La Passion de Simone

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist and mystic who died of self-starvation and tuberculosis in 1943, is a notoriously tricky subject for any biographical treatment. Her life was steeped in contradictions, and it resists audience-pleasing takeaways. Yet it was perfectly suited to the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose shimmering works often concern enigmatic heroines with rich interior lives.

Though little of Weil’s work was published in her lifetime, she inspired an almost cult-like following among noted writers and intellectuals, from Albert Camus to Susan Sontag and Flannery O’Connor. Born in Paris in 1909 to a secular Jewish family, the precocious Weil was reading about Marxism and pacifism before she was a teenager. At age six—in a harbinger of adult concerns—she refused sugar out of solidarity with French soldiers on the front during World War I.

After university studies at the École Normale Supérieure, Weil taught philosophy at several girls’ schools from 1931–38 and worked intermittently on farms and in automotive factories to learn about the psychological effects of industrial labor. She went to fight alongside the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War but soon left after struggling to operate a machine gun and burning herself over a cooking fire.

Slight and prone to poor health, Weil was ill-suited to manual labor or combat. After she reported mystical experiences in 1937, she found a spiritual affinity with Roman Catholicism (though she expressed discomfort with the church as an institution). During the Second World War, Weil escaped to New York and then London to work with the French Resistance. Spending her final months in a sanatorium, she died at age 34 of tuberculosis. It was hastened by her refusal to eat more than the official ration in occupied France.

Though Weil’s life saw its share of surface-level drama, Saariaho was drawn to her ideas and values. “The combination of Weil’s severe asceticism and her passionate quest for truth has appealed to me ever since I first read her thoughts,” the composer said in a program note, adding that when she left her native Helsinki to study composition in Germany in 1981, she packed a copy of Weil’s book Gravity and Grace. Saariaho later explored Weil’s writings in the original French and eventually teamed up with her longtime librettist, the Lebanese-born writer Amin Maalouf, and American director Peter Sellars, to create La Passion de Simone, an oratorio divided into 15 sections, or “stations.”

Based on the passion play tradition, each station focuses on a different aspect of Weil’s life and ideas, touching on the impact of war, the labor movement, and her growing disillusionment. The soprano serves as an unnamed, imaginary sister, who voices Weil’s philosophy while also recognizing its personal cost (in the eighth station the singer momentarily assumes Weil’s identity). Pre-recorded, aphoristic quotes from Weil’s writings are part of the score’s electronic layer, while the choir and the orchestra, in Saariaho’s words, “create the world” in which the solo parts live.

La Passion de Simone received its premiere in Vienna in 2006, still years before Weil’s letters and journals were published in English and recognized for their contemporary relevance. And since Saariaho’s death in 2023, her own stage works (which also include L’Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater, and Innocence) have drawn fresh interest, as the opera world reexamines the cosmic, complex, and universal themes that define her storytelling.

—Brian Wise

La Passion de Simone is a piece about attention.

Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf do not give us a biography of Simone Weil. They offer a series of meditations that circle a human being who refused comfort, refused belonging, and refused to look away from suffering. The structure echoes the Stations of the Cross, but the journey here is interior. It is a passage through perception, conscience, and the unbearable weight of noticing.

Simone Weil’s life resists theatricality in the conventional sense. There are no grand public events and no obvious dramatic confrontations. Instead, there is a mind and spirit relentlessly turning toward affliction, toward factory labor, toward war, toward hunger, toward God, toward absence. It is a life defined by choices about where to place one’s attention.

In this production, we do not attempt to illustrate Weil’s biography. We do not recreate factories, battlefields, or historical settings. Instead, we create a visual and spatial environment that allows the audience to inhabit the act of contemplation itself. The stage becomes a field of perception. Bodies, light, sound, and space are arranged so that we experience stillness, distance, proximity, and time as Weil might have experienced them.

Saariaho’s music does not move with narrative urgency. It invites us into a different relationship with time, one in which listening becomes a form of witnessing. Shimmering textures and delicate harmonic shifts create an atmosphere where small changes feel immense. This is not music driven by story. It asks us simply to be present.

The singer, chorus, and reader function less as characters than as voices of thought and reflection. They are fragments of Weil’s inner and outer world. At times they observe her. At times they seem to speak from within her.

One of Weil’s most radical ideas was that attention is the purest form of generosity. To truly look at something, to see another person’s suffering without turning away, is for her an ethical act. In a world saturated with distraction, this idea feels startlingly contemporary.

Our hope is to create the conditions for that kind of attention. We aim to slow the audience’s internal tempo and offer an experience where meaning emerges through duration, composition, and quiet accumulation rather than spectacle or explanation.

La Passion de Simone does not tell us what to think about Weil. It asks us to practice, for seventy minutes, the discipline she devoted her life to. To look carefully, to listen deeply, and to remain present in the face of what is difficult to bear.

—Marcus Shields