ABSTRACT
The central character of the opera is the Finnish Revivalist leader Paavo Ruotsalainen, arguably the most important evangelist in Finland during the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in rural north eastern Finland into a poor family, Ruotsalainen became a traveling evangelist as a young man and found a sympathetic audience with rural peasants who found his prophesizing of Christian beliefs a form of compensation for their hard day to day existence. The rearrangement of the scenes generates a certain dramatic stability in the opera. One interesting feature of the opera is the numerous recurring motives and harmonies: these musical elements are consistently associated with some of the above-listed characters as well as with certain objects that are integral to the narrative. These Leitmotives function primarily to generate a mood during a scene.
