When Love Leaves a Person All at Sea

For the Salzburg Festival this year, the themes are Troy and love, and their interconnection. On many nights the opera-goer is forced to acknowledge war in general--and the Trojan War in particular--as love’s death (Gluck’s “Iphigenia in Tauris”), destruction (Berlioz’s “The Trojans” or, at least, major obstacle (Mozart’s “Idomeneo”). But Sunday was devoted to love alone.

The day began with love up close, in a morning concert in which Zubin Mehta conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in its first attempt at Messiaen’s epic symphonic expose of love as sumptuous affection, hot sex and spiritual fulfillment--the “Turangalila Symphony.” In the evening, it was “Love From Afar,” which is the translation of the title of Kaija Saariaho’s mysterious new opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” and the most celebrated and newsworthy event of this summer’s festival.

The day also began badly. The gentlemen of the Vienna Philharmonic (it still has not made good on its promise, three years ago, to hire women, other than its harpist, who was not needed Sunday) played with condescending coolness. Their love is reserved for Mozart (the late G-Minor Symphony was also on the program and far more intricately nuanced). Thankfully, though, two regal and irresistible elderly ladies--the still astonishing pianist Yvonne Loriod (Messiaen’s widow) and her sister, ondes martenot player Jeanne Loriod, were the soloists in Messiaen’s gargantuan symphony, and they did not hesitate to show the stuffy male players a thing or two about the “Turangalila’s” ardor and beguilingly irregular rhythms.

The connection between Saariaho and Messiaen is not casual. The Finnish composer, who lives in Paris, is the master of ravishingly complex and multidimensional sonic textures, often created with the help of subtle electronic modulation of traditional instruments. Hers is a music one listens to not so much as dramatically organized events in time but, rather, as sonically compelling layers of sounds to be penetrated. She has said that it took Peter Sellars’ production of Messiaen’s static but spiritually satisfying opera “Saint Francis of Assisi,” which Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic here several years ago, to convince her that she too could write an opera.

“L’Amour de Loin” concerns the 12th century troubadour Jaufre Rudel of Aquitaine, who voyaged to find his distant love in Tripoli but fell ill at sea and died in her arms just as he arrived. An exceptional, poetic libretto written in French by the Lebanese novelist and essayist Amin Maalof (who, like the composer, is a Parisian emigre), adds a striking, operatic twist. Clemence, Jaufre’s ideal woman, loses her faith in a God who would take her lover from her. But she ultimately cannot live without either Lord or love and, in a religious transformation, she enters a convent and devotes herself to both of her now distant loves.

For Saariaho, another distant love appears to be America. The opera was made for a U.S. team. It was written for Dawn Upshaw as Clemence, Dwayne Croft as Jaufre and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as the Pilgrim, who serves as the lovers’ go-between. Kent Nagano, the newly appointed principal conductor of Los Angeles Opera, is the conductor; Sellars, the director. Los Angeles patron Betty Freeman helped pay the bills.

The production, designed by George Tsypin and stunningly lit by James F. Ingalls, in the Felsenreitschule, the Summer Riding School built against the rock of a mountain and remade as a small opera house, is exquisite and understated. The stage floor is a shallow pool of water.

The excellent Arnold Schoenberg Choir (the lovers’ companions) are lined against one wall. Jaufre and Clemence inhabit tall translucent towers on either side of the stage (he is lifted and lowered in a basket; she wanders up and down a spiral staircase). A graceful, smoke-gray, translucent boat transports the troubadour and Pilgrim across the divide. Light, rippling water, the transparent properties and the old Riding School’s rock arcades behind the stage offer a remarkable visual equivalent of Saariaho’s shimmering washes of sound. Ear and eye are enchanted.

That said, Saariaho is less successful in her vocal writing. She has an affinity for Upshaw’s voice (she has written two earlier works for the soprano, and it was Upshaw in the production of “St. Francis” that helped inspire her to undertake the project), and the opera ends with a brilliant, powerful scene of transformation for Clemence. Still, much of the other vocal writing appears, on first hearing, to lack personality. Jaufre is surprising as an earthy baritone rather than an ethereal tenor. The Pilgrim seems flat, although it was also the opera’s loss that Lieberson, who is undergoing medical treatment, had to cancel her appearances (as she had with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May and June). Dagmar Peckova was the satisfactory but not commanding replacement.

But it also takes time to penetrate Saariaho’s surfaces, and the delicious instrumental brew that keeps this opera intoxicating for two uninterrupted hours may have simply proved too much for a first-time listener. And Nagano’s careful and sensitive attentions lavished on the SWR Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg only made the voices seem less interesting, although the moments when Saariaho translates Jaufre’s medieval troubadour songs into her own idiom are wondrous exceptions.

All of that makes the impulse to hear “L’Amour de Loin” again, to dig into its many levels of poetry and sonic texture, strong. This is “Love” with legs; the production will travel to Paris and, in 2002, to Santa Fe, N.M., where it should look fantastic against the outdoor theater’s desert backdrop. The Salzburg Festival is already planning a revival as well. The lucky Austrians have already had an opportunity to listen to the opera on a national radio broadcast.