It is strange that though Sweden has produced so many great singers from Jenny Lind and Cristina Nilsson onwards, it has given us no great opera Berwald's Estrella di Soria and Drottningen av Golconda have never made headway abroad, nor has Stenhammar's Gillet pa Solhaug. Blomdahl's Aniara is the only modern Swedish opera to have briefly enjoyed the international limelight, which with respect, is a pity considering that Rosenberg's Marionettes, The Isle of Felicity and the opera-oratorio, Joseph and His Bretheren have never crossed the border. Among the most admired modern operas in Sweden itself is Gunnar de Frumerie's Singoalla, his only opera and by all accounts the work closest to his heart. I have known it only from the beautiful Love duet of Act 1 from the 1940 production with Set Svanholm as Erland and Mls Grevillius conducting (included in a Swedish EMI nine-LP set of the Stockhom Opera). The same scene was also included in a 1983 anthology on LP of Swedish opera (Caprice CAP1262), in which Rosenberg, Nystroem and Werle also featured. Kerstin Meyer, who sang the title-role on Singoalla's revival in 1955, also recorded Singoalla's song (Swedish EMI 061-31593) but this, alas, I have never heard.
Gunnar de Frumerie (1908–87) belongs to the same generation as Dag Wiren and Lars-Erik Larsson but he is far less well established outside Sweden. In so far as he is known at all, it is for his charming Pastoral Suite for flute and strings, and for his cultivated songs. The Pastoral Suite is less often heard nowadays than it should be, and the best of his songs—in particular his Lagerkvist settings, with their fastidious workmanship and sensitivity—deserve wider currency. If his output is only modestly represented on LP in his home country, his name is not to be found in either the LP or CD catalogues published by Gramophone. Mind you, in Bo Wallner's Var tids musik i Norden (Stockholm), he is allotted not much more than a paragraph and even Herbert Conner's valuable two-volume History of Swedish Music (Stockholm) gives him only four out of more than a thousand pages.
Singoalla is a novella by Rydberg, one of the commanding figures in Swedish literature before Strindberg, Sibelius set a number of his poems, including Hostkvall (''Autumn Evening''). The setting of the opera is Sweden during the fourteenth century just before the onset of the Black Death. Erland, a young knight has fallen in love with Singoalla, the daughter of the Chieftain of a wandering tribe by whom he has a son, identified in the story only as a ''child of sorrow''. Erland wants to accompany her and her people in their nomadic life but they hold him hostage in order to gain free passage with all they have purloined from a monastery. Singoalla is rejected by the tribe and Erland who is given a potion causing him to lose his memory, abandons her. The second part (Acts 3 and 4) is set a decade later: Erland is married though tormented by strange dreams; he tells of a child who goes from house to house predicting the coming of the plague. At this point the ''child of sorrow'' appears and asks to enter his service. In so doing he unleashes the tragic denouement that brings death to them all. There are, according to Margareta Rorby, strong autobiographical overtones in Rydberg's tale: Erland's coldness to the ''child of sorrow'' reflects his own youth and the portrayal of Singoalla ''unites a naive and innocent sensuality with an asocial and forbidden eroticism''.
Put alongside, say, Schoek's Penthesilea or Massimila Doni the last opera I reviewed in these columns (June 1987)—for for that matter, Merikanto's Juha—this is doubtless small beer. There is not the same degree of sophistication, variety of invention or sense of characterization and scale; yet at the same time there is a directness of utterance and a freshness and atmosphere that lend it appeal. Frumerie's style is firmly diatonic with a strong modal flavouring: indeed, one could be forgiven for mistaking the opening for Kodaly or Vaughan Williams. While most of the opera wins one's sympathy, much of it strikes me as naive. The music of the Second Act in the gipsy encampment is rhythmically stiff and uninventive, and their chorus in Act 1 is second-rate stuff.
The present recording is based on concert performances, in which some roles are doubled and in which the leading role of Erland was taken at relatively short notice by the Norwegian, Bjorn Haugen. He gives a thoroughly committed account and Anne Sofie von Otter is a good Singoalla. Erik Saeden and Per-Arne Wahlgren are as reliable as one has come to expect. The 13-year old Lasse Bergstrom copes manfully with the demanding role of the child but is often strained by the rather awkward writing, which must have been one of the factors that militated against wider acceptance of the opera. The recording itself is good, as is the orchestral playing under Ahronovitch, the chorus acceptable. There is a detailed synopsis in English and good notes but the libretto itself is not reproduced in translation.
In the last few years the catalogue has been much enriched by the enterprising and exploratory policy of BIS, Finlandia and Caprice. Singoalla is no masterpiece and certainly not the discovery that the Tubin or Stenhammar symphonies are, but parts of the score are imaginative and there is a simplicity and unpretentiousness about the best of it that is appealing.'