This is the final instalment of the saga which Octave is devoting to Les Troyens to mark the major new production conducted by Philippe Jordan and directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov at the Opéra Bastille. This time, we are taking a look at Cassandra the emblematic heroine to whom Berlioz gave a voice. “The most beautiful daughter of Priam” for Homer, cursed by Apollo for rejecting him, the prophetess misunderstood by Troy is a character that has evolved since Antiquity according to the literary genres given over to her. When Berlioz began composing Les Troyens in 1856, he seized on the ancient story to create the central character for The Capture of Troy. Although cut from the production’s premiere at the Théâtre lyrique in 1863, the two acts in which Cassandra appears are testimony not just to the composer’s command of the ancient texts but also to an affective commitment towards a character who would upend the codes of the legend and the theatre. From Virgil’s epic through Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and on to Berlioz’s opera, each work offers a certain degree of freedom and fulfilment to Cassandra’s words until she is finally liberated from the divine yoke which muzzled her.    

Cassandra never features in Virgil’s Aeneid as a character. Her words are evoked in the story of the capture of Troy which Aeneas recounts to the Queen of Carthage in Book II. This gives rise to a twofold deprivation of Cassandra’s words. She is mentioned for the first time in these terms:

“Even then, Cassandra opened her lips for the coming doom—lips at a god’s command never believed by the Trojans.”

Cassandra is deprived of a singular voice. Through her, an entire chorus of prophesies are expressed which discredit her in the eyes of Trojan society.

Even so, another passage qualifies that point of view. The character’s silence is not total in the epic. If, indeed, she does not speak at the moment of the action, she has spoken of what we will anachronistically call the “horizon of expectation” of the protagonists and the premonitions revealing the future: “Let us yield to Phoebus and, advised, follow better things.”

If, once again, the voice of Cassandra is reduced to that of the god who cursed her, one can note, however, a slight evolution in the acceptance granted to her prophesies. In the same passage, two verbs of speech are used to evoke Cassandra’s past actions: “canebat” from the verb “cano” which means “to sing” and “vocare” which literally refers to the act of invoking an object or an event. “Vocare” reminds us of the special relationship that the voices of the prophets maintain with the future, but it is here that the verb “to sing” seems to give meaning to the entire passage. It is indeed song that makes Cassandra’s voice and her relationship with time unique. Already with Virgil, the sung dimension of the discourse lends a specific status to the character of Cassandra and for her becomes a factor of emancipation even after her death.

Before we look at how Berlioz grasped the postulate of the transfiguration to come of Cassandra’s character for the first part of his grand opera, we should examine how Cassandra’s character was treated dramatically from Antiquity to 19^th century opera.    

Ancient theatre, and more precisely, Greek tragedy, made use of multiple voices. Recent studies on the subject concur as to the musical nature of theatre performances in that era. If Aristotle in his work Poetics considered that tragedy was first and foremost a text, he nevertheless mentions the art's musical specificity: “I call a highly seasoned language” one that has rhythm, melody and song; and I mean by “seasonings of a specific species” that certain parts are executed simply with the aid of the metre, whereas others may use song” The sung dimension of Greek tragedy needs to be placed in the religious context of its performance: the great Dionysia.

The first level of voices belongs to the characters or “the authors of the performance.” That is to say they are involved in the plot and responsible for the action. This first level of voice is itself twofold. According to researchers like Claude Calame or Florence Dupont, Greek tragedy is based on alienation techniques. The first among them is the mask. The character, be it male or female, is played by a man. The other medium of singularization for the characters is the voice. Each actor may play several characters: only the modulation of their voices makes it possible to identify between fictional beings. The second level of the voice is the chorus which “as a compact and unified voice is there to remind us that harmony is the aim of all discourse.” (Pierre Judet de la Combe). The chorus' vocal unity is also intended to guarantee the unities of time and place characteristic of Greek tragedy. The voice of the chorus in Greek tragedy thus marks the junction between two temporalities. It participates in the action performed on stage by means of exchanges with the characters yet, through this “there and then” aspect of the sung performance, it also reconnects with the temporality of the performance, the spectators, and the cultural and ritualistic dimension of the tragedy.
    

       In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, it is on the basis of these language “seasonings” that Cassandra stands out as a character. Through language, the art of poetry illustrates the marginalisation the Trojan prophetess suffers in the legend. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Cassandra indeed acts as a figure who disrupts the different unities through song. As a Trojan princess, Priam’s daughter acts like a barbarian (who does not speak Greek) at the gates of the palace of the Atridae. This is illustrated by Clytemnestra’s retort, which she addresses to the chorus as such: “Well, if her language is not strange and foreign, even as a swallow’s, I must speak within her comprehension and move her to comply.” Cassandra’s initial silence leads the chorus into a position that is both dramatic and hermeneutic and which ultimately evokes the use of an interpreter: “It is an interpreter and a plain one that the stranger seems to need. She bears herself like a wild creature newly captured.”. Exchanging with the chorus alone, the Trojan prophetess in turn offers less a discourse of action and more a discourse of interpretation, provoking a break musically. In her exchanges with the coryphaeus, the prophetess rallies a significant portion of the choreutids to her side, thus leading to a harmonic rupture of that “compact and unified voice” on stage. This process would be repeated by Berlioz.
   

