Les Troyens
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Les troyens (in English: The Trojans) is a French opera in five acts by Hector Berlioz. The libretto was written by Berlioz himself, based on Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. Written between 1856 and 1858, Les troyens was Berlioz's largest and most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he never saw the opera performed in its entirety during his lifetime. Under the title Les troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred, with many cuts, at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris, on 4 November 1863. It was repeated 21 times.
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[edit] Compositional History
Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and he admired Virgil since his childhood. In his memoirs, he gives a detailed account of how he embarked upon an opera based on The Aeneid:
I happened to be in Weimar with the Princess Wittgenstein, a devoted friend of Liszt's, a woman of rare intelligence and feeling, who has often comforted me in my fits of depression. Something led to me to speak of my admiration of Virgil and of an idea I had formed of a grand opera on the Shakespearean model, to be founded on the second and fourth books of The Aeneid. I added that I was too well acquainted with the necessary difficulties of such an undertaking ever to attempt it. "Indeed," replied the Princess, "your passion for Shakespeare, combined with your love of the antique, ought to produce something grand and uncommon. You must write this opera, or lyric poem, or whatsoever you choose to call it. You must begin it, and you must finish it." I continued my objections, but she would hear none of them. "Listen", said she. "If you are shirking the inevitable difficulties of the piece, if you are so weak as to be afraid to brave everything for Dido and Cassandra, never come to see me again, for I will not receive you." This was quite enough to decide me. On my return to Paris, I began the poem of Les Troyens. I attacked the score, and after three years and a half of corrections, changes, additions, etc., I finished it.
On 3 May 1861, Berlioz wrote in a letter: "I am sure that I have written a great work, greater and nobler than anything done hitherto." Elsewhere he wrote: "The principal merit of the work is, in my view, the truthfulness of the expression." For Berlioz, truthful representation of passion was the highest goal of a dramatic composer, and in this respect he felt he had equalled the achievements of Gluck and Mozart.
In his memoirs, Berlioz described in excruciating detail the intense frustrations he experienced in seeing the work performed. For five years (from 1858 to 1863), the Paris Opéra -- the only suitable stage in Paris -- vacillated. Finally, tired of waiting, he agreed to let a smaller theater, the Théâtre Lyrique, mount a production. However, the management, alarmed at the size, insisted he cut the work in two. It mounted only the second half, given the name Les Troyens à Carthage. Berlioz noted bitterly: "it was manifestly impossible for them to do it justice... the theater wasn't large enough, the singers insufficiently skilled, the chorus and orchestra inadequate." Many compromises and cuts were made and the resulting production "an imperfect" one. In view of all the defects, Berlioz lamented "to properly organize the performance of so great a work, I should have to be master of the theater as absolutely as I am master of the orchestra when rehearsing a symphony."
Even in its less than ideal form, the work made a profound impression; musicians like Meyerbeer attended night after night. A friend tried to console him for having endured so much in the mutilation of his magnum opus and pointed out that after the first night audiences were increasing. "See," he said encouragingly to Berlioz, "they are coming." "Yes," replied Berlioz, feeling old and worn out, "they are coming, but I am going."
Berlioz never saw the first two acts, later given the name La prise de Troie ['The Capture of Troy], performed. The first five-act performance of the "complete" Les troyens, spread over two nights, only took place at Karlsruhe in 1890, 21 years after Berlioz's death. In subsequent years, wrote British Berlioz biographer David Cairns, the work was thought of as "a great sprawling white elephant, product of declining creative vitality, beautiful in patches but fatally uneven and quite unstagable——apart from anything else, because of its length."
[edit] Publication
Berlioz himself arranged for the entire score to be published by the prominent Parisian music editors, Choudens et Cie. In this published score, sanctioned by his authority, he introduced a number of optional cuts which have often been adopted in subsequent productions. Berlioz complained bitterly (he was a legendary complainer) of the cuts that he was more-or-less forced to allow at the 1863 Théâtre Lyrique première production, and his letters and mémoires are filled with the indignation that it caused him to "mutilate" his score. Nevertheless, all the optional omissions (mostly choral repetitions) that he sanctioned in the Choudens score make perfect dramatic sense, which suggests that he understood and tacitly aknowledged the excentric and unorthodox nature of his dramaturgy, no matter how much he loved the music he had composed.
In 1969, Bärenreiter Verlag of Kassel, Germany, published a Critical Edition of Les troyens, containing all the compositional material left by Berlioz. The preparation of this criticial edition was the work of Hugh Macdonald, whose Cambridge University doctoral dissertation this was.[1] The tendency since then has been to perform the opera complete. The published score is now part of the New Berlioz Complete Edition of Bärenreiter.
[edit] Subsequent Performance History
While it performed both "halves" of the unwillingly severed work at various times between 1899 and 1919, the Grand Opéra in Paris, première scène lyrique of the French-speaking world, did not produce the complete Les troyens, in one evening as Berlioz had conceived it, until 10 June 1921, in a brilliant mise-en-scène by Merle-Forest with sets by René Piot and costumes by Dethomas, Philippe Gaubert conducting.
The cast included Marguerite Gonzategui as Didon, Lucy Isnardon as Cassandre, Jeanne Laval as Anna, the legendary tenor Paul Franz as Énée, Édouard Rouard as Chorèbe, and Armand Narcon as Narbal.
Marisa Ferrer, who would later sing the part under Sir Thomas Beecham in London, sang Didon in the 1929 revival, with the great dramatic soprano Germaine Lubin as Cassandre and again Franz as Énée. The immortal Georges Thill sang Énée in 1930.
