passiondesimone – Sydney Chamber Opera

SAARIAHO’S MUSICAL PATH TO SIMONE

SCO’s Artistic Director discusses the work of Saariaho
By Jack Symonds

Why did I so strongly want to bring Kaija Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone to Sydney Chamber Opera? Simply because the fusion of Saariaho’s unique musical style with the ideas and persona of Simone Weil seemed a perfect match, and one ripe for investigation on the stage by a probing creative team.

Saariaho’s music has been a love of mine since I was a teenager- I must have played albums of her string concertos and orchestral works a hundred times. The universe of sound she invariably unveils in the first five seconds of a piece is musically unique and expressively sui generis: I can’t think of any composer who makes music the way she does.

The glistening webs of tone that open each work seem to stretch from the bottom to the top of one’s aural perception, ushering in an ocean of music that teems with a seemingly impossible abundance of sonic life. Much has been written comparing Saariaho’s music to natural phenomena; waves, lava, the slow unfolding of flowers. The essence of her art is to bend the instrumental and vocal colours available to create a sense of sound reborn from the grit of white noise, embracing the purest fundamentals of music making in striking new ways.

A little bit of history for those wanting to know where Simone came from: in the 1990s Saariaho really began to integrate her early explorations of electronics in Paris with her instrumental writing. It’s like the whole orchestra heaves with an electronic force trying to break out of what it means to play ‘correctly’. She refined this into works of considerable drama, density and savage beauty- listen especially to the orchestral diptych Du cristal …à la fumée. That piece does what it promises: gradually turns a very hard, crystal-like musical object into the aural equivalent of smoke by a kind of musical alchemy where everything melts and becomes effervescent. This process is here perfected, and never left her musical arsenal; La Passion de Simone seems to be built on this principle of writing. What I love about this earlier style is that even though it’s sometimes almost impossibly dense, her clarity of composition and orchestration means that it’s like one hears almost limitless depths of ideas and textures in some kind of vast, uncharted world.

Gradually, the density begins to clear. A piece like Graal Théâtre is every bit as complex in its thought patterns as Du cristal, but the lines are cleaner and the whole sound world more iridescent; the colours are chosen with delicacy rather than the immense textural strength of before. This is a violin concerto, and the violin’s long, singing lines perhaps prepared the way for her long-awaited détente with the solo voice.

Kaija Saariaho Graal Theatre Violin concerto

It was the original singer of Simone, soprano Dawn Upshaw, who initially seems to have inspired Saariaho to begin to write more – and differently – for the voice. The soprano and electronics piece Lonh, and soprano, female choir and orchestra work Château de l’âme seem to be gateways to the operas, and to Saariaho’s more recent music in general. The singing lines she was making room for are now, very naturally, vocal melodies. She also seemed to happen upon a distinctive vocal style almost immediately. Sung melodies act like extraordinary, lyrical ornaments on the orchestral or instrumental texture creating long, hypnotic lines of arresting beauty. They seem sensually arching, always with clear high points and expressive directness. Her background in electronics and composition using the natural overtone series (‘Spectralism’) means that the vertical harmonies which produce these horizontal lines are extremely resonant and have a real connection to each other – even though they are complex. The way Saariaho spaces notes on top of each other is carefully done so that we can hear every single pitch precisely, making the music feel inevitable and somehow ‘right’.

Her big hit was the opera L’amour de loin from 2000– a dreamy, medieval troubadour work which is perhaps the absolute epitome of her style, recently staged by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera. The old troubadour-inspired songs and chants which form the backdrop to this opera really seem to have gotten under her skin and even emerge, transformed in subsequent pieces. The next opera was perhaps a surprise in its directness and brutality: Adriana Mater is about a woman raped in war, becoming pregnant, and the story of her bringing up a son who becomes a violent, complex man. All the implicit, lava-violence of the early ‘90s music comes bursting out in that piece which still manages to contain a final scene painting the most moving portrait of maternal love and forgiveness I think I’ve ever heard in opera. Simone was next and, I think, successfully marries the brutality of Adriana with the voluptuousness and languor of L’amour de loin.

L'Amour de Loin: "Si tu t'appelles Amour", staged by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera

All the best qualities of Saariaho’s music are on display in this extraordinary piece from 2006. The enveloping mystery of the opening immediately conjures the paradoxical, strange figure of Simone Weil with a pool of sound that seems as if it has existed forever, waiting for this story to be told.

