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The Met's 'Les Troyens': Berlioz at His Best
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Newspaper Article
The Met's 'Les Troyens': Berlioz at His Best
2003
Overview
Yet the composer's operatic masterpiece, \"Les Troyens,\" which returned to the Metropolitan Opera repertory on Monday night, presents a very different Berlioz. This five-act, four-hour pageant of dance and music drama, first performed in 1890, is shot through with a chaste, high-minded nobility that is like nothing else in the repertory. It is, I suppose, a \"radical\" work in many ways -- certainly some of the harmonies in \"Les Troyens\" would not become commonplace for the better part of a century after it was written -- but, gloriously, it looks backward for inspiration, to the writings of Homer and Virgil, to the stoicism of ancient Rome, to the timeless values of the classical. It is instructive to note that this was only the 29th performance of \"Les Troyens\" in the Met's history, while many lesser operas long ago passed the 500 mark. There are a number of reasons for this. To begin with, for more than a century after \"Les Troyens\" was finished, the score lay about as a set of mysterious fragments (a little like the latter-day Forum or Colosseum). Even after the landmark performing edition was assembled in 1969, the opera's size and complexity scared off most presenters. For many years, \"Les Troyens\" survived only as a sort of glorious rumor -- the great French Grand Opera that nobody had heard.
Publisher
WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post
Subject