Lucienne Anduran was Didon in the 1939 revival, with Ferrer as Cassandre this time, José de Trévi as a lightweight Énée, and Martial Singher, later a long-time favourite at the Metropolitan Opera as Chorèbe. Gaubert conducted all performances before the Second World War.
The Paris Opéra gave a new production of the complete Les troyens on March 17, 1961, directed by Margherita Wallmann, with sets and costumes by Piero Zuffi. It was conducted by Pierre Dervaux. The beloved Régine Crespin appeared as Didon, with Geneviève Serrès as Cassandre, Jacqueline Broudeur as Anna, Guy Chauvet as Énée, Robert Massard as Chorèbe and Georges Vaillant as Narbal.
Air-checks are extant of performances by this cast from broadcasts made by the French National Radio. Several of these artists, in particular Mme Crespin and M Chauvet, participated in a set of extended highlights commercially recorded by EMI in 1965, Georges Prêtre conducting.
It is important to give these details because several English critics, and their American echoes, seem to be under the delusional impression that somehow the first performance of the complete Les troyens, "more or less as Berlioz conceived it" occurred at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1957, conducted by Rafael Kubelík. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Paris Opéra had given the complete Les troyens in one evening, "more or less as Berlioz conceived it", 36 years before it was ever staged at Covent Garden.
In fact the distinction of performing Les troyens for the first time in London belongs to Sir Thomas Beecham, who led a concert performance of the complete opera broadcast over the BBC in 1947. His cast included the statuesque Marisa Ferrer, a remarkable exponent of Gallic declamation with a lustrous spinto soprano voice, as both Didon and Cassandre, parts she had perfomed in Paris at the Opéra as we have seen. A lightweight but highly distinguished lyric tenor, Jean Giraudoux, was Sir Thomas' Énée, and a Paris stalwart, the oaken-voice baritone Charles Cambon, sang both Chorèbe (a role he had sung in Paris as part of the alternate 1929 cast) and Narbal. An excellent aircheck of this performance exists and has been issued on CD.
The musical details and performing editions of Les troyens used at various productions at the Paris Opéra and by Sir Thomas Beecham and by Raphael Kubelík in London were all the same: all used the orchestral and choral parts rented out by Choudens et Cie. of Paris, the only then available.
The sheet music made available by Bärenreiter from its Critical Edition, first published in 1969, was used by Colin Davis in his 1969 Covent Garden production, recorded by Philips.
Les troyens was staged again in 1990 for the opening of the new Bastille Opéra in Paris. It was a partial success, because the new theatre could not be quite ready on opening night, which caused much trouble during rehearsals. The performance had several cuts, authorised, willingly or not, by Berlioz, including some dances in the third act.
To mark the bicentenary of Berlioz's birth in 2003, Les troyens was revived in productions at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris (conducted by John Eliot Gardiner), Amsterdam (conducted by Edo de Waart), and at the Metropolitan Opera (with the noted American mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson as Dido).
[edit] Summation
Only knowing the work from a piano score (a deficiency he could easily have corrected by making a simple day trip to the Paris Opéra,) the British critic W.J. Turner declared that Les troyens was "the greatest opera ever written" in his 1934 book on Berlioz, much preferring it to the vastly more popular works of Richard Wagner. American critic B.H. Haggin heard in the work Berlioz' "arrestingly individual musical mind operating in, and commanding attention with, the use of the [Berlioz] idiom with assured mastery and complete adequacy to the text's every demand". David Cairns described the work as "an opera of visionary beauty and splendor, compelling in its epic sweep, fascinating in the variety of its musical invention... it recaptures the tragic spirit and climate of the ancient world." Hugh Macdonald said of it:
In the history of French music, Les Troyens stands out as a grand opera that avoided the shallow glamour of Meyerbeer and Halevy, but therefore paid the price of long neglect. In our own time the opera has finally come to be seen as one of the greatest operas of the 19th century. There are several recordings of the work, and it is performed with increasing frequency.
[edit] Characters
- Cassandre (Cassandra) - Trojan prophetess daughter of Priam (mezzo-soprano)
- Chorèbe (Choroebus) - a young prince from Asia - betrothed to Cassandra (baritone)
- Énée (Aeneas) - Trojan hero - son of Venus and Anchises (tenor)
- Didon (Dido) - Queen of Carthage - widow of Sychaeus - prince of Tyre (mezzo-soprano)
- Anna - sister of Dido (contralto)
- Narbal - minister to Dido (bass)
- Iopas - Tyrian poet at Dido's court (tenor)
- Hylas - a young Phrygian sailor (tenor)
- Panthée (Panthus) - Trojan priest - friend of Aeneas (bass)
- Ascagne (Ascanius) - son of Aeneas (soprano)
- L'ombre d'Hector (Hector's Shade) - Trojan hero, son of Priam (tenor)
- Priam - King of Troy (bass)
- Hécube (Hecuba) - his wife (mezzo-soprano)
- Sinon - a Greek spy (tenor)
- Two Trojan Soldiers, basses
- A Greek Captain (bass)
- Mercure (Mercury) (bass)
- Hélénus (Helenus) - a Trojan priest, son of Priam (tenor)
- A Priest of Pluto (bass)
- Polyxène (Polyxena) - sister of Cassandra (soprano)
- Andromaque (Andromache) - widow of Hector (silent role)
- Astyanax - her son (silent role)
[edit] References
- ^ Hugh John Macdonald, "A Critical Edition of Berlioz's Les Troyens". Ph.D., Musicology, Cambridge University, 1968. 4 vols., 1220 pages.
Wolff, Stéphane: L' OPERA au Palais Garnier, 1875-1962. Les oeuvres. Les Interprètes. Paris, L' Entracte, 1962
