"A man, a woman — one in his castle in Aquitaine, the other in the Citadel of Tripoli, but both waiting expectantly for an alter ego. In the prism of medieval courtly love, or fin'amor, their encounter seems doomed to failure. For them, the hope of union oscillates between fantasy and reality: idealised object of desire, disinterested feelings of love and self-effacement on the one hand, impossibility of fusion with the beloved, psychological tensions and material contingencies on the other.
"Premiered at Salzburg in 2000 in a production by Peter Sellars, 'L'Amour de loin', to a libretto of Amin Maalouf, was the first opera of Kaija Saariaho. The historical and legendary life of Jaufre Rudel serves as its pretext. The poetry in 'langue d'oc' of this twelfth-century troubadour gives a prominent place to 'l'amor de lonh', love for a woman from whom he is separated by distance. But this does not make it a historical or mythic opera. The libretto conceived by Amin Maalouf presents an adaptation and interpretation of the medieval narrative that favours its timeless resonances — and there, assuredly, lies the richness of the opera. In emphasising the love relationship at a distance, the virtuality of ideal love and the links between genres, as well as both the gap between East and West and the porosity of their frontiers, the text reflects problems that could hardly be more topical. And the elements of the text that thereby touch on the limits of understanding react in remarkable fashion with the musical style of Kaija Saariaho, who constantly probes the irrational, on the borderline between the intelligible and the sentient.
"In the declamatory tradition of 'fin'amor' that emerged in the twelfth century, a man sets himself the task of seducing a woman who he knows will forever remain inaccessible to him (because she is married, bound by social prohibitions, or quite simply non-existent). As the poems of the troubadours attest, love for a woman was at that time raised to an ideal by courtiers. This 'secular liturgy' of the seigneurial society of the Middle Ages, as the historian Georges Duby calls it, embodies a reversal of values, that of the social codification of amorous relationships, or even a transgression, that of the taboos concerning adultery. Thus 'fin'amor' successively takes on the aspect of a game, an outlet for pent-up feeling, an ordeal, a quest, or even a genuine peril to be confronted —a peril that may lead to a tragic, disastrous outcome.
"Such is the case in 'L'Amour de loin'. The troubadour Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye, going against the mores of the time — and the collective consciousness represented by the chorus of the opera — plunges headlong into passion for a creature of his imagination. When he returns from the East, a pilgrim tells him that the object of his desire is perhaps less unreal than he thinks. This woman does indeed exist, he informs him. Although he ardently desires to know more about her, Jaufre at first refuses to hear her name. As an ascetic, he is vowed to an amorous passion that is ethereal, without any hold on reality, and devotes himself to celebrating his love through his verse. But this contemplation from afar will soon become more and more arduous. On his return from his second voyage, the pilgrim admits to Jaufre that he has spoken to the fair one, and even sung her some of the troubadour's songs from memory. Furious, Jaufre feels himself betrayed, but above all believes he has betrayed the lady whose name he now learns: Clemente, countess of Tripoli. For if the ideal love must forever remain secret (and the Latin 'secretus' does indeed mean separate, set apart, or solitary), then to reveal it sets in motion an irrepressible impulse, a destiny, a conquest.
"Clemente, hitherto relegated to an imaginary space in which love for her was devoid of all hope of realisation, is now transformed into an irresistible object of desire. Racked by the distance which separates them, racked by his psychological moods, the troubadour sees his retreat into a dreamworld turn into an inner crisis. For him, this solitary duet in which the voice of the other appears only in the form of illusion is no longer tenable: a flight into the real world, a crossing over into her world, begins to take shape. But there now emerges from this love charged with negativity what psychoanalysis would call a 'death wish'. Between Eros and Thanatos, between the expansion of desire and the illusory conquest of its object, 'l'amor de lonh' takes the form of an unbearable psychological tension, verging on mental torture.
"In his 'Fragments d'un discours amoureux' ('A Lover's Discourse: Fragments'), Roland Barthes reminds us of the extent to which otherness, that is, irreducible difference, can create the urge that prompts us to pursue the other in his or her flight.
