Review: Kaija Saariaho’s ‘Adriana Mater,’ After Her Death

The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.

A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”

Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.

But some nudges, and a commission from the Paris Opera, led to “Adriana Mater” in 2006. Less than a week after Saariaho’s death, that sophomore outing was revived at the San Francisco Symphony — by the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sellars, two of her longtime collaborators, who first brought the work to life.

The long-planned event was a ready-made memorial for news so fresh it had to be acknowledged with a program insert. On that succinct sheet of paper, Salonen touchingly remarked, “This is the first time I’ll conduct the music without my friend.” And Sellars described the performance as “the best way we know to remember her, call her back and let her go again.”

“Adriana Mater” is starkly different from “L’Amour”: contemporary in its subject matter and more explicitly dramatic. But then, all of Saariaho’s operas are distinct, even if they add up to stars in the same constellation.

The composer who was reluctant to write for theater would go on to create the richly nuanced monodrama “Émilie,” premiered by the soprano Karita Mattila in 2010; the Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” staged in 2016; and “Innocence,” first unveiled at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, a work powerfully wise in its ideas and execution, a smoothly cohesive collage of styles that now seems like something of a career capstone, if not her masterpiece.

History will decide what music of Saariaho’s will survive. It’s hard, however, to imagine the operas fading from the repertoire. They represent the art form at its best: elevated expression that, through storytelling, constantly revisits themes that are timeless and universal. For all their complexity, they are about how we love, how we hurt, how we die. Beyond any surface-level drama, like a school shooting in “Innocence” or war in “Adriana Mater,” these works are utterly relevant — not only in how they pertain to our moment, but also in how they capture the root of that word, as the author Garth Greenwell has observed of the French “relever,” to raise back up.

That much was clear during the San Francisco Symphony’s performances of “Adriana Mater,” which concluded on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall and were recorded for later release. Amin Maalouf, the librettist for all of Saariaho’s operas until “Innocence,” has said that the work recalls conflict in the Balkans at the end of the 20th century. But its themes resonate independent of that reference point. It is fundamentally about the uncertainty of motherhood, and about compassion in the face of brutality — about seeking, as one character says, salvation over vengeance.

“Adriana Mater” is an opera of difficult questions and emotions but straightforward plot. Adriana (the mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, a mighty presence in a small frame) rebuffs Tsargo, a drunk young man, with a mixture of disgust and pity. But later, Tsargo — sung by the baritone Christopher Purves with Alberich-like bite — returns during wartime to rape her, empowered by circumstance and an assault rifle. Adriana becomes pregnant, and despite warnings from her sister, Refka (the alluringly lyrical soprano Axelle Fanyo), chooses to have the baby. “It isn’t his child,” Adriana says. “It’s mine.”

But she does worry: Will the child be more like Tsargo or like her? Cain or Abel? Act II, set 17 years later, puts that uncertainty to the test when her son, Yonas (an agile, heldentenor-like Nicholas Phan) learns his father’s identity and sets out to kill him. But when he sees Tsargo, blind and broken, he cannot bring himself to do it. Yonas feels ashamed for not carrying out the murder, but his mother is relieved. He is truly her son.

Saariaho’s music is rarely representational. Adriana’s offstage rape is punctuated with violent chords, and drilling percussion evokes the assault of war, but otherwise the writing favors atmosphere and abstraction. In a way that prefigures the grand tapestry of “Innocence,” she attaches specific sounds to each character: turbulent harmony for Adriana, long melodic lines for Refka, darkly shadowed low strings for Tsargo, frantic lightness for Yonas. Too often in contemporary music, conductors seem merely to be keeping time; but all this was handled deftly by Salonen, who looked as animated and assured as if he were conducting Beethoven.

Sellars’s concert-hall staging was minimal, as was his original production at the Paris Opera. Here, the action unfolded on platforms of various heights that kept the singers, looking contemporary, if not specifically of any one place, in Camille Assaf’s costumes, almost always isolated. At the start, Adriana and Tsargo’s little stages, under James F. Ingalls’s lighting, were colored yellow and blue, as if to suggest that the story took place in Ukraine.

But any comparison to the current war didn’t linger. The colors changed constantly, mercurial and expressive, as the action unfolded. Neither Sellars nor the opera, after all, needed an updated story to make it more recognizable. That’s already in the score, in the way Saariaho’s delicately consoling music stares down the worst of the world and says: The only way forward is grace.

‘Adriana Mater’

Performed on Sunday at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.