SAARIAHO, KAIJA
Amour de loin, L’ (Love from Afar)

  • Kaija Saariaho. Opera in five acts. 2000.
  • Libretto by Amin Maalouf.
  • First performance in the Felsenreitschule, Salzburg, on 15th August 2000.

CHARACTERS

Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye, a troubadoubaritone
Le Pèlerin (The Pilgrim)mezzo-soprano
Clémence, Comtesse de Tripolisoprano
Jaufré’s companionschorus

In Aquitaine, tired of pleasure, Jaufré, Prince of Blaye, yearns for another, distant love, although he seems unlikely to find her. His old friends mock his dreams and tell him that there is no such woman. A pilgrim, recently arrived, tells him, however, that he has met just such a woman. In the second act the Pilgrim has returned to Tripoli and tells the Countess Clémence of her distant lover in France, who calls her his love from afar. In the third act, in France once more the Pilgrim tells Jaufré that his lady now knows that he sings about her. Jaufré plans to meet her. The following scene, in Tripoli, finds Clémence hoping to avoid suffering by keeping their relationship distant. In some anxiety and after hesitation Jaufré sets out but sickens, and as he reaches Tripoli is dying. In the last act the Pilgrim tells Clémence of Jaufré’s arrival. He is carried into her presence and seems to revive, as the couple embrace and declare their love. Jaufré dies in her arms, and she inveighs against Heaven, considers herself responsible for her lover’s death and resolves to enter a convent, finally seen praying, ambiguously, to her ‘love from afar’.

The libretto by the French Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf is based on the work of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, whose poems are haunted by the leitmotif of ‘Amors de terra lonhdana’ (love from a far-away land) and whose supposed death for love at the feet of his beloved Countess of Tripoli was an early invention of troubadour biographers, derived from his poems. The opera by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who like Maalouf has made her life in Paris, has been described as tonal and yet not tonal. The score calls for various electronic devices and avant-garde techniques.