The Composed Landscapes of Jüri Reinvere

One evening I arrive unexpectedly in Aliide’s cottage in my well-travelled Opel.

She knew me when I was a child, but I haven’t met her since I was a teenager. The first thing I notice, is the fear in her eyes. Her hands move restlessly. She keeps observing me, not exactly knowing what I think of her now, immediately after the collapse of Soviet Union. Back then she had used her benefits of belonging to the Communist party without hesitation.

When she discovers that I am not judging her, she attacks me, openly and aggressively. She doesn’t approve my car, my cigarettes, my home address, the music I write is wrong, the literature I read is wrong, the radio is wrong, Estonia is in peril, and earlier things were better, much better.

I don’t respond. It confuses her. She tries to attack me again, but then suddenly withdraws to her chamber and returns sluggish. A TV rattles in the corner, Mitterrand’s well-carved words about French-Baltic friendship.

And next – she treats me as if I were her best friend.

She’s got two cats. When the night falls, she goes and fetches them down from blossoming apple trees. She wraps the cats in towels, brings them in, and warms them next to the oven. From their swaddling clothes they follow me with their sleepy, scanning eyes. Then she goes to feed the wild cats on the fields behind the house. I see from the window, how in the hay around her crooked back dance tens of black questioning marks.

Then it is completely dark.

JÜRI REINVERE :: PURGE, based on the novel of SOFI OKSANEN

A story of modern human trafficking  and the aftermath of WWII

libretto by the composer

premiere in Finnish National Opera, 20. April 2012

Duration: act I 60′, act II 70′. Orchestra (3333…), choir, soloists. 

Published by FennicaGehrman, Finland

“Born a classic!” Kotimaa (Finland)

“By putting us inside a mind that shuts off in self-defense at the onset of brutality, Reinvere tells us more than any amount of thrusting orchestral violence ever could.” Financial Times (UK)

“A Purge worthy of homage. […] Like straight out of Kalevala…” Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden)

“An opera based on a novel nominated with Prix Femina and Fnac, “Purge” wakes up the frightening and shameful history, where two women have to face the tragedy of destiny.” La Scene (France)

“It hits right to the core of opera culture. […] The final scene reaches the Wagnerian scales… The end of the “Purge” is one of the most beautiful ones ever…” Kirkko ja kaupunki (Finland)

THE NOVEL:

“The bold combination of history, politics and suspense” The Sunday Times (UK)

Film version produced by Solar Films

Rights of the novel sold to 43 territories, stage rights sold to 11 territories

“…/ [It] is a novel with a psychological dimension that tells with honesty a tragic chapter in European history.” Turisti per caso magazine (Italy)

Over 300000 copies sold in France, over 30 months on Bestseller list in Finland

Jüri Reinvere’s score, at once suggestive and dramatic, achieves an effect where the stage seems to mirror an entire society, filling the stage and creating intimate moments. His musical language is modern, but the focus on gripping story-telling makes Purge a classical opera. “I emphasize Estonians coming to terms with the past. I claim that the past can only become the past when we have faced it eye to eye,” says Reinvere.

Reinvere wanted to pay homage to classical opera and complete the most important arias. This opera is very challenging for the singers – both the soloists and the chorus. The part of the main character Aliide requires a range of two and a half octaves. Additionally Reinvere uses documentary soundscapes, e.g. original sounds of American Studebaker-cars, which the Soviets used for the deportation of people to Siberia.

“It was important that Purge was made an opera from beginning to end.” says the composer. “It cannot be an illustration of the book or the play. It has to work as the most classical operas work together, like Dumas and Verdi, for instance” and adds: “opera has a strange skill. It is simultaneously the truth, and more than the truth. By telling the truth of the past, we can understand finally the present, both in ourselves and in the music, which we are surrounded by”. (from the Finnish National Opera)

Orchestra has to be the protagonist of this opera, that invisible, incomprehendable power, which predominated in the Soviet Union, and whom we really were not capable of recognising. The power, which poured out from a labyrinth of hierarchy, coerced people to act in a certain way: insecurely, cowardly, sometimes heroically, very often with a good sense of humour – but was impossible to personalise.