"Drawn to encounter an 'other' who is absolutely other, which is to say the experience of the most radical otherness, Jaufre devotes himself body and soul to the unknown (woman). Accompanied by the pilgrim, this strange go-between, he embarks on his crossing. But just what is he crossing over? The waves, a gulf separating two continents? Himself? Where is he heading? Towards the object of his desire, Clemente, or an idea of elsewhere, of the East? The motifs intermingle, and the opera now gives rise to a formidable play of allegory; the traversal appears as an ordeal symbolising all kinds of crossing, physical and ideal, geographical and mental. When the contours of the other are outlined as a territory, a country, a continent, to reach that shore is not only to cross a limit, but also to have felt the porosity of a frontier, to have allowed oneself to be filtered (and infiltrated) by contact with it. Jaufre makes the crossing. He goes blindly towards the object of his desire, though realising the full extent of the risk he runs, that of forgetting himself and losing his love forever. But nothing — neither the collective consciousness of the chorus which addresses him, nor the words of the pilgrim — can stop him from taking that step. Although the storm of the opera's fourth act does not wreck his ship, the troubadour's 'personal crusade' is about to be wrecked — an inner wreck, a wreck of the soul. When the boat reaches the shores of Tripoli, and the geographical gap is at last reduced, the many tensions within the prince of Blaye soon finish him off. Scarcely has he arrived in Tripoli, at the very moment when these two singularities, drawn towards one another, are permitted a point of contact, than that contact turns out to be ephemeral in the extreme, and Jaufre dies in Clemence's arms. The beautiful lady, deeply moved by this experience, will in her turn don the costume of the ascetic by withdrawing from the world and entering a convent.
"Do not the subject of 'L'Amour de loin', this archetypal tragic experience, its tensions, its traversal, in a sense concord with our normal experience of music? Do they not form the basis of an allegory of the relationship each of us has with music? Just as its flow draws us along while at the same time leaving us on the shore — escaping our grasp and all attempts at appropriation - does not music engage a similar form of otherness, notably when it reveals the stranger within us? If the experience of music is the disorientation of ourselves within ourselves, it also sketches the contours of something unknown.
"Kaija Saariaho has never ceased to probe the limits of musical experience. One might say of her music that it is always played on the frontiers of the emotional and the rational, of the intelligible and the sentient, of the palpable and the imaginary — which explains the composer's interest in unstable musical phenomena (the lack of distinction between instrumental timbre and harmony, for example). The musical style here avails itself of the techniques deployed in pieces of smaller dimensions, whether for orchestra or soloists. Certain earlier works had already been centrally concerned with some of the opera's themes; thus 'Château de l'Ome for soprano, women's chorus and orchestra' (1995), 'Lonh for voice and electronics' (1996) and 'Oltra mar for orchestra and mixed chorus' (1999) evoke the relationship between East and West, medieval poetics and the troubadour Jaufre Rudel, and the idea of a sea-crossing and of its changes of atmosphere.
"Perhaps one of the most captivating aspects of 'L'Amour de loin' is the cohabitation between vocal lines and orchestral spectra. The voices are treated on the basis of melodic structures that are apparently relatively simple, characterised by conjunct movement, but whose intonation generates very subtle, finely controlled ornamentation. The harmonies envelop the stage and the characters, and the intonation of the text merges into the ambient sounds produced by the orchestra combined with the electronics. Sometimes the orchestra takes hold of a vocalise and, while drowning it in its own mass, gradually amplifies the mood it portrayed, as if projecting it into the distance. When it absorbs the inflections of the protagonists and the intonations of their affects, the orchestra acts like a reservoir soaking up the tensions of the narrative. The different sections incorporate them in order to reflect them, redeploy them in orchestral colours, and compose a sort of screen or landscape exuding a distant resonance, an echo distorted by fantasy; an echo which sometimes also becomes prefiguration and anticipation, and thus destabilises the temporality of the work. Moreover, the opera makes occasional sparing use of medieval resonances. From time to time the vocal writing presents modal scales, though without lapsing into naïve imitation, and therefore without seeking 'authenticity'; one can also perceive here and there the presence of a drone, which very quickly blends into ambient sound, or figuration in the harps suggesting an arpeggiated lute chord — but such suggestions always remain 'distant'. The listener will be struck by other references: a few intervals of the augmented second suggest a dream of the East, and the recurrence of minor seconds in the voices sometimes evokes the 'pianto', the motif which has represented tears, and distress in general, at least since the Renaissance.
