About the work
Kaija Saariaho's „L'Amour de loin" („Love from Afar") was premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2000, to a libretto by Amin Maalouf. Based on a medieval legend, the opera tells of the unfulfilled love of the troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Saariaho's hovering, colour-rich idiom made the work one of the most successful operas of the present day.
Plot
The Aquitanian prince and troubadour Jaufré Rudel, weary of courtly life, sings of a distant, ideal beloved he has never seen. A Pilgrim who has travelled across the sea tells him that this woman truly exists: Clémence, the Countess of Tripoli. Between the two, separated by the Mediterranean, the Pilgrim alone mediates, carrying messages and songs to and fro. Clémence too begins to love her distant admirer. At last Jaufré sets out to seek his beloved — but on the crossing he falls gravely ill. Dying, he reaches Tripoli and expires in the arms of Clémence, whom he sees for the first and last time. In her grief she withdraws into a convent.
Cultural significance
„L'Amour de loin" is one of the most-performed operas of the twenty-first century and a key work of contemporary music. Saariaho's union of the subtlest dramaturgy of tone-colour, electronic influences and a timeless subject of longing and distance was widely honoured. In 2016 it was the first work by a woman composer to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera in over a hundred years.