Last night I was at Davies Hall to hear the San Francisco Symphony in the first of a three-performance stand of Adriana Mater, the 2005 opera about war-time tragedy with music by Kaija Saariaho & libretto by Amin Maalouf. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, a longtime friend & associate of the composer, conducted & the work was staged, as part of his multi-year association with the Symphony, by Peter Sellars, who was instrumental in the work's creation & to whom it is dedicated. This run of concerts was clearly going to be a jewel in the season's crown even before the 2 June death of the beloved & much-missed composer. The performances are dedicated to her memory & music.
There are four characters: Adriana herself (performed by mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron), her sister Refka (soprano Axelle Fanyo), the alcoholic drifter Tsargo (baritone Christopher Purves), & Adriana's son, Yonas (tenor Nicholas Phan). The action took place on several platforms jutting out into the first rows of floor seats & one in the middle of the orchestra stage itself; the characters are often isolated on the individual platforms. The costumes mostly look like street wear & are suggestive of a contemporary setting. Despite some strange vocal effects that I assume came from amplification (or possibly the odd acoustics of the always unsatisfactory Davies Hall – & by the way I had forgotten how excruciatingly uncomfortable the seats there can be), such as the voices suddenly sounding very different when a singer faced a different direction, or even sounding altered (though possibly that was intentional), all four singers were dazzlingly impressive: fully present in their intense & difficult vocal lines & their characters, & even the use of I guess iPads with (again, I guess) the music didn't undercut their effectiveness.
The music is magnificent, like some great mysterious beast rising up from the depths. I've heard recordings of other works by Saariaho, including her first opera, L'Amour de Loin (Adriana is her second opera) but I had never heard anything from this piece before. It's a very rich, dense score & Salonen led the band in a gripping account. The opera is in seven tableau, which were presented in two parts of about an hour or so each. There is a small chorus, set off to the side, who provided ghostly effects, giving the action a resonance beyond the four characters we were shown.
But all this splendid artistry is in the service of a surprisingly simplistic melodrama. Shorn of its artsy dream-arias & poetic repetitions, Maalouf's libretto is crude & clumsy in its characterization & story-telling. The setting is an unnamed country, soon to be engaged in a civil war. Adriana, while returning to her house, speaks with Tsargo, a weak drunkard. It is clear that she is Good & he is Bad, though no real reasons for these judgments are given. He reminds her that they once danced together (the music turned, briefly but enchantingly, to a dreamlike lovers' atmosphere). She rebuffs him, in the polite way of women to men they aren't romantically interested in. Refka reproves her for even speaking to Tsargo, who is beneath them & seems dangerous; Refka is also Good, but more cautious. When war begins Tsargo returns, suddenly a soldier carrying a machine gun. He demands entry to Adriana's house so that he can monitor enemy forces in the street. She refuses. He forces his way in & there is a very powerful orchestral interlude, during which, according to the plot summary in the program, "we deduce that he rapes her". (The rape is not staged.) She decides to have the child, but wonders which parent he will resemble: "Cain or Abel?" is how she puts it. & the lights go up.
I assume the lack of any political, cultural, historic, or social aspect to the war is deliberate, to give it a timeless, almost mythic feeling. But this lack also flattens the characterizations: would a more specifically situated Adriana & Refka really have no side they supported? Their neutrality, which is clearly meant to be seen as a good quality, since War is bad, could look like cowardice or opportunism if the stakes were spelled out. Tsargo is weak & ineffectual until the war starts: but once it does, he is suddenly a powerful & much feared mercenary. This makes him a useful allegorical figure representing the damages & terrors of War, but is less effective as a description of an actual human being, particularly as he dwindles right back into decrepitude when the plot requires his weakness rather than his strength. (There is also apparently no PTSD for this former soldier.)
The second half begins with a scene between an angry Yonas & his mother; he is now a young man & he has just discovered that his father was not the hero who died defending them that his mother had always described, but instead someone whom he repeatedly refers to as "a monster". We don't know how he's learned about his father – his mother asks, but he dismisses the question. But if, as he also says, everyone else knew the facts & has been laughing at him, why is he only discovering them now? It seems unlikely that no one would have taunted him with this knowledge before. & wouldn't it be obvious, even to an upset youth, why his mother didn't tell him he was the product of rape? But this knowledge comes now, out of the blue, because the storyline needs it to happen now; any questions about this particular situation are dismissed or ignored. We are given the scene, but no sense of a real life behind it. Yonas tells his mother, despite her protests, that he needs to kill that monster, his father. During the whole scene he has been brandishing a machine gun, just as his father did earlier, so clearly his anger makes him potentially Bad, like his father. But is this rage typical for him, or not? We have no way of knowing. He meets his father, now alone & blind, & Yonas can't bring himself to kill him – no reasons are given, he just can't do it. His mother is glad that he has not murdered his father, telling him, "We are not avenged, but we are saved" (which is indeed an effective line). He, Adriana, & Refka join in a group hug. Tsargo will, presumably, eventually die in his gutter.
But the crucial thing about this scene is that Yonas has not made a conscious moral choice not to kill: he simply finds himself unable to. It's been suggested all along that the mother's "good blood" is warring in him against the father's "bad blood", though, as mentioned, we don't know enough about Yonas to have any sense of his personality outside of this immediate situation. (There is also no examination of what it means, in a country subject to deadly violence, for a man to be unwilling, or unable, to kill). The retrograde & frankly dangerous implication here is that there is "good blood" & "bad blood" that determines our personality & actions, & Yonas's failure or inability to kill his father is due to the mother's "good blood" winning out. You have to reach pretty far into "this is all metaphorical" territory not to see the eugenicist views underlying the action here, & sure, you can do that, but it seems to me disingenuous not to see them as a clear implication. The attempt to create a (relatively) timeless story strips out the specific details & situations that would lead to moral complexity & ambiguity. It's clear from the start which character is Bad & which ones are Good, there's no resistance or choice involved in the drama, & nothing that happens here is surprising or disturbing or discomfiting. As I said, the music is magnificent, & if a recording becomes available I would buy it in a minute. But I wouldn't read along in the libretto.
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