Les Troyens
Les Troyens is a French grand opera in five acts, running for about five hours, by Hector Berlioz. The libretto was written by Berlioz himself from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid; the score was composed between 1856 and 1858. Les Troyens is Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety. Under the title Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred with many cuts by Léon Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, at their theatre on the Place du Châtelet in Paris on 4 November 1863, with 21 repeat performances. The reduced versions run for about three hours. After decades of neglect, today the opera is considered by some music critics as one of the finest ever written.
Composition history
Berlioz began the libretto on 5 May 1856 and completed it toward the end of June 1856. He finished the full score on 12 April 1858. Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and he had admired Virgil since his childhood. The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a prime motivator to Berlioz to compose this opera.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.
Early performance history
Premiere of the second part
In his memoirs, Berlioz described in excruciating detail the intense frustrations he experienced in seeing the work performed. For five years, the Paris Opéra – the only suitable stage in Paris – vacillated. Finally, tired of waiting, he agreed to let Léon Carvalho, director of the smaller Théâtre Lyrique, mount a production of the second half of the opera with the title Les Troyens à Carthage. It consisted of Acts 3 to 5, redivided by Berlioz into five acts, to which he added an orchestral introduction and a prologue. As Berlioz noted bitterly, he agreed to let Carvalho do it "despite the manifest impossibility of his doing it properly. He had just obtained an annual subsidy of a hundred thousand francs from the government. Nonetheless the enterprise was beyond him. His theater was not large enough, his singers were not good enough, his chorus and orchestra were small and weak."Even with this truncated version of the opera, many compromises and cuts were made, some during rehearsals, and some during the run. The new second act was the Chasse Royale et Orage , an elaborate pantomime ballet with nymphs, sylvans and fauns, along with a chorus. Since the set change for this scene took nearly an hour, it was cut, despite the fact its staging had been greatly simplified with a painted waterfall backdrop rather than one with real water. Carvalho had originally planned to divert water from the nearby Seine, but during the rehearsals, a faulty switch nearly caused a disaster. The entries of the builders, sailors, and farm-workers, were omitted because Carvalho found them dull; likewise, the scene for Anna and Narbal and the second ballet . The sentries' duet was omitted, because Carvalho had found its "homely style... out of place in an epic work". Iopas's stanzas disappeared with Berlioz's approval, the singer De Quercy "charged with the part being incapable of singing them well." The duet between Didon and Énée was cut because, as Berlioz himself realized, "Madame Charton's voice was unequal to the vehemence of this scene, which took so much out of her that she would not have had the strength left to deliver the tremendous recitative Dieux immortels! il part! , the final aria , and the scene on the pyre." The "Song of Hylas" , which was "greatly liked at the early performances and was well sung", was cut while Berlioz was at home sick with bronchitis. The singer of the part, Edmond Cabel, was also performing in a revival of Félicien David's La perle du Brésil, and since his contract only required him to sing fifteen times per month, he would have to be paid an extra two hundred francs for each additional performance. Berlioz lamented: "If I am able to put on an adequate performance of a work of this scale and character I must be in absolute control of the theatre, as I am of the orchestra when I rehearse a symphony."
Even in its less than ideal form, the work made a profound impression. For example, Giacomo Meyerbeer attended 12 performances. Berlioz's son Louis attended every performance. A friend tried to console Berlioz 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.
Early concert performances of portions of the opera
After the premiere of the second part at the Théâtre Lyrique, portions of the opera were next presented in concert form. Two performances of La prise de Troie were given in Paris on the same day, 7 December 1879: one by the Concerts Pasdeloup at the Cirque d'Hiver with Anne Charton-Demeur as Cassandre, Stéphani as Énée, conducted by Ernest Reyer; and another by the Concerts Colonne at the Théâtre du Châtelet with Leslino as Cassandre, Piroia as Énée, conducted by Edouard Colonne. These were followed by two concerts in New York: the first, Act 2 of La prise de Troie, was performed in English on 6 May 1882 by Thomas's May Festival at the 7th Regiment Armory with Amalie Materna as Cassandre, Italo Campanini as Énée, conducted by Theodore Thomas; the second, Les Troyens à Carthage, was given in English on 26 February 1887 at Chickering Hall with Marie Gramm as Didon, Max Alvary as Énée, and possibly conducted by Frank Van der Stucken.First performance of both parts
The first staged performance of the whole opera took place only in 1890, 21 years after Berlioz's death. The first and second parts, in Berlioz's revised versions of three and five acts, were sung on two successive evenings, 6 and 7 December, in German at Großherzoglichen Hoftheater in Karlsruhe. This production was frequently revived over the succeeding eleven years and was sometimes given on a single day. The conductor, Felix Mottl, took his production to Mannheim in 1899 and conducted another production in Munich in 1908, which was revived in 1909. He rearranged some of the music for the Munich production, placing the "Royal Hunt and Storm" after the love duet, a change that "was to prove sadly influential." A production of both parts, with substantial cuts in the second part, was mounted in Nice in 1891.In subsequent years, according to Berlioz biographer David Cairns, the work was thought of as "a noble white elephant – something with beautiful things in it, but too long and supposedly full of dead wood. The kind of maltreatment it received in Paris as recently as last winter in a new production will, I'm sure, be a thing of the past."
