Saariaho: L'amour de loin
Dawn Upshaw (soprano) - Clémence, Countess of Tripoli
Gerald Finley
(baritone) - Jaufré Rudel
Lilli Paasikivi (mezzo-soprano) - the Pilgrim
Orchestre de Paris
Choeur de chambre Accentus
Kent Nagano (conductor)
Peter Sellars (director)
Sunday 2 December 2001
Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris
Saariaho: L'amour de loin
Rachel Harnisch (soprano) - Clémence, Countess of Tripoli
Wolfgang Koch (baritone) - Jaufré Rudel
Maria Riccarda Wesseling (mezzo-soprano) - the Pilgrim
Chor des Stadttheaters Bern
Berner Symphonie-Orchester
Hans Drewanz (conductor)
Olivier Tambosi (director)
Monday 3 December 2001
Stadttheater, Bern, Switzerland
Seldom in the life of a brand new opera are there near-simultaneous
productions that offer such radically different experiences. On consecutive
days, Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin had its final matinee at Paris'
Théâtre du Châtelet and an opening night at Bern, Switzerland's Stadttheater.
The Paris L'amour was a revival of Peter Sellars' production from the
Salzburg Festival, which introduced the opera to the world, to extravagant
acclaim, in the summer of 2000. The Bern production had the air of an audacious
upstart, being produced with no input from either the composer or librettist
Amin Maalouf — and without a single artist, director or designer of
international standing. Among both the creative team and cast, I hadn't heard of
anybody.
So divergent were the productions in their viewpoints
that one could safely say they had only one thing in common — their
leading sopranos deserved hazard pay: the Châtelet's Dawn Upshaw sang her final
aria lying flat on her back in a wading pool (her vibrato noticeably quickened)
and Bern's Rachel Harnisch was forced to tread among 
so many onstage books that at her curtain call she
stubbed her toe (and was in visible pain). The two productions, in fact, resist comparison but invite
contrast since they weren't even on the same continuum: Paris was more
contemplative than theatrical, while Bern took a more probing, dramatically
externalized view of the libretto. That Bern finally had the edge assures that
this opera won't necessarily be the exclusive property of large, well-subsidized
theaters.
You have to wonder what allows a piece to take on such different colors without losing its essential character, particularly this early in its life. L'amour de loin has only been in existence for 15 months — a blink of the eye in opera time. Upon closer examination, the piece appears to be production-proof, and for highly specific reasons. In her first work in this medium, the 49-year-old Saariaho was careful to not bite off too much. There are only three characters and they have simple but elemental emotional trajectories: the medieval troubadour and provincial Gallic prince Jaufré Rudel de Blaye, after years of empty debauchery, finds a pure and perfect love in Clémence, the Countess of Tripoli, whom he knows strictly from descriptions of her beauty and integrity of character. The third character, known only as the Pilgrim, is the dramatic go-between, finally inspiring Jaufré to go to Tripoli — much to Clémence's anxiety, since she knows she can never be all he believes her to be. The plot proceeds on a straight but gradual direction without twists, the possible exception being the Greek choruses that periodically mock Jaufré and Clémence for their romantic high-mindedness.
Musically, this story is realized in washes of orchestral color that
seamlessly meld with a subtle electronic score, conspiring to create shimmering,
rippling, rustling, whispering and even chirping effects. There are occasional
allusions to troubadour music with dramatically struck harp arpeggios, and, in
Clémence's court, dance-like echos of medieval estampies. All of it possesses
the visceral qualities that theater music should have. Unlike the madrigal-like
text splintering that Saariaho employed in her Sylvia Plath settings in The
Grammar of Dreams, she sets Maalouf's French-language libretto with
straightforward, syllabic expressiveness. Even the most derivative modern
composers require some getting used to — but not Saariaho's score,
which isn't remotely derivative: it neither conforms to nor defies current
compositional fashion, but simply proceeds with the thematic economy of
Parsifal, most hauntingly in a six-note motif 
built on a mere three
pitches. At the world premiere of Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, the
audience reportedly demanded that it be encored; similarly, L'amour de
loin leaves you wanting — no, aching — for more.
This directness and simplicity of expression makes it particularly open-ended interpretively. At the opera's end, you don't know if Clémence, who is grieving desperately for the death of Jaufré, is entering a convent out of devotion to God or to the troubadour's memory, or if her life is expanding or contracting. The Sellars production in Paris treated the plot like a skeleton — albeit a highly literate one — in a tale of spiritual evolution achieved through love: Whether or not Clémence is the woman Jaufré thinks she is, the point is the inner journey that the two make. A key difference in the two productions is the starting point of their journeys: For Sellars, they arise from splendid solitary confinement, both suspended over the onstage wading pool (symbolizing the water that separates them), he in a birdcage-cum-hourglass, she in a winding stairway decorated with vague (and unconvincing) allusions to Arabic art. The masterstroke of George Tsypin's set design was use of light and water, allowing ripples to be reflected on a large, onstage rear screen.