The solo soprano takes on Simone as an idea: she sings to her, about her, through her, around her and speaks as her, allowing Saariaho to use instruments, voices and text to paint a more complex and fully-realised Simone than any single performer could ever portray. The additional use of choral voices adds immeasurably – they are embedded in the tapestry of the orchestra, and I see them giving words and definite meaning to the instruments to articulate this imagined, musical Simone.

The vocal melodies and words are then spun in time over a constantly shifting instrumental backdrop of resonance. It’s this sense that everything is always melting, transforming and alive that is essential to capture in every aspect of realising her work.

..."The universe of sound she invariably unveils in the first five seconds of a piece is musically unique and expressively sui generis: I can’t think of any composer who makes music the way she does."

There is also an ever-present feeling of timelessness, and a deliberate confusion of the unfolding of musical time versus clock time. In a great Saariaho performance you should feel like you have no idea how long you’ve been there – five minutes could stretch into eternity, or the whole thing could feel like an upbeat to a single, new second. I will never forget the feeling of seeing the world premiere of Lumière et pesanteur in 2009. It’s actually a short orchestral piece, a transcription of the 8th ‘Station’ of Simone. I hadn’t heard Simone at all then, but the sense that this six or so minutes was complete, perfected, suspended time in an exquisite unfolding world- like the most delicate plant opening in timelapse- has never left me. Since then, I knew I had to find a way to bring a major piece of Saariaho’s to Sydney, and Simone is, unbelievably, the first of her larger works to ever be performed in Australia.

Director Peter Sellars has said of Saariaho’s work that “in the 21st century…we have a responsibility to do more than sit around and tell sad stories. Here we see there will be a future. And that future has been guaranteed all over the world by women, women who in impossible situations nourish and cultivate human dignity.” Simone Weil: figure of impossible, paradoxical grace, Kaija Saariaho: composer of some of today’s greatest and most distinctive music, and the Australian dream team of director Imara Savage and designer Elizabeth Gadsby are just the people to show us this future.

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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

A Passion for Transcendence

A PASSION FOR TRANSCENDENCE

Creatives find their concept for La Passion de Simone
by Annarosa Berman

The idea for the form of La Passion de Simone, a work for solo soprano, chorus and ensemble based on the life of the philosopher Simone Weil, came from the passion play tradition according to composer Kaija Saariaho. Yet when the director for Sydney Chamber Opera’s new production for Sydney Festival, Imara Savage, and designer, Elizabeth Gadsby, began to explore Saariaho’s score and Amin Maalouf’s libretto, they were initially confused.

Says Savage: “The different sections are labelled as Stations, so as a theatre maker you think, okay, this is a passion play – there are discreet episodes that lead to the main character’s death. Except that the music does not necessarily reflect such episodic stations- it is much more subtly structured and complex.” Maalouf’s libretto did not fit the passion play mould in any obvious way either – as Savage puts it: “How do you stage somebody’s thoughts changing?”

Savage and Gadsby, who in the early, conceptual stages of a production think of themselves as co-directing, approached SCO artistic director and conductor of the production Jack Symonds for help. “Can you tell us what the music is doing, and why? ” they asked. Symonds responded with an essay explaining, among other things, how Saariaho’s score can be thought of as operating like sonic waves that sometimes build to what could be perceived as a climax, yet are never resolved.

“Elizabeth and I both connected with Weil’s view that you gain knowledge through endurance and suffering,” Savage says. “If you walk into suffering rather than pulling away from it, you transcend it to a place of spirituality, where death is not the end. When we started thinking about Weil’s life in these terms, it became easier, because the music strongly reflects it.”

In keeping with this insight, Gadsby began to grasp the drama of the music when she realised that it was constantly moving from one thing to the next, like particles in space. “It’s not dramatic in the sense that it builds up and then settles – it never settles. It goes towards something and then shifts and moves somewhere else. Therein lies the drama.”

What sustains the narrative is Weil being in a constant state of endurance, with the assurance that if she endures long enough, there will be some kind of knowledge gained. Savage says: “La Passion de Simone is a meditation on suffering. It asks you to contemplate what it means to step into suffering, like Weil did. She gave away all her worldly possessions and rationed her food in accordance with what people could eat in wartime France, for example. She suffered so that she could empathise with others who suffered.”

