Second meeting: How Finns feel about trains

We met at Milla’s place. Not all of us were able to be there, though: poisoned by Unicafe, Itzam was throwing up at home, and Eljas had urgent plumbing business to attend to. So it was just Juho and the girls. That didn’t really lessen the excitement – Juho had written some sketches for the libretto and we couldn’t wait to hear what they were all about. Milla and Iida read them through to see how they’d sound. (Great.) Are you curious yet? Think about Finnish winter. Think about extreme cold, darkness, and ugly concrete buildings in the middle of nowhere. To this nowhere-place a person arrives on a train. This is the grand start of our libretto experience.

Here I’ve got to digress a bit:

To really appreciate the train scenario, you have to understand that the Finns have a very special relationship with trains. We have a state-owned railway company, VR, that has a monopoly in Finland. The prices are outrageous (to put it mildly), and the trains are very often late for various reasons. One of the reasons is snow. It snows every winter, and every winter VR is surprised by this strange phenomenon. Also many technical faults hinder the trains on their journeys across our dear country. Everyone knows someone who was in a train that got stuck for so long that the restaurant cart run out of alcohol.

The train station announcements are famous for their lack of foresight. ”The train to Kuopio will be delayed for five minutes.” You hear this and you think, alright, I can wait here, that’s not long. And five minutes later: ”The train to Kuopio will be delayed for another 10 minutes.” You’re annoyed, but you hold on. After four or five announcements like this, though, you start to have stronger feelings about trains, announcers, and life in general.

Probably the trains are not going to play a huge role in the opera, but. Anyway.

The libretto is progressing: Juho promised to bring more scenes to our next meeting, so the co-operation can really start. Now it’s mainly about Juho and Itzam working together to find the right balance between music and text – there are many things you have to think about when you’re writing something that’s going to be set to music. But more of that later.