Saariaho - Innocence (Aix, 2021)

Kaija Saariaho - Innocence

Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, 2021

Susanna Mälkki, Simon Stone, Magdalena Kožená, Sandrine Piau, Tuomas Pursio, Lilian Farahani, Markus Nykänen, Jukka Rasilainen, Lucy Shelton, Vilma Jää, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth,Camilo Delgado Díaz, Marina Dumont

ARTE Concert - 10th July 2021

The loss of Kaija Saariaho in June 2023 came as a shock to those who recognised her as one of the most brilliant of contemporary composers. I saw her twice in person, once at the premiere of her opera Only the Sound Remains in Amsterdam in 2016, where she was present in the foyer posing for press photos. It was a surprise however to walk into a coffee shop in Dundalk in Ireland in June 2019 and see her sitting there with her husband Jean-Baptiste Barrière. Even though I knew she was there as a guest for a performance of her works at the Louth Contemporary Music Society's annual two-day summer festival, and Dundalk has seen many famous modern composers appear in town, it still felt strange to see the composer of such sublime music in such an everyday place. I think I made a brief nod and smile of acknowledgement, unwilling to disturb her. The performance of Terra Memoria that evening by the Meta4 string quartet was extraordinary and thrilling.

I greatly admired her music, even though like most contemporary music, you had to search it out and rarely had the opportunity to have it brought to you. For various reasons I never found the time to watch the streaming of Innocence at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2021 even though I had read good reports about it. Sadly, now that there won't be another, this final work will remain her last contribution to the world of lyric drama and, belatedly taking the opportunity to view it now, the work is even more poignant now, deeply moving and surely a masterpiece, a fine testament to the wondrous complexity of her musical range. The beauty and power of her music is fully evident here, the restless striving to push her music into new ground through the use of unconventional instruments like the kantele and exploring the range of the voice as an instrument.

Innocence is in almost complete contrast to her previous opera Only the Sound Remains. It exudes menace and sorrow from the outset even as the drama opens on the day of a wedding that is a supposedly happy occasion for the bride, the groom and his family. But not everyone is happy, the celebrations tainted, almost overwhelmed by a greater emotion; the shock and horror of the caterer Tereza who has been asked to provide service at the last moment. To her horror, she has just come to the realisation that the eldest son of the family she is working for killed her daughter Markéta along with a number of other children in a gun rampage through a school ten years previously. As she relives the experience, the family are forced to confront the reality that this event cannot be erased or forgotten about.

Going into the opera without knowing what is to take place, there is nonetheless an evident rawness and complexity in the situation, one that is trying to bring together two contrasting events that do not sit well together. The music tries to encapsulate these conflicting sentiments, as well as find a way to suggest that something has taken place that is almost too deeply disturbing and horrific to depict or even speak out loud. It takes a while before the libretto make that realisation explicit, the present and past playing out at the same time, and when it comes it still feels painful, even if it remains too horrific to show with any kind of dramatic realism. And yet, through the music and the direction, it manages to truly get to the heart of the mixed emotions surrounding it in place and time.

Simon Stone is a good director to bring out the complexity of undercurrents and contrasting viewpoints (see his extraordinary Tristan und Isolde, also performed at Aix in 2021) and he finds a creative way of allowing it to work coherently, but it's Saariaho's music, conducted at the premiere by Susanna Mälkki, that really brings it together. The score gets to the heart of the situation and sentiments without resorting to cinematic techniques or the conventional dramatic orchestration that you might expect, but rather with a delicacy and sensitivity of touch, the music plunging deeply into the interior world rather than the external drama.

That's quite a challenge. For a start there is a large cast of individual figures in Sofi Oksanen's original libretto, each of the children international students, speaking in a mix of languages, who each tell their own story while simultaneously living and reliving their experience. Some are now dead, others express fear blended with survivor guilt, constantly questioning how they reacted at the time, how they could possibly have helped. This plays out at the same time and alongside the parents of the killer feeling concern about bringing an innocent new bride into this family, mixed with guilt about their son's actions, questioning whether they are in some way to blame, whether they failed to notice the warning signs, whether they were complicit to one extent or another in what has happened.

