Kaija Saariaho : Dramas

5 Dramas despite saariaho’s protestations in the 1980s that she would never write an opera, and even though some music critics were surprised when she did produce such works, her operatic works can also be understood as a logical continuation of her development as a composer. Opera combines several art forms and Saariaho’s musical path has always moved fluidly over their meeting points. She has had a special interest in the human voice in its various forms since childhood, and vocal works written to carefully chosen literary texts have been an important facet of her production since her early years as a composer. The themes of the texts she has chosen to compose have been those of great dramas concerning the ambiguous nature of love and life. Her understanding of the nature of sound, its color and spatiality applied to voice, instruments, instrumentation, and orchestration, as well as her works building on long-lasting arcs of tension on many levels of the musical texture, have also paved the way toward her creation of intensive large-scale dramas. Writing an opera was a natural result of Saariaho’s musical creativity, which draws from multisensory sensations. The visual dimension of her musical imagi- nation and her tendency to become musically inspired by literary texts provided fruitful ground for the creation of staged art. Some of her earlier works have also 93 kaija saariaho : Dramas 94 been visualized, for instance, The Grammar of Dreams (a collection of seven works from 1986 to 2000) was staged with lighting and costumes. Opera is also a natural art form for a composer who likes to collaborate and who is able to create functional and inspirational working relationships with other people. In addition to being keen on collaborating with trusted musicians, Saariaho has over the years worked with several sound technicians, painters, dancers, and filmmakers. Even though most of the collaboration regarding an opera production takes place after the work has been composed, it is crucial for the present-day composer to find such collaborators who will support her or his musical ideas. It took years for Saariaho to be able to identify her own relationship with the operatic tradition. Some of her early plans for multimedia works functioned as the first steps toward operatic thinking, but the idea of writing an opera only became logical to her when she felt the need to write music for a story line that would require remaining within a certain theme for a long time. She began to plan an opera in the early 1990s, after having completed the ballet Maa. Love and death, the most typical themes of the opera tradition, fascinated her, and she wanted to approach them through her compositions. She was also interested in spiritual opera. Opera is a meeting point of music, literature, theater and other visual arts, staging, and lighting. It is also a product of collaboration between people who have backgrounds in different arts and, thus, multiple viewpoints. This “demo- cratic principle of opera,” as Peter Sellars calls it, requires a shared space and the kind of collaboration where “there is not enough room for disagreement without weakening the whole, but at the same time everything becomes stronger—when the opera is done, it is a very rich texture with layers of series of experiences that has almost the same kind of layering as life has”1 (Photo 5). Sellars describes how this layering of events creates the magic of the opera: “Human beings need permission—and that’s metaphor—to recognize that there are many layers of reality moving at any given moment, and that every small gesture has very large consequences. So opera is this amazing form, which takes a gesture, and under- stands it through music, poetry, dance, visual art, all at the same time.” Musically, Saariaho’s first opera,L’amour de loin, builds on the central features of her idiom: it celebrates sound color through rich orchestration, by electronic means, as well as by expanded vocal and instrumental techniques. Sellars, who is used to creating the staging on the basis of the orchestral score, soon discovered that Saariaho’s music, where “every little movement in the spiritual conscious- ness is printed with high intensity,”2 requires a different kind of working method. “With Kaija’s music, the things you expect to hear when reading the score, you Photo 5. A long-term collaborator, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho, and Peter Sellars at the national premiere of L’amour de loin at the Finnish National Opera House (Helsinki, 2000). Photo courtesy of Leif Weckström. do not hear. It is so mysterious, it does not sound as it looks like on the page, it goes into another sound world.” Saariaho did not develop and experiment with her new musical ideas in smaller works before beginning to compose her second opera. With Adriana Mater (2006), she moved directly toward more dramatic writing, an operatic tragedy, which examines its characters—a mother, her sister and her rapist, the father of her unborn son—during a war. The theme of the opera arose over a dinner with Maalouf after they had seen a performance concerning motherhood that had upset Saariaho with its stereotypical solutions. As a mother, Saariaho wanted to bring a woman’s perspective to the events of war. Maalouf, on his part, had experienced war when working as a war reporter. Sellars was also part of the team from the very beginning of the working process. In his opinion, Adriana Mater addresses important moral concerns in a deeply emotional way. “When Kaija takes on a subject that is here and now, a day-to-day world that is confronting us every moment, her musical representation of that dramatizes it so deeply, all these levels of hurt, invisible wounds and invisible states. In fact, life is a series of deep emotions and soul states that are moving our lives every minute. The zone of feeling that we pass through in our lives is a place that most of us are not very articulate about and do not really recognize in our lives. Kaija’s music seizes from that place.” The Saariaho-Maalouf-Sellars team does not fear making art that awakens emotions and touches the divine. In that respect, Saariaho’s music differs greatly 95 kaija saariaho : Dramas 96 from the music of the previous generation of European serialism, which valued the abstract musical structures produced by a detached and supposedly objective frame of mind. Roughly stated, in those contexts music that evoked emotions and was appreciated by the listeners was dismissed as bad music. Saariaho’s music opposes such values and so Sellars finds a depth of feeling that corresponds to “our search for a language that can express an emotion that saturates the time we are living in but that is strangely unacknowledged.” He appreciates the detailed sensibility of Saariaho’s music. “[I]t is highly theatrical in the sense that it dramatizes the life of the soul, it dramatizes this inner movement, leaving most of the events of the outer world apart.” Operas L’amour de loin is an opera lasting about two hours divided into five scenes and thirteen acts. The main roles are sung by a soprano, a baritone, and a mezzo soprano who sings a male role, thus, a so-called travesty role. The composition also involves a male and female choir, which does not necessarily sing on the stage with the soloists; in Sellars’s production, the choir is placed on opposite balconies on either side of the stage. The orchestra is enlarged with extra percussionists and a keyboard player who produces the electronics, controlled by sound technicians. The plot of L’amour de loin originates in the life story and distant love of a twelfth-century troubadour, Jaufré Rudel. The original stanzas from his life story, the vida, are the basis for the opera libretto, and Jaufré’s special song composed by Saariaho has some influences from the original fragmental notation. The opera recounts the story of two ill-fated lovers, the prince and troubadour from Blaye (near Bordeaux, in present-day France), Jaufré, and the Countess of Tripoli (in present-day Lebanon), Clémence. The third character is a pilgrim, who travels and mediates between these two. The troubadour is tired of his present life of entertainments. When visiting Blaye, the pilgrim tells him about the Countess who lives in Tripoli and Jaufré falls in love with her although he has never seen her. He composes songs describing his distant love. When the pilgrim visits Tripoli again, he sings one of Jaufré’s songs to her, also describing the troubadour who sings about her. At first, Clémence doubts whether she is worthy of his love, but eventually she falls in love with her distant admirer. Jaufré and the pilgrim take a journey across the sea toward Tripoli to meet the Countess. On the voyage, Jaufré falls ill and dreams about their meeting. When they arrive in Tripoli and the couple finally meets, he dies in her arms. At first, the Countess curses her fate, but gradually her grief transforms into acceptance and love. The libretto works on several levels: it provides the basic plot of the drama, its settings and scenes, and the poetic dialogues reveal the nature of the main characters, their thoughts and mental states. Jaufré and Clémence are unruly nobles whose longing for something other than their current lives leads them to transformational events, whereas the androgynous character of the pilgrim is a mediator and messenger between the couple and their two worlds, Orient and Oc- cident.

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