New Times, Old Affinities. The Association Française d’Expansion et d’Échanges Artistiques as a Sponsor of the Finnish Opera, 1923–1926

The Association française d’Expansion et d’Échanges artistiques was founded in Paris in 1922 in the nationalistic climate following World War I, with the aim of strengthening the worldwide influence of French art. It operated under state protection but early on gathered a representative swathe of French society: private persons from bankers to heads of art institutions, artists to tycoons, and patrons to diplomats. In Finland this association met a newly independent nation susceptible to be drawn by German influence. However, a certain Francophilia remained, which had flourished during the last decades of the time of Finland as an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. The first Finnish music correspondent of the Association française d’Expansion et d’Échanges artistiques, diplomat and journalist Wentzel Hagelstam, was an offspring of the old world. Exiled from his home country by imperial Russian authorities, he had spent nearly twenty years in Paris. Among Finns, he became one of the ‘most trustworthy friends’ of the French. His friendship was rewarded through exceptional services: the Association invested effort and money in offering French operatic works to the Finnish Opera, in financial difficulty. The Association’s bureaucracy and the shortage of money apparently caused this cooperation to regress, one symptom among others of declining cosmopolitanism.