Kaija Saariaho

Listening Guide. The Exotic Other. Kaija Saariaho, L'Amour de loin (Love from a Distance). Act 1 scene 2. The Pilgrim: "Peut-être bien qu'elle n'existe pas."

In this scene from Saariaho’s opera from 2000, recently produced by the Metropolitan Opera in 2016, the 12th-century troubadour Prince of Blaye, Jaufré Rudel (baritone)—suffering from ennui and beset by yearning for something other than his life of pleasure—encounters the Pilgrim (mezzo-soprano), who tells him that there may indeed exist an exotic beloved in a faraway land. The Pilgrim begins singing with waves of crashing timbres combined with high sustained pitches in the strings, which gives way later to melodic whorls in solo woodwind instruments, before the skeptical male chorus (the prince’s comrades) joins in.

This is not Saariaho’s first excursion into exotic subject matter (e.g. Six Japanese Gardens for percussion and electronics, 1994). Here, Saariaho sonifies the common trope of the ethereal other who is held in musical, mythical suspense (the sustained pitches), expressing the mesmerized state of those who behold the exotic beloved. The dramatic orchestration vividly expresses the devastating allure of the beloved as portrayed by the Pilgrim and imagined by the prince.