MEXICO CITY (Process).– The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho died on June 2. Internationally recognized and awarded for her numerous compositions, she left a unique work together with the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, which is worth referring to because of her link with Lebanon. Her proposal adds to that story that reaches the present to be told through music.
Numerous music critics have written about Saariaho’s artistic virtues, so I seek to highlight what Maalouf’s scripts contribute to understanding the Middle East. His proposal differs from the interpretation of Edward Said, for whom Verdi’s famous opera Aida “meets many of the needs of European culture and from within it… (such as) confirming that the Orient is an essentially exotic, distant and ancient place in which the Europeans can display their shows of force”. Instead, Maalouf’s pen extends the story he has told in his novels to his operatic librettos, told from within while respecting his cultural traits.
In such a way that the Lebanese writer has maintained his tireless work amassing legends and stories, with the musical resources of Kaija Saariaho; since their first meeting in Love from afar (2000), which took him back to his historic Lebanon to narrate an impossible love at the time of the crusades in Tripoli, where the fortress built by the Christians to resist the the Muslims. Countess Clemence lives there, who has fallen in love with Jaufré Rudel, prince and troubadour of Blaye, only by hearing her voice and through the mediation of a pilgrim who has managed to encourage her to fall in love with her, generating a passionate love from afar.
The theme is based on the legend of a traveling prince who enlisted in the army of one of the crusades, fell ill on the high seas and only reached his destination in Tripoli to die with his beloved Clemence, whom he never knew. A poetic libretto, exceptional for its simplicity, written in French by the novelist and essayist, set to music by Kaija Saariaho, adding a surprising operatic twist. The opera—directed by Peter Sellars and starring Gerald Finley as Jaufré, Dawn Upshaw as Clemency, and Monica Groop as the pilgrim—as noted by music critic Mark Sweed (Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2000) that attended its world premiere at the 2000 Salzburg Festival – mentions the brilliant and powerful transformation scene for Clemence when the three characters achieve strong and moving expression, according to Maalouf’s poetry:
I had never wanted to embark before.
But now at the end of the trip is Tripoli.
At the end of the trip is Clemencia,
There is my second birth.
The water of baptism will be deep and cold,
At the end of the journey my life will begin.
The key of Clemencia’s recitative is the same that the author has undertaken, expressed in the first sentence of the heroine’s final poem: “If your name is Love, I adore only you, Lord”. She cries out for not suffering and is satisfied because:
His songs are more than caresses and I don’t know if
I would love the man as I love the poet.
I don’t know if I would love her voice as much as I love her music.
The couple of artists, one European and the other with his heart rooted in Lebanon, undertook another project by turning the poem Cuatro instantes (2002) into music, a beautiful composition where love is the prevailing motive:
our lips rub together
Our fingers intertwine
Our bodies are discovered
But I close my eyes
To dream of you…
More current and perhaps too realistic is Adriana Mater (2006), already in our time denouncing the suffering of women and the revenge they can exert; It is about the drama of a woman raped in one of the wars like those that devastate the world and that unfortunately the author’s own country, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan face. In the play, the son of the criminal action must confront the truth that the family has hidden from him. The Tsargo rapist, however, is just another victim, who must warn Adriana when war is coming:
(…) the Others will invade our streets.
They are going to slit our throats, all of us, women and men,
Just like in the days of our fathers.
They have been sharpening their weapons for a long time,
They are thirsty for revenge.
When Yonas returns from the war, the son he has procreated awaits him and upon his claim: “Unfortunately, I was born of your blood!”, Tsargo replies:
I lost that blood in the war,
to the last drop;
they infused me with another.
The idea is present from Saariaho’s first meeting with Maalouf, when the chorus sings:
damn love
when it makes us despise existence.
damn love
When he betrays life and becomes an ally of death.
The narrator no longer accepted the silence of his books full of words with live characters, but with the composer they acquire more life through music and we can listen to them in French, although we imagine other languages as those who inhabit the stories of her novels speak them. .
In this way, he demonstrates his cosmopolitanism and his insatiable thirst for knowledge and knowledge of everything that enriches his cultural proposal as a Christian Lebanese, as an Arab who lived with Islamic culture, influenced by the Protestantism of an English education, who writes in French, a different language. to that of the country of his birth and who lives in France, historically and affectively very close to Lebanon.
With Adriana Mater the authors came together to tell a feminist story in stark writing for a different story from Maalouf’s pen and what is usually sung in an opera. Without contemplations or kind words, he is linked to the literature of another creator who carries the stigma of exile in his theatrical work. It is about the Canadian Lebanese Wajdi Mouawad and his surprising play Incendios, made into a film with the title of The Woman Who Sang (2011). Both works coincide due to suffering, the desire to avenge the insults and the consequences left by the wars that engender the children of pain.