The orchestra dwells in the bottom of this pit. I decide to use only certain colours in the orchestration. Colours, which pass the angles, which sound has to swerve on its way from the pit to the audience. I think of the darkness of the theatre. Darkness, which is a companion of that opera, a hidden orchestra, which with all its power pushes the singers to act in a certain way.

There’s a big amount of risk in this, but I decide to act upon this.

Where once was the most ungodly prison of NKVD and which was used mostly for torturing its own management, is nowadays a monastery. It lays at the end of metro line and a couple of stops with trolleybuses.

Monastery is dim, from the walls drop big plots of painting. Right outside the gates shops, tramways, people on their journeys, with bags and without, kissing couples, teetering grandmothers, who climb with their bundles over the piles of pipes.

The history is invisible. A singing of monks, under the frescoes, all with motionless faces, in a golden glow, the scent of mirth. The chant circles around g sharp, then someone takes a bell and rings it five times – and proclaims: “The truth is come”.

Later, in the opera, both G sharp and A flat play a significant role, especially when there’s presence of the invisible, both in love, and in the relation of government to the people. And what comes for Aliide, bells ring her five times five times.

Orchestrating the first act

Financial Times, 23.4.2012

The New Yorker, 19.4.2012

Helsingin Sanomat, 18.4.2012

Rita sits behind the kitchen table; Viktoria is making us blinis with sour cream and caviar from a can. Outside hums the Prospect Mira, a main road into central Moscow.

Zsuzsa shares a flat with me in Budapest. She speaks only Hungarian and my Hungarian is sufficient only for a very simple dialogue, but we talk about everything using our dictionaries and hands.

Viktoria is a classic Moscovite girl, modest, hardworking and very self-conscious. I have known her since her childhood; their summer place was next to ours on the west coast of Estonia. Rita has just arrived – ironically – from Vladivistok. Her clothing screams for attention.

In the evenings I sit alone with Zsuzsa in the kitchen. She is very beautiful, both inside and out. She has a boyfriend in a tiny town, but has accepted an offer from an elderly and rich Hungarian man who lives in Vienna to be a companion to him and his friends and also to do some housework, perhaps.

Rita has come to Moscow to find a husband. She ran away from Vladivostok and bought a ticket to Moscow at the airport leaving her parents and a boyfriend. She is staying at Viktoria’s. In the mornings she watches a special TV show for women who have come to Moscow to find a husband. In the hours-long program tips are given for hitting on a man, on the right make up, and which bars are the coolest at the moment. The TV credits roll to the images of tanks and Rita heads for the streets. The streets are full of women walking in ethereal dresses.

Zsuzsa weeps to me about missing her boyfriend and what she plans to do with her money later. She shows me photos of both men; she does not like the old Hungarian man in Vienna; then, covering her boyfriend’s photo, leaving only the eyes visible, she gasps, so that I understand what she wants to burst out: ”Szemét!” – ”His eyes!”

I try to talk sense to her, but she cannot understand it. Her head is full of her love, she almost trembles, like a new leaf, at how much good she can do for her love.

When I leave for Moscow Airport, Rita gives me a powerful hug and does not want to let me to leave. I sense a deep sorrow from within her body.

I have never spoken about either of these women to Sofi, but when I read Purge for the first time, I was amazed at how clearly I saw both these girls in Zara.

A couple of months later I receive a postcard from Zsuzsa. It was stamped in Graz. She asks me if I could rescue her, but her handwriting was very bad and it didn’t say where she was. 

For ten years, Käbi and I talked about whether the right attitude towards the oppressed nations that committed crimes among themselves in support of the occupying force should be as cold-hearted and critical or compassionate. Compassion as understanding is the opposite of pity.

