About the Savonlinna Opera Festival

The Savonlinna Opera Festival is Finland’s premiere cultural event. World renowned for its high-quality opera performances and concerts, every summer it brings music lovers from across the globe to the charming lakeside city of Savonlinna. The month-long festival is held in Olavinlinna, a towering medieval castle by Finland’s largest lake. This creates a uniquely dramatic ambiance for its 70 000 visitors. Once inside, festival-goers are dazzled by classics and rarely seen works as well as world premieres and visiting productions from esteemed opera houses like La Scala and the Bolshoi Theatre.

Dramatic setting meets excellent acoustics
Built in 1475, Olavinlinna Castle is the world’s northernmost medieval castle still standing. Set on an island amidst the breathtaking beauty of Finnish Lakeland, during the festival, it’s illuminated by the white nights of the Finnish summer. Combine the castle’s extraordinary atmosphere with its excellent acoustics and covered auditorium in the courtyard, and it’s easy to see why the festival promises such an unparalleled opera experience.

A summer paradise in the Finnish Lakeland 
Savonlinna is located in southeast Finland in the heart of the Finnish Lakeland, Europe’s largest lake district. Built on a series of islands, the city is known for its tumultuous history near the Finnish border and its rugged nature. As a visitor, you can explore the area’s abundance of lakes, forests and wildlife, such as Lake Saimaa’s rare species of freshwater seal, the Saimaa ringed seal.

One of the world’s first opera festivals
When world famous Finnish soprano Aino Ackté first visited Olavinlinna Castle in 1907, she knew it would be the perfect place for an opera festival. In 1912 Ackté’s vision became a reality and the first Savonlinna Opera Festival was held that summer, making it one of the first opera festivals in the world.

The birth of the Savonlinna Opera Festival ties in closely with the emerging Finnish identity and Finland’s striving for independence at the beginning of the 20th century. Attending a political meeting in Olavinlinna Castle in 1907 (the year in which Finland democratically elected its first Parliament by universal suffrage), the Finnish soprano Aino Ackté, already famous at opera houses the world over and an ardent patriot, immediately spotted the potential of the medieval castle built in 1475 as the venue for an opera festival. The romantic castle set amid lake scenery of ‘supernatural beauty’ could not, in her opinion, fail to impress all who beheld it and was thus the perfect stage for the Finnish music just bursting into flower.

The first Opera Festival was held in summer 1912. Aino Ackté did as she had promised and turned the castle into a stronghold of operatic art. Five operas were performed in the castle over five summers – virtually all the ones so far composed in Finland. In 1930 the Festival went on to stage its first world premiere, the Singspiel Talkootanssit (The Village Dance) by Ilmari Hannikainen. The only opera by a non-Finnish composer was Charles Gounod’s Faust; a natural choice in that the leading female role of Marguerite was one in which Ackté had excelled on the world’s great opera stages. Her magnificent plans were, however, soon dashed by the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Finland’s Civil War and the ensuing economic difficulties, but news of the Festival had already reached opera lovers in other parts of the world.

The Opera Festival tradition then lay dormant for close on four decades. The first plans for its resurrection were made in the early 1960s. The Savonlinna Music Days held from 1955 onwards had introduced an opera course in 1962 and one of the teachers on the course, the Viennese Kammersänger Peter Klein, suggested that Olavinlinna Castle would be perfect for an opera-course performance. Over several summers the idea matured in the minds of not only Peter Klein but also of Savonlinna opera activists Viljo Virtanen, Pentti Savolainen and Pertti Mutka.

The ideas and plans of this Finnish-Austrian quartet became increasingly ambitious and the four finally decided on a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio with two casts: one of students on the course and the other of top Finnish soloists. The years of planning culminated in 1967 in the televised premiere of Fidelio to a packed auditorium in the castle courtyard. Honouring the occasion with his presence was the then President of Finland, Urho Kekkonen. The Savonlinna Opera Festival had made a superb come-back!

Over the years, the Savonlinna Opera Festival has grown from a one-week event into an international festival lasting a month. Each year it performs to a total audience of around 70,000, and almost 10 per cent from abroad. Savonlinna has become a byword among opera lovers the world over. Its artistic standard was already attracting widespread interest and admiration back in the 1970s, due greatly to the unstinting efforts of its Artistic Director, the world-famous bass singer Martti Talvela, to achieve the same objective as Aino Ackté in her day: to place Savonlinna on an artistic par with the great European festivals while presenting the world with Finnish opera at its very best.