Japanese Theater Inspires a New Opera of Celestial Textures
Renowned theater director and UCLA Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance professor, Peter Sellars, collaborated with composer Kaija Saariaho on an operatic reinterpretation of Ezra Pound's translation of two Noh plays, titled “Only the Sound Remains.”
"The Noh is unquestionably one of the great arts of the world,” the poet Ezra Pound wrote in 1916, “and it is quite possibly one of the most recondite.”
Kaija Saariaho & Philippe Jaroussky: Only the Sound RemainsCreditCreditVideo by Warner Classics Over the 20th century, this traditional Japanese theatrical form went from little-known to practically ubiquitous. Its scenic austerity, symbolic gestures and ritualized drama captivated artists. The long list of playwrights and composers looking to Noh for inspiration includes Samuel Beckett, Harry Partch, Bertolt Brecht and Benjamin Britten.
And, now, the composer Kaija Saariaho and the director Peter Sellars. Their most recent collaboration, “Only the Sound Remains,” an operatic reinterpretation of Pound’s translation of two Noh plays, arrives for its American premiere in Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, on Nov. 17 and 18.
It will be a homecoming of sorts. Ms. Saariaho first discovered Pound’s poetry in an apartment she sublet during a Carnegie Hall residency in 2012. Two years later, she composed a large part of the opera in the city.
“Pound’s language is very fresh and surprising because, in fact, he didn’t speak Japanese,” she said in an interview. “It’s his interpretation of those stories. And the way he is describing the natural elements and the light, and has words like ‘color-smell’ — it all has directly to do with my music.”
Both of the one-acts that make up the work — “Always Strong” (originally “Tsunemasa”) and “Feather Mantle” (originally “Hagoromo”) — dramatize encounters with the invisible world. In “Always Strong,” a priest summons the unhappy spirit of a young lute player and performs a religious service using the ghost’s instrument. “Feather Mantle” depicts a fisherman’s argument and eventual reconciliation with a tennin, or angel, whose robe he has found and intends to keep.
Ms. Saariaho has conjured luminescent sonorities and ethereal textures from an ensemble of flute, string quartet, percussion and kantele — a type of Finnish zither akin to the Japanese koto, its inclusion inspired by Pound’s evocative description of the lute in “Always Strong.”
“The bass strings are something like rain; the small strings talk like a whisper,” a vocal quartet sings delicately above trilling strings and piccolo, while the kantele creates a resonant cascade of sound. The bass-baritone Davóne Tines represents the human roles; the countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, supernatural ones. In “Feather Mantle,” real-time electronic manipulation spins out the angel’s voice into reverberating crystalline shards.
Ms. Saariaho and Mr. Sellars have collaborated for years, but their turn to Noh was not an obvious choice. Although Mr. Sellars had staged “Hagoromo” in the 1980s, and Ms. Saariaho set two of Pound’s austere “Cantos” in her chamber piece “Sombre,” their earlier stage works, like “L’Amour de Loin” and “La Passion de Simone,” focused on women.
As they searched for a new subject, though, Ms. Saariaho was looking for something entirely different, something suitable for an intimate chamber ensemble with electronics. “Something like a fairy tale or traditional story,” she said. Mr. Sellars proposed Indian texts; Ms. Saariaho felt they didn’t resonate with her music. But when they arrived at Pound’s Noh translations, it felt like a match."— Ryan Ebright, Nov. 12, 2018
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times website.
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