SAN FRANCISCO.- A haunting orchestral prelude sets the mood: muted percussion, melancholic breaths, anguished strings. The curtain rises and the first voices we hear from a pera They are those of two young people crouching in the shadows.
“I… I… I can’t… go to work,” one of them stammers in German. I can’t board a plane… I can’t sit with my back to the door, says another in Spanish.
They are living ghosts, traumatized survivors of a shooting in a school that happened 10 years before, but whose memory intrudes like an unwanted guest in the celebration of a wedding that takes place in the present.
This is how it begins Innocence, the last opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died of brain cancer last year. Premiering at the Aix-en-Provence festival in France in 2021, it now debuts in the United States in San Francisco starting June 1.
For 100 minutes without intermissions on a revolving two-level stage, two worlds develop separately, at first, but gradually intertwine as we discover the tragic connections between the groom’s family and past events at an international school.
Direction of the opera
I wanted to create a kind of thrillersaid Clment Mao-Takacs, who directed this production at the San Francisco opera house. She is very focused, which keeps her mouth open and her heart beating from the first note.
Regarding the score, Louise Bakker, who directs the production, indicated that Saariaho had created the atmosphere as much as the music.
Don’t expect long, romantic melodies from Puccini, he said. That’s not what this is at all. But the beauty of this piece is in its truth and its precision and what you can contribute from that.
Simon Stone, who directed the premiere and will oversee the production when it comes to the Metropolitan Opera in a future season, said the rotating stage helps audience members feel like they are discovering the links between past and present for themselves. .
He thought about whether he could turn the restaurant where the banquet is held into the school slowly, gradually, throughout the production, he said, Without the audience realizing it, they could be drawn into the same sense of intractable pain that the characters felt.
The pain is palpable, but the innocence of the title is less clear. It turns out that no one in the story is exempt from some responsibility, not even the waitress whose daughter was one of the victims and who now works at the banquet without knowing that the eldest son of the family was involved in the shooting.
Innocence is what is killed when an event like this occurs, Stone said.
Interestingly, Saariaho’s initial idea for the pear arose from Da Vinci’s fresco of The last supper.
Matthew Shilvock, general manager of the San Francisco Opera, remembers first hearing about the project during a dinner with Saariaho in 2015.
Kaija was fascinated by the mindset of each of the 13 people around the table, she wrote in an article on the company’s website. A group brought together in a moment of deep emotional impact, but each one contributing their own perspective, history and reality.
From this core, Saariaho and his librettist, the Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, outlined the film, which has 13 singing or speaking roles: seven at the school and six at the wedding banquet. As if to underline the different understanding that each character brings to the events, nine different languages are used in the script.
Finland has not been immune to school shootings, with the worst resulting in multiple victims in 2007 and 2008. But the prevalence of gun violence in the United States makes the issue especially sensitive here.
“I wonder how the American public will cope with his relentless approach to an issue that, for decades, has been caught in accelerating cycles of national insanity,” wrote critic Alex Ross in The New Yorker after the opera’s premiere in 2021. In the end no false tone of healing or hope is heard; Instead, the circles of complicity continue to widen. What rescues the opera from utter desolation is the inherent beauty of Saariaho’s writing.
Recognizing the sensitive nature of the issue, the San Francisco Opera has hosted a series of panel discussions and community outreach events focused on topics such as gun violence and the representation of trauma on stage, screen and music. .
Despite the tough subject matter, there is a sense that things come full circle by having the US premiere in San Francisco. It was here, in 2018, again under the direction of Mao-Takacs, that the music of the opera was performed for the first time by an orchestra.
Shilvock had arranged for the company’s musicians to record excerpts so that the creative team could experience the sound world of the opera. Saariaho was present in the auditorium.
It was crazy and really moving, Mao-Takacs recalled. I will always remember Kaija’s look when I turned to her, and she was in the orchestra pit in the big empty hall and I said, ‘What did you think?'”
And she said this beautiful phrase: ‘it sounds like I wanted it,’ she said. She expressed her joy that the orchestra sounded good, her pride in having been able to write exactly what she had in mind.
FUENTE: AP
