In this age of internet dating, when strangers build up idealised pictures of each other in cyberspace before plucking up the courage to have that illusion-shattering first (and possibly last) meeting, the medieval concept of courtly love is strangely topical again.

Perhaps people should be taking their blind dates to an opera recounting a 12th-century troubadour’s love for a countess whom he has never met — especially since English National Opera is charging only £20 for any seat in the Coliseum. So (thinking practically) they won’t have wasted too much money if the date turns out to be disastrous.

That’s not quite the case in Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de loin (Love from Afar), though the piece hardly ends happily — what with the troubadour dying of emotional exhaustion and the countess railing against God for his cruelty and then banishing herself to a convent. In Amin Maalouf’s libretto, Jaufré Rudel’s medieval chronicle La Vida breve is retold with only three characters: Roderick Williams’s hopeless fantasist troubadour Jaufré, Joan Rodgers’s alluring but self-centred Countess, and Faith Sherman’s Pilgrim, the pragmatic traveller who persuades Jaufré to cross the Mediterranean to meet the woman whom he has idolised from the safety of another continent.

As a storyline it’s little more than a grain of sand, but there’s a world of fluctuating emotions in Maalouf’s words and Saariaho’s dream-like score, with its Middle Eastern modes mixed with ethereal electronics, beautifully expressive vocal lines (often melding into speech), slow swirls of mushy, spectral harmonies, languid pedal-points, Debussy-like flute melismas and impressionistic orchestration, with tinkly bells often prominent. What finally emerges is the message that true love is won only by selflessness and sacrifice — which is presumably why so many people, like the troubadour, are terrified of renouncing distanced adoration for unconditional commitment.

There’s a gentleness and mysterious beauty about the Finn’s music, sensitively captured by Edward Gardner and the ENO orchestra, which explains why L’Amour has had so many performances since its premiere in 2000. But I’m not sure whether, for this first British production, it is well served by Daniele Finzi Pasca’s hyperactive staging. Pasca comes from the pretentious end of the circus world, and when acrobats aren’t whirling through the air, or shadow-puppet operatives cutely ingratiating themselves with the audience, he’s constantly raising and lowering Jean Rabasse’s Persian-style grilles, or sending vast sheets of muslin floating down from the circle, or fiddling with the lights, or projecting video of the sea. I counted six scene changes in the first five minutes.

Some stage pictures are picturesque. But the production seems far too busy for such a contemplative piece, especially when the music is so well sung and the text so clearly enunciated. It’s as if Pasca doesn’t trust the opera to cast its own spell. In which case, why direct it?

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