FROM AROUND THE WORLD: HELSINKI.(Review)

It's easy to approach Aulis Sallinen's new opera, King Lear, with inflated expectations. Not only Verdi, but Debussy, Puccini and Britten entertained the idea of an opera on the subject. We're inclined to look for something superhuman where these masters failed to produce. And who can avoid measuring the composer's skill against Shakespeare's? We want to know what the new work will say above and beyond what the original play says. Judged by these standards, one might conclude that Finland's best-known opera composer attempted too much and ought to have written another "fur-cap opera" about rugged Finns in a hostile environment. But seeing the new opera at the Finnish National Opera, where it had its world premiere September 15, one often felt the power of the play to a degree that would have been impossible if the music had been second-rate.

Sallinen fashioned his own libretto from Matti Rossi's Finnish translation of Shakespeare, distilling it down to ten scenes apportioned between two acts, each nearly ninety minutes in length. The break comes after Lear's daughters Regan and Goneril insist that he give up his retinue of knights (Act II, Scene IV of the play). In this exchange, after three well-crafted if unremarkable scenes of exposition, the drama begins to take hold, bolstered by the elemental force with which bass Matti Salminen projected Lear's dumbstruck realization of his plight, then by the pity he aroused when the character was reduced to groveling. Yet all the while, Lear was sustained by the lyrical intensity of the music. Sallinen's lyricism remains rooted in post-Romanticism, yet it is infused with enough modernistic elements to keep it sounding fresh. For Lear, Sallinen tempered somewhat the eclecticism of his earlier operas, such as The Red Line, which FNO gave at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1983, or Kullervo, whose 1992 world premiere took place in Los Angeles. There was less tendency to shift idioms for the sake of variety. Even for the expanded role of the Fool, Sallinen avoided detached musical numbers, yet his symphonic fabric easily accommodated aria-like utterances and ensembles.

One of the reasons Verdi gave for not setting Lear was that he wasn't ...