Aulis Sallinen – King Lear
Matti Salminen; Finnish National Opera; Okko Kamu
Ondine ODV 4010
King Lear is, for me, the most tragic of Shakespeare’s tragedies – which obviously, makes it a perfect opera libretto. Erroneous judgement, betrayal, devious plots, poison, enucleation… all the raw elements of an opera are here. Yet Verdi struggled for most of his composing career with Il Re Lear and finally gave up without completing the opera. It was up to the contemporary Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen to give us a full musical account of the cursed king’s story. Just as the dramatic King Lear comes to us in many versions, Sallinen, who also wrote the libretto, chose to blind the Earl of Gloucester, leaving King Lear with his eyesight intact, yet emotionally blinded to the true nature of each of his three daughters.
Sallinen, who himself eschewed opera as not a “pure” musical form (until 1973), changed his mind when he created his first opera The Horseman, which is still performed. Despite his highly modern compositional idiom, he reached for a much more melodic approach for Lear. Indeed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a long-forgotten verismo opera sung in Finnish, not a composition created in the year 2000. Says Sallinen: “An opera must be a servant to its libretto.” That is how this postmodern composer arrived at an almost conventional opera, with arias and duets and leitmotifs lyrically representing the characters. Somewhere up there, Giuseppe Verdi is smiling.
