L'amour de loin
Kaija Saariaho decided to write her first opera after attending a performance of Messiaen's St. François d'Assise at the Salzburg Festival in 1992. Eight years later L'amour de loin will be given its world premiere in the same venue, staged by the same director Peter Sellars, similarly with singer Dawn Upshaw in a principle role and performed in French. Kaija Saariaho is Finnish but she is resident in Paris where she has worked at IRCAM for a long time. She is particularly attracted by the challenge of composing an opera and writing for the voice, as shown already in her piece for soprano Château de l'âme (created in Salzburg in 1996 for Dawn Upshaw). It also gives Saariaho the chance to envisage the sound dimension and its relation to the visual dimension, something of prime importance for a musician who first started out by studying the fine arts.
The story of Jaufré Rudel
The subject of the opera is based on the legendary life of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel, as handed down to us in thirteenth century manuscripts. "Jaufré Rudel was a very noble man, the Prince of Blaye. And he fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli without ever having seen her, merely from all the good things he had heard about her related by the pilgrims returning from Antiochia. And he wrote many songs about her with beautiful melodies and simple words. And because he wanted to see her he set off on a crusade. At sea he became ill and was taken, almost dead, to an abbey in Tripoli. The Countess was informed about what had happened and she came to his bedside and took him in her arms. He knew that it was the Countess and immediately regained his power of hearing and his sense of smell. He praised God for having allowed him to live long enough to be able to see her and he died in her arms. And she had him buried with full honours in the house of the Templars and then, the very same day she went into a convent and became a nun because she was greatly grieved by his death."
Jaufré Rudel really did exist. He was a vassal of the Count of Angoulême, follower of the first troubadour, Count William IX of Poitiers, and he set off on a crusade in 1147 to die in the Holy Land. We have partial manuscripts of his songs, haunted by themes of distant love, the lady who is never seen, dying from love, and as a starting-point the Brief Life of Jaufré Rudel which serves as an introduction. The most famous of his canso (canzone) was set to music by Kaija Saariaho (Lonh, 1996). Since the romantic era historians and philologists have tried in vain to find out more precisely just who the troubadour was and above all to identify the Princess of Tripoli. On the contrary, however, the mystery and uncertainty surrounding the life of Jaufré have inspired the poetic imagination of Heinrich Heine and Carducci, and also provided the subject for a drama by Edmond Rostand.
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| Le chansonnier de Montpellier, (from Markus Müller: Minne-bilder. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne.) |
The Orient and the Occident
Amin Maalouf is at present writing the libretto for the opera. The author of Croisades vues par les Arabes, of Samarcande and a recent essay on Les identités meurtrières is from Lebanon, the country where Jaufré failed, eight hundred years earlier. The author enters into dialogue with the troubadour whose songs are quoted in the opera. The confrontation between the Orient and the Occident, a daily fact of life for Maalouf, is the focal point of the opera and reveals many different aspects. Cultures and characters enter into relations with one another, also two worlds with complementary emotions and likewise two musical worlds. The libretto follows the original life: there are five acts alternating between scenes in Blaye and scenes in Tripoli. Jaufré is a baritone role and Clemence a soprano and between the two is a central figure, the pilgrim (mezzo-soprano). This character acts as a mediator between the two lovers and the two worlds.
The invention of love
The unattainable love of Jaufré Rudel is one of the most radical expressions of what is referred to as courtly love. The troubadour, in love with the idea of the lady in his imagination as well as the lady in reality, even if he dreams of seeing and touching the one he loves, finds satisfaction in a sublime, absolutely chaste desire. In the impossibility of his love he discovers the source of a paradox joy, stronger than possessing the one he loves. The drama originates from the heartbreak suffered by the poet between the desire to see the countess and the knowledge that his love must end if this desire is fulfilled. His illness is nothing other than the expression of physical oblivion and the growing anxiety of the poet as he approaches Tripoli. Death is the inevitable end of a passion which cannot be satisfied without fading and whose fulfilment is found elsewhere, not in possession, happiness and marriage.
L'amour de loin will be performed at the Salzburg Festival as a counterpart to Tristan und Isolde. The legends of Tristan and Jaufré appear to be two sides, Breton and Provençale, northern and Mediterranean, of the western conception of love as manifested in twelfth-century Provençale poetry. Although they appear strange to contemporary values, the idea of courtly love has a mythical force.
It continues to live on in the subconscious of men and women nowadays when they enjoy a feeling of love without the consummation of desire. Jaufré did nothing other than to live out a passion to its final consequence, a passion inherent in us in the state of a forgotten reflex, a fine legacy of the Middle Ages, submerged by other habits and less sophisticated behaviour.
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