After the first act, surprisingly, I can’t start the second. I am polishing one of Aliide’s three main scenes. Its music tries to render some beauty, but its text expresses the whole tragedy of her nation.

            I am working in a manor house of a farm situated in a village named Jerusalem about eighty miles from Hamburg and Hannover. There’s a piano and no one is home except for the heavy images of the household’s forefathers and the Labrador who sleeps at the top of the stairs. She does not move at all during the day, just drifts from one spot in the sun to the next. The piano room is separated by curtains. I try to wizard out heavy chains of seconds and thirds, in between them the Labrador and my terrier growl at each other. Every now and then all this grows to Wagnerian proportions.

            The children have left; their rooms remain the same. When my ears become dull to harmonies, I walk from one room to another; high, dark doors, behind them alcoves scented with the furnishings. The rooms are filled with toy cars, fans, posters of stars: the whole history of West Germany, in a couple of dozen years since the downfall to wealth.

             In the evening the heat grows. I take a bike and cycle around the Lüneburg Heathland. Everything is blossoming, the wind turbines whisk the clouds, the earth has turned mourning purple.

The most central theme in ”Purge” is that to purge is to understand.

            When one has left the trauma behind, as happened in the countries of Warsaw pact, there are two options going forward: either to recognise the past and comprehend it, and through that overcome it; or leave it untouched – in which case time takes care of the purge by discontinuing future generations.

            I think the question of compassion and judgement is not a question of state or culture—it is a private question in an obligatory way towards reconciliation.

            The fractured cultures of the former Soviet countries have answered the question in many different ways – Germany and Poland in one way, Ukraine in another, the Baltic countries in a third way and Byelorussia has its own backward ways. But there’s a clear logic in this: both the Nazis and the Soviets were the most bestial in Byelorussia.

I have the whole second act still ahead of me.

Since the publication of Sofi’s ‘Purge’, it has continued to surprise me how critics from many different countries have presumed that the ideas and dialogues in the novel only really concern people from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

            In today’s society we see challenges, which if left unchecked have the potential to create resentments in communities both at home and in the workplace. The choices of Aliide are the moral choices we all may have to make one day.

            In extreme circumstances would we choose any differently ourselves?

In 1980s Tallinn the KGB offered me felt pens for blowing the whistle on one of my teachers.

            She and I often met and talked about all kinds of things; she wanted to educate me to be a self-confident Estonian. When talking about how all-encompassingly the nations occupied by the Soviets helped their oppressors, she used the word  “self-contaminating”.

It was no different than Kertész’ Auschwitz or all those people in the lands of Warsaw pact: the same way that the prisoners in concentration camps bartered with bits of bread for a better place in their own hierarchy, the Soviet citizens ferreted each other and traded for almost anything, usually something ridiculously small – or for something illusive, like freedom from danger. The Kremlin didn’t have to do anything other than kill – all the rest: the paralysis and the sustaining of fear were summoned in the oppressed by their own labour.

We had felt tip pens at my school. It was an elite school but like most of the Soviet Union it was infected by a process likening to bestiality. Teachers, who understood the society and treated their pupils with love had become an anomaly – they now had their own needs; their children demanded pens, jeans, chewing gum, stickers, things they could trade for more humane treatment. Children without felt pens were treated by adults like dirt.

            With the onset of the Singing revolution, we saw Western countries in ecstasy via Finnish TV. Our school was infected first by a riptide of religion, then by suicides. Some students went more or less secretly into mental hospitals.

Years later I met a student from that school. She could not remember any physical or mental violence at all. She was as shocked as I was by her amnesia.

            Everything that had meant something was invisible. It was considered not worth understanding. Everything that was a facade was visible. After the news about of another suicide, most of us carried on as a means of defence. Only at a bus station near the school could one see a few pupils secretly crying.

I tended to think for years that one of the tasks of any state would be to create an environment of purging the past. Germany is an example of that; and Germany, for the time being, is inwardly doing relatively well.

             It was only later when I realised that it is not about states understanding themselves, it is about its citizens understanding themselves. No country can summon what its citizens cannot comprehend.

