The Beginning

Once upon a time I had some friends over for dinner. We ended up talking about our career prospects and the eternal problem of how to earn money as a musician. One thing led to another, and soon I found myself suggesting to my composer friend Itzam that we should make an opera. We came up with a rough sketch of what kind of opera it could be, how many singers and players we could include and so on. During the course of the evening we convinced ourselves of the brilliance of our idea. The Start-Up Opera was born.

The next step was to find the people to do it with. We wanted to make a performance that could be easily performed in all kinds of places, so we decided to go with chamber opera. Two singers and a piano quintet (piano, violin, cello, flute and clarinet) would suffice. The singers were easy to find, since me and Itzam both study in the Sibelius Academy – we’d worry about the musicians later. I promised to take care of coaching the singers and of the general management side of things. Then we had to find a director and a librettist. Luckily I was a part of a production of Menotti’s Telephone Opera at the time, and the director Eljas Liinamaa happily agreed to join our new and wondrous crew. He also was able to recommend a writer friend of his, Juho Gröndahl, and voilà! We were ready for battle.

So we knew what we wanted to do and who we wanted to do it with. It was time to start worrying about money. Since none of us is a millionaire (and no-one’s dating one, either), we started to apply for grants. As every poor artist knows, applying for grants is so much fun! Not! As the general manager, I sacrificed myself for the common good and got to work. For a while I was buried in numbers, CVs, timelines and such. Itzam’s girlfriend Natalia Vaskinova, one of the founders of TaideTöölö, and my Excel-savvy boyfriend were collateral damage. Natalia brought in her knowledge of budgets and advertising; and I bet no grant application has so beautiful a graphic timeline as ours. (Yes, I’m bragging about my boyfriend. So?)

If you’re assuming that now I’ll tell you about how we got the funding and got to work, you’re a little off track. Despite our hyper-detailed, long-as-hell application we didn’t get the money. We’ve sent two other applications now and anxiously wait for results. The dream lives on.