Then there is the challenge of exploring the act of the school shooting itself, trying to present a rounded account of the complex motivations that may have lain behind it; was it inspired by racism? was it a terrorist act? and the impossibility of even being able to fully explaining it. The stage shows commemorations taking place simultaneously with the bloodbath, the occasion contaminated by a sense of anger at the tragedy being used and exploited for political gain, with politicians making fake promises of changes to gun laws. The pain of some has value, the pain endured by others none at all, as one of the victims puts it, words and good intentions replacing any real action; nothing will be done, until the next shooting.

The singing has its own complexity, in a multiplicity of languages, English, Finnish, French, Spanish and German are spoken, and even the singing voices have an uncommon range, from background choral voices used as an instrument, to spoken recitative and folk-inspired arrangements on the part of Markéta, the dead daughter of the catering server at the wedding party. The work also captures Saariaho's fascination for time, how it can be subjective, seeming to stretch out when one is bored and in other moments it can feel like time seems to stop. This feeds into how she composes the music for each overlaid and overlayered scene. Time has stopped for some, it is repeating for others, past and present coexist. The music ambitiously attempts to bring this all together, bringing together the experiences of many into the same period of time.

The opera is superbly directed by Simon Stone for the Aix festival. It's not just the concept of the rotating box of rooms and split levels that keep the continuity flowing and scenes overlapping, but much like how the same idea was applied to his Wozzeck, the clarity with which the complexity of the story is allowed to unfold is impressive. The scene of the shooting is horrific enough without it requiring blazing guns, the testimonies from blood-splattered victims and survivors tells the story in its own horrific fashion, but the scene where Tereza confronts the family and the new bride with the deception they have been carrying out, pouring out all the pain she has had to live with is truly harrowing. Nothing however is as clear cut as we would like it to be when it comes to identifying who is a victim. The performances here from Sandrine Piau and Magdalena Kožená is this scene are extraordinary, but then they are both remarkable throughout. The filming for screen is also superb, the close-ups in this scene showing the intensity of the dramatic performances.

The singing is outstanding, Saariaho writing beautifully for the voice with singers clearly chosen as best for the roles and all of them outstanding. Markus Nykänen as Tuomas, the Finnish groom, and Lilian Farahani, his Romanian bride Stela, both give notable performances of great emotion and intensity at the situation they find themselves in. Saariaho is not afraid to use spoken recitation when it is required for its own effect, for the direct expression of the students, rising into singing under the strain of the experience. Choral arrangements of chants and humming vocalisations underline the ambiguity of the unspoken and the inexplicable. The high pitch yelps of Vilma Jää's Finnish folk singing for the dead Markéta takes getting used to but have their part to play also and work effectively for the dramatic purposes of the opera. Combined, it makes Innocence an almost overwhelming experience, for all it takes in, for all it expresses, for it being a work of unparalleled ambition and genius. 

External links: Festival d'Aix-en-Provence

Saariaho - Only the Sound Remains (DNO, 2016 - Amsterdam)

Kaija Saariaho - Only the Sound Remains 

Dutch National Opera, 2016

André de Ridder, Peter Sellars, Philippe Jaroussky, Davone Tines, Nora Kimball-Mentos, Heleen Koele, Marian Dijkhuizen, Albert van Ommen, Gilad Nezer

Nationale Opera & Ballet, Amsterdam - 15 March 2016

The few indications of what you could expect from the new opera by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho suggested that it was going to be quite 'arty' in conception. The fact that the piece was to be based on two Japanese Nôh dramas adapted and directed by Peter Sellars certainly prompted this impression and expectations of slowness and paucity of drama were indeed met at the 2016 World Premiere of Only the Sound Remains in Amsterdam. Where the work exceeded all expectations however was in the richness of the musical language that Saariaho employed with a minimum of instruments, and in how successfully it expressed the inner meaning of the work.

When you are dealing with Nôh drama, that is obviously the most important aspect to get across. Japanese Nôh theatre, the Dutch National Opera's promotional material told us "was born from the Buddhist idea that light is concealed largely in darkness, so as not to blind mere mortals." The conceptual approach to the subject then is a sound one, in more than one sense of the word. Reduced down to their simplest form, symbolism largely taking the place of any representational view of the dramatic staging, it's indeed only the sound that remains as a way of delving into the darkness that separates mortals from the true light on the other side of the veil.

