Introduction
Since its publication in 1961 Stanisław Lem's novel Solaris has been adapted many times in different artistic media. Andrei Tarkovsky's (1972) and Steven Soderbergh's (2002) cinematographic adaptations are perhaps the most well known but there have also been almost 20 different productions of Solaris between 1968 and 2020, from theatre to ballet to radio, including two operas that are relative contemporaries of Fujikura's:Footnote 1 one, for four voices, electronic and instrumental ensemble, by Enrico Correggia, was premiered in Turin in 2011, and the other, by Detlev Glanert, for orchestra and a large chorus, was premiered in Bregenz in 2012. Fujikura's version (2013–14) is an opera in four acts with a medium-sized orchestra (flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, celesta and strings) and live electronics (IRCAM). Nor is it Fujikura's first work based on Lem's story: he also composed two pieces for trombone solo and electronics before that – K's Ocean and Vast Ocean – which contain some of the seeds of the later stage-work.
The enthusiasm for Solaris as a subject for an opera is perhaps surprising. In the early twenty-first century many libretti have been based on novels, to the extent that Claude Coste has suggested that it is ‘becoming one of the essential characteristics of the revival of the opera theatre’,Footnote 2 but few have used science-fiction stories. So why is this particular story so interesting? In this article I hope to demonstrate that the narrative theme explored in Solaris, as well as the importance of the inner psychic life of the main character, Kris Kelvin, are particularly suited to Fujikura's musical processes. I will explain how Saburo Teshigawara's librettoFootnote 3 strengthens the structure of the original text and reduces the plots into a single narrative line and then go on to analyse the diverse ways in which Fujikura uses music to fill the voids of the libretto and recreate the depth of the story, focusing on the three main characters of the opera: the Ocean, Hari and Kelvin.
Solaris: from the novel to the libretto
In his book Opera and the Novel: The Case of Henry James,Footnote 4 Michael Halliwell offers a study of the adaptation of fiction into opera, arguing that recent operas are now more likely to be based on novels or short stories than on plays or entirely original libretti – in other words, on writing that is not specifically dramatic. Similarly, in 1977 Peter Conrad discussed the connection between the different media:
music and drama are dubious, even antagonistic, partners… opera's actual literary analogue is the novel. Drama is limited to the exterior life of action… The novel, in contrast, can explore the interior life of motive and desire and is naturally musical because mental. It traces the motions of thought, of which music is an image. Opera is more music novel than musical drama.Footnote 5
However, although deriving a libretto from a novel has led to a renewal of the lyrical genre, the task of adapting the narrative text for the stage poses many challenges for the librettist, in particular those of ‘reduction and dramatisation’.Footnote 6
The form of the original story must be reduced to reveal the basic plot and its themes dramatised, because composers and librettists approach any narrative with specific musical requirements. In the case of Solaris, however, the narrative structure is, as Hugo Hengl remarks, ‘a major challenge for intermedial transposition’,Footnote 7 because when the secondary plots and the intertextual dimension are removed the only narrative line that remains is ‘a touching love story set against the backdrop of a scientific enigma, staged as if behind closed doors’.Footnote 8 Is that enough from which to compose an entire opera?
Time and structure: from length to strength
Many aspects of Lem's writing style make adaptation difficult. He builds a network of intertextual references in his text, called a ‘microcosm reflexive’,Footnote 9 through constant reference to the library. The book also has an unusual narrative structure, especially in terms of form and temporality, with chapters of variable length, highlighting single events or subjects instead of a chronological sequence and, as the story goes on, the initially precise and dense temporality becomes vague and distended. The universe of the novel is relatively delimited with only a few characters (three living, one dead and two Visitors) interacting within an observation station in space.
Lem's use of first-person narration is also a challenge; because he tells the story from Kris Kelvin's point of view, much of it is articulated around Kelvin's personal reflections and thoughts. To erase these internal exchanges would break the sense of the story and its narrative line, and issues of communication are a fundamental theme of Solaris; but what happens inside Kelvin's head, what he thinks, cannot be staged or represented in the same way as what he actually says, with words. These difficulties have nonetheless been overcome by Teshigawara and Fujikura and they have succeeded in proposing not just a new adaptation but a new way of hearing the novel.
The library through which Lem establishes intertextuality as a subject in Solaris is a ‘large circular room with its smooth walls covered in a checkerwork of drawers with their multitudes of microfilms and electronic records’, which is ‘located in the very center of the Station’.Footnote 10 The geographic centre of the story becomes the heart of its narrative frame and Lem uses it to create his ‘microcosm reflexive’, the narrative sequence that reproduces the main plot on a smaller scale. Kelvin has been called to the Solaris space station to find out what has been happening, and during his research in the library he delves into the archive and discovers the planet's history. Lem's aim was to transcend science fiction and create ‘an entirely new narrative structure, one that might be modelled on historiography. The biographies of scientists. Or perhaps a collage of excerpts from scientific texts, press clippings. The addresses of Nobel laureates. Or other facsimiles.’Footnote 11 In the libretto, however, this intertextuality has been removed entirely.