Publication of the score
At the time of the 1863 production of Les Troyens à Carthage, Berlioz permitted the Parisian music editors Choudens et Cie to publish the vocal score as two separate operas. Only 15 copies of the first edition were printed, at the composer's expense. In this published score, he introduced a number of optional cuts which have often been adopted in subsequent productions. Berlioz complained bitterly of the cuts that he was more or less forced to allow at the 1863 Théâtre Lyrique premiere production, and his letters and memoirs are filled with the indignation that it caused him to "mutilate" his score.In his July 1867 will Berlioz lamented that Choudens had failed to meet their contractual obligation to engrave the full score and asked his executors to ensure the opera "be published without cuts, without modifications, without the least suppression of the text in sum exactly as it stands." In the late 1880s, after a lawsuit, the firm printed the full scores of La prise de Troie and Les Troyens à Carthage, orchestral parts, and an improved vocal score, but only the vocal score was sold. The remaining material was only made available for short-term hire.
In the early 20th century, the lack of accurate parts led musicologists W. J. Turner and Cecil Gray to plan a raid on the publisher's Paris office, even approaching the Parisian underworld for help.
In 1969, Bärenreiter Verlag of Kassel, Germany, first published the full score of Les Troyens in a critical edition containing all the compositional material left by Berlioz. The preparation of this critical edition was the work of Hugh Macdonald, whose Cambridge University doctoral dissertation this was. With its publication, as well as the release in 1970 of the first complete recording, "it was finally possible to study and produce the whole work, and to judge it on its own merits."
In early 2016 the Bibliothèque nationale de France bought the 1859 autograph vocal score, which included scenes cut for the orchestral autograph score; the manuscript also includes annotations by Pauline Viardot.
Later performance history
On 9 June 1892 the Paris Opéra-Comique staged Les Troyens à Carthage and witnessed a triumphant debut for the 17-year-old Marie Delna as Didon, with Stéphane Lafarge as Énée, conducted by Jules Danbé; these staged performances of Part 2 continued into the next year.In December 1906 the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels commenced a run of performances with the two halves on successive nights.
On 6 February 1920, the Théâtre des Arts in Rouen staged what was probably the first French performance of Les Troyens on one night, with only a few cuts, which had been sanctioned by the author. The Opéra in Paris had presented a production of La prise de Troie in 1899, and in 1919 mounted a production of Les Troyens à Carthage in Nîmes. Both parts were staged at the Opéra in one evening on 10 June 1921, with mise-en-scène by Merle-Forest, sets by René Piot and costumes by Dethomas. The cast included Marguerite Gonzategui, Lucy Isnardon, Jeanne Laval, Paul Franz, Édouard Rouard, and Armand Narçon, with Philippe Gaubert conducting. Marisa Ferrer sang Didon in the 1929 revival, with Germaine Lubin as Cassandre and Franz again as Énée. Georges Thill sang Énée in 1930. Lucienne Anduran was Didon in 1939, with Ferrer as Cassandre this time, José de Trévi as Énée, and Martial Singher as Chorèbe. Gaubert conducted all performances in Paris before the Second World War.
In the UK, concert performances of Les Troyens à Carthage took place in 1897 and 1928, then in 1935 a complete Les Troyens was performed by Glasgow Grand Opera Society, directed by Scottish composer Erik Chisholm.
Les Troyens was performed for the first time in London in a concert performance conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and broadcast at the BBC in 1947. His cast included Ferrer as both Didon and Cassandre, Jean Giraudeau as Énée and Charles Cambon as both Chorèbe and Narbal. An aircheck of this performance has been issued on CD. However, the 1957 production at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden conducted by Rafael Kubelík and directed by John Gielgud, has been described as "the first full staging in a single evening that even approximated the composer's original intentions". It was sung in English.