Oslo's impressive new opera house is like a giant futuristic marble-white ship that slopes into the water, writes Michael Dervan
'IT MEANS EVERYTHING for opera in Oslo," says Bjørn Simensen, manager of Norway's national opera company, Den Norske Opera. We're sitting in the relative calm of an upstairs foyer in Oslo's €500 million new opera house. The building, designed by the Norwegian firm, Snøhetta, is like a giant, futuristic, marble- white ship that juts dangerously into the water of Bjørvika harbour.
The imagery differs depending on who you talk to. Some people have likened it to an iceberg, others have mentioned ski slopes. The architects have built to every corner of the site, and, with the building actually sloping right into the lapping water, a special underwater barrier has been created to prevent direct encounters from the ferries that dock opposite. Inside and out, the new opera house is bold and direct, dominated by white stone, glass, and wood - light oak in the foyer, darkened oak in the main auditorium.
The statistics alone are impressive. The building is clad in 36,000 custom-cut slabs of Carrara marble, the matrix of its planes and shapes created through the combination of computer-aided design and traditional craft. All of the complex slopes of its exterior - the uppermost roof level layered to give a boundary-less, ha-ha effect - are open to the public. It's hard not to think of it as a skateboarders paradise, although the signs prohibiting that activity are already in place.
There are three performance spaces, with seating for 1,364, 440 and 200. The actual main stage is situated 16 metres below sea-level, and the gross area of 38,500 sq m is divided into 1,100 rooms. Together, a national opera and ballet company are like a small factory, though this one is unusual in having exercise bicycles dotted along some of the corridors. And by any standards, the timescale of the project has been impressive, too. It was approved by the Norwegian parliament in June 1999. The international design competition which followed attracted 350 entries. The building work started in 2003, the opening gala was held on April 12th.
Photographers are already enjoying the building's extraordinary shape, the play of angles and light provided by the Braille-like decorations of the aluminium fly-tower and the orange-peel effect of the wooden galleries that separate the auditorium from the foyer.
What the photographs don't prepare you for, however, is the sheer scale of building when you walk over the narrow connecting bridge, or the surprising intimacy of the auditorium itself.
Simensen is basking in the glow of a task well done. He sees the new building as the culmination of over a century of striving. "In the last century there was an effort to manage the opera business together with the national theatre, in the way that they do in Copenhagen and a lot of German cities. Grieg was in favour of that, and Bjørnson, the theatre director. But Ibsen was against, and Ibsen won, unfortunately.
"The next attempt was during the First World War. A ship owner and yard owner donated the whole thing, model, drawing, everything. I've seen it. It was supposed to be built outside Akershus Castle, close to the City Hall. But his ships were under the American flag, and President Wilson took America into the First World War, so he took all the ships - during wartime governments can do things like that. Mr Hannevig, that was his name, went broke.
"And there were other attempts over the years. But, finally, now we are able to join the civilised nations of the world, so to speak. Until now, we have been a very small, elitist group of three European countries without opera houses, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway."
He could well have mentioned Ireland, too, as neither the Cork Opera House nor the Grand Opera House in Belfast are buildings that could come remotely near accommodating the national opera and ballet companies that are being served in Oslo. The new house is bringing expansion on all fronts. The orchestra will increase to 100 players, the chorus to 60 singers, the ballet to 60 dancers, the company as a whole from 400 to 600 people. Annual state support for the enterprise is rising from €25.2 million to €37.8 million.
Simensen's plan was for the house to open with the première of Gisle Kverndokk's specially commissioned "family opera," Around the World in Eighty Days. The scope for spectacle in this Jules Verne adaptation is obvious. But a seven-week delay in the readiness of the stage machinery forced its postponement, and it's been re-scheduled to the 2009-10 season.
The opening night was given over to a mega-gala, which ran to over five hours and was carried live and complete on television. This certainly allows all present to vouch for the durable comfort of the seats, and from my seat in the fourth row of the stalls, the orchestra could be heard with fullness and warmth - there is, intentionally, a longer reverberation time than in most opera houses - and the singers came across cleanly but not quite as strongly.