Gadsby likens this “constant state of endurance” to the experience of picking up a stone and examining it from multiple angles. “You look at it from every possible perspective and then you go, well what does this object taste like? And what does it feel like to try and be a stone? That’s what Simone did: she emulated other people’s experiences in order to have compassion for them. She went to war, went to work in a factory, starved herself.”

Once director and designer grasped how the music sustained the drama, the next question was, how does one represent, on stage, a constant state of flux?

Gadsby says: “The idea of watching something dissolve, then reform in front of your eyes, came up. Imara said, how do you stage that? So we started thinking of gestures that would create a sense of watching matter decompose and reform, and we settled on white rice as a material that could fall in a constant stream, or be in a constant state of flux.”

As [Amara] Savage puts it: “How do you stage somebody’s thoughts changing?”

But singing an opera while a pile of rice is falling on you would be challenging, plus the women didn’t think Symonds would be thrilled with the sound of rice constantly falling on stage during the performance. There was also the structure of the libretto to contend with: the soprano, sung by Jane Sheldon, embodies Weil, while simultaneously observing her as narrator. Savage and Gadsby found a solution that was both practical and artistically satisfying when they asked video artist Mike Daley to create a video installation of Sheldon standing underneath four tonnes of rice piling up around her. Thus, the Sheldon in the video talks, and observes Weil, while Sheldon on stage sings, and embodies Weil.

If the image of Weil slowly being subsumed by rice is a relatively static one, that is the intention. Savage says: “As designer/director, your task is to keep the audience stimulated by creating and changing images. But in Passion, the music is going around the cosmos, and the libretto, besides being full of philosophical contradictions, goes from God to politics to lived experiences to Weil as a child to Weil on her death bed. The libretto and the score need something to anchor it, or you’d be doing the same thing three times over.”

Gadsby adds: “The music gives the emotional content and the libretto acts as intellectual foil to that. What we are trying to do is to create a space where the audience can sit with all the information and emotional content that they’re given. The central image, although it is constantly moving towards something else, stays the same.”

“You look at it from every possible perspective and then you go, well what does this object taste like? And what does it feel like to try and be a stone? That’s what Simone did: she emulated other people’s experiences in order to have compassion for them. She went to war, went to work in a factory, starved herself.”

Direction and design ideas grew organically from the two women discussing the work. “That’s generally how Elizabeth works,” says Savage, to which Gadsby adds: “The best design happens when the designer and director’s brains merge, so you don’t know whose idea was what. Imara bombards me with ideas: sometimes I’d open my inbox and find twenty emails from her, and a hundred images and written thoughts. She pours all this information on me, and I then piece together the most important ideas and we discuss them.”

Many people would struggle to make head or tail of the “indiscriminate” research that she shares with Gadsby in the conceptual phase, Savage says, but Gadsby always manages to create a synthesis. “I said, ‘Rice? No, maybe not.’ And Elizabeth said, ‘Rice? Yes!’” They discussed the symbolism of rice: how it stands for consumption and nurturing, but in some Buddhist traditions where you’d eat one small bowl of rice a day, also for asceticism. And when mandalas are built from rice, for meditative qualities. “It resonated with so many ideas in the work,” Gadsby says.

In the end, La Passion de Simone’s creative team found their answers by focusing not on its links to the passion play, but on Simone Weil’s fractured and contradictory identity. “She’s an activist but also a philosopher, she was Jewish but became Christian and was interested in Eastern religions,” Savage says. “She’s a multi-faceted woman who cannot be pinpointed into a particular thing. In fact, it would have been a disservice to have tried to describe her in fifteen stations.”

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We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

SAARIAHO’S MUSICAL PATH TO SIMONE

Kaija Saariaho Graal Theatre Violin concerto

L'Amour de Loin: "Si tu t'appelles Amour", staged by Robert Lepage at the Metropolitan Opera

Keep in touch

General Inquiries ​

Support Us

Connect with us

Newsletter Sign-up

General Information

We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

A PASSION FOR TRANSCENDENCE

Keep in touch

General Inquiries ​

Support Us

Connect with us

Newsletter Sign-up

General Information

We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and perform. We honour their elders both past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

General Inquiries

General Inquiries