28 February 2005

BEIRUT: The Al-Bustan Festival continued its exploration of contemporary European music over the weekend with two concert performances of the opera "L'Amour de Loin" ("The Love from Afar"). A hybrid work, it was composed by Finland's Kaija Saariaho with a libretto by Amin Maalouf - otherwise known as Lebanon's best-known expatriate novelist.

Commissioned for the Salzburg Festival's 2000 season, "L'Amour de Loin" is an enjoyable but puzzling and ultimately somewhat irritating piece. The music is lovely and challenging but it's difficult to discern its relationship to the libretto and thus what the composers' intentions were. This uncertainty makes it difficult to tell whether the piece is a success or not.

"L'Amour de Loin" is based upon an archetypal story of "courtly love" - a convention (common to both the medieval European troubadours and Arabic jahiliyya poetry) that sees the poet spin passionate love lyrics to a woman he knows he will never possess, whether for reason of station or physical distance.

The "true story" at the root of the opera revolves round a 12th-century Proven?al troubadour, Prince Jaufre Rudel de Blaye. It seems Rudel fell in love with Clemence, Countess of the Crusader Principality of Tripoli, without ever having met the woman. In 1147 he went so far as to join the Second Crusade just to meet Clemence and died shortly thereafter. It seems that a small corpus of Jaufre's poems of unrequited love still survive.

The story has all the stuff of romantic legend and several artists, including 19th-century English poet Robert Browning, re-worked the story before Maalouf got his hands on it.

In Maalouf's version, Rudel is a young man bored with a life of carousing, who yearns a higher order of love for a woman he is content to acknowledge doesn't actually exist. His friends (here a male chorus) quite sensibly ridicule this foolishness. Then a pilgrim just returned from Tripoli informs Rudel that the woman he's seeking actually does exist and proceeds to depict her - brave but shy, strong but delicate, beautiful but not arrogant, noble but not proud, devout but not pious, and so forth. In his present state of self-indulgence, the prince cannot help but become obsessed with her.

The second act introduces the audience to the Countess of Tripoli - a young woman bored of small-town Trablous and yearning for the bright lights of Toulouse, where she was born. The pilgrim informs her of Rudel's existence and the fact that he's taken to composing love songs to her. She is first offended then intrigued.

The pilgrim returns to Blaye to tell Rudel about Clemence's response to the news of his love for her, and the prince decides he must meet her himself. He boards a ship with the pilgrim but feels ambivalent at the prospect of meeting the woman of his fantasies.

The pilgrim visits Clemence to inform her that Rudel's ship has moored at the harbour but that the prince has fallen ill en route and will not survive the night. She rushes to his stretcher. The two declare their love for each other and the prince promptly expires.

Clemence blames herself for his death and rails against god for allowing him to die. The chorus warns her not to be so foolish as to tempt god's wrath. She declares that she will retire to a convent. The opera ends with Clemence declaring her undying love to "Love" "Goodness" "Forgiveness" and "Passion," "Now it is you who is far away: can you still hear my prayer?"

Maalouf's text seems to cultivate ambiguity as to whether the countess is talking to god here or the departed Rudel. With the music's dying fall, it is uncertain which of two grossly inflated gestures she has chosen - returning the prince's gesture of courtly love for the rest of her life or (even more inexplicably) embarking upon a career of divine love a la John Donne.

Such equivocation is unnecessary when it comes to the performance. The three principal voices all comported themselves competently. Jacques Imbrailo (Rudel) and Nicola Stonehouse (the pilgrim) both have fine lyric voices. They conveyed little in the way of characterization but, to be fair, the performance was staged as an oratorio, not an opera. That said, the dramatic voice of Malin Christensson (Clemence) is so expressive - particularly given the obscure blandness of her character - that you wish she had the opportunity to bring the character to life in a proper performance of the role.

The supporting players were excellent. The Young Janacek Orchestra, under the baton of Jan Latham-Koenig, made a crisp and evocative rendering of Saariaho's score. The Choir of the National Conservatoire of Strasbourg, here divided into male and female choruses, contributed an additional layer of nuance to the opera's aural complexity, augmenting the balance created by the orchestra.

Saariaho's score is easily the most intriguing thing about the opera. She has eschewed the temptations of minimalism in favor of a busy, swirling setting that is as gently discordant as anything thrown up in the late-20th century canon.

Given the vaguely maritime theme, it's tempting to imagine this swelling soundscape, constantly shifting anti-melodic against itself, is meant to evoke the motion of the sea. String and brass sections provide the body of the movement, while furtive interjections of woodwind and percussion - flute, oboe, piano, drum, triangle - are intermittently thrown up by the current.

The impression is reinforced by the fact that the score bears little relation to the situation rendered in the libretto. In fact it plays no obvious illustrative role vis-a-vis the action - except for one point in the final act when, with a lone pipe and death rattle, the score flirts with cliche. Rather Saariaho's music moves in apparent indifference to Maalouf's words.

At a structural level the integration of the libretto is fine. "L'Amour de Loin" is not an opera of grand arias but of recitative - hardly without precedent - and the composer's use of the twin choruses is reminiscent of the ancient Greek chorus. The problem is in the book itself.

Some assert that critics looking to opera for the mainstays of good theatre (writing and acting, for example) are deluding themselves. On the other hand you need only go as far as Peter Brook's excellent production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" to find it's possible to combine great writing, acting and music.

The francophones in the audience claimed to adore the language of Maalouf's libretto. Compared to the score, however, the subject matter of this opera is remarkably hackneyed and uninteresting - particularly for one of Maalouf's profile - and its relationship to the score is difficult to discern.

The libretto's sentiments are so facile against the score's intensity and drama that one is tempted to speculate that the intention is baldly commercial - to give the audience something sentimental to clasp while the music takes them in altogether more progressive directions.

Alternatively you may wonder whether the intended effect of this dialogue between score and libretto is comic - a self-conscious "send up" of the story's sentimentality. Failing this, it's possible the general lack of communication between words and music is meant to convey how trifling the human story is against the profound music of the spheres.

If this was the intent it could be commended, were it not for the ambiguous prayfulness that concludes the piece. Some might suggest there's altogether too much of that going on already.