Few things are as exhilarating as the birth of a new opera. From the commissioning to the first time you hear the music sound in a room. And then, when this strange amalgamate of word and sound, music and theatre, which is opera, meets an audience for the first time. Last time, our composer Daniel Börtz and librettist Claes Fellbom had had a great success with a historical subject, Marie Antoinette, at the Folkoperan, Stockholm’s second opera house. In the 1990s Börtz, of course, with Ingmar Bergman as librettist and director, made opera out of Euripides’ Bacchae. Now Börtz and Fellbom approached the Royal Swedish Opera with the sketch for an opera, which reflects one of the great tragedies of contemporary Sweden, how young women – and also young men – become victims of honour related criminality, threatened, abused or killed by their own or their partner’s family. The operatic recreation of a reality, which in its implacable cruelty competes with classical tragedy but also asks serious questions about our society. Questions which each of us must try to answer every day. Because an opera about honour killings is today a Swedish tragedy. The opera was Svall (Surge).
Fadela and her sister, Aida (she does not want it pronounced Aïda!) are fictitious personages with real models. Sometimes one could feel offended by how the media robbed Sara, Pela and Fadime – the actual murdered girls – of their family names. Only after their grim death these girls from immigrant families became close to us, ordinary young Swedish women at last. But it must not be that only violent tragedy can put young people with foreign background – who were born and lived their short lives here – in the centre of attention of Swedish society. A violent death is always in vain and without meaning, however illuminating the grim lesson for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, a number of debaters, feminists, post-colonialists, culture-relativists and their adversaries among writers and journalists, in culture or politics, have used these destinies with the best intentions. They have used them to describe diversities and similarities, structural, cultural or psychological, and how the Swedish society has tried to deal with the strange and unknown, the “Other”, the confusing new or terrifying archaic. This does not mean it is a question of theory if the lumping together of honour related crimes with violence against women in general betrays good insight or confusion or if any discussion of different or similar concepts of honour or chastity in diverse cultures necessarily leads to racism and discrimination. Discussion is never wrong, neither is research. But if hypotheses of structural superiorities are adopted as laws of nature while violence grows in the dark, human beings will die while the elite talks.
Svall was commissioned in 2003 and premiered in 2005. It was shown in Stockholm and Umeå as a co-production by the Royal Opera, Riksteatern and NorrlandsOperan with the Stockholm Culture House and Folkoperan as venues. The score uses eight soloists, a small chorus of eight and a chamber orchestra of 27 players. The preparations took the director, Elisabet Ljungar and me, the dramaturg, as far as Istanbul to meet documentarists and writers who treat the issue from the Turkish horizon. We brought into the production as experts both psycho therapeutics from Save the Children as well as volunteers from Sharaf’s Heroes – an organisation of young men who fight reactionary role models that would make them abuse or even kill sisters and potential brothers-in-law.
All members of the ensemble as well as Finnish conductor Jan Söderblom solved their demanding tasks with great commitment. Especially the two young singers who took the parts of the sisters with amazing truthfulness were rightly praised in the press. While a single dissenting female critic vented suspicions of “commercial” intentions against librettist and composer. (Did anyone anywhere any commercial benefits from political chamber-opera with modern music?) Our new friends from the groups, who work with the victims of these archaic honour codes, saluted the work as a means of lifting this question in the public eye. When those who work directly with young people in mortal danger told us how important it was that we used the prestige of a 233 year old cultural institution to focus a contemporary social problem of this urgency, we felt both proud and somewhat embarrassed. Any new opera must give its audience a new and strong experience. There is an emotional understanding beyond language which only music can give. In Svall , as in all relevant political theatre, our emotional catharsis finally makes our reason ask ourselves: What must be done?
This article will also be published in the Swedish ITI:s publication Swedish Theatre
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