ABSTRACT
This chapter examines five works by Kaija Saariaho which refer to dreams or nighttime: Im Traume, an early piece for piano and cello; three vocal works from the late 1980s/early 1990s – From the Grammar of Dreams, Grammaire des reves and Nuits, adieux; and Saariaho's first opera, L'Amour de loin, focuses on its dream scene. According to Sigmund Freud, dreams are not irrational, but they follow a different logic from conscious thought. His seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was the first serious attempt to systematize this structural logic, and thus, as per his title, to arrive at a method for interpreting dreams. In Freudian terms, the harmony in Im Traume can be seen as a musical illustration of 'latent dream content', which is the unifying principle behind the entire seemingly fragmentary 'manifest dream content' – the various textures and timbres of the piece.