The chronology of events is significantly reduced. As Table 1 shows, Lem's book is built around 14 chapters (numbered in the table but unnumbered in the novel), each of which focuses on a character or an action. The timeline is not easy to follow: some chapters begin in the middle of the night and last only a few hours; others cover several days. In contrast, the libretto is temporally structured and underlines the chronological development of Kris Kelvin and Solaris’ story more clearly. In the novel the reader must look for time markers to understand that chapters 1 to 4 cover Kelvin's first day on the Station, or that in chapter 13, ‘Victory’, two months have passed since the beginning of the story; by contrast, Teshigawara clearly establishes the time of different acts and scene.Footnote 12
Table 1: Overview of the two narrative structures
The number of characters is also reduced. As in Soderberg's version, Teshigawara and Fujikura focus on Kris Kelvin and Hari's love story. The secondary plots disappear, as does the character of Sartorius, the third scientist living on the station. Gibarian, already dead when Kelvin arrives on Solaris, but sometimes present on the station as a Visitor, is now a screen character. Snaut, however, remains because dramatically he is needed as a reminder to the audience that the story is told from Kelvin's point of view. Without Snaut there would be nobody who could explain what had happened before Kelvin arrived or happens in the moments when Kelvin is not present in person; Snaut is a counterpart to Kelvin, an outsider who opens up the narration.
The keywords: writing the characters musically
Although the libretto drastically reduces the number of characters and, as a result, their psychological interactions, Fujikura has found an effective musical way to strengthen character relationships. In a 2015 interview with Bastien Gallet the composer explained how he thinks about the musical motifs and how he tried to link the vocal lines and the orchestra:
There are several words in the libretto that I have identified as keywords. Each time these words appear, for example ‘Solaris’ or ‘Visitor’, the singers sing the same transposed pattern. Some of the characters are also linked to a specific sound, like the Ocean or Snaut, and the music changes when the characters change their mood, for example when Snaut is sincere, which rarely happens to him, or when Kelvin is not honest with Hari.Footnote 13
There are not many characters in the space station and so the relationships between them became more interesting for the composer than the actual characters themselves. As Fujikura says, ‘the drama is played not only between the characters, but also within themselves, as if they were each habited by several people. I think that only music can fully express these conflicts.’Footnote 14 By linking characters’ musical patterns – what Fujikura calls ‘keywords’ (see Figure 1) – through the orchestra he proposes an audible version of the original story and gives the spectator a better understanding of the characters’ psychology.
Figure 1: Six musical ‘keywords’, as notated by the composer.
Kris is presented as an anti-hero. He is rarely honest, but he sings very slowly to give an impression of grandeur. The orchestration confirms his vocal typology, using bassoon or cello for the voicings. Fujikura also uses a second singer, offstage, to express Kris’ thoughts, allowing the audience to hear the difference between what he says and what he thinks. Offstage-Kris uses electronic effects and his voice is spatialised around the stage.
Hari the Visitor is a complex character, between innocence and strangeness. She ‘sings more slowly, in a regular meter, which gives her a strange, disturbing innocence’,Footnote 15 but also ‘slightly treated by the electronics, as if adding a trail to her melodies, with a bit of reverb’.Footnote 16 Sometimes she becomes frightening and hysterical (in Act 2 and Act 4, for example). She is mainly accompanied by strings using harmonics, with an orchestral texture similar to that of the Ocean.
Snaut, meanwhile, is unstable and irritable. His orchestration features the flute and first violin, perhaps not an obvious choice for a male voice. Sometimes, as in Act 4 – One week later, he sings with a sort of Sprechgesang, accompanied by string pizzicato. Elsewhere, as at the beginning of Act 3 – Day 3 (p. 143, bar 21), he speaks with Kelvin and his vocal line is in total contrast to the orchestra: Snaut's singing is regular, a word on each quarter note of the ascending pattern (‘you slept well?’: C, B, F♯), but the strings play groups of sixteen notes or whole notes with tremolos (see Example 1). Snaut's apparent calm is belied by the music and the same effect will be used later in the woodwind (pp. 145–48).
Example 1: Musical example of Snaut's instability (bars 22–23), Solaris, p. 143. Ricordi Berlin, SY. 4111 /01.
These musical keywords are, of course, not an innovation: most musical dramaturgy is based on recurring patterns, whether they be Puccini's parola scenica or Wagner's leitmotifs.
