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L'Amour de Loin
“Finley gave a highly musical, nuanced performance... deeply moving in his death scene.” Opera Canada
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Composer |
Kaija Saariaho |
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Libretto |
Amin Maalouf |
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Venue and Dates |
Santa Fe Opera 27, 31 July, 9 August 2002 |
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Conductor |
Robert Spano |
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Production |
Director: Peter Sellars Design: George Tsypin Lighting: James F. Ingalls |
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Performers |
Jaufré Rudel, Prince de Blaye: Gerald Finley |
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Notes |
US Premiere |
Articles:
Cori Ellison, New York Times, 21 July 2002
When Lady and Troubadour Become One
Just a few years ago, the works of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho were heard largely by diehard new-music aficionados. If her name was known more widely, it was probably linked to the thorny modernist rigors of the Darmstadt school in Germany or the spiky electronic riffs of Ircam, the computer-music mecca here, where she trained during the 1980's.
Ms. Saariaho (her full name is pronounced KIGH-yuh SAH-ree-ah-ho), 49, has lived in Paris for two decades, but by now her Garboesque face and incandescent red hair are recognized by legions of fans, would-be students and importuning commissioners everywhere. Perhaps most surprising, she has become best known as the composer of an opera, her first: ''L'Amour de Loin,'' hailed by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times as the ''best new work'' of 2000.
''L'Amour de Loin'' (''Love From Afar'') begins a sold-out American premiere run of three performances in a production by Peter Sellars at the Santa Fe Opera on Saturday. In addition, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival will present Ms. Saariaho's ''Sept Papillons'' and ''Spins and Spells'' for cello, played by Felix Fan, on Friday and ''Lonh'' (''Afar'') for soprano and live electronics, sung by Dawn Upshaw, on Aug. 7.
These days, Americans can find Ms. Saariaho's music all over. This month, the Chicago Symphony gave the American premiere of her flute concerto, ''Aile du Songe'' (''Wing of the Dream''), at the Ravinia Festival in Illinois. Next month, she begins a teaching residency at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts, where the soprano Valdine Anderson will perform her song cycle ''Chateau de l'Âme'' (''House of the Soul'') with the Boston Symphony, conducted by Robert Spano. Next season, she will have major performances in Boston, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia and Washington.
It is worth noting that Ms. Saariaho's vocal works are serving as her introduction to several major American musical centers, for they hold the key to her rapidly expanding popularity. Her growing interest in the human voice has, over the last decade, highlighted the melodic side of her music and nudged her toward a more extroverted, dramatic style and toward the embrace of the traditional symphony orchestra.
For this, we must perhaps thank Ms. Upshaw, who captured Ms. Saariaho's imagination with her performances on records and in Messiaen's opera, ''St. François d'Assise,'' at the Salzburg Festival. ''She is at the center of 'L'Amour de Loin,' '' Ms. Saariaho said. ''Chateau de l'Âme'' and ''Lonh'' were also conceived for Ms. Upshaw.
After the premiere of ''Lonh'' at the Salzburg Festival in 1996, Gerard Mortier, then the festival's artistic director, encouraged Ms. Saariaho to propose an opera project. She had felt tempted by opera since 1991, when she wrote her first stage work, the abstract ballet score ''Maa'' (''The Earth''), she explained. But she had not set any texts except poems, and she became convinced that she could never write opera as she knew it. Until, that is, she heard Messiaen's groundbreaking work, which remained a crucial reference point for the nonlinear dramaturgy of ''L'Amour de Loin.''
The opera began quirkily, with a theme rather than a plot. ''I felt that I must create an opera about love and death,'' Ms. Saariaho said just before the work's Paris premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet in November. ''I'm sure that sounds so banal. After all, nearly all operas are about those themes. But I wanted to go toward these great mysteries of our life that we cannot really approach through reason but that I feel can be approached through music.''
Seeking a story to hang her theme on, Ms. Saariaho turned to the half-historic, half-legendary ''vida breve,'' or biographical sketch, of Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye, the 12th-century French troubadour whose Provençal verses had provided the text for ''Lonh.''
''Why did I choose this story that is really so foreign to me?'' she asked. ''The story chose me. It's not traditionally dramatic, in the sense that nothing much happens. People said, 'You're not going to make an opera from a story like that.' But it remained in me, because it speaks of love and of death in a really profound and timeless way.
''In the midst of composing it, I understood that it was also my story. I was at once the troubadour and the lady, these two parts of me that I try to reconcile in my life. To write music, concentration is necessary, an interior hearing. To be a woman, to be a mother, one needs to be always available and busy. It's difficult to have, at the same time, your feet on the ground and your head in the sky.''