One would have to wait for the 19th century and Berlioz’s opera for this song to truly have an effect and become action. If Berlioz portrayed Cassandra and Chorebus’s love scene in a duet where incommunicability reign, it is as a Trojan woman whose word is free that the composer manages to liberate the character from her divine yoke. We should look on the youngest daughter of Priam as a young woman who “refuses to accept any negation of her right to speak, nor the narrow margins of her place as a woman, because she persists in doing so freely and clearly. Furthermore, she does not speak of feminine subjects but of politics by suggesting what the city should or not do.¹” Entering on stage, the prophetess, who has just lost her lover in battle, predicts Troy’s future in Italy:

“All shall not perish. The valiant Aeneas
and his troops, brought home after thrice being in combat,
have freed our hardy citizens
Imprisoned in the Citadel.
Priam’s treasure is in the hands of the Trojans.
Soon, in Italy, where fate calls them,
They will see a new Troy rise
`A Troy more powerful, more beautiful.
They walk towards the Ida.²”

In addition to freeing Cassandra from her legendary charge in the finale of The Capture of Troy when the prophetess divides the chorus—excluding the “Thessalians”- and invites them to fight to “condemn the victory of the Greeks”, it is the operatic heroine whom Berlioz is liberating. The cohesion of the score of Les Troyens resides in the mirroring of the two parts and the conflict between the two heroines, Cassandra and Dido. If Chorebus died in combat, it is not grief that kills the Trojan princess for she knew that death hung over their wedding. The Capture of Troy makes no mention of Ajax coming to rape Cassandra, nor of Agamemnon dragging her in triumph to the door of the house of the Atridae where Clytemnestra will end up “tearing her to pieces”. Certainly, Cassandra commits suicide but that act is a gesture of glory to save Ilion from being sacked whereas the suicide of Dido is closer to that of a tragic heroine disabused and betrayed by love.

If Cassandra ultimately escapes Eros' fatal arrow and Apollo’s yoke, there is one person in the adventure of Les Troyens that neither love nor poetic inspiration would leave unperturbed until the end of his days, and that was Berlioz himself. For having freed the Princess of Troy, it seems that the composer in turn was subjected to the same curse to which she had fallen victim. Given the little recognition that Carvalho offered the first part of the work, Berlioz declared: “Ô my noble Cassandra, my heroic virgin, I must resign myself to the fact that I will never hear you!... And I am like the young Chorebus, “insano Cassandrae incensus amore.”

Les Troyens marks the end of a Berlioz cycle that enabled us to hear Philippe Jordan conduct La Damnation de Faust in 2015 and then Béatrice et Bénédict and Benvenuto Cellini in 2017 and 2018. The Musical Director of the Paris Opera looks back on a voyage that took us into the world of the most revolutionary of the 19^th century French composers.

Philippe Jordan: Yes, Dmitri Tcherniakov's production is the third at the Opéra Bastille, after the Pier Luigi Pizzi and Herbert Wernicke productions, conducted by Myung-Whun Chung and Sylvain Cambreling. From a musical point of view, it was important to schedule this work at the end of the cycle, after La Damnation de Faust, Béatrice et Bénédict and Benvenuto Cellini. Les Troyens is a remarkable piece in the Berlioz catalogue. It is his major work, his grand opera. Benvenuto Cellini was already a large-scale work, but a comedy. Here, with this tragic subject, Berlioz was moving closer to French grand opera in the vein of Meyerbeer. Les Troyens reveals a total command of his technical and aesthetic means.
    

Ph.J.: From one work to another, I am struck by Berlioz’s fidelity to a flamboyant style, combined with a desire to create a unique world for each subject. For La Damnation de Faust, based on the work by Goethe, he turned to a German style influenced by Weber and his Freischütz, Schumann and Mendelssohn, as the student songs suggest. In Benvenuto Cellini, which refers to Italian history, one hears a great deal of Rossini and a touch of Bellini and Donizetti as well. Béatrice et Bénédict, which also evokes Italy, subtly reflects southern atmospheres. With Les Troyens, he sets out in search of an ancient style. However, at the time, very little was known about that style. So, Berlioz went ahead and invented and created a sound. Aware that in Ancient times there were no stringed instruments played with bows, he used woodwind, brass, kettledrums and ancient flutes ( today replaced by oboes)—particularly in the first choral— in which the people of Troy express their joy—in order to obtain a strange and archaic sound. Aside from the arrival of Cassandra, supported by an entrance of strings that lends a sudden sense of tragedy, and aside from a few pizzicati on the cello and the viola, the strings are conspicuously absent.

