Few composers, in their music or their personas, are as otherworldly as
Kaija Saariaho. The 49-year-old Finland-born, Paris-based composer is, from a
distance, a forbidding presence, with her thin figure, pale skin, penetrating
eyes and cherry-blonde hair. Then you talk a bit, make her laugh a few times
(not difficult) and see her with her family, affectionately playing with her
seven-year-old daughter, talking to her brainy 13-year-old son and dozing on the
shoulder of her husband, the composer Jean-Baptiste Barrière.
Kaija Saariaho is indeed of this world, though the earlier impression isn't necessarily a mistaken one. In her younger years, she lived like a musical hermit at IRCAM, the electronic music think-tank in Paris, and longed for a solitary, mystical existence. Yet the world kept drawing her out — and never more so than in the summer of 2002, when her opera L'amour de loin (Love From Afar), which was premiered in at the 2000 Salzburg Festival, was the huge success of the Santa Fe Opera's season. All three performances were sold out; at the heavily attended dress rehearsal, the weather — lightning in particular — accentuated the atmosphere in this work about a medieval troubadour, Jaufré Rudel, who is consumed by love for a woman he knows only by report, Clémence, Countess of Tripoli.
Now the opera's future includes Helsinki, in a yet-to-be-announced season where it's likely to be recorded (at long last) under the baton of her countryman, Esa-Pekka Salonen. However, Saariaho's next stop after Santa Fe was Tanglewood, where she spent a week in residence supervising performances of her work. There, between rehearsals of her song cycle Château de l'âme, she talked with andante contributor David Patrick Stearns, music critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, about her successes — successes for which she is hesitant to take credit. "It's not my music, you know," she said in her hypnotically measured alto. "It came through me."
David Patrick Stearns: Your music is very distilled — nothing extraneous. Is that quality particularly important to you?
Kaija Saariaho: Yes. I'm the first listener to my music. I don't want to be bored.
DPS: I've heard your opera several times: once at the Châtelet in Paris in the spare, abstract Peter Sellars production [a version of which
was seen in Santa Fe] and twice in a very different production in Bern, Switzerland,
which was more symbolic, set in a single room filled with huge books. That one
made sense to me: the troubadour is an obsessive man of letters; huge windows
opened and closed around him, as his soul expanded and as his life ebbed away. I
loved it. But I don't sense that you did.
KS: It was a shock.
DPS: Which suggests that your opera is no longer yours. It's ours.
KS: I know — I feel it. It's beyond my understanding, somehow, that it has such enormous success. I'm not often concerned, you know, if my music gets to people or not. But at the dress rehearsal at Santa Fe some people walked out, and I thought maybe music isn't universal, maybe it won't reach these people. It made me very nervous.
Then the first night, I got the feeling that the public was exceptional. Dawn
[Upshaw] was singing the role [of Clémence] for the third production. She was
singing it like Mélisande, like a big opera role — and that makes it a
big role. She has a depth in her interpretation; she is so very touching.
DPS: You had no input into the Bern production. Some composers keep tighter controls on their work [than that].
KS: I don't think [that control] is good for the music. Our job is the score, and that should be enough. We are professionals in that domain and we've seen so many dilettantes in charge of the staging. What do I know about that? The music supports a different kind of interpretation quite well.
DPS: Many composers work with electronics early on and then grow out of it, as if it's one of the sins of their youth. Your ethereal instrumental textures, as augmented by your subtle use of electronics, seem central to your aesthetic.
KS: Yes. There are things you can't realize otherwise. I understand why some people come out of using electronics. If you get to work with more and more interesting musicians, that's very seductive — and good for the music.
DPS: But you don't seem much interested in traditional ensembles.
KS: No — indeed no. I have nothing against them. I wrote one string quartet but it doesn't sound so much like a string quartet.
DPS: Is there a vision inside of you that you try to realize? Or do you begin
with an idea and take a journey with it?
KS: A bit of both. I have quite exact plans, normally, [as to] how I advance my music, and then I either follow my plans or not. But I need to have knowledge of the totality before I start. I have a basic chord around which I organize my harmony; I don't use tonal functions, ever. But I use functions so that there is a feeling of release to something we know, to the material that I introduce in the beginning. In the flute concerto [L'aile du songe, written right after L'amour de loin and coming out on the Naïve Montaigne label in November 2002], it's always built around the solo. So many things are from that solo line.
DPS: With the combination of non-traditional ensembles and the non-traditional harmony, I feel that your pieces create an alternate universe — a dream world, or at least something quite apart from the real world. Is that your aesthetic?
KS: It's the only music I can imagine. The music is very strongly in my mind. How could it be from the real world? What music is of the real world?