That's very high concept and somewhat airy-fairy, so let's deal with the more objective reality of what is represented on the stage in the two short operas. Both of the Nôh dramas deal with a contact that is established between a mortal and a being from "the other side". In 'Always Strong', a Buddhist priest evokes the spirit of the legendary warrior Tsunemasa during a ceremony in his honour. Tsunemasa's ghost is drawn back by the offering of a lute that was a gift from the Emperor, the warrior appearing in the form of a shadow that eventually disappears leaving only the sound of his voice remaining behind. In the second story 'Feather Mantle', a fisherman finds the feather robe of an angel, and only agrees to return it if the angel will agree to perform a celestial dance in exchange.

There is not really any greater complexity to the dramas than is outlined above, and not really any great sense of meaning that you can take from the descriptions or indeed the libretti for the works alone. What is important, as much in opera as in Nôh drama, is the essence of the performance itself, and the clue to the nature of art as a medium of communication with "the other" is in the works themselves. It's a musical instrument, a lute, that permits the Priest to hear the voice from the spirit world, and it's through the dance of an angel that a humble fisherman is able to see beyond it to experience a vision of the waxing and waning of the moon. Sellars' direction keeps the works as simple as that, with little use of props and only two or three figures on the largely bare stage, with only a thin veil and lighting/shadows used to show the separation between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Watching Only the Sound Remains, I was reminded of another recent new opera, Georg Friedrich Haas' Morgen und Abend which premiered at the Royal Opera House last year, but only in as far as how Sellars similarly reduces the dramatic content in his libretto to deal with a subject that lies outside normal human experience. Like Morgen und Abend - although the musical approach is very different (the range of modern music far wider than most suspect) - Only the Sound Remains also attempts to extend the range of music drama, using new sounds and techniques to describe something that mere language and a dramatic construct alone cannot hope to reach; an attempt to grasp a sense of the other.

Kaija Saariaho's music is the vital element that establishes the connection to the spiritual side in both works, and it is really is something quite astonishing. The music is performed by a small seven-piece ensemble that consists of a string quartet, percussion, flute and Finnish kantele harp. The string quartet, and perhaps the percussion as well, creates a kind of an ambient atmospheric drone background mood music that could be said to be representative of the physical world. The more expressive exploration of the light on the other side is achieved mainly through the soft flow of the flute and the extraordinary otherworldly plucked string sounds of the kantele. More than the choice of instruments, it's the incredible way that they interact that establishes the connection between the physical world and the spiritual. The overall impact and richness of this sound world is mesmerising, Saariaho enlarging the palette of sound she can achieve using these acoustic instruments alone, with little need this time for the use of electronics.

Electronics were used only noticeably in one or two places in the second piece, and mainly then on the voice. The use of the singing voice is evidently another hugely important element of the overall soundscape here and again Saariaho's writing for it in Only the Sound Remains is just extraordinary. Both pieces are written for only two singers on the stage; a baritone for the priest and the fisherman; a countertenor for the ghost and for the angel (with a dancer doubling the role). Here alone the desired sound is fully realised with Davone Tines integrating with the earthier sounds of the physical world and Philippe Jaroussky's countertenor soaring to reach that otherworldly level. A quartet of singers in the raised orchestra pit however also forms part of that vital function of connecting the two planes in a kind of narrator role, even taking a performance role mirroring gestures on the stage.

Although the two works like the two worlds they explore remain separate, there is of course much that connects them and Sellars' libretto, along with his on-stage visual clues and Saariaho's dynamic musical expression of the light and dark, help bring out the underlying commonalities in the works and the message that lies within them. The interaction that occurs in both plays suggests an answer to the question of why there isn't a stronger bond between the two worlds on either side of the veil. The ghost of Tsunemasa reliving the horror of the wars and the angels held earthbound by human doubts, show that those on the other side tend to come off badly when they come into contact with the physical world. If they leave any trace behind in the world, only the sound remains and, when expressed like this in music, in poetry and dance, it's the closest thing we have to heaven on earth.

Links: DNO