"'L'Amour de loin' offers a contemporary reinterpretation of an essential aspect of the songs of the troubadours (whose name is derived from the Occitan 'trobar', 'to find', but also 'to invent' or 'to compose'), the comparison between the art of love and the art of composition — and not only in the musical sense of the term, when one remembers that 'composition' in French may also mean 'compromise'. Kaija Saariaho herself, to whom we will leave the last word, became aware of this relationship, a relationship that will perhaps have its validity for every listener: 'I realised in the middle of composing the work that it was my story too. I was at once the composer and the lady, the two parts of myself that I try to reconcile in my life. To be a woman composer is almost impossible. To write music, you need concentration, to listen to what is going on inside you. To be a woman, to be a mother, you must always be available and efficient. It's hard to keep your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds at the same time ...'" (Stephanie Roth, tr. Charles Johnston. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Rundfunkchor Berlin, Kent Nagano, Ekaterina Lekhina, Marie-Ange Todorovitch, Daniel Belcher
1.1. Acte I: (Traversée)
1.2. Acte I, Tableau I: 'J'ai Appris À Parler Du Bonheur'
1.3. Acte I, Tableau II: 'Peut-être Bien Qu'elle N'existe Pas
1.4. Acte I, Tableau II: 'Qu'as-tu Fait De Moi, Pèlerin?'
1.5. Acte II, Tableau I: Clémence
1.6. Acte II, Tableau I: 'Pèlerin, Dites-moi!'
1.7. Acte II, Tableau I: 'Un Homme Pense À Vous'
1.8. Acte II, Tableau II: 'Rien Ne Vous Oblige À L'aimer'
1.9. Acte II, Tableau II: 'Ja Mais D'amor'
1.10. Acte III, Tableau I: 'Au Château De Blaye'
1.11. Acte III, Tableau I: 'Pèlerin, Pèlerin, Dis-moi'
1.12. Acte III, Tableau I: 'Jaufré, Elle Sait'
1.13. Acte III, Tableau I: 'Peut-être Ferais-je Mieux De M'en Aller'
1.14. Acte III, Tableau II: 'Ben Tenc Lo Seignor Per Verai'
1.15. Acte III, Tableau II: 'Non, Par Notre Seigneur'
2.1. Acte IV, Tableau I: 'Mer Indigo'
2.2. Acte IV, Tableau I: 'Me Croiras-tu, Pèlerin'
2.3. Acte IV, Tableau II: Songe
2.4. Acte IV, Tableau II: 'Je L'ai Vue, Pèlerin'
2.5. Acte IV, Tableau II: 'Calme-toi, Jaufré'
2.6. Acte IV, Tableau III: 'Je Devrais Être L'homme Le Plus Heureux Du Monde'
2.7. Acte IV, Tableau III: 'Ces Choses Se Savent, Oui'
2.8. Acte V, Tableau I: 'Comtesse, Regardez'
2.9. Acte V, Tableau I: 'Noble Dame, Je Vous Apporte Une Nouvelle'
2.10. Acte V, Tableau II: 'C'est Vous, C'est Vous'
2.11. Acte V, Tableau II: 'J'aurais Tant Voulu'
2.12. Acte V, Tableau II: 'Seigneur, Si Je Pouvais Rester Ainsi'
2.13. Acte V, Tableau III: 'J'espère Encore, Mon Dieu'
2.14. Acte V, Tableau III: 'J'avais Cru En Toi'
2.15. Acte V, Tableau IV: 'Si Tu T'appelles Amour'
