True Fire by Kaija Saariaho: Poetics of Composition

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary music culture. She became known to the general public after the triumphant premiere of her Love from Afar opera (L’amour de loin, 2000), held at the Salzburg festival. The article is devoted to another work of the composer — the vocal cycle True Fire (2014), which was also successfully received by critics and the public, but has not yet been the subject of a separate study. This work is the first experience of its analysis, focused on both its musical and literary components, which led to the conditional division of the article into two parts. The composer, by her own admission, sought to demonstrate in the cycle the rich palette of colors of the world-famous Canadian baritone Gerald Finley for whom the composition was written. In addition, in True Fire through the texts of R.W. Emerson, M. Darvish, S. Heaney and the lullaby of the Tewa Indians, which became the literary basis of the work, the author’s ideas of a different order are embodied. What they are and how they are reflected in music are the questions that we tried to answer in this article.

The Postmodern Troubadour

The twenty-first century, barely two decades old, has already seen the production of two highly acclaimed modernist operas about troubadours, Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf’s L’amour de loin (2000) and Written on Skin (2012), by George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp. The troubadour has been invoked repeatedly in Western culture as a nostalgic figure representing an idealized past and purity of poetic expression, a kind of anti-Pierrot. The librettos of both operas depart from troubadour razòs, thirteenth-century biographical accounts that tell the true story of the genesis of specific troubadour songs, a historically “authentic” move that appears to affirm an attitude of nostalgia for the lost Middle Ages. While L’amour de loin largely delivers on this affirmation, Written on Skin treats its medieval source in a radically different way. The story is told from a vantage point outside historical time, so medieval and modern times are equally distant and can be referred to with equal ease and ahistoricity. Text, music, and stage design foreground similarities between the medieval and modern, collapsing historical distance and underscoring commonalities between the medieval and the modern. Drawing on recent literary-critical uses of the metaphor of historical time as a palimpsest, in which historical moments are superimposed, never entirely erasing what is underneath, the chapter suggests that the opera effects a striking reversal in which the future, not the past, is the effaced text of the palimpsest. Thus the nostalgia of the opera can be read, paradoxically, as that of the past toward the future.

Taking place

Music ‘after Debussy’ does not present musical arguments or narratives, but rather ‘takes place’ and is thus experienced more like landscape, or the painting of landscape, than literature. It is concerned neither with representation nor communication. A central concern with the sea, from Debussy’s La mer (1905) through to Murail’s Le partage des eaux (1996) and Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2001) denotes a concern with allowing music to be endlessly mobile in its play of forms and colours, but non-discursive. This requires a different kind of listening which relates to a different kind of consciousness of the sonic environment. The closed space of the garden is explored in Fauré’s song cycle Le jardin clos (1914). Debussy’s La mer forms a principal focus for exploring an immersive play of forms that work outside the linearity of tonal practice.

Sonograms of Desire, Medieval and Modern

This essay unites musicology's concern with the discursive force of organized sound, and sound studies' concern with the discursive force of sonic environments, recording formats and media networks, to consider how the widely transmitted medieval song ‘Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai’ attributed to Jaufre Rudel produces sonograms that map distance and desire in the chasm between the Islamic East and the Christian West. The first half of the essay examines ‘Lanqan li jorn son lonc en mai’ in the context of transcultural sound networks, medieval notions of global geography and the material formatting of songs. The second half considers a 1977 recording of the song by the Clemencic Consort, and the 2000 opera by Finish composer Kaija Saariaho called L'Amour de loin with a libretto by the Lebanese author Amin Maalouf. In both cases, the song is sonically reimagined to express modern-day strife in the Middle East.