LE FIGARO.
- What memories do you have of last year, when rehearsals for your opera
Innocence
took place when we knew that the festival would be canceled due to a pandemic?
Kaija SAARIAHO.
-
It was a strange but precious experience.
I am very grateful to the festival for maintaining these sessions, because it gave me reassurance.
As this is such a complex work, it is important to be able to check that everything is working, that no errors or details have been left to correct.
Read also:
Kaija Saariaho, opera for women
What is the relationship between
Innocence
and
The Last Supper
by Leonardo da Vinci, which represents the last meal of Jesus and the apostles?
This painting has intrigued me for as far as I can remember.
What is admirable in its composition is the way of presenting these thirteen characters whose history we know well.
We can see how everyone experienced this moment, the role they played in it.
And it makes me think that when you ask several people their perception of an event, what mark it left on them, how it changed their lives, you get very different answers.
This provided me with the starting point.
Have you kept the theological dimension in your opera?
No, I mostly kept the idea of guilt, and also the number of thirteen characters, but I imagined with librettist Sofi Oksanen a completely different situation.
A dramatic event that the characters have experienced and that the spectator does not know when the opera begins.
It's a bit like a thriller whose connections we don't immediately understand, and which is being built little by little like the pieces of a puzzle.
Actually, there are two parallel stories, but I'd rather let you find out.
The influence of language on musical writing is something that fascinates me
Kaija Saariaho
Did I understand correctly that
Innocence
will be sung in several languages?
This is even the original idea.
I have been looking for a long time for an opportunity to use multiple languages in an opera, because the influence of language on musical writing is something that fascinates me.
In
Innocence
, there are thirteen characters and nine languages.
Aleksi Barrière soon joined us as a playwright and translator.
It was he who translated the text into several languages, mainly English, because Sofi Oksanen always writes in Finnish.
Did you know the nine languages in which you composed?
Not at all, and I was hoping to speak them all after I finished my opera, but to my regret that did not happen!
It was a huge job to assimilate the intonations, the accents, the color of each language, so that each character is characterized, not only by the orchestration but also by his vocal writing.
Especially since of the thirteen performers, some are lyric singers but there is also a folk singer and actors, which multiplies the types of utterance.
I was ambitious in my desires, which is why this project took me seven years in all, including three for the composition.
We discuss on every page of the score, but once the conductor conducts it is his interpretation
Kaija Saariaho
By working on other works at the same time?
No, I can't.
I always plan my work well in advance because I can only do one thing at a time.
How do you collaborate with conductor and director?
I leave the hands free to the director: each his profession, I do not have the ambition of Wagner or Stockhausen who wanted to control everything!
Simon Stone is a passionate artist, very invested in his work and I have complete confidence in him.
As for the conductor, it is a permanent exchange with Susanna Mälkki, on whose shoulders rests the world creation, but also with Clément Mao-Takacs, who will direct the covers in other cities.
We discuss on every page of the score, but once the conductor conducts it is his interpretation.
July 3, 6, 10, 12 at 8 p.m. at the Grand Théâtre de Provence.