The Many Lives of Kaija Saariaho's L'amour De Loin
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Cori Ellison “Mais c’est chaque fois la première fois”: The Many Lives of Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin Since its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2000, L’amour de loin, Kaija Saariaho’s first opera, has been presented in eight different productions, in fourteen cities on two continents—easily setting a record for operas of the new millennium. Its popularity is not surprising in light of its extraordinary musical beauty, richness, and originality, as well as the depth and universality of its dramatic themes. Yet L’amour de loin is radical in its dramaturgy and challenging for both audiences and interpreters. Though based on historical characters, L’amour de loin conjures a mythological resonance reminiscent of similarly pioneering operas like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise. Like them, it is minimal in event and maximal in ideas, colors, and emotions, defying conventional Western operatic dramaturgy to bravely shift the dramatic onus to a unique and opulent sound world. And like those operas, L’amour de loin invites and inspires myriad theatrical interpretations of prodigious imagination and breathtaking diversity. The world-premiere production of L’amour de loin (Salzburg 2000/Chatelet 2002/Santa Fe 2002/Helsinki 2004) presented the work in the typically poetic, elemental, hieratic style of Peter Sellars. Subsequent productions have ranged widely in style and emphasis, from the entirely animated production by visual artists Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen (Bergen International Festival 2008), and the visually spectacular version by Daniele Finzi Pasca of Cirque du Soleil (English National Opera 2009, Vlaamse Opera 2010, Canadian Opera Company 2012), to the more terrestrial interpretations of Olivier Tambosi in Bern (2001) and Steffen Piontek in Rostock (2008). With the support of slides and video clips, as well as insights provided by directors, performers, and the composer herself, this presentation will identify the challenges posed by L’amour de loin and compare the disparate solutions advanced in each of its eight productions to date. Lauren Frankel The Construction of Gender in the Operas of Kaija Saariaho Already an internationally renowned composer, Kaija Saariaho reached a new level of acclaim in 2000 with her first opera, L’amour de loin. Since its premiere at the Salzburg Festival, L’amour de loin has been produced in cities around the world. Saariaho has stated that after the completion of her first opera she had no intention of writing any others. Nevertheless, 2006 saw the premiere of Adriana Mater in Paris, and in 2010 Émilie was premiered in Lyon, firmly establishing Saariaho as one of the leading opera composers of the 21st century. In each of these works, Saariaho develops interior dramas from minimalistic plots, using reinterpretations of familiar themes to subvert traditional operatic gender roles. In this paper, I investigate the musical and dramaturgical construction of gender in Saariaho’s operas, including the media reception of these themes. As Saariaho has said, L’amour de loin, like all opera, concerns love and death. Unlike most, however, it features the death of the hero, rather than the heroine. Furthermore, it ends not with his death, but with the heroine’s moment of greatest virtuosity, her reflection on their love. Adriana Mater presents its protagonist not as a martyr to violence, but as a symbol of maternal power, and ultimately of salvation. Émilie, in contrast, explores the destructive side of maternity. Émilie’s pregnancy is not only an omen of her own death, it represents the gender constraints that restricted her scientific career. This monodrama, sung by a nightgown-clad soprano, references the convention of the mad scene, while at the same time reinterpreting it. As noted in The New York Times, “Émilie’s grandest emotional outburst concerns not a lover [...], but [Isaac] Newton’s magnum opus.” Rather than conform to or rebel against convention, Saariaho’s women and men reinvent the standard tropes of opera and gender. Liisamaija Hautsalo Émilie and the other Voices Kaija Saariaho’s opera, Émilie, premiered in Lyon 2010, tells a story of an aristocrat mathematician and physician, Émilie du Châtelet. Set in 18th century France, the opera depicts a pregnant Émilie, composing a letter to her beau, poet de Saint- Lambert, taking the form of a monodrama, an operatic work for one soloist and orchestra. With the libretto by Amin Maalouf, the nine-scene opera is composed for a single soprano voice. However, through Émilie’s letter writing, many voices emerge as she recalls her past and envisages a frightening future. Informed by Lacanian understandings of ‘voice’ and Abbate’s (1991) musico- narratology, this paper investigates these ‘other’ voices, including the voice of Émilie’s unborn child, the child’s father, de Saint-Lambert, Émilie’s other lovers and the most famous of them all, Voltaire. Through this investigation, it may be seen that the