Jaufre's vida breve, written a century after his death by the minstrels who disseminated his chansons and his legend, serves as a neat synopsis of the opera's streamlined plot: ''Jaufre Rudel de Blaye was a noble and generous man. . . . He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, without having seen her, because of the great virtues he had heard spoken of her by pilgrims returning from Antioch. He composed many poems to her, with lovely melodies but very simple verses. Because he wished to see her, he crossed the sea. He fell ill on board and was transported to an inn in Tripoli, nearly dead.
''This was told to the countess, and she went to him and took him in her arms. Knowing it was she, he recovered his sight and hearing and praised God for having kept him alive until he had seen her. He died thus in her arms. The countess had him entombed, with great honor, in the house of the Templars. Then, because of the sorrow she felt for his death, she became a nun.''
In the fluently poetic French libretto, by the Lebanese-born writer Amin Maalouf, the tale of Jaufre's ''amor de lonh,'' his pure and perfect love from afar, is propelled on its arrow-straight course by a Pilgrim of ambiguous sex whose reports incite Jaufre's voyage. Ms. Saariaho suggested adding a sort of Greek chorus, which acts as a collective conscience and an extension of the orchestra.
Neither following nor flouting compositional fashion, Ms. Saariaho fleshes out the simple story with sounds that are typical of her current style: luminous washes of iridescent color, a haunting dreamlike ambience, a focus on timbre and harmony, and a kind of slow-burning spiritual fire. Though the score cannot be called tonal, its harmonic language is tonally grounded, and it hits the ear as hypnotically consonant. Ms. Saariaho occasionally evokes an antique flavor with the struck harp arpeggios of troubadour music, rhythms of medieval dance and modal harmonies tailored to each of the three characters.
The orchestra demands some 80 players, yet Ms. Saariaho most often deploys it as a web of chamber groups interacting contrapuntally with the vocal lines. The score's electronic elements are so subtly blended into the musical texture as to be imperceptible. ''Her technique is so masterful, so subtle, that one hardly sees the boundary between acoustic and electronic,'' said Kent Nagano, who conducted the Salzburg and Paris productions.
The dearth of apparent action through the opera's two hours is mirrored in the illusion of musical stagnation, by now a trademark of Ms. Saariaho's music. In fact, though the rhythmic activity can be iceberg-slow and not always perceptible, it is as essential to the music's architecture as the heartbeats of the characters are to the drama.
THE Santa Fe production of ''L'Amour de Loin'' will be staged by the same creative team responsible for its Salzburg and Paris premieres: Peter Sellars, direction; George Tsypin, sets; Martin Pakledinaz, costumes; and James Ingalls, lighting. But Mr. Tsypin had to redesign the set completely, as he had done in Paris, to accommodate the differing dimensions and physical traits of the theater.
Ms. Upshaw will repeat her portrayal of the countess, Clemence, a breakthrough performance of white-hot emotional and vocal intensity. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley will sing Jaufre, as he did so suavely in Paris. The superb Finnish mezzo-soprano Monica Groop, as the Pilgrim, will be new to the cast. Mr. Spano will conduct.
Mr. Sellars's mesmerizing production interprets ''L'Amour de Loin'' as a parable of spiritual evolution achieved through love. Jaufre and Clemence begin the opera in solitary towers on opposite sides of a wading pool, beautifully lighted to reflect its ripples on a vast cyclorama at the rear.
The elemental directness of ''L'Amour de Loin'' will surely invite a variety of interpretations. Mere days after the Paris premiere, the small, provincial Municipal Theater of Bern, Switzerland, presented a production that reportedly took a more expressionistic viewpoint, reimagining the opera as a tale of neurotic obsession. The agendas for future productions in Helsinki and Darmstadt and at Lincoln Center are anyone's guess.
As for Ms. Saariaho, her biggest challenge of the moment may be carving out the time to fulfill a seemingly endless stream of commissions. She is completing ''Quatre Instants'' (''Four Moments''), a song cycle on texts by Mr. Maalouf, scheduled for April premieres in London and Paris. Despite some weariness, she seems gratified to have won a wide audience through her originality, craft and sophistication. Perhaps more to the point, in Mr. Sellars's words, ''Kaija has written music to love.''