Bern's director, Olivier Tambosi, seemed to view the piece more as a resolution of neurotic obsession among two empty people, as if to say 0 + 0 = 1... Or perhaps it doesn't. That their union is only tentatively achieved suggests folly on their part; Clémence's grief over his death feels almost like a mad scene. Scenically, Bern's Raphael Barbier appears to have seized upon one of the libretto's many arresting lines: "I undress and dress twenty times, thirty times, before I find the precise word that has been hanging in the sky for all eternity, awaiting its destination," sings Jaufré. Anyone who writes professionally knows that words are only the vehicle of thought, and to obsess on a single one is to admit an inner vacancy that borders on madness. Thus, we find a modern-dress Jaufré waist-deep in books, hundreds of them, huge and tiny, piled and scattered. Clémence is seen from the beginning, a spectral figure, dressed in black with hair severely contained, wandering in the background even before she is mentioned or described.
The choruses, which were positioned in the balconies of
the Châtelet, were completely offstage in Bern, suggesting that they are the
warring voices going on inside Jaufré's mind. After all, were you to diagnose
him, the conclusions would range from agoraphobia to obsessive-compulsive
disorder. His internal transformation is brilliantly 
visualized by a dozen or so tall windows that are
slowly opened, letting brisk breezes flow in and white curtains billow. Clévmence
casts off her dark outer garments, undoes her hair and goes barefoot, her
decision to accept the challenge of his idealized love being characterized with
her teetering precariously on the highest pile of books. There was an ongoing
image with stage lights: When Jaufré gives up his isolation, lights that have
randomly hung from the air have their bulbs languidly unscrewed by the Pilgrim.
After his death, when the raging Clémence has ripped down the white curtains and
closed the windows, her bittersweet commitment to spiritual life is sung while
the Pilgrim re-opens the windows, each containing a single golden light that is,
unlike Jaufré's dangling yellow bulbs, securely fastened. This was a journey
with lots of signposts — unlike the Sellars staging, which prompted
audience members to provide their own. If Bern's production was a Rorschach
inkblot test, the Châtelet's was a tabula rasa.
Performancewise, the Paris team was more refined, even though Upshaw was the only singer left from the Salzburg cast. Lilli Paasikivi as the Pilgrim and especially Gerald Finley as Jaufré were vocally superb, their hallmarks being straightforwardness of expression. Though Bern's Jaufré, Wolfgang Koch, lacked the stage charisma of Finley, his singing was no less compelling; Maria Riccarda Wesseling as the Pilgrim was utterly remarkable in her word coloring and depth of musical understanding. In Paris, Kent Nagano conducted the Orchestre de Paris in the spirit of Messiaen's St. François d'Assise, a logical approach since that opera was what finally convinced Saariaho to write one of her own. However, Nagano's languidly blended sonorities and meditative tempos convinced me that he's not Messiaen's or Saariaho's best advocate. Bern's conductor, Hans Drewanz, conducted L'amour more like a flesh-and-blood opera, with rugged contours and sweaty rough edges, the electronic component often taking center stage in the overall texture with an effect so gripping, you wondered where it was all going.
Soprano Harnisch, as Clémence, was a willing accomplice,
full of arresting interpretive touches: In the final act as she awaits Jaufré's
arrival, she stood at the lip of the stage facing the audience, mercilessly
mocking the supposed purity of his intentions, 
accompanied by an eerie series of nervous tics belying her
nervous insecurity. Upshaw, in contrast, was more an Everywoman caught
in extraordinary circumstances, and delivered a kind of singing I've never heard
from her. While her radiant soprano has always been the unflappable vehicle of
Wolf art songs and Vernon Duke's more depressive moments, the voice, here, was
flappable indeed, so intense was her expression of inner crisis. Long experience
listening to Upshaw tells you this shouldn't be happening, that this voice
shouldn't be doing that. That it does happen makes her performance all the more
compelling. Might this role be the summit of her career?
The morning after that performance, I ran into Saariaho
on the TGV that left Paris for Bern at 7:44 a.m. — a bad hour for
composers as well as critics. Unmistakable 
with her wild strawberry blonde hair and eyes that are
penetrating even when bleary, she caught me listening to her Grammar of
Dreams compact disc, and we talked about the night before: "I'm not normally moved
by my own music, but this performance was so... so... strong."
"It hurt to go back to the real world." I said, remembering how abrasive the Paris Metro seemed afterwards.
"It did," she agreed.
Therein lies the final difference between the two productions: Paris left me
stripped bare with nerve endings exposed. Bern left me strangely fortified, with
a darker journey emerging more definitively into the light.
