 
That is what makes love so wonderful |
That is what makes love so wonderful
Tristan und Isolde and L'amour de loin
Ernst Bloch once said that like everything mythical, love has already
been dreamed seven times. Whereas history allocated reason to man and
feeling to woman, the defence of love in art, philosophy, music and literature
has often proved to be an anti-social act. Seen in this way love appears
to be the scandal of two stars that disregard the prescribed law of their
orbit in order to encounter each other absent-mindedly in space.
That is indeed a highly romantic view of love, accompanied by break-up
and downfall, and yet it is deeply human. For a society where there is
no longer any love, is not a humane society any more. Whatever love may
be: irredeemable promise or the principle of self experience reflected
in the eyes of man and woman; whether it be blind or seeing; fatal infection
or sensuous care; chaos or deliverance; truth or madness; restorer of
goodness or disaster - love and force react like fire and water and are
incompatible. Therein lies all the dialectic of love as the psychological
birthplace of what is new.
The Salzburg Festival is this year presenting two stories set in the Middle
Ages showing two variations of love - Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and
the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho's opera L'amour de loin, commissioned
by the Festival for this season. On the one hand we have the couple Tristan
and Isolde, their love as an act of resistance and a dangerous dream of
flying in Utopian spheres, enmeshed by a hostile social network that cannot
support them.
On the other hand we have a completely different couple, the Provençale
troubadour Jaufré Rudel and faraway in the Orient, in Tripoli, his Clémence,
whom he loves but does not know. Amin Maalouf has written the libretto
for this opera, which freely refers back to the life and songs of the
Provençale troubadour from the 12th century, and portrays the story of
a fairytale-like distant love.
A man loves a woman whom he does not know
Little or nothing is known about the historic figure of Jaufré Rudel
(12th century), whose songs inspired the Finnish composer and the Libanese
librettist Amin Maalouf. Jaufré belonged to the second generation of troubadours,
became famous through his "faraway love" (amor de lonh) for a woman he
had never seen but worshipped from afar and sang about in six songs -
these still exist and three melodies have been handed down in French sources.
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| George Tsypin's stage design for L'amour de loin |
Jaufré probably served as a vassal to Count Angoulème; he might have
been a pupil of the first troubadour known by name, Guillaume IX of Poitiers
(1071-1126) and it is assumed that he accompanied the Count of Toulouse
in 1147 on the crusade to the Holy Land where he died.
However, this is not intended to be a historical view, attempting to sound
out reality, of two couples in love long ago in the Middle Ages. It seems
rather more to be as if the love designs of both operas cross each other
along with their transformations and irritations at the moment when all
desire to be together has to be reflected in a distant time, "because
no one ever succeeded in finding the path again that was lost at the end
of childhood" (André Breton). Nevertheless, where the myth reflects on
signs of history and projects them onto the present, that is where in
both love operas the innocent view of love and all its narratives of origin
come to an end. Therefore Kaija Saariaho's and Amin Maalouf's love opera
is overshadowed by the secret trauma of failed life designs which are
reflected in the courtly love doctrine of the troubadour, in the paradox
interplay of imagined fulfilment and gratified renunciation, of unresolved
erotic tensions and resignation.
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| Peter Sellars, Gerard Mortier, Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf in the Felsenreitschule, Photo: PSF |
To love and risk the impossible
A deep longing to be moved permeates Clémence and Rudel, and yet neither fears anything so much as waking up from the dream which ultimately dissolves in death and loneliness. Love that betrays life and becomes an ally of death - its story is formed in Kaija Saariaho's opera as a contrasting game of fantasy, transcending time and space, with visions of the luxuriant Orient and barren Occident embedded in a great lyrical symphony of hope and renunciation, in a fatal debacle between fearful vacillation and the desire for fulfilment.
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| Tristan und Isolde, stage design by Eduardo Arroyo, Photo: Ruth Walz |
The desire remains to measure anew the relationship between love and society, even if it is only in the artificial space of music-theatre. What is still fascinating and at the same time irritating about Wagner's understanding of the Middle Ages, haunted by the trauma of unsuccessful social change after the failed revolution of 1848, is that in Tristan he so radically juxtaposed the old and the new, building up new elements from the old in order to go against the tide of his time. His Tristan, "the draft of an imagination", as Wagner wrote to Liszt, is "the toilsome and heavy work of creating a world that does not exist". For Wagner to love and risk the impossible meant wanting to read into the future - "... without end, never waking, never fearing, embraced namelessly in love, given entirely to each other, living only in our love!" Tristan's words are as bold as the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (a synthesis of all the arts) which the composer placed at the centre of the restricted bourgeois 19th century society. This pragmatic centre, anything but ideal and reasonable, incompatible with the artistic messages that Wagner was constantly emitting, the unbridled myth of absolute love that he thought he would find in Gottfried von Strassburg's unfinished epic poem, can perhaps only be tolerated nowadays as a staged work of art, as transient intoxication, until the curtain falls.
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| Photo: Jean Baudrillard, from In the horizon of the object |
This is what makes the love with its strange longing for an imaginary Middle Age so wonderful and so incompatible. In such stories of love, memory swims against the current of reality to another (possible) future.