Lucia och Lucie

Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor was performed within a couple of years in the early 1870s both in Stockholm at the Royal Swedish Opera (1872) and in Helsinki and Turku by the Finnish Opera Company (1874, and in 1873 in Viipuri). This coincidence is worth studying, but not so much because of the opera – Lucia was a popular choice in Europe and belonged to the standard repertoire of every soprano who wanted to show her skills. These particular productions shed light on how the European tradition spread along two different paths to Finland and Sweden, and provide a relevant context in which to study the culture-specific similarities and differences between the staged performances in each capital. In fact, the most striking similarity between the productions is that the two debutantes in the title role, Ida Basilier (1846–1928) and Emmy Achté (1850–1924), were friends as well as rivals, they both came from the same Finnish town of Oulu, and both had studied in Paris with the well-known teacher J.J. Masset.  However, at first glance the differences between the productions are striking. The Royal Swedish Opera had a century-long history to look back on; it had resources, planning routines and long experience of performing operas of varying volume and demands. Lucie eller Bruden från Lammermoor had been performed nearly a hundred times when Basilier sung the role in 1872. On the other hand, Lucia Lammermoorin morsian was not only a debut for Achté, it was the première opera for the Finnish Opera Company, and only the second time that Finnish had been heard as an operatic language (Il Trovatore in 1870 was the first time). In spite of these differences, however, Basilier came very close to singing the title role in Helsinki, too, and from the same score she used at the Royal Swedish Opera. There may have been practical reasons for the Finnish Opera Company’s turn from Lucie and the French score to Lucia and an Italian-German score at a rather late point; the printed orchestra score was more readily available in Tallinn. However, there were political-ideological undertones that cannot be ignored. A major task for the Finnish Opera Company was to promote Finnish as a national language in a culture in which the potential opera-going public in Helsinki belonged to the Swedish-speaking upper class. Officially the ties between Finland and Sweden had been broken, but in reality they were still strong, as the story of how Lucie became Lucia in Helsinki shows.