Hey look, another Finnish opera. The topic of this one is awfully esoteric, at least for the non-Finns among us. Aleksis Kivi was a nineteenth-century writer of poems, plays, and a novel who died at the age of thirty-eight of some mixture of physical and mental causes and is now--per wikipedia--known as Finland's national writer. As I understand it, he was one of the first writers to take the Finnish language seriously, as opposed to just writing in Swedish. It's kind of amazing to me that this was ever released on DVD, not that I'm complaining. I was unfamiliar with Kivi, but that novel of his does look kind of interesting, so maybe I'll check out the English translation.
The opera is certainly not a conventional biography. If anything, plotwise it sort of reminds me of Philip Glass, a very impressionistic thing where not much happens. Most of it takes place at the end of Kivi's life, depicting him as a desperate, broken-down alcoholic, though the second act goes back to happier times, when he's winning writing contests and being the toast of the town among the young reformers, with a wealthy patroness. The young Kivi is played by a different singer. In the last act, things really start to break down, it's at least in part his hallucinations, and at the end there's a duet between the old(er) and young Kivis. The main conceit throughout the whole opera is that there's this implacable literary critic, August Ahlqvist, who HATES HATES HATES Kivi and, at least in this telling, more or less drives him to his death. I am not here to adjudicate Finnish literary disputes, but as depicted here, Ahlqvist is quite a hateful character. It's not a singing role; all his dialogue is spoken, which seems like an effective touch. He was (according to the DVD sleeve notes) a technically accomplished poet himself, but lacked the music that Kivi has. A lot of the libretto is taken from Kivi's actual writings, apparently, not that you'd necessarily know if you're not familiar with his oeuvre.
I don't think an opera necessarily needs to be plot-heavy, obviously. Glass is great. But I have my doubts here. I see what it's going for, and I suppose maybe it works on its own desired level, but I really kept wanting more to actually...happen. I am not sure if Rautavaara's habit of writing his own libretti was a good one. Granted, I am not Finnish, and maybe if I were (god, if only) and if the character had more cultural resonance to me, I would like this more. And yet...something like Boris Godunov takes place in a very specific historical period, treating of a time and place that most of us know nothing about--and yet, it works. It's specific yet universal. You don't need to have any special knowledge of or investment in the events for it to resonate. I feel like this should be that way too, but I'm not convinced it is. Rasputin had its issues, no doubt, but I certainly feel it was closer to that ideal than this is. I still like the music (though I do feel it misses a beat in not doing more to evoke Kivi's time and place), but I don't know that I'd call this a success. To me, I'd say it's more a vaguely interesting curiosity than anything else.
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