subsequently (Finland's struggle for independence) by her Lover (Finnish nationalists)[73] and the Chatelaine (social reformers).[74][lower-alpha 14] It is unclear, however, whether the simplicity of Hertzberg's libretto is evidence for or against an allegorical interpretation: while the music author Christopher Webber argues that the decision by Sibelius and Hertzberg to use "generic, nameless characters" indicates that they were more interested in political messaging than good storytelling.[74] The Sibelius biographer Andrew Barnett concedes Sibelius may have found the libretto too shallow to support a deeper meaning.[73][lower-alpha 15]

From the 1870s to the 1890s, the politics of Finland featured a struggle between the Svecomans and the 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.[77][78] One goal of the Fennomans was to develop vernacular opera, which they believed to be symbolic of nationhood; to do so, they would need a permanent company with an opera house and a Finnish-language repertoire at its disposal.[79] 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).[80][81][lower-alpha 16] 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 foreign repertoire 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.[83]

Fredrik Pacius, the father of Finnish opera, wrote two Swedish-language operas (1852 and 1860); in 1891, the Finnish Literature Society held a competition for the first Finnish-language opera.

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.[84] Sibelius had seemed an obvious candidate to inaugurate a new vernacular era, as he had become a favorite of the Fennomans with his Finnish-language masterpiece Kullervo, a setting of The Kalevala for soloists, male choir, and orchestra.[85] The competition was the 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 abandoned this opera due to self-doubt and artistic evolution.[5] In the end, the Society received no submissions,[86] and when Sibelius finally emerged with his first opera, it was 1896's The Maiden in the Tower to a Swedish libretto. In its reviews, the Finnish-language press asked for Sibelius's next opera to be in the vernacular.[23][22][87][lower-alpha 7]

Scholars have offered several explanations for the seeming conundrum that is The Maiden in the Tower's Swedish-language libretto. First, Hertzberg's selection as librettist probably guaranteed a story in Swedish; he was known not only for his Swedish-language historical novels and translations of Finnish folklore (including The Kalevala and excerpts from The Kanteletar),[63] but also for his longtime association with the Swedish-language press.[28][lower-alpha 17] Second, Sibelius also was more comfortable with Swedish, his mother tongue.[89] For example, while composing Kullervo in 1891, his letters to his then-fiancée Aino Järnefelt detailed how difficult and unnatural he found the task of setting a Finnish text.[90][lower-alpha 18] Third, there was little market for Finnish opera.[70] Domestically, the Finnish Opera Company remained disbanded and Helsinki was still without an opera house.[92][lower-alpha 19] Internationally, Sibelius—as a composer who desired an international reputation—probably recognized that a Finnish-language opera would have little appeal in Germany, "the land of musical milk and honey".[89] Finally, the question may be misplaced. The lottery soirées were seen as a time for the nation, however internally divided over language, to unify against a common foe: Imperial Russia. As such, the evenings brought the feuding sides together under one roof and offered bilingual programming.[93] Indeed, not only was Sibelius's The Maiden in the Tower balanced during its premiere with the performance of a Finnish-language version of Bonsoir, Monsieur Pantalon!, an 1851 opéra comique by the Belgian composer Albert Grisar,[20] but afterwards, Yrjö Weilin was selected to translate Hertzberg's libretto into Finnish.[94][lower-alpha 20]

Most commentators have viewed Sibelius's music positively. Hannikainen describes The Maiden in the Tower as an "early masterwork ... in spite of some weaknesses",[95] while the music critic David Hurwitz calls it a "slender but typically appealing effort ... [with] vocal writing throughout [that] is effective and confident".[96] The music journalist Vesa Sirén writes favorably that "the orchestration is skillful, the melodies are memorable, and there is enough dramatic fire in the setting".[15] Tawaststjerna argues that "Sibelius shows ... considerable talent for musical drama"; in particular, he cites the Maiden's part as "anticipat[ing his] 'great' solo songs", such as Autumn Evening (Höstkväll; Op. 38/1, 1904), On the Veranda by the Sea (På verandan vid havet; Op. 38/2, 1903), and Jubal (Op. 35/1, 1908).[47] "Considering that it is a first attempt," he continues, "The Maiden in the Tower has moments of unmistakable effectiveness ... as in the symphonies, Sibelius shows his command of musical movement and his capacity to build up a convincingly realized climax".[97]

Conversely, the musicologist and Sibelius biographer Cecil Gray posits that Sibelius's heart wasn't in The Maiden in the Tower: as a commissioned work, it lacks "any inner prompting or inclination ... it [is] completely negligible".[98] Similarly, the musicologist and Sibelius biographer Robert Layton writes that "deep inside him Sibelius must have recognized the truth that his was not an operatic talent ... [The Maiden in the Tower lacks] a sense of mastery ... it must be admitted that this is neither good opera nor good Sibelius". Nevertheless, Layton acknowledges the Maiden's prayer in Scene 2 and the chorus's spring music in Scene 3 are, respectively, "undoubtedly impressive" and "captivating and haunting".[99] Finally, the music critic Hannu-Ilari Lampila argues that, while The Maiden in the Tower "cannot be considered a masterpiece", it is nonetheless a "musically ... interesting" amalgam of "Sibelian national romanticism" and "frenetic accents of [Italian] verismo", especially the "earthy passions" of Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana.[100]

In 1981, Jussi Jalas gave The Maiden in the Tower its first performance in 85 years.

Despite its resurrection in 1981, in the intervening decades Sibelius's opera has entered neither the Finnish or the international repertories, and performances have been rare.[101] The most common explanation for The Maiden in the Tower's neglect is the story's lack of appeal and the attendant risk of mounting a production.[15] Modern commentators have criticized Hertberg's libretto as "a lifeless concoction",[102] "bland",[103] "thinly-plotted",[15] "tarnished by naïveté",[99] and "startlingly silly ... its inanities on dreadful display from the opening lines".[18] While Tawaststjerna concedes that Hertzberg's libretto "as a whole is not without dramatically effective scenes",[9] he too registers a negative opinion, characterizing Hertzberg as a "mediocre author"[9] whose "simple" story was "embarrassingly awful... [an] operatic albatross that [Sibelius chose] to wear round his neck".[63]

Hannikainen posits a second explanation. He argues that The Maiden in the Tower has developed a poor reputation in part due to its "misleading" classification as an opera, because this label invites comparison with full-scale operas and thereby does Sibelius's small-scale work a disservice.[95] Evidence in support of this position includes: first, that Achté's letter asked Sibelius for a one-act stage work, not specifically an opera;[104] second, that the 1896 program advertised the piece as a "dramatized Finnish ballad";[105][lower-alpha 1] third, that critics in 1896 struggled to categorize the new piece, describing it as an "opera", "operetta", "tableau", "ballad number", "short, opera-like composition", and "small, one-act play";[107] and fourth, that Sibelius—even if he had wanted—could not have written a full-scale opera, given the paltry orchestral and vocal resources at his disposal.[108][109] As such, The Maiden in the Tower might more fairly be categorized with and compared to Sibelius's other lottery music, such as 1893's Karelia or 1899's Press Celebrations Days.[110]