Music: Sleeping Beauty

The opera was so old that musicologists are not even sure of its history. The theater was equally ancient. But last week this antique combination made the liveliest show in Sweden. II Maestro di Musica, a broadly farcical opera buffa (a pastiche partly based on a 1737 comic opera by Pietro Auletta), filled the Drottningholm Court Theater, built in 1766 during the reign of Queen Lovisa Ulrika. U.S. and European visitors to Stockholm’s talent-packed summer music festival learned at first hand why the Swedes are making a new mark for themselves in opera as they already have in movies.

In II Maestro, and II Barbiere di Si-viglia, Giovanni Paisiello’s rowdy comic version of the famed tonsorial tale, skilled young soloists—their names still little known abroad—testified toDrottningholm’s success in developing new operatic singers. Night after night S.R.O. crowds came back for more.

Flexible & Functional. They came as much to see the sights as they did to hear the music. Only a few yards from the Drottningholm (Queen’s Island) summer palace and only 20 minutes from downtown Stockholm, the long green lawns and fountains surrounding the theater set it centuries back in time. The building is still owned by the royal family. It has never been damaged, changed or remodeled, and some of its 400 seats still bear the name plates of Queen Lovisa’s household staff (King’s Great Watch in the front rows, palace kitchen wenches in the rear).

Decorated with lacelike rococo friezes and 17th and 18th century sculptures,

Drottningholm’s theater was first the plaything of Lovisa’s son Gustaf III, founder of Sweden’s royal institutes (including the Swedish Academy, which serves today as jury for Nobel Prizes in literature). Gustaf filled the place with musicians, staged four performances a week, wrote many of its plays and opera librettos himself, even starred in some of its productions. Shortly after his reign, the theater was abandoned, and for 120 years, says Director Gustaf Hillestrom, it remained “a sleeping beauty.”

Awakened at last in 1922, after a court librarian rediscovered its past, the theater was found to be still in good shape. Its collection of null 18th century sets, ranging from trompe I’oeil farmhouses to ornate court scenes, is the world’s largest. The wooden stage machinery, designed by the Italian master Donate Sopani, is so flexible that a four-man windlass team can make a complete scene change in ten seconds. In the 40-odd rooms where actors and singers once lived while the royal family was in residence at Drottningholm, the original hand-painted wallpaper survives—as does a wicked caricature of a needle-nosed French ballet master penciled on the wall of the prima. donna’s dressing room. A gold-painted harpsichord, discovered under the stage and now used by the orchestra, is considered one of the 18th century’s best.

Training for Tomorrow. The setting alone is enough to provide an 18th century atmosphere. But Director Hillestrom goes further. Pages call the audience to attention with handbells, and all performers dress in genuine period costumes. Leading Drottningholm’s orchestra with crackling vitality in last week’s II Maestro and II Barbiere, Conductor Bertil Bokstedt was resplendent in the silk robe of an 18th century courtier. Onstage, Sweden’s gifted young singers—Soprano Karin Langebo, Tenors Carl-Axel Hallgren, Arne Ohlson, Uno Stjernquist, and Basso Arne Tyren—wore the periwigs fashionable at the time of Queen Lovisa.

Drottningholm is more than just a period piece. Its talent scouts range the country to seek out new voices, and its stage provides a training ground for the best of them. The theater gave Elisabeth Soederstrom her start when she was fresh out of school, helped Kerstin Meyer prepare for her U.S. debut in Carmen this fall. Even Sweden’s established stars —Birgit Nilsson, Set Svanholm, Jussi Bjoerling—owe some of their development and much of their musical education to the Drottningholm Theater.