Fujikura's keywords are more complete than an Erinnerungsmotiv (reminiscence motif) but cannot be entirely related to the Wagnerian conception of the leitmotif except in its primary sense as ‘a theme, or other coherent musical ideas, clearly defined to retain its identity if modified in subsequent appearances, whose purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force or any other ingredient in a dramatic work’.Footnote 17 The musical keywords in Solaris are deeply embedded in the orchestral score and mostly individualise characters rather than ideas or feelings; they do not direct the action but simply reinforce a connection between text and music.
The composer plays with the dialectic potential of his material so that the public can both identify the characters musically and hear and understand the musical and psychological evolution by listening to the orchestral context. As ‘the music changes when the characters change their mood’, Fujikura's keywords can create a new psychological depth because they induce a form of distancing: the orchestra comments on the action but also introduces a slight shift by inserting various levels of meaning. Finally, the recurrence of patterns and the unvaried keywords create an ambiguous temporality, a suspended time in which the characters seem to evolve very slowly. The audience experiences the slowness and tension of time as it is experienced on the orbital station.
The Ocean as principal character: the sound of water in Solaris
I moved further down and reached out my hand to the next wave. It faithfully repeated the phenomenon that humans had first witnessed almost a century before: it hesitated, withdrew, then flowed over my hand yet without touching it, in such a way that a narrow layer of air remained between the surface of my gauntlet and the inside of the covering, which instantly changed consistency, turning from liquid to almost fleshy. I then raised my arm; the wave, or rather its narrow tongue, followed it upwards, continuing to encase my hand in an ever more transparent dirty green encystment. I rose to my feet, otherwise I would not have been able to lift my arm any further. A shaft of the gelatinous substance stretched like a vibrating violin string but did not break off; the base of the entirely flattened wave, like a strange creature waiting patiently for the end of these experiments…Footnote 18
In Solaris, the protoplasmic Ocean is invested with intelligence and a will to communicate with the other protagonists and so deserves to be considered and treated like a character, just like Hari or Kelvin.Footnote 19 Because of its ability to increase the psychological and sensory aspects of all residents of the orbital station, the Ocean has a special meaning to Fujikura, too: ‘what I prefer in the book is obviously Solaris, this ocean planet that gives different perspectives on a character's experience, which projects before them their disappeared loves’.Footnote 20 In fact, the composer's great fascination with Lem's story, and more specifically with the Ocean, appears not only in his opera but also in two earlier pieces for trombone solo and electronics, Vast Ocean, written for the Donaueschingen Festival in 2005, and K's Ocean, for the London Sinfonietta's Sonic Explorations Festival in October 2009. As the composer wrote in his programme notes for Vast Ocean, in these two pieces ‘the solo trombone is the main character (maybe Kelvin in the novel) and the live electronics which are directly related to the soloist's performance, the ocean’.Footnote 21 The water is characterised by delicate and shining bell-like tones emerging from the mass of sound, and the inner dynamics and the resonance of the electronic parts suggest a swaying sensation.
In the opera, the Ocean's keyword is a single descending minor seventh and, unlike the other keywords, its harmonisation – using a minor seventh and fourth – is an intrinsic part of the keyword (see Example 2).
Example 2: The Ocean keyword, as notated by the composer.
To give the impression of the swaying water, Fujikura creates a layered orchestration: first the strings, with a granular effect – marked arco non vibrato – enter separately and quietly; then the composer varies the dynamics, from pp to ff, using crescendi and metric change to create internal waves in the texture. Then, the strings play with vibratos and tremolos. A similar approach is adopted in the woodwind, Fujikura using timbre and dynamic changes to vary the colour of the orchestra. In the midst of these sustained notes a celesta and vibraphones play another pattern (see ‘A few weeks later’, in Act 4). The Ocean is represented not only by a theme and an orchestration but also by particular types of texture and musical figures; sometimes this is deployed to overwhelm the music of other characters, as happens at the end of the opera when Kris’ vocal line is completely absorbed into the colour of the water.
Hari, the Ocean and Solaris
Hari (Harey in Lem's original story) is Kris Kelvin's Visitor. The Ocean has taken the form of his wife, who killed herself a decade before. Kris seems to lead a satisfactory existence in the orbital station by deciding not to resist his Visitor but rather to treat her as his partner. Through Hari Kris develops a sentimental bond with Solaris and decides to stay there forever.
Hari initially seems to be a simple character but she evolves very quickly and becomes much more complex. She knows that she is not the real Hari but she continues to act as if she were and experiences a wide range of feelings: envy, love, anger, sadness, etc. This evolution towards a form of humanity is a particular feature of the Visitors, as Snaut reveals in the middle of the story: ‘the longer they are with you here, the more human they become. And the more independent, within certain limits of course.’Footnote 22 Thus, Hari is caught between the fact that she is no more than a projection, of the Ocean and of Kelvin's psyche, and her unrealisable will to be a real person, to be independent.
