By the time he wrote Aniara, Karl-Birger Blomdahl was already a leading figure in the world of Swedish arts and culture. Having composed numerous renowned choral works, orchestral pieces and ballet music, he also often appeared in magazines and television music programmes.
Karl-Birger Blomdahl read Harry Martinson’s science-fiction poem the same year it was published. For many years, he had been looking for a literary work on which he could base an opera. Blomdahl had a strong interest in astronomy, technology and science, as well as in society and politics. These issues inspired Martinson as well, and in Aniara their interests met. Blomdahl penned an endearing letter to Martinson, in which he asked if he could rework his science-fiction poem into a libretto. Once Martinson had given Blomdahl his approval, Erik Lindegren, an author with whom Blomdahl had worked since the 1940s, was assigned the task. Lindegren and Blomdahl had previously written the choral works In the hall of mirrors 1951-52 and Anabase 1956, as well as the ballets Sisyphus 1954 and Minotaur 1957, which both involved choreographer Birgit Åkesson.
Aniara had its premiere at the Swedish Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1959. Karl-Birger Blomdahl compiled a team of well-known artists and creatives from the time to bring the opera to life. Choreographer Birgit Åkesson, set designer Sven X-et Erixson and director Göran Gentele were all involved, and Sixten Ehrling, the first Master of the King’s Music at the time, conducted the opera. Each individual was granted plenty of space to develop their own individual contribution to the opera. Birgit Åkesson, for example, opted for one of the leading roles – pilot Isagel – to be strictly a dance role, drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese Noh theatre.
For the Stockholm press and public, it was a truly sensational affair that one of the leading roles in an opera could be a dance-only role, but also that the opera included aspects of electronic music. Mima the supercomputer is a technological wonder, offering the people on-board Aniara glimpses and images from their earlier lives on planet Earth. During the 1950s Blomdahl discovered electronic music’s wonderful capacity to create new soundscapes, and early on he knew that the hourglass-shaped Mima would be portrayed through electronic music. With Blomdahl’s assistance, Sweden later set up its first electronic music studio, EMS.
Several of the Swedish Royal Opera’s most renowned singers held leading roles in Aniara, including Margareta Hallin, Kjerstin Dellert, Erik Saedén, Arne Tyrén and Sven Erik Vikström. The Stockholm premiere was a success, and Aniara remained on the Royal Opera’s repertoire for years to come. The opera was also staged internationally, including in Hamburg, where the German premiere was held.
Harry Martinson’s infamous statement, ‘What was once an ox became nothing more than a stock cube,’ was a reference to the extreme text reduction that his Aniara underwent when it was translated into libretto format. However, except for a few individual lines, all the lyrics in the opera were taken from his science-fiction poem. In order to express a variety of emotional states, Blomdahl included elements of jazz, folk, electronic and twelve-tone music into his operatic composition. The jazz influences are most noteworthy in the scene where all the passengers gather for a midsummer party in Aniara’s main meeting room, and the overjoyed singer Daisy Doody sings in Dorisburger, a language Martinson invented.
Karl-Birger Blomdahl was a modernist composer completely and entirely. Having studied under pioneering composer Hilding Rosenberg, Blomdahl’s musical expression and tonality were influenced by the likes of Bela Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg. In the early 1900s Schönberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a musical process which was crucial to Blomdahl, and which Susan Philipsz was fascinated with in her reworkings of other composer’s pieces. Twelve-tone music is atonal, where the composition is not assigned a major or minor key. This is made possible by including all 12 notes, which are located a half step from one another, in the composition. This technique has been fundamental in the development of modern art music.
