Finnish label Ondine's release of The King Goes Forth to France is the first recording of the 1984 opera by Aulis Sallinen on a libretto by Paavo Haavikko. Haavikko is one of the most renowned figures in contemporary Finnish literature, and The King Goes Forth to France has its origins in a radio play presented on Finnish Radio a decade earlier. It is a post-apocalyptic tale of an unspecified King of England who moves onto the continent, defeating and killing the armies of the Western lands after the British Isles are frozen over during an encroaching ice age. The story is rather nonsensical and is, by turns, whimsical and violent, written completely without regard for chronology or developments in technology and weaponry -- various eras both historical and current collide in the course of the opera. It bears a trace of influence from Frenchman Alfred Jerry's play Ubu Roi with one main exception being the addition of four women, two named Caroline and two named Anne, whose place it is to win the heart of the King; however, none of them ultimately succeed in this task. In the booklet, The King Goes Forth to France is described as "a fairy tale for adults," but fairy tales often come with an implied moral, and this work does not have one -- it is a weird fantasy about imperialism mixed with environmental concerns, which, nonetheless, does not take a side or a stand on either issue.
One aspect about The King Goes Forth to France that is unusual isSallinen's music; one would expect such a text to go hand-in-hard with an ultra-modernistic score. However, outside of some rare dramatic stings that fit to action given within the text, there is nothing more "modern" sounding in The King Goes Forth to France than anything that appears in
Shostakovich's Katerina Ismailova; indeed,
Sondheim's Sweeney Todd is probably a "thornier" work overall than this one. This rather conservative musical treatment is in keeping with Haavikko's own tastes; introduced to Finnish arts as an avant-garde, "angry young man" in the 1950s, Haavikko later tempered his work to incorporate preferences drawn from more traditional kinds of writing, and in 2006 Haavikko is viewed as the "grand old man" of literature in his home country. One cannot imagine more effective advocacy for The King Goes Forth to France than the performance on this CD -- the cast is perfect, and the
Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under
Okko Kamu does a terrific job of showing this score off to its best effect. English speakers will definitely want to keep the book at hand, as sung Finnish, which sounds a little like Russian, is certainly not a language that one can pick up on the meaning of here and there as one might be able to do with an opera that is in French or German. For those who like contemporary operas that are neither clangorous nor too hard on the ears, The King Goes Forth to France will prove a pleasant surprise, although a DVD issue of the opera itself, with subtitles, might have been a better option yet.