single vocal line transforms double-voiced, technically made possible by Saariaho’s use of a real-time harmonizer, thus enabling a dialogue between Émilie and her loved ones. Thus, Émilie can be defined as what I term ‘multi-voiced monodrama’. Sanna Iitti On responses to Kaija Saariaho’s oeuvre and post-modern traits in her works Reviews about Kaija Saariaho’s compositions published in Finland at the outset of the 1980s were to a great extent disfavourable. Those writings render insight in aesthetic preferences that worked against the composer for a lengthy while. I shall discuss those understandings, showing that the critics’ presuppositions were inflicted by their cherishing certain modernist trends besides traditionalist composers, who cultivated Finnish mythological and literary subjects. Contrary to that, Saariaho’s composition suggested inclinations reminiscent of Central-European avantgarde styles. Moreover, one commonly questioned the artistic validity of musical works that women composed, particularly if these were stylistically different from the compositions that men had created. The critics’ tones softened but gradually along with the composer’s growing fame abroad. Saariaho’s colleagues excused her gender due to her skillful handling of the computer technologies that she and many other composers had begun to exploit in their work. A representative and one pioneer of spectral composition, she aided the breakthrough of new aesthetic trends in Finland. I shall propose that her recent works include post-modern traits. Distinguish- ing some of these, I shall reflect on her motivations for those choices. What does she suggest by for instance citing her own output or that of an ancient troubadour? Does this imply her rejecting originality as an ideal or her conceiving her compositions as a form of production rather than as artworks? Saariaho’s coping with the predominantly male-dominated institutions that sustain music life worldwide has resulted in a solid career. This ought to remind one of the fact that separatist feminism or the rejection of Western musical traditions sel- dom benefits Western female composers. – Future research should clarify responses to Saariaho’s music beyond Europe: in Asia besides the USA, as I propose. Evangelia KOPSALIDOU The comparison of Kaija Soriaho’s music to Greek female composers of the 21st century. Kaija Soriaho as an innovative composer of the 21st century impresses with her music. As Greek musicologists and music educators while listening to her music we think of two active Greek female composers: Lena Platonos (1951-) and Eleni Kalaindrou (1939-). Even if their work is not so extensive we can think of some similarities concerning the conception of music, its relation to the text and the use of electronic sounds. Lena Platonos was a “child” of Manos Hatzidakis (1925-1994) as she had a professional relationship with him for many years and a personal friendship. She was born in Crete, Greece. She is a pianist and a composer of electronic and art song music. She composes songs, music for theater, ballets, the television and pieces of contemporary “classical” music. Eleni Karaindrou is a greek composer best known for scoring the films of the director Theodoros Angelopoulos (1935-2012). Apart from music studies in Greece and Paris she has also studied history and archeology. She had composed music for theater and cinema. The aim of this paper is to deal with the “music” relationship of these three female composers concerning mostly the repertory, the use of electronic music and musical instruments and the connection between text and music. For this purpose we are going to choose works that have as many similarities as possible without excluding those ones with notable differences. Kaj Lassfolk Sonic aspects of Kaija Saariaho's NoaNoa for flute and electronics NoaNoa (1992) for flute and electronics is one of the centerpieces in Kaija Saariaho's list of works. The work has seen numerous concertperformances and has been discussed in several research publications, for example, in the light of embodyment, roles of performers, and technology. This presentation focuses on the detailed sonic features of the work with special interest in spectral properties and acoustic relationships of the various sound sources involved. The work contains three basic sound sources: 1) flute and speaking voice of the performer, 2) pre-recorded and preprocessed sounds played by a computer, and 3) realtime sound effects. Basically, The performer's part and the prerecorded sounds act as two opposite polarities in the sonic spectrum while the realtime effect processing acts as a "glue" that bridge the two contrasting parts. However, each of the individual parts themselves cover a wide sonic range with various contrasting features. A central research question is, how the sonic properties of the soundsources are used to create both cohersion and contrast in the whole acoustic end result of the performed work. The primary method of thisstudy is spectrum analysis of a special multitrack recording of the work which the sound sources recorded on separate tracks.