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''L’Amour de loin'' (''Love from Afar'') is the first opera by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho from a five act French libretto by Amin Maalouf. The opera was given its world premiere performance on 15 August 2000 at the Salzburg Festival and its US premiere on 31 July 2002 at the Santa Fe Opera. Saariaho, living in Paris since 1982, had become familiar in 1993 with ''La vida breve'' by one of the first great troubadours of the 12th century, Jaufré Rudel. Prior to that she had seen a Peter Sellars’ staging of Messiaen’s opera, ''Saint-François d'Assise'' at the 1992 Salzburg Festival, but did not think that she was capable of writing one. However, the production convinced her of the possibility of transforming the poem into an opera, given Sellars’ sensibility and talents: “If that is an opera, then I can write one" she is quoted as saying.〔Anthony Tommasini, “A Prince Idealizes His Love From Afar”, ''New York Times'', 17 August 2000〕 The idea for an opera on this subject was to evolve over the following seven or eight years. After she was so taken by seeing the original manuscripts of the story of Jaufré (the love-struck young poet who wrote to a faraway lover in Tripoli, Lebanon), she set his poem to music as ''Lonh'' in 1996, a score for soprano and electronic instruments. The sensibilities and backgrounds of both Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese-French author and journalist also living in Paris, and Saariaho – both voluntary exiles - brought them together to collaborate 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”.〔Philip Huscher, “The Land Where I Was Born”, ''Santa Fe Opera 2002 Festival'' program book〕 Having secured an advance commitment from the Salzburg Festival to stage the opera, Saariaho set about writing ''L'Amour de loin'' in 1999. Gerard Mortier, intendant of the Salzburg Festival, was at the origin of this project which included the participation of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden-Freiburg, an ensemble well known for its excellence in contemporary music. ''L'Amour de loin'' received the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2003. ==Performance history== The opera's first production became a joint commission by the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and the Santa Fe Opera in addition to Salzburg. Peter Sellars directed the original production, as well as several later ones. Additional productions were staged at Stadttheater Bern, Switzerland (December 2001 onward), in Darmstadt, Germany in the spring of 2003, and at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki in 2004. In 2005, Jan Latham-Koenig conducted two concert performances as part of the Al Bustan International Festival of Music and the Arts in Beirut. In 2008, the Bergen International Festival in Bergen, Norway opened with a production by the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, produced by Bergen National Opera (previously Den Nye Opera). They created an animated film in place of a stage setting.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Berlin Enthusiasm for Festival Opera )〕〔 〕 The English National Opera presented a new production in July 2009 at the London Coliseum. The Canadian Opera Company presented a co-production with English National Opera and Vlaamse Opera in February 2012.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Love from Afar )〕 The Landestheater Linz presented a new production in 2015. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「L'Amour de loin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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