fri 29/03/2024

Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de Lyon | reviews, news & interviews

Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de Lyon

Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de Lyon

A new compositional turn from the Finn undermined by misogynistic madness

The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very much like the work's model, Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande, had done a hundred years before. Ten years on, the critical establishment descended on Lyon for Saariaho's third opera, Émilie - which comes to the Barbican in 2012 - based on the last days of the life of 18th-century French intellectual, Émilie du Châtelet, to see if Saariaho could repeat the trick and set the operatic standard for the coming decade.
At first, it seemed like the answer could be a resounding yes. The curtain lifted on a ravishing set, a ravishing orchestral sound and a ravishing singer. The caryatid figure of Karita Mattila, in 18th-century nightie, sits at her desk surrounded by an extraordinary orrery (built up beautifully by designer François Séguin and director François Girard), while a string haze, encrusted with the glisten of a harpsichord line like a starry sky, weaves dreamily around her.
What's instantly clear is that Saariaho's genius for the allusive is still here. Just as in L'Amour de Loin, where there was the subtlest of medieval flavours being sprayed up by the Debussyian waters, so in Émilie the Baroque is hinted at and touched upon like a passing daydream. But this is about all that remains of Saariaho's seductive signature style. For in Émilie, Saariaho seems to be making a break from her compositional past, tearing up her own rule book and turning her hand to musical convention. Out go the absorbing sonic washes, the saturated colours and harmonies, out goes the feeling that one is walking through the music, rather than just listening to it, and in comes a more rigid and frigid musical framework made up of discernable rhythmic cells and attempts at forward motion.
It's an intrepid volte-face. There's almost something perverse about it: the act of turning your back on such a winning formula. But it's not without sense too. It's reasonable both as a response to the rationalism of Châtelet, one of the world's first female scientist's, and her exacting world and as an interesting self-imposed restriction: a Cubist phase. Saariaho is almost challenging her compositional self in Émilie, seeing how she might cope without her colouristic crutches. And one can't forget practical considerations either. In a show for one soprano (especially when the soprano is a 50-year-old diva like Mattila) vocal considerations (for example, taking into account whether the singer has enough room and rest in the two hour tour de force to breath and shine over the orchestral line)  are especially important.
So does it work? I'm afraid largely it doesn't. Amin Maalouf's pregnant libretto is perhaps the main problem. As with all his texts, the nature of the words - focusing in this case on Émilie's final, mad, contemplative hours - are not easily given to an interesting ebb and flow. They're the ebb and flow of an intellectual losing her senses: randomly uninteresting or uninterestingly random.
Even so, Saariaho should have been able to redeem things. But she doesn't. Rhythms slip into unfortunate allusions - I kept hearing the clipped first beat of a calypso dance - and cease to gain any real cumulative power. Harmonies try but fail to advance arguments. Thematic and rhythmic material that recur throughout the nine tableau count for naught without an overall propulsive kick. Was this the fault of conductor Kazushi Ono and the Orchestre de l'Opéra de Lyon? After seeing the score, I doubt it.
Having said all this, one fascinating dramatic pattern does emerge. Rhythmic ostinati and a diatonic flavour are summoned up when Châtelet's mental cogs start turning, when knowledge starts being generated or Voltaire, her lover, is mentioned, while Saariaho's atomised 12-tone soundscapes rise up during Châtelet's rages and morbid clairvoyance. A musically conventional rationality is pitted against the sonic vibrancy of irrationality. One almost gets the sense that Saariaho has no truck with the Enlightenment project. Châtelet's hyperventilating is far more interesting to Saariaho than her careful study. Which leads to the most troubling and bizarre aspect of the opera for me: its misogyny.
How and why a female composer would want to produce yet another hormonally ravaged female character is beyond me. When mugging up on Châtelet, I was excited. Here, finally, I thought, we have a heroine that might offer the opportunity for a composer to present a vision of femininity that is not threatening and unstable but bold and believable. Instead of focusing the spotlight on an irrational woman in a rational society, one could highlight the rationality of Châtelet amid the madness of those around her. But no, Châtelet staggers around her orrery study barefoot like a 19th-century hysteric: temperamental, mystical and totally doolally. It was ultimately this squandering of historical material that disappointed most.

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