The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (53 page)

Because this work was not truly conceived for the stage, producers have used it as an excuse for all sorts of extravagant visual fantasies of mayhem and apocalypse, many of them using film or video elements.
Concert performances, in which the mind’s eye is allowed to realize its own individual landscapes, are probably more cost-effective and aesthetically satisfying.

Recording

CD: Nicolai Gedda (Faust); Colin Davis (cond.).
Philips 416 395 2

DVD: Paul Groves (Faust); Sylvain Cambreling (cond.).
Salzburg Festival production.
Arthaus Musik 003

Les
Troyens
(
The
Trojans
)

Two parts and five acts. First performed Paris, 1863 (incomplete). Libretto by the composer

Inspired by Virgil’s
Aeneid
and the operas of Gluck,
Les
Troyens
is an enormously ambitious work containing four hours of music.
In Berlioz’s lifetime, only a truncated version of the second half was ever performed and the first truly complete staging did not take place until 1969.

Plot

Part
One:
La
Prise
de
Troie
(
The
Capture
of
Troy
)

After years of a futile siege, the Greeks have apparently left their camp outside Troy, leaving behind only a large wooden horse.
The Trojans are overjoyed, but King Priam’s daughter Cassandra (Cassandre) prophesies doom.
Her lover Chorebus (Chorebe) fails to console her.
Celebrations are interrupted by Andromache, the grieving widow of Prince Hector, a casualty of war, and by news from Prince Aeneas (Enée) that a priest who threw a javelin into the wooden horse’s flank has been devoured by two serpents.
Aeneas thinks that the goddess Athena needs to be appeased, so the horse is dragged into her temple within the city walls.

Hector’s ghost appears to Aeneas and tells him that Troy has fallen – Greek soldiers have disgorged from the belly of the wooden horse and set fire to the city.
Hector commands Aeneas to leave Troy with his son Ascanius (Ascagne) and establish a new empire in Italy.
In the Temple of Vesta, Cassandra discovers that Aeneas has fled and Chorebus has been killed in the fighting.
Fired by a vision of the glory awaiting the Trojans in Italy, Cassandra and the temple virgins choose death rather than dishonour at the hands of the marauding Greeks.

Part
Two:
Les
Troyens
à
Carthage
(
The
Trojans
at
Carthage
)

In Carthage, a new colony founded by fugitives from Tyre, citizens gather to hail the widowed Queen Dido (Didon) and celebrate their prosperity – threatened only by the king of neighbouring Numidia, who claims Dido’s hand and Carthaginian territory.
The Trojan fleet is blown to the shores of Carthage.
Dido offers generous hospitality, remembering her own experiences as a refugee.
Aeneas disguises himself and allows his son Ascanius to speak for the Trojans, but he throws off his disguise when Dido’s minister Narbal announces that the Numidians have invaded and announces that he is ready to fight in Carthage’s defence.

An orchestral interlude, the ‘Royal Hunt and the Storm’, depicts how Dido and Aeneas fall in love after they are forced to shelter in a cave when a storm interrupts their hunt.
Back
at the court, Carthage celebrates the success of Aeneas’s war against the Numidians.
After Dido and Aeneas rejoice in their mutual love, the god Mercury reminds Aeneas of his duty to establish a new empire in Italy.

Aeneas is torn, but after visitations from Trojan ghosts, he decides that he must do his duty and leave for Italy.
Dido is enraged at Aeneas’s desertion.
Impelled by a mixture of remorse, vindictiveness and misery, she commands the construction of a pyre on which all relics of the Trojans are burnt.
As the Carthaginians add their curses, Dido stabs herself.
But before she dies, she is granted a disturbing vision of her descendant Hannibal, defeated by the glory of the empire that Aeneas is destined to establish – Rome.

What to listen for

A score of astonishing richness, at its most relentlessly intense in the breathtaking Part One, dominated by the baleful figure of Cassandra, set against the extraordinary power of the choruses.
Note the exquisitely melancholy clarinet solo which accompanies the widowed Andromache’s mute appearance.
Part Two blossoms into a more sensuous charm, grace and emotional variety: the elegant anthem ‘Gloire à Didon’ and the relaxed, expansive duet for Dido and Anna, the brilliant orchestral scene-painting of the ‘Royal Hunt and the Storm’, the wonderful way in which a quintet becomes a septet celebrating the glory of a starlit night and modulates into Dido and Aeneas’s sublimely lilting love duet; the sailor Hylas’s evocative aria of homesickness, ‘Vallon sonore’, and the alternating grief and fury to which the betrayed Dido gives vent before the solemn rituals of the final scene and the triumphant restatement of the Trojan March as it makes its way to its Roman destiny.
Note also Berlioz’s arrestingly sinister handling of the ghostly apparitions.

Aeneas lies both uncomfortably high and low for modern tenors and requires soft high notes that most of them simply can’t produce.
It is also a long role which explodes periodically rather than building steadily: of recent interpreters, only
the wilfully individualistic Jon Vickers has been decisively successful with it, and even someone as versatile as Placido Domingo had to retire defeated before its demands.
Cassandra and Dido should be strongly contrasted: Cassandra belongs in the Gluckian classical tradition – a fierce, strong character requiring a high mezzo-soprano with fire in her belly; Dido is a warmer mezzo-soprano of more Romantic hue, but she too must find the power for the emotional turmoil of the final scenes.

In performance

With its ballets, huge chorus, and massive set changes,
Les
Troyens
presents a daunting challenge for an opera house, and only the bravest stage it on one evening – with intervals, a complete performance lasts well over five hours.
Aside from whatever they make of the sheer spectacular possibilities (such as the appearance of the Trojan horse), directors can also point an interesting contrast between the doomed grandeur of the embattled, decadent, hierarchical Trojan civilization and the younger, more open, vulnerable and energetic colony of Carthage.
To convey the latter, several productions have chosen to evoke images of New World Puritanism and clean-living, free-thinking rural Shaker settlements.

Recording

CD: Ben Heppner (Aeneas); Colin Davis (cond.).
LSO Live 0010

Béatrice
et
Bénédict

Two acts. First performed Baden-Baden, 1862.

Libretto by the composer

An adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Much
Ado
about
Nothing,
originally intended as a one-act divertissement and written almost as relaxation after the rigours of
Les
Troyens.

Plot

Hero, daughter of the governor of Messina, loves Claudio.
Bénédict and Béatrice pretend to despise each other, and engage in witty repartee.
A plot is hatched by their friends to make them fall in love.
The music master Somarone rehearses a local choir.
Béatrice and Bénédict acknowledge their true feelings, and are married alongside Hero and Claudio.

What to listen for