| L'Amour de loin | |
|---|---|
| Opera by Kaija Saariaho | |
 | |
| Translation | Love from Afar |
| Librettist | Amin Maalouf |
| Language | French |
| Premiere | 15 August 2000 |
L'Amour de loin (Love from Afar) is an opera in five acts with music by Kaija Saariaho and a French-language libretto by Amin Maalouf. The opera received its world premiere performance on 15 August 2000 at the Salzburg Festival.
Saariaho, living in Paris since 1982, had become familiar in 1993 with La vida breve by one of the first great 12th-century troubadours, Jaufré Rudel. She did not think she was capable of writing an opera until she saw Peter Sellars's staging of Messiaen’s opera Saint François d'Assise at the 1992 Salzburg Festival. "If that is an opera, then I can write one", she has said she thought.[1]
Her idea for the opera evolved over the following seven or eight years. She first set a Jaufré poem to music in Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronic instruments.
The sensibilities and backgrounds of both Maalouf, a Lebanese-French author and journalist also living in Paris, and Saariaho – both voluntary exiles – brought them together to turn "a seemingly simple story into a complex story very simply told...[and with] the straightforward trajectory of its plot, L’Amour de loin turns anxiously around deeper themes – obsession and devotion, reality and illusion, the loneliness of the artist, the need to belong".[2]
Having secured an advance commitment from Salzburg Festival director Gerard Mortier to stage the opera, Saariaho began L'Amour de loin in 1999. The SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden-Freiburg, an ensemble well known for its excellence in contemporary music, was also on board.
L'Amour de loin received the 2003 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
- ^ Tommasini, Anthony (17 August 2000). "A Prince Idealizes His Love From Afar". The New York Times.
- ^ Philip Huscher, "The Land Where I Was Born", Santa Fe Opera 2002 Festival program book