What the critics say
Alan Rich, Opera news, November 2002
Reports from abroad - from Salzburg in 2000 and from the Châtelet in Paris a year later - did not exaggerate in the matter of Kaija Saariaho and her first-ever opera L'Amour de Loin. Extraordinary in its beauty, its emotional breadth and - best of all - its power to involve the observer's imagination, her work achieves all this with amazing sureness and simplicity. One of the triumvirate of composers now in their forties (the others are Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen) who have brought worldwide attention to the resurgence of Finnish composers as a major force on the new-music front, Saariaho has created in this work a most encouraging return to genuine operatic thinking in its most elevated sense. At a time when the operatic assembly line seems largely concerned with outfitting familiar movie scenarios with new musical soundtracks, here at last is a work that reinvests the lyric stage with the sense of myth and mystery depressingly absent in many recent ventures.
These reports, furthermore, had reached Santa Fe, whose enterprising opera company had co-commissioned the work and scheduled it for three performances as the gleaming beacon of its forty-fifth season this past summer. By some distance, this was the season's hot-ticket item, so much so that general director Richard Gaddes was obliged to invite a paying audience (at ten dollars a pop) to the final dress. As he did for the European performances, Peter Sellars devised the evocative, inventive staging to visuals by his usual "team": set by George Tsypin and, most important, lighting by James F. Ingalls. As in previous performances, Dawn Upshaw sang the music of Countess Clémence, a role she can now be said to own.
The means here are remarkably simple: three characters (plus a small choral ensemble), five connected scenes without intermission, lasting just over two hours. The text, by the Paris-based Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, draws upon the medieval account of the Provençal troubadour Jaufré Rudel, who learns of the Countess Clémence of Tripoli as the epitome of his ideal of purity of heart and body. A Pilgrim crisscrosses the Mediterranean to carry messages of love and wisdom between the "lovers from afar." Finally, and tragically, they must meet; Jaufré, on shipboard, falls ill and arrives in Tripoli in time to die in the arms of Clémence, who then screams out against the heaven-sent irony. "What didst thou seek to punish? That he called me 'Goddess'?" she rails. "Could it be that thou art jealous of the fragile happiness of men?"
The plotline evokes thoughts of Tristan; but the benevolent shadow overall is cast by Pelléas et Mélisande, in the fluid elegance of the vocal lines richly enveloped by a dark-hued orchestration in which soft glints shine through like audible gold. Saariaho's orchestra is subtly enhanced with an electronic undertone, wonderfully woven under Robert Spano's direction into a substance both tangible and audible. Sellars's staging seemed to capture that same quality. His stage, covered with water to perhaps ankle depth, bespoke both connecting sea and separating gulf; better yet, it merged with Ingalls's lighting to mirror in its ripple and shimmer the aching beauty of Saariaho's haunting score. From two towers, eerily lit from within, the lovers sang their discourse; between them, the Pilgrim plied a skeletal, even ghostly, small ship.
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley was the Jaufré, as he was in Paris; Finnish mezzo Monica Groop - a memorable Mélisande some years back in Los Angeles - was the Pilgrim. Dawn Upshaw has collaborated with Saariaho on previous vocal works, notably the song-cycle Le Château de l'Ame, recorded on Sony [60817]; there is a cherishable symbiosis between the edgy passion of the music's often jagged lines and the angelic softening of Upshaw's tone. Still, the final music of L'Amour de Loin, sardonic, challenging, seemingly mingling both sorrow and irony - and delivered by Upshaw in a state of partial immersion on Sellars's stage - became the most harrowing of all the lingering memories from this extraordinary night.
Harvey Steiman for Seen & Heard International Opera Review
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2002/July02/Saariaho.htm
Performance on 31st July 2002
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho lives in Paris. I doubt it's a coincidence that it's the same city where a century earlier Claude Debussy wrote his only opera, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’. There are plenty of parallels between Debussy's opera and Saariaho's. Both concern the psychological workings of an ill-starred love affair. Both plots are easily summarized but laden with symbolism. And, most significantly, both use a musical language that, on the surface at least, seems gauzy and is mostly delicate.
All those thoughts came to mind as ‘L'amour de loin’ spun out its two hours on the stage of Santa Fe Opera, which always includes one premiere among the five operas it presents in its summer festival. This one has a big advantage with the gorgeous voices singing the opera's three roles. Canadian baritone Gerald Finley sings Jaufré Rudel, a 12th century troubador who falls in love with a princess across the sea purely on the description provided by The Pilgrim, played by Finnish mezzo-soprano Monica Groop, best known for her work in early music. American soprano Dawn Upshaw plays Clémence, the princess who is the love from afar.
