12 Saariaho's L'amour De Loin Modernist Opera in the Twenty-First

12 Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin Modernist Opera in the Twenty-First Century Joy H. Calico Kaija Saariaho’s first opera, L’amour de loin (2000), is one of the most criti- cally acclaimed and commercially successful new operas of the twenty-first century. Its Salzburg premiere was well received, as were stagings of the same production in Paris (2001), Santa Fe (2002), and Helsinki (2004). The true test for any new opera is the number of subsequent interpretations it receives, however, and by that measure L’amour de loin has far exceeded reasonable expectations. New productions in Bern, Darmstadt, Bergen, Linz, Amsterdam, and Quebec City (the latter slated for the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York City in the 2016–17 season); concert performances in Brussels, London, Beirut, Strasbourg, Berlin, Tokyo, Trondheim, and Paris; and a version in English translation by the English National Opera, given the Cirque du Soleil treatment by stage director Daniele Finzi Pasca, all attest to sustained audience appeal. This is an extraordinary run for a new opera, and particularly one in a modernist idiom. As such, it challenges the tenacious postmodern shibboleth that to be modernist is to be atonal (and hence unpopular), as well as its corollary that to be postmodern is to be diatonic (and hence popular). Taking David Metzer’s model as my frame- work, I argue that L’amour de loin is evidence that late modernism offers an idiom for opera in the twenty-first century that is musically complex, emo- tionally expressive, and broadly accessible. Late Modernism I begin by situating this analysis within the current discourse on musical modernisms. In the first decade of the new century, scholars have shown renewed interest in such questions, paying particular attention to music composed in the late twentieth century and beyond. Literary scholar Mar- jorie Perloff, who discerned crucial links between experimental poetry writ- 342 Opera after World War II ten since 2000 and modernist poetry written a century earlier, catalyzed this inquiry. The challenge issued in the final sentence of her monograph has proved irresistible: “Ours may well be the moment when the lessons of early modernism are finally being learned.”1 Increasingly, scholars turn their attention to “analyzing the connections between recent music and the found- ing principles of modernism.”2 To contextualize modernist connections across the past century, however, one must confront what came to pass in the interim: postmodernism. The word itself, replete with a prefix that declares the death of the root, is an apt indication of the public relations difficulties that have plagued musical modernism, particularly since World War II. Björn Heile notes that it is “hard to dispel the suspicion that for many musicologists the attraction of postmodernism lay primarily in its seeming to offer an intellectual cover for anti-modernist sentiment: all of a sudden the familiar, basically conserva- tive, resentment against modernism sounds fashionable, up to date and even ideologically progressive.”3 Indeed, Andrew Timms’s dissection of the discourse finds that the shrewd equation of musical modernism with atonality has served antimodernists well because it reduces the entire range of modernist styles and processes to just one: serialism—more specifically, total serialism as it emanated from Darmstadt after World War II. It is no accident that this particular manifestation of modernism is also the one that has proved least popular with audiences and the one whose prestige and vast institutional support also bred resentment among musicians. “Modern- ism” easily became shorthand “for music that many will habitually avoid, find unappealing, and wish on only their worst enemies.”4 The status of “modernism = atonality” as an article of postmodern faith meant that modernism in any manifestation that does not fit the cliché of “elitist, ugly music taken to intellectual extremes that appeals to deluded cognoscenti” can produce a kind of cognitive dissonance.5 This equivalence is sufficiently common that some critics struggle to reconcile the appeal of L’amour de loin with its composer’s credentials: “The consonant nature of the opera’s harmonies and the beauty and intelligibility of its melodies fur- ther suggest that L’amour de loin is not a purely modernist opera, despite the composer’s background in the Central-European avant garde.”6 Consonance and melody are then taken as evidence of postmodern aesthetic grafted on to modernist technique. This rhetorical maneuver negates the possibility that modernism could include such features and resolves the cognitive dissonance with the reassurance that postmodernism has, in fact, carried the day. Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin 343 Advocates of modernist music have mounted a counteroffensive, begin- ning with a critique of postmodernism. Some contend that, as in the field of literature, postmodern music’s brief heyday has already passed; others dis- miss the notion of a division between postmodernism and modernism en- tirely.7 Many argue that pronouncements of postmodernism’s ascendance and modernism’s attendant demise were both premature and greatly exag- gerated from the start. Sufficient hindsight permits a general consensus that there was some sort of turning point around 1980, but it was not a turn in which postmodernism simply killed off modernism. Instead, these scholars describe other, concurrent developments that perpetuated or reinvigorated the modernist music project, described variously as “transformed modernism” (Alastair Williams), “second modernism” (Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf), “critical modernism” (Björn Heile), and “late modernism” (David Metzer).8 The turn may not have represented the dominant art-music trend, but its red thread can be traced in works written since 1980 by composers whose modernist credentials were never in question, such as Luigi Nono, Helmut Lachenmann, and György Ligeti.9 That red thread emerges in the new century as one particularly vibrant compositional option among the many cur- rently in use. It would seem that musical modernism is not dead after all. Metzer presents a persuasive, nuanced argument to support his claim that we are witness to a period of late modernism that began around 1980. A brief summary of his approach is necessary at this point. In his view, narra- tives of modernism premised solely upon innovation are insufficient, because the late modernist reorientation around 1980 abandoned some approaches from the 1950s and 1960s while continuing to use others. Instead, he offers an account based on lines of inquiry and advocates thinking about pieces ac- cording to the ways in which composers pursue these lines therein. He fo- cuses on inquiries into compositional states and the act of expression. The former (inquiries into compositional states) “involves the shaping of the musical language in a work so as to emulate a specific ideal.” He investigates inquiries into four ideal states in late modernist music—purity, silence, the fragmentary, and the flux of sound—and interprets these as providing “new ways of conceiving and organizing pieces” after “the decline of serialism and other systematic methods.” As to the latter (inquiries into the act of expression), Metzer finds that the consistent presence of “prominent, graspable means of expression, evocations of subjectivity, modes of direct communi- cation, and forceful gestures” distinguishes late modernist works from their immediate predecessors.10 344 Opera after World War II The paradigmatic narrative of musical modernism as predicated upon innovation has an analog in general accounts of aesthetic modernism that privilege speed. Conventional understanding links technology to the aesthetic modernism of literature, film, philosophy, and the visual arts through the valorization of unprecedented speed, emphasizing “the exhilarating ef- fects of velocity, acceleration, shock, and ongoing mobility.”11 Speed’s tri- umph of time over space is less evident in accounts of musical modernism, even those that are teleological and technologically oriented, but much as Metzer dismisses innovation as constitutive of modernism, Lutz Koepnick discards its corollary speed as an essential component of modernism. In- stead, Koepnick locates a kernel of what he calls slow modernism, a modernist aesthetic of slowness, even in the work of the Italian futurists. He calls for “recognizing important strains within aesthetic modernism” from its earli- est origins that did not necessarily denigrate slowness as “anti- modern, nos- talgic, and anti-aesthetic.”12 Unlike Odo Marquard’s compensatory slowness, however, which holds that the pace of modern life has outstripped the human capacity to keep up and advises that individuals withdraw and re- treat to natural and biological rhythms instead, Koepnick’s slow modernism is not reactionary.13 It is one in a plurality of modernisms, not an alternative to them, and its hallmark is not duration so much as a distinctive experien- tial quality: “Rather than seeing the present as a dialectical stage of asyn- chronous oppositions and negativity, modernist slowness approaches the now—without necessarily abiding critical awareness—as an open meeting ground of various streams of time, a space too complete in its temporal layering simply to be negated as a whole, a site at which neither past nor future existed in the singular and a traditional dialectician’s concept of total- ity no longer appeared quite applicable.”14 Those who have heard

Load more