Osler's Razor

I have a great job. But there are people who arguably have cooler jobs than I do, and one of them is Razorite Tall Tenor. With his permission, I am reprinting below a remarkable note I received from him recently:

Greetings from Nivala, a town of 11,000 in the center-north of Finland (some 400 miles north of Helsinki). I thought I’d take the time to write you in a little more detail about this opera I’m doing here, “Rockland.” I must tell you that I knew nothing of this story, or of this history, before I got involved in this project. In a way, it’s a perfect analogy for what made America “America.”

Last fall, I was contacted by the Artistic Director of the Pine Mountain Music Festival, located in Houghton, MI. This is waaaaaayyy up in the northwest corner of the Upper Peninsula. I’ve known this guy for 20 years: He’s a stage director and we’ve worked together several times previously.

He told me his festival was co-producing (along with a festival in Nivala, Finland, where I am now) a new opera about Finnish immigrants who had come to the UP to work in the copper mines there, and that there is a role in this piece that he’d like to invite me to sing. He sent me the score, most of which was in Finnish (with an English translation), and I read through it.

Musically, the role posed no problems for me, and the character - a mine foreman who’d come to Michigan from Cornwall - looked interesting. The fact that the character is also a Cornishman was appealing, because his role is written in English, and I would not have to learn Finnish!

As I understand it, the genesis of this piece dates back some ten years, to when some of the board members of the Pine Mountain Music Festival - opera buffs of Finnish-American descent - began to think of how “their” story was operatic material. I do not know how this idea morphed and grew to become this opera, or how the two Finns responsible for the music and the libretto came to be involved, but much of the seed money for the project came from those board members.

Copper mining in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan began around the time of our Civil War. Between then and 1930, some 90% of the copper mined in the world came from “copper country” in the northwest UP. The last of the working mines was closed in the 1960’s. During the peak years of the mining boom, between roughly 1890 and 1920, thousands of immigrants came to the region, from all over the world. Many of them were Finns, drawn by the available mining jobs, the similarities of climate and geography, and their friends and relatives who preceded them.

The Finns came, and they did what they could to be comfortable: They established churches, schools, and cultural societies like brass bands. In essence, they put down roots, though not all of them stayed in Michigan - the grandfather of one of my singer colleagues lived and worked there from 1903 to 1906, then returned to Finland.

Work conditions in the mines were brutal, primitive, and dangerous. As with so many immigrants throughout history, those newly-arrived got the worst jobs. There were accidents; miners died. Labor organizations attempted to unionize the workers and improve working conditions. There was an occasion, in 1906, two workers were killed by “Pinkerton men” hired by mine owners to suppress pro-union activity. There was a major workers’ strike in 1913. All of these factual events are depicted in the opera.

In my mind, there can be no mistaking the parallels between the things that happened 100+ years ago and events we see unfolding before us today. The owners used their financial muscle to have the authorities to do their bidding. Union activity was suppressed. Safety regulations were resisted or ignored because to obey them would cost the owners money. I do not see a “stretch” between the events depicted in this opera and the Koch Brothers, the political news out of Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and the West Virginia coal mine disaster of 2009. I also think that the Chilean copper miners trapped underground for two months last year are in a sense the descendants of the Finns in this opera.

Here’s what has fascinated me most, though: The greater community of Nivala, Finland has embraced this story as “theirs.” Yes, this is partly because many people here do have ancestors who left this region for the UP copper mines, and thus have American cousins, today. But there is more going on here than just that.

This opera festival has its offices in Town Hall. We are performing in the town ice rink (not kidding - it’s the only venue large enough). The town library set up and exhibition of photos and memorabilia of the Michigan mines. Even though the school year has ended, the entire company - soloists, chorus, crew, orchestra, administration - is fed lunch each day, weekends included, at the town’s high school. The people serving food and drinks, and selling t-shirts and souvenirs, at the performances, are volunteers (so is the chorus, for that matter). Seriously, the entire community has pitched in, in ways big and small.

A couple of nights ago, I met and had dinner with a group of Board members from the festival in Houghton, MI, who’d come here to see the world premiere. Interestingly, they spoke of how the people back in “copper country” were embracing and supporting the upcoming Michigan production. They spoke of the feeling back in the UP that the story of this opera was “their” story, and were really surprised when I told them of how it seemed to me that the Finns of Nivala felt the same way.

So, across two continents but at the same time, two communities have undertaken a project that in some way “belongs” to them. But the way I see it, this isn’t a “Finnish” story, an “American” story, or even a “Finnish-American” story. Yes, the opera itself is a universal story of hope, work, sacrifice, and desire to make a better life, but the story of how the people of Nivala, Finland and the people of the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan have taken ownership of this project that is the larger point: We human beings are more united than we knew.