DPS: All too much, actually. Your music, though, seems to come from a
particularly distant place, with all the pre-recorded, electronically altered
voices whispering in the background. And then there are your titles, which are
very poetic, never generic, like Graal-Théâtre or Château de
l'âme.
KS: Titles are very important. The most complicated thing about composition is to reduce the material that you're working with, and titles help me do that. They're very meaningful during the composition, and sometimes the title is there from the beginning.
DPS: Did you always imagine music this way, and just had to learn to write it down?
KS: In the beginning, I had no need to write it down. I thought all people imagined music. Little by little, I realized I needed to write it down. I tried some compositions when I was eight or nine, sketching something that was yellow and nervous — yellow and nervous was the idea.
I always played instruments but I'm not very talented in that — I was very disappointed with myself. I thought I'd be an organist, maybe, in some faraway place and have a spiritual life and all that. Then I learned more about what an organist's job is, and it's very boring. So little by little, I forced myself toward composition.
DPS: So many strong-minded composers come out of Finland these days. Any ideas as to why that is?
KS: The Finnish people have a special relationship to music. People there tend to be shy and isolated, yet have a very strong need to express themselves. So music is good for that. There are many practical reasons, of course. The music education system is fantastic and very creative.
DPS: Most of the texts you set are in French. Your titles are French.
KS: I'm surrounded by the
French language. I'm writing a song cycle for Karita Mattila, and I spent a long time looking for a
Finnish text. I didn't find one that would correspond with what I wanted to
write for her. It has something to do with my reality today; it's my
environment.
I never decided to live in Paris. I applied at IRCAM and was accepted. In Paris, I saw, for the first time, a variety of people and the time they take to have a nice meal. That was something very strange for me; I've always been very strict with myself. I think it was good for me. I never decided to move to Paris; I just stayed there.
DPS: Yet you speak Finnish to your children.
KS: It's the only language I speak really well, and one must always be clear with one's children. Were it not for the children, my head would be in the clouds all the time and it would be very dangerous. The young people in my family force me to see the light around me, even though the social aspects are foreign to me. I lived in France for years before I had my children. I had no idea of anything, because I was only composing.
DPS: Your husband is also a composer. [Barrière's credits include collaborations with director Peter Greenaway and directing the musical research department at IRCAM.] With two creative artists in the household, do you ever get on each other's nerves?
KS: Of course! But we've been with each other 20 years, and from the beginning he was always very supportive of my music. It takes a very special ego structure to be around me this summer.
DPS: Indeed, particularly with all the acclaim you've been getting. Do you like working in America?
KS: There are many very good orchestras. Conditions are very good and the people are very direct. I can more easily communicate.
DPS: Do Americans take direction more gracefully?
KS: Not always.
DPS: Do you like hearing your own works?
KS: It should give me more pleasure than it does. I can't sit down and enjoy the music, ever. I see the weaknesses of the compositions. I don't need to go onstage to thank the conductor — it's very unpleasant for me. I just don't like it. Maybe it's shyness. I can't enjoy the moment. I try. I want to be positive; I want to thank the musicians. Everybody has done their best for my music and it's fantastic, but ...
DPS: You and your French contemporary, Marc-André Dalbavie, have a number of points in common. You both set medieval poetry to music and make keen explorations into abstract, unconventional sound. Do you feel a kinship with him?
KS: No. I know him quite well and think he's quite a formalist. His music has a plan that he executes very carefully.
DPS: What living composers do you connect with?
KS: Not many. Henri Dutilleux. Magnus Lindberg.
DPS: A major operatic influence was that great non-opera, Olivier Messiaen's St. François d'Assise. What effect did that have on you?
KS: Before that, I could never imagine physical, dramatic action in my opera. It was my narrow-mindedness that opera had to have that. With St. François, everything is very internal.
DPS: When I ran into you at the Châtelet production of Arabella starring Karita Mattila, I wondered what you thought of such an earthbound piece so different from yours.
KS: I was interested in seeing how Karita was interpreting [the role]. She feels everything so deeply that even a superficial story becomes meaningful.
DPS: Are you planning your next opera?
KS: Yes, but I don't speak about it. It's far away.
DPS: It's "de loin".
KS: Yes!
DPS: L'amour de loin had only three characters. Will there be more in the new one?
KS: Not many more. I'm not Baroque. I don't like extravagance.
DPS: Given your success, do you ever worry about compositional paralysis because people now expect such great things from you?
KS: I know they are, actually. But it doesn't make me nervous. I ask for
eight or 10 years to finish a piece. My plan needs to be sparse — the
music needs time. I'm living very well [financially] with my music — I
don't need to compromise.