Simensen, who is leaving at the end of the year, clearly feels he left no stone unturned in pursuing the success of the project. He travelled the whole of Norway, giving over a thousand talks and presentations. He even sought a meeting with Oslo's taxi drivers - "a lot of discussion and talk in society, you know, takes place in taxis" - and had an ace up his sleeve, knowing that there's no parking at the new house. Oslo's central station, however, is only a few minutes walk away, and that walk, which currently involves pedestrian walkways over a dual carriageway, will be transformed in a few years time when a new tunnel will relocate the road underground.
The building of the opera house is part of the Fjord City harbour renewal project, and that connection, says Simensen, was vital to the political and public acceptance of the new opera house. And, he argues, "the power of modern architecture is extremely strong." He points to the Sydney Opera House and Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum, but discreetly passes over Sydney's functional failure as a venue for the actual performance of opera.
Sydney was clearly in the picture when the specifications for the architectural competition were being drawn up. The Oslo Opera House had to be a monumental building. And, as one of the architects, Tarald Lundevall, explains: "Instead of establishing monumentality through verticality, which is historically the way most used by architects, we established it in the opposite way." Snøhetta simply never thought of building up. "No," says Lundevall's colleague, Kjetil Thorsen, "that would be privatising. Commercial buildings go up high, where the public has nothing to find, nothing to lose. Common ownership on cultural buildings, on public buildings, should be horizontal. And housing is in between."
Lundevall, again: "Our response to this expectation for monumentality was to try and establish a huge, commonly-owned territory. The public ownership of the building is not an abstract taxpayer thing, or cultural user thing. We tried to establish this monumentality through a wide, easily accessible, commonly-owned area. People grasp the idea that they own the building. They've taken it out of our hands."
I ask about the non-obvious challenges, the hidden risks. Thorsen suggests that "the greatest uncertainty in a project like this is how politics reacts, re-prioritises, changes the perception of it. That was assumed in the risk analysis to be the highest risk. The second one was the complexity of the building." Lundevall adds: "If the remains of a Viking ship had been found in the excavating of the site, that probably would have stopped the whole project. It has been technically very complicated to build the house more or less in the water. The area which looked like dry land at the start was an old industrial fill of sawdust, which is to be regarded more or less as water when it comes to a technological point of view."
As a 21st-century building, the Oslo Opera House is the opposite of the great, formal opera houses of the 19th century. And, as Thorsen explains, with the full co-operation of the company, "we pushed all the functions that you normally hide inside the opera towards the facades. You will see here how they make the costumes, you can look into the workshops, you can see how they do the scenography, the painting, you can look into the orchestra rehearsal room, you can look into the ballet rehearsal rooms. All the functions that are normally hidden inside we've actually pushed to the outside."
While in Oslo, I had the opportunity to meet Trond Giske, the Minister for Culture and Church Affairs. I asked him how the opera house became a priority on the political agenda. "I think it was the conditions that the opera and ballet were working under in the old opera house. When they moved in there, it was thought to be for a limited period. But that turned into many decades, and a new opera house was long overdue. And the other arts in Norway have better working conditions, the theatres, the orchestras, the other expressions of art have better places to be. It was time for opera now."
The obvious arguments against the expenditure come from the needs of health, education, infrastructure. "That's an argument that can always be used against spending money on culture, that we need some hospitals, we need some schools, we need some kind of social welfare reforms. You will always be able to spend more money on hospitals or schools. If we as a nation or society should wait with culture and the cultural life until we get hospitals and schools and social welfare systems that are good enough, we will never have those cultural activities," says Giske.
"Culture and the arts are not a luxury. They are a necessity. Without music, without literature, without the theatre, our lives wouldn't be as good. I think it's right, especially in a country like Norway where we have quite good public finances, to spend some it on the arts, and especially on something that will stand for many generations as the opera house will do."
