"Birth"
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, April 24, 2006.
Kaija Saariaho, whose new opera, “Adriana Mater,” had its première in Paris
earlier this month, once said that she likes to explore the boundary
between music and noise. Many of her large-scale works, “Adriana”
included, begin with a great, heaving expanse of intermingled timbres,
like a landscape turned molten, or an ocean boiling. Instruments cry
out at high or low extremes; pitches are bent or broken apart; violins
are bowed with such intensity that they groan; flutes are blown until
they emit an asthmatic rasp. It’s the kind of sound that boxes the ears
and maxes out the brain; information pours in on all frequencies. But
Saariaho is something other than a sonic terrorist out to shock
whatever remains of the bourgeoisie. She makes her eruptions of noise
seem like natural phenomena, the aftermath of some seismic break.
Shapes emerge from the chaos, and the shapes begin to sing. The latter
sections of her pieces often bring apparitions of rare, pure
beauty—plain intervals that sound like harmony reborn, liminal melodies
that disappear the moment they are heard. They are like the wildflowers
that bloom in Death Valley, their colors intensified by the nothingness
around them.
Saariaho, who is fifty-three, has had a fascinating career
trajectory, moving from the hothouses of the European avant-garde into
something like the cultural mainstream. She was part of a ridiculously
gifted class of Finnish music students that included the composer
Magnus Lindberg and the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (who led
the “Adriana” première). She has been living in Paris since 1982, and
from the start her music has been marked by ideas that have been
circulating in French music for several decades: the derivation of
melody and harmony from overtones, and the blending of instrumental and
electronic timbres. She has long been associated with IRCAM, the electronic-music institute that was founded by Pierre Boulez, in 1977. (New Yorkers will have a chance to hear IRCAM’s gadgetry in a mini-festival at Columbia University on May 6th and 7th.)
Saariaho’s chief French models were Tristan Murail and Gérard
Grisey, who, in the nineteen-seventies, developed a compositional
process that came to be called “spectralism.” By way of computers, they
analyzed the overtones that accompany any resonating tone—say, a low E
on a trombone. They then tried to capture that spectrum of tone color
in novel forms that unfolded in shimmering waves. The resulting music
sounds exotic on first encounter, but its foundation in acoustical
reality gives it a certain “rightness,” in contrast to previous
compositional systems, such as twelve-tone technique, which imposed
alternate realities on unwilling audiences. After all, the lower end of
the overtone series supplies the building blocks of Western music—the
octave, the fourth, the fifth, the major third. Seminal spectralist
works, such as Murail’s orchestral piece “Gondwana” and Grisey’s
evening-length instrumental cycle “Les Espaces Acoustiques,” have
epiphanic moments in which grand harmonies coalesce from the ether—the
same effects of emergence that are central to Saariaho’s aesthetic.
Composers who have taken inspiration from spectralist methods—among
them Saariaho, Julian Anderson, Georg Friedrich Haas, and the late
Claude Vivier—aren’t tune-happy populists by any means. But they have
brought a new sensuousness to European music. In place of the spastic
gesturing that was de rigueur during the Cold War era, their work often
unfolds in meditative, deep-breathing lines. While spectralist music
would hardly serve as the soundtrack to a yoga session, it does have
the capacity to generate a state of eerie calm. In a way, it is the
European counterpart to American minimalism, which, back in the
nineteen-sixties, returned emphatically to musical ABCs. It was
interesting that while Salonen was rehearsing “Adriana Mater” in Paris,
his home orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was mounting a
festival of minimalist music. Perhaps a new lingua franca is emerging,
one that reunites a fractured compositional scene. The title of
Murail’s “Gondwana,” after all, suggests a vision of music as a single
giant continent.
Saariaho never imagined herself an opera composer.
But, after seeing Messiaen’s monumental sacred opera “St. Francis of
Assisi” at the Salzburg Festival in 1992, she realized that she could
engage the genre as slow-moving ritual rather than as event-packed
drama. Eight years later, her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” or “The
Distant Love,” was unveiled at Salzburg. It is based on a libretto by
the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf, who, like the composer, is a
longtime Paris resident. The story has the simple power of an ancient
tale, which it is: Jaufré, a twelfth-century troubadour, falls in love
with the idea of a far-off Tripoli countess and, after a long,
dread-filled journey, dies in her arms. Saariaho’s music captures with
magical immediacy the drastic emotions that swirl around this romance,
which is different from standard operatic melodrama in that the action
is largely psychological. There is a riveting DVD of a Finnish National
Opera performance, with a beautifully restrained Peter Sellars
production, roof-rattling orchestral sounds under Salonen’s direction,
and great lead performances by Dawn Upshaw, Monica Groop, and Gerald
Finley. Saariaho’s stroke of genius is to keep the melodic lines spare
and direct amid the orchestral phantasmagoria; Debussy’s “Pelléas et
Mélisande” is her vocal model. After watching the DVD, you may find
yourself writing a letter to your local opera house, pleading for a
production. This one is addressed to Peter Gelb, Metropolitan Opera.
