Footnotes

While the building functions well as a performance space, in a more symbolic way it operates as a repository for the country’s self-image. Oil has made Norway rich, with a very wealthy elite, but the nation still likes to see itself as classless, open, and unpretentious, a place where art and craft are incorporated into everyday life and where nature is experienced directly and often. In this reading, the opera house is a kind of self-contained island, complete with a mountain, a sweeping plain, a moat, and a causeway. ➡︎