The north wind was relentless, at our backs but cutting through us as we walked along the harborside to a performance of Rigoletto at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Our coats were of wool not down. A night at the opera is not just about music but about appearances. The design-conscious Danes were sure to be dressed up—or so the reasoning went.
Rigoletto is a landlocked piece set in Mantua in northern Italy, but the plot does include a river into which a body in a sack is supposed to be dumped but isn’t. The title character, who has contracted out the killing, proves unable to subdue his need to confirm the identity of the victim, who turns out to be Rigoletto’s beloved daughter, Gilda. She dies in his arms as the final curtain crashes down on the tragedy. Curses must be fulfilled in any opera worth its salt.
What wasn’t salted were Copenhagen’s quays, sidewalks and pathways. There was ice on land and offshore. The going was treacherous.
We were on foot because we couldn’t take a waterbus directly to the dock in front of the opera house. The harbor was frozen except for a lane of open water out in the middle, where wind-whipped waves were visible in the glare from the lights of power plants on the opposite side and from a giant European Union fishery inspection ship tied up beside us.
Like most everything else having to do with Denmark these days, the scene made me think of Greenland, the Arctic ice opening up around it for commercial shipping and military maneuvers.
Earlier in the day, a Danish friend had informed me that Greenland is rising out of the sea at the rate of about an inch a year. The island has shed hundreds of gigatons—that was the unit of measure the Dane used in his flawless English—of ice in recent decades. He didn’t say if this weight-loss program was enough to keep the island’s coastline somewhat constant as sea levels rise.
My Danish friend shared these geologic, anthropogenic facts while we’d been in the city’s art museum, standing in front of a huge painting completed by the Danish artist Jens Rasmussen in 1872 that purports to be the first of Greenlandic Inuit people. It shows a family in a long boat navigating among icebergs and spectacular rocky outcroppings. They paddle towards the setting sun, its rays fanning out in what could be interpreted as broad, colonizing rays that encompass them and the entire canvas. The painting’s explanatory tag informed us that Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland had been granted to it by the World Court in The Hague in 1933 after Norway had made a claim to some of the island’s territory. No asterisk had been added to the curatorial tag to explain that native Greenlanders were not represented at The Hague.
As we continued down the quay, I imagined the Inuit family paddling down the open channel in Copenhagen harbor to the opera house, wondering what the possible meaning of these nocturnal rites might be possibly be. The Amalienborg was to our right, away from the water. Its four palaces were acquired by Denmark’s royal family after their Copenhagen residence burned down at the end of the 18th century. An equestrian statue of King Frederick V, who reigned in the middle of the century, rises in the middle of the spacious round piazza ringed by this grand architectural ensemble.
This bewigged monarch was a lover of Italian opera, the blockbuster entertainment of his age. From across the water, the new opera house fills in the gap between the two palaces closest to the harbor. Frederick—and therefore also his horse—has his backside turned to the water. Seen from the far end of the royal piazza, the king seems to be riding forth as from the opera house itself.
But the opera house is a couple of kilometers away. Its enormous size confuses all scale and proportion. With its a massive flat roof extending towards the water above the four-story concours with its tiers enclosed in expansive glass windows, the structure devoted to high culture could just as well be an airport or cruise ship terminal.
Completed in 2005, the opera house’s nearly $400 million price tag was paid for by the foundation set up by one of the founders of the Maersk shipping line. The gift entailed a massive tax write-off which effectively meant that the city of Copenhagen had to buy the place after it was built.
Whatever aesthetic criticism one might raise about the opera house, the size, ambition and power of the building accurately reflect prevailing power relations—the hegemony of the Kings of Capitalism as against the coddled impotence of hereditary monarchs.
Within the cavernous, Escheresque foyer of the opera house, with its multiple staircases and mid-air walkways, operagoers raising their champagne glasses during intermission or when dining at the upscale restaurant at the top tier can look back at the royal palaces of the Amalienborg, reduced to a miniature Legoland Versailles.
One might think of Rigoletto as a music of warmer weather, especially if one is being buffeted by a north wind on the Copenhagen quay. Frederick V had inherited his love of opera from his father, Frederick IV, who had made his Grand Tour (incognito as the Duke of Oldenburg, so as to avoid too much pomp and circumstance) in 1708-9. His itinerary included taking in opera season during Carnival in Venice. That year, the Grand Canal and Lagoon froze over. Rigoletto was premiered in 1851 in Venice. The Industrial Revolution was underway. The Earth’s warming ways were literally gathering steam. From ice to fire, the weather can always be counted on to be operatic.
We made it around the harbor, cutting off some of the distance at the far end thanks to the bridge being busy with pedestrians and cyclists heading to the opera.
As we walked towards the glow of the huge chandeliers pushing their light out in Rasmussenian rays through the glass façade of the opera house, I thought not of Greenland but of the Winter Olympics. Rigoletto is set in in Mantua, which lies somewhat south but also between the host cities of the 2026 games, Milan und Cortina. That night we were missing the slo-mo coloratura of women’s curling in favor of the vocal athletics of Rigoletto.
The average temperature of the Winter Games has risen by some four degrees Celsius since 1956, when this sporting spectacle was last held in Cortina. In spite of facile pronouncements about carbon-conscious transport and the brandishing of recyclable knives and forks at the Olympic Village dining facilities, these games were the opposite of sustainable. Environmental impact statements were waved, forests decimated, and untold tons of artificial snow manufactured. More than half of the infrastructure projects, including roads and parking lots, are still to be built—and will be.
Not far from the Copenhagen opera house on the same side of the harbor, a giant incinerator power plant has an artificial ski slope on its undulating roof that descends from the smokestack to the harborside. I wondered if bobsled runs and downhill courses could be built in this flat country for a future Olympics, now that so many other possible sites at lower latitudes will soon be untenable.
We entered the opera house through the glass doors. Not many of the Danes were really that dressed up. Scandinavian sense had trumped Scandinavian style, at least in the outfits for that night at the opera. We checked out coats and made our way to our seats.
Contained far within the great foyer, the theatre itself is paneled in sumptuous wood. The acoustic is alive and human. Yet I still felt the weight of that unmeltable architectural ego and its overbuilt exterior that could, at least for a time, keep the elements at bay.
The terrifying overture of Rigoletto started from below in the pit. Verdi’s tragedy had departed its moorings. Like a ship docked in the harbor, the titanic Maersk opera house might, by a spectacular feat of nautical engineering, one day also be cast off, ready to rise with the seas—or be pulled down by a curse that it had brought on itself.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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