             But what choice could the individuals make about bread, a felt tip pen, whether their children can survive, or whether they can remain there?

And after the collapse – the stillness. Only the silent droning of busses on a nearby road. When all that had happened had been so big, and so all-encompassing – it had become unfathomable.

            But all the people continued living, like Aliide – the whistleblowers and the ones who drowned in the Gulag, left with their questions completely alone. 

We are high above the earth – all around are massive snowy mountains.

            Iet is still. About twenty cottages, rarely occupied, all empty. Above our head fly eagles – and mornings and nights an animal rustles in the woods, carefully, staunchly. The neighbouring village is also deserted, wrapped around a leaning chapel – which is still standing thanks to prayers – and there’s a cowbell in the bell tower. The village is huddled together, it reminds me of a theatre set.

            To get to Iet one has to drive around a dead-ended valley – on the way up there is a dam with deep, calm, luring waters – and through a couple of villages full of blooming trees and an absence of people. Higher, at home, one realises – the whole valley is ours.

            Iet is perched opposite a wooded mountain, Muncrech, painting a panorama with another village, also lifeless – its houses loiter in the setting sun, the village has got eyes, lips and whiskers. Up to the left surge solitary summits, the three-thousanders of the San Bernardino; and down to the right, in the next, main valley, glitters the tiny town of Biasca, as from a grave. Its nightly lights are the only sign that people inhabit this planet.

It’s Easter. During the day I orchestrate act one outside, in the evening I set the computers and loudspeakers towards the mountains and listen at full volume to music: Richard Strauss, Bach, Ligeti. The ice patches opposite reflect the music, the snows has only started to melt. The plucks of the lute fall to the valley like waterdrops, the sun wheels slowly over the mountains, the brasses race through the cavities of Muncrech and return full speed. Higher hang the streams of waterfalls.

I am working the whole time, managing to go down to the valley only once, to look for something for the computer. The IT-specialist behind his hundreds of monitors speaks no English, only a very little bit of German.

At night there is no electricity – candle light, the smell of straw, the computer plays quietly in the corner. Easter food. Early mornings, before the sleep of people fades, the mountains wake like an orchestra, in one monumental endlessly held chord.

            I throw most of the written material away and return anew to the harmony queues.

Most of the second act is created in an empty school straight out of Hogwarts. 

            It consists of theatres and rehearsal rooms, on the hilltop governs a big church. All abandoned for summer holidays. I am have a big concert piano here, its wide sound tries to force its way into the opera’s last hour. When the windows are open, sheep baa on the hills.

            The scenes have become like living organisms. They move contrarily, uttering their own will, they constantly change their plans. Every morning I plan the work of the day, and every evening I am somewhere else than where I am supposed to be. Writing the last scene of Aliide, each day I think this will be my final day. In the evening I discover that the finish line has been moved a couple of miles forward. One day turns to five, ten, twenty. I wish I were a marathon runner, who’s suffering is put to an end in a couple of hours.

            Members from the school staff visit. I am introduced to a group of parents who are seeing the school. Through a glass door I hear the words “composer,” “Berlin,” and “opera.”

I decide to leave the end unpolished, from the last orchestral bit I write down only its chord progressions. The rows appear to work themselves out, everything falls into place without me influencing it at all. I draw the final two lines.

            I am driven home. There my memories end.

Back in London I fall onto the bed, exhausted. My friend does not allow me to stay, forcing me to leave to town every morning at eight. Probably this saves me.

I try to think of other things, I try not to listen music. My perception has become extra-sensitive—at night I smell the toothpaste from the bathroom. On a street, passing by, I see Aliide and Zara entering a shop.

            Coffee in the mornings, newspapers piled on the floor, the crackling sound of BBC Radio4. It sounds solacing. Lunch at Sheekeys – life is a feast dipped into vinegar sauce.

