“There is still something that a woman knows and that a man does not know, and it is what it means to become a mother, having two beats in the heart in one body”. There is a great tenderness, almost poetry, in the words used by the American director Peter Sellars to tell the show that from 9 October stages at the Costanzi Theater for the Rome Opera Season.
This is the Italian first of Adriana Mater, composed of the Finnish musician Kaija saariahoone of the great musicians of our time, unfortunately disappeared in June 2023 due to brain tumor.
Kaija Sariaho, born in Helsinki in 1952, was one of the few contemporary artists hosted at the Metropolitan Opera of New York: in 2021 she had been conferred from the Biennale Musica the golden lion to her career “for the extraordinary technical and expressive level reached in her choral scores and for the originality of the treatment of the voice”. Always in 2021 his last work, Innocencewas welcomed by a triumph of public and criticism at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Inspired by a mass shooting in a school, spoken and sung in several languages, Innocence was defined by Alex Ross on the New Yorker “A monumental cry against the violence of weapons”.
Also Adriana Mater touches a tragic theme of our time. The story is consumed in a war scenario in which a mother, Adriana, has to face motherhood born from physical violence. The protagonist decides to complete the pregnancy resulting from the abuse of the soldier Tsargo, despite the opposition of his sister Rifka. Once he raised, however, his son Yonas, manifests a dark restlessness, which insinuates the doubt in the protagonist that the soul of that young man is fatally linked to the violent circumstances of his birth.
The work was composed in 2005 on French booklet by Amin Maalouf, French journalist and writer naturalized French, since 2011 member of the Académie Française. The work made its debut in 2006 in Paris with the direction of Sellars, who returned to us several times until the last recovery in 2023 in San Francisco, just before the composer’s disappearance. Sellars puts it on stage in a new installation of the Rome Opera Theater.
Peter Sellarsoriginally from Pittsburgh, an innovative and daring director known for his ability to merge elements of European culture with those of the American tradition, during his career he has directed festivals, theaters and events among the most prestigious in America and in the world.
“Kaija Saariaho and I had a long and very deep friendship,” says the director. “He often said ‘I want to write a work on a mother, because in the whole history of the work there has never been a theatrical work on a mother written by a woman. Adriana Mater is an immense, powerful work, but with only four characters, like a Greek tragedy’.
On the podium the Spanish director Ernest Martínez Izquierdo, also at his first commitment with the Capitoline Foundation, who worked with Saariaho for thirty years.
The two acts and seven scenes work is created by the Opera di Roma in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony. On stage in the role of the protagonist, Adriana, Mezzosoprano Fleur Barron. The other three interpreters are the soprano Axelle Fanyo (Refka), the US tenor Nicholas Phan (Yonas) and the baritone Christopher Purves (Tsargo). The choir is entrusted to Ciro Visco. The costumes are by Camille Assaf, the lights of Ben Zamora, sound designer Timo Kurkikangas.
After the first representation, Thursday 9 October (8 pm), Adriana Mater by Kaija Saariaho returns to the stage on Saturday 11 (6 pm), Sunday 12 (4.30 pm), Tuesday 14 (8 pm) and Thursday 16 October (8 pm). The replica of October 14 is broadcast live on Rai Radio 3.
In the photo of Fabrizio Sansoni, a moment of the tests with Fleur Barron and Nicholas Phan
