Gustav III of Sweden and the Opera

In 1773, Swedish King Gustav III (1746-1792) founded the Stockholm Opera House, an institution that still exists today. He had just restored strong royal power through a coup d'état. The two undertakings went hand in hand: "Gustavian" opera exalted a monarchy that asserted itself as enlightened. The conference presented Gustav III's creation of Swedish opera, an achievement in which the personality of the king, a passionate lover of theater and talented playwright, combined with the monarch's political will. The study is based on reconstruction work using archival documents, which we set out in the book Svenska operans födelse(The Birth of Swedish Opera, Stockholm 1998), in collaboration with musicologist Anna Ivarsdotter. France played a key role in the creation of the Swedish national scene. Gustavian" opera was modeled on the tragédie lyrique that Prince Gustave had encountered on his visit to Paris in 1771, with a strong emphasis on chorus, ballet, "merveilleux" and theatrical machinery. France supplied set designers (especially the visionary Louis-Jean Desprez) and choreographers - the composers, on the other hand, were Italian or German. Swedish librettos are often based on French texts. For the inauguration of the Stockholm Opera in 1773, Gustave III turned to the France of Louis XIV, adapting Fontenelle's libretto of the musical tragedy Thétis et Pelée (1689). In the "Peruvian" opera Cora och Alonzo(Cora and Alonzo, 1782), the libretto is based on Marmontel's philosophical novel Les Incas (1777), but the French text is emptied of its critical potential. In Gustavian opera, text, music and set combine to arouse the spectator's emotions and convey a political message. Classical rhetoric offers an avenue of exploration here: even in the ^18th century, it provided a framework for opera theorists, librettists and singers alike, and influenced musicians' compositional techniques. In the historical opera Gustaf Wasa, staged in 1786 at a time when Gustav III was preparing a war against Denmark, the verses of Swedish poet Johan Henric Kellgren, the music of German Johann Gottlieb Naumann and the sets of Frenchman Desprez combine to arouse the audience's enthusiasm for royal politics.