TO KAIJA SAARIAHO
Hail and Farewell (1952-2023)
THE FRENCH COMPOSER AND TEACHER Olivier Messiaen was once asked what was the most important ability for a composer to possess. He pointed to his ears. “You have to hear,” he replied. This might seem like a flippant response. Chefs learn to taste, visual artists learn to see, musicians learn to hear. But what he meant was that a composer, a true composer, must perceive the profound nuances of every pitch, rhythm, and timbre deep inside of themselves and be uncompromising in the transference from the inner ear to the page. This kind of intense internalized hearing also meant that the composer understands how and when to manipulate one of those elements and the fathomless consequences that arise like falling dominoes.
The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died last week, could truly hear. She was able to conjure up new sounds and colors that were at once both original and organic. Her spare melodies all seemed to have their roots in a much older music. Like old chants, the same collection of three or four notes would reoccur in new orderings like a musical Rubik’s cube. They emerged seamlessly from the harmonies that had their roots in the manipulation of the overtone series. These harmonies would shimmer and buzz due to a finely wrought sense of orchestration.
In Saariaho’s music, the harmony is the orchestration. The melody is the timbre. Each element succeeds on an emotional level because of their dependency on one another.
No matter what she was writing—solo works, operas, orchestral tone poems, concerti—her music always had a deep radiance and a glow. This light infused sound likely came from her early obsession with the nature of her native homeland of Finland, much like the reigning figure that towers over all Finn composers, Jean Sibelius. Like Sibelius, her music has a gradual, seamless flow. One musical idea morphs into another. She escaped that shadow, consciously or not, by relocating to France. Her music, most notably her operas, fit naturally into the French canon going back to Debussy. The major operas, L’Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater, Innocence, are not derivative, but sit confidently along side other French masterpieces such as Messiaen’s Saint Francis of Assisi (an opera she cited as the work that proved to her that she could tackle the form) and Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande. When I heard the news of her death, my gut reaction was that she was the most important French composer since Messiaen…even though Saariaho not actually French.
She is, in my opinion, at her best as an opera composer. She was able to convey myriad emotional states with a single chord; a chord, mind you, that had been subjected to masterful orchestration and an acute sense of pacing. Take for example her most recent, and I dare not write this word, final opera Innocence. The story revolves around the aftermath of a school shooting and the wedding, years later, of the shooter’s brother. A woman, who is still haunted by the daughter that died in the shooting, is catering the reception. When the moment comes early in the opera that the mother realizes who she is serving, the music morphs into a static, yet pliable, stomach churning chord that hovers in space, full of dread and anxiety. It moves slowly and methodically. Off-stage vocies mutter, slide, and echo the orchestra. It is suffocating in its transparency. (I remember turning to my partner during this sequence, “she has found the simplest and most effective way to musicalize a panic attack.”). What follows is an ever shifting series of personal reflections, flashbacks, and confrontations.
In the final sequence of the opera, the ghost of the daughter comes to her mother and tells her, as best as she can, to let go. Sever the smoldering parental ties that remain and live her own life. The music gradually wedges outward, step by step, to the quiet extremes of the orchestras range, the very top and bottom of the instrumental forces. It murmurs in the lowest contrabasses and delicately pierces in the highest piccolos. The mother and daughter are left, not with a heart-felt reconciliation, but in a dark, uneasy vastness. Harmonically, the opera is complete (the bass having returned to the C of the opening), but emotionally, the music seems to imply that there is no reconciliation possible. A child who preceded a parent in death, the ultimate nightmare, is a grief that is unending. The music and the characters cannot let go.
One can imagine these moments in the hands of a lesser composer: a rapid fire torrent of scurrying strings depicting anxiety, a lush mother/daughter leitmotif in four octaves uniting their love across realms—a bad Liebestod. These choices could all work in some sense. But Saariaho’s ability to be understated and nuanced takes the work to another level. Look at any page of a Saariaho opera score and you will find that at the moments of heightened intensity, very few instruments are deployed. The orchestral landscape if oftentimes quite still in these sequences, like when people tune out the world or get a deep ringing in their ears when they suddenly realize something terrible has happened. This operatic subtlety, a trait rarely associated with most canonical operas, made each of her stage works that much more terrifying, heartbreaking, and awe-inspiring. Saariaho was able to do in opera what Proust said was at the heart of any great art. Great art, Proust said, goes to a place where the reader (or listener) progresses beyond the wisdom of the creator and discovers their own.