La Passion de Simone: towards the impossible

 

La Passion de Simone (2006) combines two intriguing female figures of the recent century: the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) and the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943).  

This is a vocal and choral passion in a Bachian vein. The soprano soloist plays the part of the evangelist, as it were, narrating the life story of Simone. The choir comments the incidents, and the speaker (reciting texts by Weil) performs kind of recitatives. The dramatical structure is borrowed from the Stations of the Cross, where Christ's road to Golgotha is viewed as 14 stations. Eventually there are 15 stations in the passion of Simone.

Saariaho, together with her librettist Amin Maalouf, portrays Simone Weil as a tragic, if not a pathetic figure. Her life was a failure indeed: Weil, a chronically sick young Jewish philosopher, identified herself with the working class, although never affiliated with a political party. She worked for a time in a factory in 1935, although she was completely incapable of assembly-line work. Then she tried to participate in the Spanish Civil War. During the Second World War, she fled the German occupation to America and Great Britain. Eventually she died in hospital for malnourishment, an affliction from which, she believed, all of occupied France was suffering. Nevertheless, the work attests the admiration that the young Kaija Saariaho felt for Simone. Weil's La pesanteur et la Grâce was a book that Kaija took with her when she left Finland for studies abroad.

The speaker recites excerpts form Weil's writings. In the beginning and at the end of the work there is this quotation: 

Rien de ce qui existe n'est absolument digne d'amour, il faut donc aimer ce qui n'existe pas. 

"Nothing that exists is absolutely worthy of love, so we must love what does not exist." This is a clear expression of Weil's appetite for the unattainable. Weil's philosophy is full of paradoxes. As stated above, the work consists of 15 "stations". The central piece, station no. 8, can be considered as the heart of the work. It is the longest part of the Passion (the final station notwithstanding) and contains not more than the following sentence:

Dieu se retire pour ne pas être aimé comme un trésor par un avare.

"God withdraws so as not to be loved as a treasure is loved by a miser." Weil's religious thought escapes such definitions like theism or atheism. Weil writes elsewhere that we must renounce everything that is not grace, and yet not hope for grace. No surprise that Simone Weil has not got many followers, although some amount of interested readers.

Amin Maalouf's libretto views Weil blind in her obstinacy. She did not notice the pain she caused to her family members and she deliberately looked for the possibility to sacrifice herself. Yet Saariaho and Maalouf confess Simone Weil as a martyr, who died in the same age as Christ in autumn 1943. "Humankind did not know that a woman had sacrificed herself for them, for their lies, their betrayals, for their bestiality." Suggesting the title of Weil's book "Gravity and Grace" (La pesanteur et la Grâce) the final words of the passion are:

"Your grace was liberated from the gravity of the world. But the earth where you abandoned us still is the kingdom of deceit where innocents tremble."

Was the sacrifice of Simone Weil pointless? Saariaho and Maalouf do not state that. La passion de Simone demonstrates a grown person's attitude to one's own idols of the youth and to the seriousness of a young person. Although one has grown to understand how childish these standards are, one feels a kind of nostalgia and hopes that these ideas were true. 

Kaija Saariaho died in 2023. Was she a religious person? Not a religious person, according to her husband, but a spiritual one. La passion de Simone witnesses that she was at least fascinated to Simone Weil's extreme theology - a religious philosophy with an atheist tone. To argue for the existence of God is a futile endeavor. It is highly likely that God does not exist. That does not mean that we could not love him. And to be honest, that is the sense of our life.

"For the privilege of discovering myself before death in a state exactly similar to that of Christ when, on the cross, he said: 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?' - for this privilege I willingly would renounce everything that is called Paradise."

(quotations from the CD booklet Kaija Saariaho: La passion de Simone. Ondine ODE-1215-5)