Background In the 17th century in an almost deserted corner of Hiiumaa island, in the family of a church teacher, the site of a drama involving three people, which ended with the death of two of them. The participants in the drama were foreigners: one Finn, one Swede born in Sweden, and one Baltic German. It’s from the source material of Aino Kallas, the Finn born of an Estonian woman, who had wrote the book „The Parson of Reigi“. There are very few signs of the existence of these foreigners. For Kallas it was a grand tale of love that had occurred: Lempelius was a Finn suffering from jealousy, while Kempe was the embodiment of a perfect Swedish Romeo. Catharina was the woman who on Kallas’s own tradition of life’s destiny was left out of the prison of her husband and society.
Me, an Estonian living long in Finland, went through all of Kallas’s source material. The work with their tender 17th century human shadows changed me profoundly: a person as an unsolvable puzzle, a white artwork.
The archive material didn’t want to come together. Not once. Or only through artificial and overblown guesswork. Like it was something involving hundreds of different people. One August day I realized: what happens when we understand that in their papers the people giving testimony dodge the questions of the interrogators like fish escaping from ships. Suddenly for me all the contradictory material changes into one logical line of possible events.
But. We can never know everything anyway. We only see one side of all that one person is.
***
The language of The Opposite Shore is just as complicated as the life of its people. They all speak many languages, but not one of them correctly. They all use dialect words from all levels where they once lived – with the syntax of the sentences based on the language which they received at school.
There are just a few isolated, yet emphasized, hints of Aino Kallas’s „The Parson of Reigi“ in The Opposite Shore. Like in the novel, seals play a leitmotif roll, in the minds of the people and the voices of nature. Lempeius from The Opposite Shore goes to court together with Job from the Bible. Kempe from The Opposite Shore gives a cup to Catharina for drinking, though Catharina doesn’t answer Kempe with the line „I neither understand you nor the connections of your words“ (like Kallas’s delicate Catharina) but says „I understand you“. Throughout the opera the breathing and whispering choir uses text fragments of Kallas’s poems. Though very little of Kallas is in these texts.
All of the rays of proportion converge at a vanishing point, a moment at which the wailing Livonian girl performs a mourning ritual for Catharina. She is a foreigner, like all of them, she is in a strange country and on a strange shore, the sea dividing their past and present.
Two hundred years later there are neither Swedes on Estonian shore nor even Livonians on their own shore.