The Copenhagen Opera House
November 2016
Earlier this month, the Royal Danish Ballet concluded its marathon run of Swan Lake at the Copenhagen Opera House. For this production, we traded in our home theater for its modern counterpart across the harbor, something we typically do for one program each year.
The Old Stage’s cozy dressing rooms and mazelike passageways spell home. Our painted portrait-lined studios serve as constant reminders of the footsteps we tread in. Walk down our hallways, and you’ll find yourself surrounded by vintage tour advertisements, encased in glass, and century-old photographs of Danish ballerinas in costumes we still have hidden away somewhere in the theater. A bust of the man who defined our company’s balletic style, August Bournonville, stands in the studio in which the famous Danish export Études was choreographed.
The Opera House, however, has a different gleam: cold, impersonal perhaps, but open, bright, and connected to the environment around it. We were fortunate to have stage rehearsals begin during some of the most beautiful few weeks of Copenhagen weather I’ve experienced, where sun poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. We lunched on the roof terrace with bright sun in our eyes and the sound of swaying squeaky sailboats below, and flung ourselves into the harbor as soon as the day’s rehearsals were over. Now the weather’s returned to a routine grey drizzle, and the Old Stage is undoubtedly a cozier place to be. However, in celebration of the end of our mammoth run of Swan Lake and the Vitamin-D soaked days I yearn for, I present to you my retelling of our modern theater’s infamous history.
Donation and Construction
In late 1999, Danish shipping magnate Mærsk McKinney Møller contacted the Minister of Culture to offer a donation of exceptional magnitude. He had just acquired Dokøen, quite literally ‘the Dock Island,’ which is directly across the water from the famous Marble Church and the royal family’s residence, Amalienborg. He sought to complete this axis with a world-class cultural institution designed to stand for centuries. Through his donation, Møller would carve his name indelibly into the city’s landscape just as the previous century’s greatest magnate, C. F. Tietgen, had done by financing contstruction of the Marble Church.
It was eventually agreed that this building should be an opera house for the Royal Theater, and in autumn of 2000, Danish architect Henning Larsen was recruited for the project. He was given only four short years to complete the uncompromisingly beautiful and modern opera house they envisioned. Estimates place total costs at over $440 million.
Controversy
Residents were permitted to submit objections to the opera house before its construction. The city received a total of 834 objections; effectively all were rejected and the city’s responses published online. Most complaints focused on the building’s location across from the Royal Residence and Marble Church, its extraordinary size, and its relative inaccessibility. The last is a reasonable protest, in my view: not until this summer (eleven years later) was a bridge relaying Nyhavn to Christianshavn — two of the most central parts of the city, separated by a harbor — completed, finally cutting the fifteen-minute detour by way of Knippelsbro bridge one previously needed to take to access the opera house.
But the most salacious drama concerns the two biggest names on the project. The magnate Møller, whose generous donation came with the strict condition that he should oversee every detail of design and construction, clashed all too frequently with Larsen, the architect whose vision was supposed to be carried out. Møller was viewed as overly controlling and his input as neither aesthetically informed nor consistent with the architect’s design. Møller himself viewed the donation as so magnanimous that all intervention had to be tolerated. Indeed, he reasoned, those involved should thank him, not resist his input. Egos clashing, Larsen heightened tensions by disavowing the project that was supposed to be his crowning glory after completion, calling it a “failed compromise.”
Their most infamous disagreement concerned the long horizontal metal bars across the front of the opera house. Larsen’s vision was to have the front made entirely of glass, so that light would filter brightly into the opera’s entrance, and those inside and out could enjoy an unobstructed view. Møller disagreed: glass on its own wouldn’t withstand the test of time; it needed additional reinforcement. Møller ultimately prevailed, though it nearly cost him his architect – Larsen all but quit the project over the matter. The horizontal bars across the front of the house have earned it a variety of unkind epithets. Among other things, it has been likened to a toaster, a spaceship, and the grille of a ’55 Pontiac. Only time will tell whether the building is hailed as a masterpiece or a travesty born of warring egos.
Acoustics, Art, and Architecture
Despite the drama, the Copenhagen Opera House undoubtedly serves its first and foremost purpose: to provide world-class acoustics tailored to the operas and ballets performed in it. An appropriate echo effect, the time sound stays in a space reverberating between the different surfaces of a room, is vital. Reverberation creates a resonance that unifies the different sounds into a rounder and softer whole. Too much resonance wipes out individual voices and instruments, too little and the music isn’t cohesive. Different surfaces in the house – velvet seats, smoked oak floors, carvings on the balcony, the spectators themselves – reflect sound differently and at different speeds, allowing for an acoustic balance that gives appropriate importance to the individual note and voice and to the music as a whole. The opera’s acousticians were inspired by what they deemed the ideal reverberation time of 1.6 seconds at the Dresden SemperOper. The Copenhagen Opera House’s figure is close, at 1.4 seconds. To the architect’s credit, the sound is not electronically reinforced, despite this being a popular practice in most new opera houses. The theater seats a modest 1500-1700 seats (depending on the size of the orchestra), allowing for only natural sound with no need for electronic boost.
The foyer is light and bright. Guests tread over gleaming Sicilian Perlatino marble floors. Three globe-shaped chandeliers, each three meters in diameter and made of many reflective pieces of glass, hang above the bar on the first floor (what would be the second floor for Americans). The very back of the lobby is home to four large bronze reliefs designed by Per Kirkeby, the influential Danish artist who designed the sets and costumes for Peter Martins’ Swan Lake, performed by the New York City Ballet and previously by the Royal Danish Ballet. In contrast to much of the lobby, these reliefs are rough and earthy. Evocative of passion and suffering, their renderings depict scaly snakes, human bodies, and the elements of a cross. Such themes stand in stark opposition to the bubbly exuberance of Eliasson’s chandeliers, presumably as a nod to the contrasting faces of theater, tragedy and comedy. At the Old Stage, between two masks of Greek tragedy sculpted above the stage, is etched “Ej blot til lyst:” not just for pleasure. The opera’s foyer subtly spells out that tradition, too.
Yet all of this is merely prologue; the centerpiece is clearly the golden brown sphere nestled into the building. This Globus is reminiscent both of a conch shell, encapsulating a pearl within, and a musical instrument. Made of over 600 sections of specially molded maple, it emits the warm chestnut glow of a string instrument. A series of staircases and floating passages lead mysteriously to another world. For me, the independent sphere, accessible on the higher levels only by way of suspended narrow passageways, evokes the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History that I visited so often as a child. Like at the opera, walking the gangplank to the globe-shaped planetarium meant leaving the real world for a surreal world within, a transitional step before entering another dimension.