As we can see, the three musical keywords are linked because they are built on the same intervals: the minor seventh and its inversion show the relationship between Hari, the Ocean and Solaris (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Musical patterns associated with the keywords Ocean, Solaris, Hari.
Through these musical patterns the three characters are connected, just as they are in the novel: Solaris is the planet made by the Ocean, and Hari is the humanoid shape or projection of this Ocean. Thus Solaris, the Ocean and Hari are three facets of the same character, and although this auditory connection is not always obvious, there are moments when it is strikingly clear, such as Hari's first appearance on Day 2 (see Example 3). Listeners may think that they are hearing the Ocean's pattern, but it is Hari's: she has emerged from the Ocean. With these works, with the interval of the keywords systems, Fujikura recreates one of the most fundamental points of the story: maybe Kelvin is lying to himself by pretending that Hari is real, but she is not, and she will never be.
Example 3: Orchestration of the Ocean during the first appearance of Hari, Solaris, p. 59. Ricordi Berlin, SY. 4111 /01.
Kris Kelvin and his double
I also split Kelvin. A singer outside the stage expresses his thoughts, allowing the audience to hear the difference between what he says and what he thinks. The sound identity of the Kelvin off the set is processed by electronics, taken up and spatialized in the room so that the audience is somehow immersed in his head.Footnote 23
Off-stage Kelvin first appears in the opera on Day 2 and is interesting for two reasons: he is the first-person narrator, the scenic response to Lem's atypical writing style mentioned earlier, and he opens up a new psychological interaction. One of the first ‘roles’ Off-stage Kelvin is to articulate what Kris Kelvin does not say, enabling us to hear two different stories taking place in the same temporality. On Day 2 Off-stage Kelvin explains the entire background story so that the spectator can understand what has happened in Kelvin's personal life, a narrative function that does not slow down the real-time action. Here, for example, is an exchange at the beginning of Day 2:Footnote 24
Ke: Is that my wife? Hari? Not possible. Ten years ago, she was 19 years old. Dead Hari… why is she here? She is looking at me. I look at her. Hari is in front of me.
K: Hari… where did you come from?
The second function is to articulate Kris Kelvin's dreams. Because of his multiple representation he can, perhaps paradoxically, seem to be the only independent character in the story. In Act 3 – Day 3 (pp. 156–57), Kris Kelvin dreams about Gibarian; this part is therefore staged with Off-stage Kelvin. In these two pages, Off-stage Kelvin is acapella, with only a slight electronic effect of source filters and delay. Here there is no orchestra to produce a musical ‘undertext’: Kris Kelvin, through his off-stage double, is real, and expresses his desire (‘I need Hari / I want her to be here’).
In fact, we can say that Off-stage Kelvin speaks differently from Kris Kelvin: the main character uses short sentences and is often dishonest whereas Off-stage Kelvin is poetic and emotional (see Kelvin and Hari's duet during Day 3 and The next day). Over the course of the opera, however, the trend reverses: Kris Kelvin speaks more often and with increasing conviction as he moves closer to his inner truth. Through these two separate characters, the spectator can hear the evolution of Kelvin's mind and the difference between his truth and his public self. At the end of the opera, they speak together with the same words and these lines summarise the key moments of the entire plot: the entire love story, Hari's appearance, Hari's loss. As shown in Examples 4 and 5, they sing together, homorhythmically. Everything is done to clarify this moment acoustically: the orchestration is based on the string quartet, as a block, with steady sounds, and the text is perfectly understandable.
Example 4: Hari appears; Kelvin and Off-stage Kelvin sing together for the first time: ‘Hari, I never imagined this could happen!’ (bars 109–12), Solaris. Ricordi Berlin, SY. 4111 /01.
Example 5: Hari's death. Kelvin and Off-stage Kelvin sing together for the last time: ‘Hari has disappeared’, (bars 240–42), Solaris, p. 236. Ricordi Berlin, SY. 4111 /01.
At the end of the opera, it is Kelvin, not his off-stage double, who sings the final words:
Ke: I will live a totally new life.
K: I will stay here, as a new lifeform.
K: Is my journey ending, or am I staying at the centre of eternity?
In Solaris Fujikura and Teshigawara have created a new reading of Lem's story that may be close to Soderbergh's cinematographic version, in building the narrative around the love story between Kelvin and Harey/Hari, but which does not abandon the particularities of the original literary version. Through his music Fujikura transposes the various formal and aesthetic elements of Lem's original science-fiction work on to the stage. The special treatment of the Ocean, both in terms of music and importance within the narrative, is key to this. Moreover, the use of musical keywords, a device familiar from earlier opera but here linked to a modular orchestration and deployed to give access to the interior life of the characters’ motives and desires, definitively places this opera as a significant new addition to the contemporary opera repertoire.
Acknowledgements
I warmly thank Dai Fujikura for his kindness and his time, and John Sannaee for the English corrections.
