Modernist Singing Of Troubadour Tales

French troubadour legends are the basis of George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” and Kaija Saariaho’s “L’Amour de Loin,” two outstanding new operas. Both were written by composers who, though not French themselves, are part of the color-obsessed lineage of French music snaking back through Messiaen to Debussy.

“Written on Skin” by Mr. Benjamin, a British composer who studied with Messiaen, had its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2012 and has been performed in the United States only in a concert version (at Tanglewood last August). Intensely dramatic, with moments of shocking violence and erotic lyricism as well as a twinkling of humor, it’s an opera audiences should demand to see onstage.

The story, told in a brilliant libretto by Martin Crimp, centers on a powerful medieval landowner and his illiterate young wife. With the arrival of a boy skilled in the art of illumination (in the original tale, he was a troubadour), the wife discovers and asserts her sexual powers — but pays dearly for it. Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Crimp set the story within an all-knowing, time-transcending framework (involving angels and the occasional reference to parking lots and air miles) that fix the specificity of the medieval setting while heightening its allegorical powers.

There is allegory, too, in “L’Amour de Loin” (“Love From Afar”) by Ms. Saariaho, a Finn who has made her home in Paris for the past three decades, but here it acts as a door to the deep recesses of the psyche, rather than into history. The opera, which has met with popular acclaim in a number of productions across Europe as well as at Santa Fe since its premiere in 2000, retells the (surely apocryphal) story of the French troubadour Jaufre Rudel (a historical figure). He falls in love with Clémence, a Levantine princess he hears about in the account of a pilgrim. In Tripoli, the pilgrim relates the troubadour’s love to Clémence and she, too, finds herself drawn to the distant admirer. But as Jaufre sets sail for his beloved, he is consumed by sickening doubt. He’s at the brink of death by the time he reaches the shore, and Clémence bestows her kiss on a dying man.

Ms. Saariaho’s dreamlike score combines dazzling surface shimmer with powerful depth. The poetic libretto by Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese author of historical fiction, creates a psychologically astute study of love as an act of reflection, both in the sense of mirroring and self-knowledge. The pilgrim embodies something profound about our love for opera: We want the singers to speak for us and validate our own conflicted feelings about love and death through the heightened, gloriously preposterous language that is opera.

Both operas are long-distance love affairs with the past, consumed in richly hued modern music. But it’s not the music of the past that Mr. Benjamin and Ms. Saariaho pay homage to — though quotations from medieval troubadour songs attributed to Jaufre are skillfully woven into “L’Amour de Loin” — but a time when music and art were central to storytelling, courtship and self-knowledge. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM