L'Amour de loin (Love from Afar) is an opera in five acts with music by Kaija Saariaho and a French-language libretto by Amin Maalouf.

The sensibilities and backgrounds of both Maalouf, a Lebanese-French author and journalist also living in Paris, and Saariaho – both voluntary exiles – brought them together 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".

[2] Having secured an advance commitment from Salzburg Festival director Gerard Mortier to stage the opera, Saariaho began L'Amour de loin in 1999.

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.

The Pilgrim returns to Tripoli, meets Clémence, and tells her that, in France, a prince-troubadour extols her in his songs, calling her his "love from afar".

Second Scene Clémence seems to prefer that their relationship remain distant as she is reluctant to live constantly waiting and does not want to suffer.

John Allison argued that it “combines with a poetic libretto by Lebanese-born writer Armin Maalouf to exquisite effect.

The result is not, it must be said, the most dramatic opera, but then neither is Pelléas or Tristan und Isolde, pieces in which music works powerfully on the imagination.”[11] James Jorden of the Observer wrote that the score “evokes the distance between the loves with downcast modal melodies and a vast, impressionistic palette of soundscapes evoking the sea”, but was more critical of the vocal writing, arguing that Maalouf's French text has “little sense of individualized emotion.”[12] The score was described as “lushly beautiful” in The New York Times.

[13] In a 2019 poll of critics of The Guardian, L’Amour de loin was ranked the sixth greatest classical music work of the 21st century.