During the last half of the war each of the European powers experienced a serious crisis on its home front. Britain resorted to conscription and suppressed a rebellion in Ireland. In both France and Italy, morale wavered when the army suffered mutiny and defeat. In Germany, the militarization of the home front under the Hindenburg Program coincided with the struggle to feed the civilian population during the “turnip winter.” Meanwhile, the death of Francis Joseph accelerated revolutionary thinking among the nationalities of Austria-Hungary. Amid growing sentiment for peace on the European home fronts, the international socialist movement held a peace conference at Stockholm which attracted more participants than the earlier effort at Zimmerwald but was just as fruitless. In the last half of the war strong civilian leaders emerged to rally the home front in each of the leading European Allies – Lloyd George in Britain, Clemenceau in France, and Orlando in Italy – while in the United States, Wilson’s ideals lent a veneer of unity to a degree of domestic upheaval not seen since the American Civil War. Women’s contributions to the war effort bolstered the cause of women’s suffrage, with Britain granting it in March 1918, to take effect in the first postwar elections.

Carmen was first given in Stockholm at the Royal Swedish Opera in 1878 just three years after its Parisian premiere. The Swedish Carmen went on tour to Copenhagen and Kristiania, but within thirteen years the opera had been staged with a predominantly local casts also in the other three Nordic countries: Denmark in 1887, Finland in 1889 and Norway in 1891.

The opera arrived in the Nordic countries amidst fierce public debate between idealists and realists arguing about how art should represent woman: as a self-sacrificing and morally high-minded model for the nation-building project (especially in Finland and Norway), or realistically, as a modern troubled woman, such as Nora in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

This chapter examines how the character of Carmen was enacted on the stage and the press reactions to her at this aesthetic and societal turning point of the fin de siècle. I argue, that the singers and critics participated in the ongoing debate about realism, gender equality and modernity. Amidst confusion at a time of aesthetic change, the will to take control of the issues at stake was still rooted in models and strategies from the past.

During the long nineteenth century, the Nordic countries witnessed economic growth, the industrial revolution and the prominent expansion of the bourgeois classes. The growing need for entertainment explains the popularity and increase in production of operettas from the 1850s onwards. Jacques Offenbach and his satirical operettas enjoyed success in Copenhagen at the Folketeatret. During the great Lehár craze, Danish performers toured Scandinavian cities. By the 1870s, Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway also had an operetta epidemic, and new venues opened for the active Danish and Swedish companies and some domestic initiatives. The first production of Offenbach’s Orfeus i underjorden in Stockholm was staged by Pierre Deland in 1860. An elegant new venue, the Oscarsteatern (built in 1906) had its first major success with Lehár’s Den glada änkan in 1907. A Swedish Theatre was erected in Helsinki 1860 and opened with Deland’s production of Orfeus i underjorden. Helsinki also accommodated Russian officers and their families, who found entertainment first in the Arkadia-theatre, where several Russian-language operetta productions were given. Operettas in Finnish found their best home at the Kansan Näyttämö (People’s Stage) founded in 1907 in Helsinki.