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Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens
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Berlioz’s oratorio L’enfance du Christ (The Childhood of Christ, 1854) and his ceremonial Te Deum (1855) were well received at their Paris premieres, both conducted by the composer. His masterpiece is considered to be the monumental opera Les Troyens (The Trojans, written 1856-1858, first performed 1863). It was based on the Aeneid, the great Latin epic by Roman poet Virgil. Berlioz knew the Aeneid by heart and wrote the libretto himself. Due to the grand scale of the opera—it has multiple choruses, processions, ballets, and scene changes, and lasts four-and-a-half hours—Berlioz never saw it performed in its entirety. The final three acts of the opera were performed as Les Troyens à Carthage in 1863.
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Berlioz’s compositions in the 1840s were haphazard in origin and frequency, partly because of his diversion of energy to travel, conducting, proof correction and journalism. In the following decade these diversions were no less pressing but he now found the mental and spiritual calm to produce a series of masterpieces that shine nobly through the day-to-day battles he was obliged to fight. After the Te Deum of 1849, his main productions were L’enfance du Christ, composed to his own text mostly in 1854. Another work of 1854 is the cantata in honour of the Emperor L'impériale, played at the Exposition Universelle of 1855. Early in 1856 he orchestrated most of Les nuits d’été (Absence had been orchestrated in 1843) for publication in Winterthur, though he never heard more than Absence and Le spectre de la rose in orchestral form. At that point (April 1856) he yielded to his desire to compose a vast epic opera based on the second and fourth books of Virgil’s Aeneid.
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Berlioz composed Les Troyens towards the end of his life, drawing on Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid, which he had admired since his childhood. In his Memoirs he recounts how his father, a country doctor, read Virgil to him and how the story of Dido's tragic fate reduced him to tears which he tried hard to conceal. When he was in Italy in 1831-32 he thought often about Virgil and visited places with Virgilian associations. Twenty years later he began to plan a grand opera, intended for the Paris Opera, whichincluded scenes showing the sack of Troy after ten years of war and the later story of Aeneas and his band of Trojans seeking refuge from a storm on the shores of Carthage, Dido's realm. Ultimately Aeneas is compelled to abandon Dido since Destiny requires him to found the great city of Rome, leaving Dido to her self-immolation.
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Not only had Berlioz won unprecedented laurels and acclaim on this tour: he had ... composed the bulk of a large new work, La damnation de Faust. For some years his mind had been turning back to Goethe’s Faust and the settings he had rejected in 1829. A librettist, Almire Gandonnière, supplied some material before his departure from Paris, and Berlioz wrote the rest himself: henceforth he would write all his own major texts. La damnation de Faust was put together in the various cities he stayed in, including Passau, Vienna, Pest, Breslau and Prague. It was completed and orchestrated on his return, although composition was briefly interrupted by the commission of Le chant des chemins de fer for the opening of the Chemin de Fer du Nord at Lille on 14 June 1846, an occasion wittily recounted in Les grotesques de la musique.
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Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and many of his best compositions are inspired by literary works. For The Damnation of Faust, Berlioz drew on Goethe's Faust, for Harold in Italy, he drew on Byron's Childe Harold, and for Benvenuto Cellini he drew on Cellini's own autobiography. For Romeo et Juliette he turned to Shakespeare's tragedy of the similar name. For his magnum opus, the monumental opera Les Troyens, Berlioz turned to Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid. For his last opera, the comic opera Béatrice et Bénédict, Berlioz prepared a libretto based loosely on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
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Berlioz was sent to Paris by his father in 1821 to study medicine. Inspired by the operas of Christoph Willibald GLUCK, he ... studied music, first privately with the composer Jean Francois LESUEUR and then in 1826 at the conservatory with Anton Reicha, a respected professor of counterpoint. After four ill-fated attempts, Berlioz received the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1830 with his cantata Sardanapalus. This permitted a sojourn in Rome at government expense.
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Les Troyens