The story, told in five acts (really scenes) without intermission, is based on a real 12th-century troubador and a real princess, about whom he wrote rhapsodic songs. In the opera, The Pilgrim takes word to the princess of these songs, and she begins to dream of this distant lover. Learning from The Pilgrim that the princess now knows of his songs, the troubador resolves to go to her. On board ship, his anxiety makes him mortally ill, and he has only a brief scene with Clémence before he dies. Clémence, in recrimination, decides to enter a convent. What makes the story work is the interior monologues and dialogues that reveal the psychological landscape roiling under it all.
Saariaho writes in a mostly tonal language, complex and often dissonant, but never hard edged. She weaves electronic sounds through the orchestral texture, sometimes eerily anticipating an orchestral sound with the electronics, which emanate from back and side of the open-sided theater. She also uses two choruses, placed on opposite sides of the orchestra seats, sometimes to represent an unseen crowd but more often to add extra texture to the overall sound. She writes long, grateful lines for the singers.
Her music is at its best in the first scenes, when she paints the picture of the troubador and his idealistic love, and the final scene, when the troubador and the princess finally meet. You can sense the sexual tension throbbing below the surface. In the middle scenes I found too much of a sameness, but that did set off the extended final scene in even greater relief. When the troubador regains consciousness only to find himself with the princess as he is about to breathe his last, the music takes on an other-worldy feel. Upshaw's final scene, as she veers from anger at God to a sort of contrition, is just a few shudders shy of a mad scene. With it, ‘L'amour de loin’ finally becomes a real opera.
Peter Sellars directed, with his usual emphasis on externalizing the big psychological moments. An arresting scenic design by George Tsypin floods the entire stage with 3 inches of water. A transparent canoe-like boat, lighted from inside with green neon, carries the Pilgrim back and forth between two spiral staircases that rise out of the orchestra pit. Until the climactic final scene, Jaufré and Clémence do all their singing from these staircases, moving up and down. This staging has the advantage of putting their voices closer to the audience, adding presence and clarity to their French.
But I worry about the singers splashing around in the water, especially Upshaw, who rolls around in the final scene and ends up totally drenched, taking her bows in a huge terrycloth bathrobe. The weather was a pleasant 70° F. on the night I saw it, but what happens when the temperature dips 20° F. lower, as it easily can do in Santa Fe? That can't be good for the voice.
James R Oestreich, New York Times, 30 July 2002
Long-Distance Love Affair in Santa Fe
The old American West has never seemed the most obvious setting for Haydn, Mozart and Verdi. But if those composers sounded particularly out of place here last week, it was for reasons musical rather than historical. Old-fashioned melody and harmony were out. Color, texture and sheer sonority were in. Living composers, Kaija Saariaho, a Finn, and Annie Gosfield, an American, were the toasts of the town.
The main event was the American premiere of Ms. Saariaho's first opera, ''L'Amour de Loin'' (''Love From Afar''), at the Santa Fe Opera on Saturday night, and the work lived up to its acclaim. The music is a marvelous fabric, full of nervous energy yet glacial in its movement. Planes and points of sustained sound are adorned with lyrical effusions, wisps of melody, flourishes and ''spins,'' as Ms. Saariaho calls certain circular figures.
The libretto, by the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, elaborates on the legend of Jaufré Rudel, a 12th-century French prince and troubadour. Having heard from a pilgrim about Clémence, a noble-hearted countess of Tripoli transplanted from France, Jaufré becomes obsessed with her, sight unseen. The Pilgrim shuttles back and forth, telling one of the other, until Jaufré travels to Tripoli himself, only to die in Clémence's arms. Clémence, after a crisis of faith, resolves to enter a convent, thus nourishing her own love from afar.
In George Tsypin's scenic design, the stage is submerged in water, several inches deep, to represent the Mediterranean, with the Pilgrim's boat resting above and a spiraling modernistic tower on either side. Though it all seemed a bit claustrophobic on the company's smallish stage, the Pilgrim's first journey was enhanced immeasurably by the lack of a rear stage wall: the darkening cloudy sky proved the most striking feature of the set.
The work makes much of duality -- sea and sky, home and exile, East and West -- but duality of an irreducible kind that mirrors rather than complements. ''Why is the sea blue?'' runs one exchange. ''Because it reflects the sky.'' ''Why is the sky blue?'' ''Because it reflects the sea.'' Small wonder that the lovers can never unite. In the same way Ms. Saariaho's masterly orchestration seems more to mirror the sinuous vocal lines (and vice versa) than to accompany, support or interact. Using her background in electronic music as well as electronics themselves, she provides a sort of sound environment, and a luxuriant one.