I buy myself an orange bow tie from gentlemen’s street. I recognize shop assistant having a Polish accent, and eventually speak Polish to her. She becomes agitated, and tells me she has escaped Poland and is hiding here from her boyfriend. “Do you have anywhere to stay in London?” she asks. “If not, you can always stay at my place.”

            “You know what, I am just writing an opera about you,” I think to myself.

But then I say nothing.

From the very beginning I have imagined that the rape scene will be difficult to write.

            Later I find I was wrong – the rape and other scenes where physical force was used were easy compared to the scenes where Estonians betray one another.

But I am hesitant; I breathe deeply before arriving at the rape.

            This composer’s cottage is half way up the mountain, among Romansh homesteads. On the other side of the mountain is Davos. From the windows I’ve got my own Magic Mountain, Piz Tarantschun, it’s magnificent, he is my daily clandestine confidante in this journey across act one. Cows and churches ring their bells twice a day. A flag of Switzerland waves slowly in the courtyard.

It’s a twenty-minute ride to Chur. In the 4-km tunnel towards Chur one of the tires has a blow out, which means limping to an emergency area. The noise in the tunnel is extremely loud and disturbing; the dog wags his tail joyously when the car is lifted up on the jack.

            Suddenly I realise in Chur Cathedral – the rape scene needs to dwell on silent chords.

It has to rely on the commiseration. The task of the music here is not to stress the violence of the rape, but to show it from another angle, as was the figure of Pietà with her hands covering the scene – actually covering all the oppressed folk.

The moment when one strikes the first notes is a colossal happening.

            It is where all the dreaming and reluctance ends, and one walks straight into a cold shower.

            And spends a couple of years in there.

The notepaper tends to show you its teeth. And smother. It is his cruelest when it is blank, but it is not really easier once something is written on it.

            I am quite bad at it; I try to postpone touching the notepaper as long as I can, the jump to the reality is so ghastly.

It is warm in Milan; its people, cafés and museums unfold in harmony, unlike The Last Supper, which is of course sold out, no one gets in. It makes sense to leave, but one stays just in case.

            It appears one can sneak in via the exit when people push the automatic doors on their way out. We walk in with no problem, no one notices anything, but then, right when The Last Supper becomes visible, we get pushed back by a co-worker.

            I notice a guide outside, an Italian. Something tells me to talk to her in German. When I do, she gives me tickets for free. The Last Supper is pale and faded, more imagination than reality.

            That evening, with relative ease, by a square, waiting, I write the very first notes – for scene five.

            Coincidentally, that same evening at La Scala, a German couple that is sitting in the loggia are happy to speak German with me. I am a bit reluctant about telling them who I am and what I am doing, but in the end I tell them. They smile incredulously. The lady, herself an opera connoisseur, asks – “do living composers exist?”

early spring 

The opera in Moscow is primarily a modern militaristic world.

            At the entrance one goes through the security checks: your bags are searched thoroughly and you yourself are x-rayed. My Estonian accent alarms the guards—anyone from the shores of the Baltic Sea is suspect, but I also notice how one of the guards becomes nostalgic and tells me about his childhood summers in Jurmala.

            I see most Moscovite theatrical productions, tens of Russian operas, Tchaikovskys, rarer Rimski-Korsakovs, Dargomyzhskys, to exhaustion. At midnight I walk home through Red Square, the image is a paradox—in the gardens of the Kremlin sing nightingales and I am working on raw ideas for “Purge”. At this stage I am willing to see “Purge” as a late descendant of Russian opera. I like the idea that the opera—which would be one of the first to speak about the legacy of the Bolsheviks—would be ignited inside the crucibles of the massive culture of Russia, alongside Chekhov’s praxis and the black cars driving out of the Kremlin.

Like everywhere else, the operas are politically correct, detached from the modern world—the juxtapose between an utterly apolitical opera and the political world is realised after one leaves the theatre.

            I’m thinking about the people, the millions of officers who froze to death digging tunnels through arctic permafrost, the millions who starved to death in artificial famines created by Stalin as a means to an end, which was creating a generation who praised him in gratitude.

