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On Thursday, June 8, San Francisco Symphony’s music director Esa-Pekka Salonen led the first of three scheduled performances at Davies Hall of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s 2006 opera Adriana Mater. In light of the very recent death of Kaija Saariaho at age 70, this was an emotion-laden event, and SF Symphony dedicates these performances in honor of the extraordinary life and work of Kaija Saariaho. Moreover, several of Saariaho’s lifelong closest collaborators were involved in this production. Esa-Pekka Salonen, himself from Finland, acknowledges that Saariaho’s family and musical life have always been deeply intertwined with his own. For example, Salonen conducted the world premiere of Adriana Mater in 2006 at Paris’s Opéra Bastille, en event that was unfortunately marred by a last-minute technicians’ strike. Moreover, stage director Peter Sellars, who staged our SF Symphony production, has worked often with both Saariaho and Salonen, including at the Paris premiere of Adriana Mater in 2006. At Davies Hall on Thursday night, Peter Sellars gave a very emotional pre-performance talk about the opera Adriana Mater and about his longterm involvement with Kaija Saariaho and her music. Sellars will offer similar talks before each performance at Davies Hall on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. Finally, the librettist for Adriana Mater was Lebanese-French writer Amin Maalouf, a longtime friend and collaborator with Kaija Saariaho. 

Musically, Kaija Saariaho evolved her style in a tradition going back to Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande and Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint-François d’Assise. Other composers cited as influences by Saariaho include Edgard Varèse, Anton Webern, and Gérard Grisey, a French composer whose “spectral music” focused on tonal sound qualities that evoked inner emotional states. Likewise, another “spectralist” Saariaho admired was French composer Tristan Murail, whose Gondwana evoked a global sense of inner developmsnt common to all organic life across a vast planetary supercontinent. Finally, Saariaho was also associated in the late 1970s with IRCAM, the research center for electronic music founded in 1977 by Pierre Boulez. Throughout her musical evolution, Saariaho emphasised the derivation of harmony and melody from overtones. 

The opera Adriana Mater is perhaps Saariaho’s richest work. It includes dissonant passages evoking dark inner spaces of the human psyche and the ravages of war on the human soul; yet her music also includes the warmth and lyricism of compassion, and, particularly, of maternal love. Structurally, Adriana Mater is in two acts, each about an hour long, divided by a temporal gap of 17 years. In Act I we are introduced to Adriana as a very young woman who rebuffs the advances of a drunk young man, Tsargo, with whom she once shared a dance at a local fair. When her older sister Refka admonishes her for even speaking to Tsargo instead of treating him with contempt, Adriana retorts that contempt is actually rooted in fear and female submissiveness. Adriana refuses to go that route, and she argues that at least she can show compassion even for a ne’er do well drunk like Tsargo, who, if he could overcome his alcoholism, might possibly become a decent person. 

In Act I’s second tableau, civil war has broken out in Adriana’s unnamed country. Sounds of distant or nearby gunfire are sporadically heard in the orchestra. Tsargo, no longer drunk, is now a partisan soldier and arrives at Adriana’s doorstep carrying a gun. He demands entrance, saying he wants access to her rooftop to surveille the neighborhood for possible infiltrators. Adriana refuses Targo entrance, saying he’s traded his addiction to drink for addiction to vlolence and war. Tsargo eventually forces his way in, and it becomes clear that he proceeds to rape Adriana 

in Act I’s third and final tableau, Adriana realises she is pregnant. Her sister Refka again rebukes Adriana for deciding to have the child instead of seeking an abortion. Adriana relates how it feels to experience two heartbeats in her own body, her own and that of her foetus. This is music of great tenderness. Although Adriana insists that the unborn child will be hers and not that of her rapist, she wonders if her child will be a Cain or an Abel, an executioner or a victim. 

The cast in San Francisco’s Adriana Mater featured the intense and vocally moving mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron as Adriana, soprano Axelle Fanyo as Refka, baritone Christopher Purves as Tsargo, and in the role of Yonas, Adriana’s son, (whom we don’t see until Act II), was tenor Nicholas Phan. In Peter Sellars’ staging, there is no scenery whatsoever. However, a raised platform at front and center-stage is used throughout the opera, mostly by Adriana in Act I but also by Yonas and Refka in Act II. Throughout the opera, Tsargo is relegated to a periphery alongside the raised platform. Occasionally, either Adriana and/or Refka retreat to another raised platform nestled alongside the deep recesses of the orchestra at stage left. 

When Act II opens, the 17 year-old Yonas has just learned that, contrary to what Adriana and Refka have told him, his father did not die heroically protecting the locals against infiltrators. 

Yonas is furious at what he considers this betrayal. When Adriana explains that she dared not tell Yonas the truth about his father until she was sure he was old enough to deal emotionally with the facts, this by no means placates Yonas. When he learns that he is in fact the product of his father’s rape of Adriana, he vows to kill the rapist. When Refka tells Yonas that Tsargo, his rapist father, has returned to the local neighborhood, Yonas runs off carrying a gun to seek out Tsargo and kill him. 

Yonas does in fact find Tsargo, now a wounded, blind old drunkard sleeping on the floor of what once was his parents’ house. Yonas questions Tsargo at length, gradually revealing his own identity as the son born of Tsargo’s rape of Adriana. There is a poignant moment when Yonas asks Tsargo to turn around and face him so he won’t have to shoot Tsargo in the back. Tsargo agrees to turn around but reveals that he is now blind and won’t be able to see Yonas. Then, when Tsargo stretches out his hands to touch Yonas’s face to determine whether this son resembles his father, Yonas suddenly bolts. He returns to his mother and accuses himself of betraying her by not killing Tsargo. Laying her head on her son’s shoulder, Adriana assures him that, “We are not avenged; but we are saved.” Yonas has proved he is indeed her son and not the son of his violent and rapist father by showing he could not bring himself to kill even the man who deserved to die. 

To sum up this emotional performance, I can only say that singers and orchestra gave an inspired performance, one in which amidst much dissonance the musical epiphanies arose out of respect for developments in the plot, but also, and perhaps foremost, out of harmonic tensions built up in the music leading to the moments of epiphany. For this, kudos go to all the participants, but especially to conductor Esa-Pekka Solonen. This may well be Salonen’s finest moment yet as SF Symphony’s music director.