Heiniö: Riddaren och Draken

A cathedral is not a theater, and the best composers who write for one understand this in their bones. Mikko Heiniö clearly does. His Riddaren och Draken — “The Knight and the Dragon” — was written to mark the 700th anniversary of Turku Cathedral, and it carries itself with the particular gravity of music intended to fill stone, not just a proscenium arch.

I confess I came to this album knowing next to nothing about Heiniö beyond a vague sense that Finnish critics like to call him a postmodernist. That label tells you almost nothing useful, and having now sat with this opera twice, I’m inclined to think it tells you less than nothing. There is nothing arch or knowing about this score. It is warm, direct, occasionally even a little old-fashioned in its willingness to let a melody simply sing — which, given how much contemporary opera seems allergic to melody, comes almost as a relief.

The libretto, by the Swedish-language poet Bo Carpelan, takes the St. George legend and turns it inward. Carpelan was one of Finland’s most distinguished literary figures — a poet of real subtlety — and you can feel a poet’s hand in how the allegory refuses to sit still. Marina, the soprano heroine, is shadowed throughout by Göran Sköld, her “braver self,” sung by a mezzo. Sköld means shield in Swedish; Drake, appropriately, means dragon. The device might have felt schematic — light chorus versus dark chorus, White Lady against Black Lady, the whole apparatus of medieval morality play — but Heiniö’s music resists the schema even as the text insists on it. You sense less a battle between abstractions than something closer to what Michael Tippett was reaching for in A Child of Our Time, that wish to “know my shadow and my light” — not to vanquish the dark but to recognize it as one’s own.

The plot itself moves with the unhurried logic of medieval pageant. Sören Drake and his marauders threaten the city; the merchants want to buy him off with gold and silver; the Prince — rightly — refuses. There’s a Jester who tempts Marina toward surrender, a confrontation at the church door, and finally Sköld’s intervention, which reads less as heroic rescue than as the moment Marina’s own courage becomes audible to herself. The Prince’s late admission — that his authority is spent, that what endures now is “your power, your voice” — lands with unexpected tenderness. It’s a small moment of political abdication tucked inside a fairly conventional deliverance narrative, and it’s typical of how this libretto keeps surprising you within a form that seems, on its surface, entirely predictable.

Structurally the piece is trim: two acts of roughly equal weight, opened by an Intrada, divided by an Intermezzo, closed by a Coda — architecture borrowed frankly from sacred music rather than from the opera house, which suits the commission and suits the building. Heiniö scores with real color and an ear for what resonates in stone acoustics; the choral writing, in particular, has an amplitude that never curdles into bombast. The Turku Opera Chorus sings with the kind of unforced commitment you get when a piece was written for a specific room, for specific voices, for a specific anniversary — there’s none of the generic quality that afflicts so much occasional music once the occasion has passed.

Is it a great opera? I’d stop short of that. But it is an unusually well-made one, alive in its ensembles, generous to its singers, and honest in its allegory even when the allegory creaks a little at the joints. Heiniö belongs, on this evidence, in the same conversation as Aulis Sallinen — not derivative of him, but working the same fertile Finnish vein of tonal, dramatically direct, theatrically shrewd opera that has made that country’s musical theater so disproportionately rich over the last half-century. Whether Riddaren och Draken travels beyond Finland’s churches and concert halls remains to be seen. On the strength of this interpretation, recorded — I’d guess — not long after the 1999–2000 premiere and led with evident conviction and idiomatic ease, it deserves to.