That Dawn Upshaw made a compelling Clémence should hardly have been surprising, since the role was written with her voice qualities in mind: the earthy naturalness as well as the unearthly purity. Gerald Finley was strong as Jaufré, and Monica Groop brought a dark, elemental quality to the role of the Pilgrim. Yet it was she who got to flower in the work's closest approach to old-fashioned melody, relaying Jaufré's song to Clémence.
Peter Sellars's purposefully static direction incorporated gestures familiar from his stagings of Bach cantatas and other works, and they mostly worked well. James F. Robert Spano conducted with supreme assurance, drawing a performance from the orchestra that might have seemed beyond its capacity on the basis of its work in two other, more conventional operas…
Joseph K So, Opera Canada, 22 December
The season at Santa Fe Opera ended on a high note with the American premiere of L'Amour de loin by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Written for three characters -- the troubadour Rudel (Canadian baritone Gerald Finley), his distant love Clemence (Dawn Upshaw) and a go-between, simply called The Pilgrim (Monica Groop) -- the story deals with such lofty and abstract notions as idealized love, obsession, alienation, loneliness, reality, illusion and finally, death and loss. Essentially static and lasting one hour 45 minutes with no intermission, the music, with its mesmerizing quality and wide spectrum of tone colors and sonorities, is distinctive without breaking new ground.
On the surface, it was not ideal fodder for an opera plot, but in the deft hands of Saariaho, librettist Amin Maalouf and director Peter Sellars, L'Amour proved an attractive and accessible work, although the ultramodern sets seemed strangely science-fiction-like and at odds with the medieval setting of the story. However, the vocal writing is unusually grateful for a contemporary work, and all three principals sang beautifully. Finley gave a highly musical, nuanced performance, coping well with the high tessitura and deeply moving in his death scene. Upshaw sang with her customary distinction, although her inherently sweet tone took away some of the dramatic bite intended by the composer. Conductor Robert Spano led the orchestra with vigor and sensitivity.
Maria Nockin, Operajaponica.org, 1 September 2002
http://www.operajaponica.org/archives/america/americaletterpast02.htm
L'amour de loin, the first opera by the Finnish composer, Kaija Saariaho, had its American premiere this summer in Santa Fe and the composer was present for the performance on August 9. The libretto is written in French by Beirut born Amin Maalouf whose 1993 novel, 'The rock of Tanios' received France's highest literary honor, the Prix de Goncourt.
The main character is the twelfth century troubador, Jaufré Rudel, who was famous for passionate love songs written to a woman he never actually met. Only after his death was she identified as the Countess of Tripoli. Maalouf's libretto changes the story slightly and the lovers do meet just before the end of the opera, but only for a brief moment, after which Jaufré dies, leaving his beloved countess to mourn her loss by taking the veil.
In Peter Sellars's production for Santa Fe Opera the entire stage was covered with a few inches of water. Circular staircases that were sometimes brightly lit with blues and greens for Europe and reds and oranges for North Africa graced either side of the proscenium and a small boat transported the pilgrim, mezzo, Monica Groop, and later Gerald Finley as Jaufré, from one side to the other. The chorus was placed just beyond the sides of the stage, men on Jaufré's side and women on the same side as Clémence, the countess.
It is the pilgrim who first tells the troubador that the woman of his dreams actually exists on the other side of the sea. She then re-crosses the water and tells Clémence of Jaufré's love for her in a particularly beautiful, ornamented piece that might be termed an aria. Groop is a singer with a beautifully even, well produced voice. Her intonation was accurate and her French was easily understood. Finley sang with a warm voice and great conviction which enabled him to catch the audience up in his passionate longing for his far away love. In Jaufré, Saariaho has created a tragic, mortally ill baritone lover who pulls at one's heartstrings when he dies shortly after finally reaching the object of his affection.
Dawn Upshaw is known for her work in modern opera and the role of Clémence was written for her. Looking every bit the seductive countess, she sang with lustrous, silvery tones and acted impressively. Her final scene was a tour de force as she struggled in the water trying to save the dying Jaufré and, failing that, railed against heaven before beginning a life of prayer.
This is an intriguing work that will, hopefully, be played in other venues. It will take more than one hearing for anyone to fully encompass it. Although it has only three characters and the plot is not very involved, Saariaho has combined acoustic and electronic music in an intriguing manner that makes it sustain interest for a complete evening. At this performance, conductor, Robert Spano, kept the lines of the soloists, the blended sounds of the chorus and this company's fabulous orchestral forces well integrated while bringing out the beautiful colors of this fascinating score.