“Adriana Mater,” which also has a Maalouf libretto and a production
by Sellars, is at once a more political and a more personal piece. It
is rooted in the composer’s memories of her first pregnancy, during
which she thought often about the person whose heart was beating next
to her own and studied the sonogram for clues. She described that
feeling to Maalouf, who added to it his own long-standing obsessions
with the agonies of modern identity, with the intertwining of religious
fanaticism and political violence. He wove a modern fable about a woman
named Adriana, who, amid the chaos of a modern regional war (in the
Balkans, perhaps), is raped and impregnated by a fellow-villager.
Seventeen years later, the child becomes an angry young man, and when
he meets his father he has to decide whether he will exact vengeance.
When, finally, he shies away from violence, Adriana says to him, “We
have not been avenged, but we have been saved.”
The story of Adriana has obvious contemporary resonances, suggesting
how a nation at war can harm itself as much as it damages its enemies.
The music begins with a typical Saariaho assault: an eight-note chord,
marked disperato, blaring brightly and cruelly in the brass.
Yet there’s something different about Saariaho’s use of the “noise”
mode in this opera. It lacks the enveloping mystery that distinguishes
“L’Amour de Loin.” Instead, the dissonance feels more like the standard
barrage that professionally anguished composers have been unleashing
since the nineteen-fifties. It makes for a sullen first act, short on
contrast. On the other hand, there may be a specific reason that
Saariaho has chosen to employ this harsh and limited palette in setting
out her scene. For centuries, male composers have been subjecting
female characters to humiliation and death onstage. It is different,
somehow, when a woman composer enacts the same ritual; there is no
element of fantasy about the violence, as there is even in such a
complexly compassionate work as Berg’s “Lulu.”
In the second act, a deeper agenda comes to the fore, which has
little to do with war, the Balkans, the Middle East, or other
present-day contexts. It has to do with the core idea of the opera:
Saariaho’s experience of the pain and beauty of birth. Ultimately, the
outer events of the story seem like an elaborate metaphor for a more
everyday but no less extraordinary story of becoming a mother in a
hostile world. When, at the end, Adriana rests her head on her son’s
shoulder, and simple intervals sound in the orchestra (notably the
elemental open fifth, as in Grisey’s masterpiece “Transitoires”), the
feeling of resolution is immense. It is a stupendous ending, all the
more so for taking the audience out of darkness into light.
The première production, at the Bastille Opera, was involving, but
not at the level of “L’Amour de Loin.” George Tsypin’s sets underused
the vast spread of the Bastille’s stage; an array of walls, huts, and
domes made for a frustratingly limited stage picture. James Ingalls’s
lighting effects were uncharacteristically predictable (blood-red for
violence, etc.). Sellars got urgent performances from the singers, but
his usual leaps of dramatic imagination were absent. Patricia Bardon
sang the role of Adriana with a sometimes edgy voice but with emotional
vitality; Stephen Milling gave a gruff, black-voiced presence to the
rapist, Tsargo; Solveig Kringelborn was luminous as Adriana’s sister,
Refka; Gordon Gietz sang passionately and accurately as young Yonas.
Unfortunately, the sound design, by IRCAM
technicians, periodically swallowed up the voices; the Bastille is not
made for electronic effects. Despite Salonen’s dynamic conducting, the
greatness of the opera was more sensed than heard. Still, the audience
rewarded Saariaho with a tumultuous ovation.
The première of “Adriana Mater” was delayed for
several days by one of the various strikes that have recently
immobilized France. While waiting, I went to the Théâtre du Châtelet to
see Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” in a Robert Wilson production, with
Christoph Eschenbach conducting; Wilson’s staging of the complete
“Ring” has been running at the Châtelet this season. As in Wilson’s
all-blue version of “Lohengrin,” which returns to the Met this week,
the working to death of a tiny handful of motifs, poses, and color
schemes (hint: it wasn’t magenta) makes for a long night. Endrik
Wottrich, Petra-Maria Schnitzer, Linda Watson, and Jukka Rasilainen
were in varying degrees inadequate to the roles of Siegmund, Sieglinde,
Brünnhilde, and Wotan. It’s never good news when Fricka, Wotan’s
querulous wife, becomes the heroine, but Mihoko Fujimura’s performance
dominated the stage, not only because her voice is lustrous in tone and
precise in diction but because her stylized attitudes of rage and
rectitude gave life to the pseudo-Kabuki mannerisms of Wilson’s
production. It somehow seemed appropriate that in the vicinity of
“Adriana Mater,” a new feminist masterpiece, the clearest theme in “Die
Walküre” was that a woman had had enough of her husband’s lies.