After 17 Years, Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater Involves San Francisco

Kaija Saariaho | Credit: Andrew Campbell

A swimming pool, Trump Tower, a trashy trailer park, a cruise ship, outer space. Director Peter Sellars has made a name for himself by placing operas in innovative settings. Now without sets, costumes or props, he reinterprets Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater for Davies Symphony Hall. This June 8-11 concert production features only the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, four singers and a choir on a stage without a proscenium arch.

“In concert, the opera has a very different sense of time,” Sellars said in a video call between rehearsals at the Davies. “Now you can feel that as a memory; you can really hear words as meditation.”

Adriana Mater takes place during a civil war in an unnamed country at an unspecified point in time. Sung in French, the story reflects on motherhood as a consequence of rape in a violent world and invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships with revenge and forgiveness.

This concert performance is not Sellar’s or Salonen’s first rodeo with Adriana Mater. They were part of the creative team, which included librettist Amin Maalouf, behind the work’s premiere at Op. 2006 standingIt isra Bastille in Paris. Salonen also conducted its Finnish premiere in 2008, and in the same year Sellars completely restaged the work for its US premiere at the Santa Fe Opera. The San Francisco performances will be the first staged concert version of Adriana Mater.

Peter Sellars | Photo credit: Ruth Walz

Sellars’ work often deals with controversial contemporary issues – previous collaborations with composer John Adams on the operas The Death of Klinghoffer, Nixon in China and Doctor Atomic still provoke debate. Adriana Mater is no exception. Converting such themes into entertaining and musically exciting operas would be a challenge for many directors. But as Sellars puts it, music is a way to make two hours unforgettable.

“To me, entertainment isn’t what we do,” he said. “For me, the art form invites you to delve deep into the history of a contemporary moment, because what you are looking at is history. It wasn’t over; You’re still in.”

In Adriana Mater’s concert production, Sellars seeks the interplay of light, music and emotions to color the perception of the opera. “If you feel things because the music changes, or the color you see changes music – all of those things are a big interplay of that. None of this is flat. All of this is alive and moving.”

But the audience will see neither singers nor musicians walking across the stage. “Nobody goes anywhere. So what you’re going to experience at Davies Hall is not just the timbre of the orchestra, but the light itself. And these incredible illuminations of light in the dark and dark in the light,” Sellars said, noting that he was with James F. Ingalls, who also designed the lighting for the opera’s Paris premiere. This production featured an apocalyptic set of translucent fiberglass mounds, vaguely reminiscent of the wartime architecture of a ruined Middle Eastern or Balkan village. The mounds were both internally lit and projected.

Critical reception to Adriana Mater was mixed from the start. “The challenge was so direct, and oddly enough, when this piece was new it seemed aggressive to some people, now it has an amazing comfort quality,” said Sellars, 65, who teaches at UCLA.

However, the sensibility has changed since the opera was first conceived, he said. “It’s a different world today. The image we had 20 years ago of a young man walking into a public place with an AK-15 in hand, we all react differently to that today.”

Sellars believes that the passage of time has now allowed the play to speak in a way that was not possible when it was first performed. “Its beauty was harder to hear when it was new. And the poetry of it was harder to experience.”

Esa Pekka Salonen | Credit: Minna Hatinen

The two-act work, Saariaho’s second opera, was rarely performed for reasons unknown to Sellar. But he still has a strong connection to it. “Kaija’s music is right there, which is very eloquent and very moving.” After the opera’s premiere, Saariaho praised Sellars for bringing a dimension of hope to the work that she had not imagined. And in a gesture unusual for a composer to a director, she dedicated the opera to him (and to her mother’s memory).

A major force in contemporary music for decades, Paris-based Saariaho initially collaborated with Sellars on her first opera, L’Amour de loin (Love from Afar). She has known the 64-year-old Salonen since both were students at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. (Her daughter Aliisa is Salonen’s assistant; her son Aleksi assisted Sellars in the 2008 Santa Fe production of Adriana Mater, and he is the librettist for his mother’s latest opera, Innocence.)

Saariaho, now 70, said memories of her first pregnancy partly inspired Adriana Mater. “When I understood in my heart, in my body, that two hearts were beating at the same time, that was an idea that really struck me,” she told an interviewer in 2008. Maalouf told reporters he used his memories as a war correspondent and his awareness of contemporary political and religious conflicts as themes in the opera.

Saariaho doesn’t like being identified by her gender in a professional context, Sellars said. “All her life she has been annoyed with people who celebrate her as a composer. She said, ‘I’m just a composer.’ That’s enough.’ At the same time, when it came time to write her second opera, she wanted to write about motherhood.”

With a new cast in this concert production, Sellars expects very different responses to the music and story, not just from the singers and musicians, but from the audience as well.

“Every time we do it, we feel it differently. We understand things differently. Another world opens up because this is a real masterpiece – it changes every time you do it because you’re looking for new meanings and there they are. And only when you stop asking interesting questions does the play stop giving you interesting answers.

“This is a great piece of art, I think,” he continued. “It’s a mirror for everyone who looks in, and each new person who looks in will look for something else and find their own reflection.”