            And in the grand language of opera—suddenly the idea of “Purge” as opera frightens me.

            I haven’t yet dared to write any of the crucial parts.

December

There are plenty of Eastern Europeans in London. One can easily feel the presence of the history of the post-soviet Russian generation, but I sense in London also a long distance from their history, the escape and the silence from it, rather than an understanding.

            I stay mostly indoors, going to town only occasionally. I see from the windows of London all nations rushing in one lump, the questions of everyone present and absent, all at the same time, a forceful reality of free choice. I am finishing the libretto, with the will power of a wolf. I have re-written it four times, and threw all four away. The fifth came quickly, in only a few days.

In the corridors I meet the neighbors. One day an Englishman speaks to me about how badly Latvians are treating their Russian minority, his friend has suffered because of it. After a moment of conversation it comes out that his friend is from Ukraine and has lived as a Russian in London—and has never been in Latvia. The man tells me his is very international in a London sort of way and that at the end of his street at home there is a Buddhist monastery.

The incomprehensibility of the society around me compels me to create the libretto in rough lines, in a very simple form. I’ve got a human being, her destiny, and the all-around unseen society around her. Her choices. Bad choices.

            Is an Estonian woman in the countryside justified in committing a crime because she is a part of the much greater crime of the entire world? When does a human being still have responsibility for his or her choices? Even when those choices are reduced to one, which one seems so ridiculously small?

            “Purge” is part fantasy and more than reality. Like an operatic fantasy, a gentrified reality, whose basic questions are the same for everyone.

October

Since Wagner the secular matter has become very difficult for the opera.

            This is why I’m trying to find it.

Opera has a capacity to talk about the most inaccessible matters. To talk about metaphysical levels–easy. To talk about death and love—really easy. But to talk about the everyday or politics is almost impossible—the words of the opera are easily eradicated by the music.

            Thus opera’s texts have great themes, but simple language. Opera speaks best when the words suggest and the music does the rest.

            In the end, it creates a strange state, an enlightened fantasy, a greater true than reality.

A composer uses time as his primary tool. The whole process of writing music is merely a carving of time.

Yet the writing of an opera happens fully outside of time. And although the writing happens in a timeless place, the storyline anchors the opera in a very specific time and place.

            During the past couple of weeks of composing, I have been completely removed from society. I’ve remained alone in my home; the world is a blur. I have had nothing but the score for company – and even the score is done, so there is not much creative work left to do.

            Every morning time contorts, becomes irrelevant and elusive – in order to recoil only in sleep. It feels as if every second of eternity happens at once, but there is nothing dramatic about it, everything around is flatly beautiful.

            It is Sunday night going into to Monday. I am finishing the percussion of the last scene, page 300, page 350, page 400. I arrive at the last page, fill in the gaps, the clocks shows three thirty and to my complete surprise suddenly I don’t have to write a thing. It is snow-like – more nothing than something. Very, very soft. Berlin feels surreal, a lifeless place, not a single ambulance outside, not a single taxi, Keiser Friedrich Street stands empty, Otto Suhr Alley stands still, around the castle the statues stand unchanging, all windows are dark, main roads are empty, traffic lights blink rhythmically in the emptiness.

            There is an accuracy of present time, of this act of working in a timeless fashion to create something so very specific to another time.

One summer night I see a dream – actually I hear a dream. A soprano sings a song cycle with the accompaniment of an orchestra; I hear it very clearly, in detail; I could easily just write it down.

            The cycle has an unconventional form, of its four songs the soprano sings only three. The language of music is something I haven’t been looking at lately – it is openly romantic, but also obtrusive and malicious.

            I quickly draw a diagram of its form. Later I fix the details. It is a clear summer day and outside, in the Charlottenburg park, the chestnuts bloom.

            I can’t comprehend what this dream was about. I’m quite surprised by it.

            A week later the idea of an opera of “Purge” emerges. And immediately I know in detail how this opera will sound.