Ph.J.: Indeed, his search for an ancient aesthetic led him to borrow from Gluck, one of the composers who, with his mythologically-based operatic tragedies, worked the hardest to revive that musical past. Berlioz treated the voice in the same way as the German master and composed accompanying recitatives whose prosody resembled that of Alceste. The principal female roles in Les Troyens were not written for sopranos. Here again, the aim was to approach Gluck’s style which favoured deeper voices. With the latter, the great heroines were mezzos, which would also be the case with Berlioz.
    

Ph.J.: Cassandra is a role with some beautiful high notes, however its interpretation requires an extremely good medium. Compared to Dido, the role is more theatrical and requires a singer who is also a proficient actress. It’s more recitative and more expressive. With Dido, who sings all the great lyrical phrases, beauty comes before expression. Aeneas, like the great male roles with Meyerbeer, or Rossini with Guillaume Tell, requires a heroic tenor who can sing opera with extraordinary high notes and a vocal flexibility which few performers possess. The chorus for its part, plays a major role, as is always the case with grand opera. In the first part, Berlioz exploits it for dramatic effect magnificently: it personifies Troy and its people. It remains active in Carthage, but it is more in the background and thus becomes more a commentator. And this works to highlight Dido and Aeneas the principal characters.
    

Ph.J.: Beethoven’s influence over the young Berlioz was major. The obvious relationship between the Symphonie fantastique and the Pastorale attests to this. They share the presence of sung parts, the same key and a similar orchestration. While owing a great deal to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Berlioz’s operatic work is also influenced by Fidelio. Later, after his contact with Italy, his composition would further evolve. The discovery of Italian opera and the history and artistic heritage of transalpine culture in general would lead him along new stylistic paths.
    

Ph.J.: Clearly, Berlioz is all about orchestration! In Les Troyens, each number has its own sound thanks to a remarkable work of orchestration. He develops colours of great finesse. But here, his musical expertise goes beyond the mere field of orchestration. The treatment of the melodies also contributes greatly to the uniformity and general harmony that characterises the work.
    

Ph.J.: Yes, Berlioz was not just a great composer, he was also a great author who, like Wagner, wrote his own librettos. It is not an exaggeration to say that both men were musical geniuses and genuine poets. They were artists who were open to all the arts. The literary quality of their works can be discussed, yet one has to recognise the real synergy that exists between their texts and their music. Berlioz, again like Wagner, sought totality in art. He was a great visionary who wanted to develop original forms. Already, with his Symphonie fantastique, that wish was expressed in his desire to compose a symphonic poem, to discover new compositional avenues along the lines of those initiated by Beethoven with his Ninth Symphony, in terms of orchestration and the use of text and chorus.
    

Ph.J.: The back and forth between all those artists was systematic and fruitful. They shared the ambition to revolutionise their art and compose the music of the 19^th century. Berlioz’s contribution to the field of symphonic music is considerable. Without the Symphonie Fantastique, the music of Wagner, the symphonic poems of Liszt, and later, those of Richard Strauss would not have been what they are. Strauss also complemented Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation, which he was especially familiar with. I hear a lot of Berlioz in his Don Quixote. Not only from the point of view of the means used to give form to a musical idea taken from a subject, but also in the orchestration. Certain flourishes of Strauss’s symphonic poem are highly reminiscent of Les Troyens. It is also interesting to note that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Les Troyens were composed at the same time. In the treatment of the voices, the orchestration and the harmony of G Flat Major, the duet between Dido and Aeneas is noticeably evocative of O sink hernieder Nacht der Liebe, the love duet in the second act of “Tristan”, which nevertheless uses more modulation. So, all these masters were fascinated by, understood by, and sometimes criticised by each other. However, we cannot deny the reciprocal influences they exerted on each another. Without their encounters, music would never have been able to evolve. Battles are never won alone!    

The saga behind the composition of Les Troyens continues: after seeing how the opera enabled Berlioz to finally free himself from material contingencies and embrace the life of an artist, we propose that you ponder another aspect of the work: the composer’s relationship with Shakespeare or, in his own words, why Les Troyens is “a grand opera on the Shakespearian model whose subject matter will be the second and fourth book of the Aeneid.”

When he composed Les Troyens, the challenge for Berlioz was to transform the stirring emotions aroused from reading The Aeneid into a genuine work of art. In his Memoirs Berlioz evokes his passion for Virgil’s poem as a young reader. Beyond the mere memories of childhood, this writing on the self would pave the way for his grand opera. It offered the beginnings of a translation of The Aeneid which underlines both his command of the Latin poem and his profound sensitivity:

“How often have I felt my heart throb and my voice quiver and break when presenting the fourth book of The Aeneid to my father!... One day, I was intensely affected by the sound of my voice uttering the translation of the line:

At regina gravi jamdudum saucia cura

I struggled on bravely until I came to the crisis—where Dido expires on her funeral pyre with the gifts and weapons of Aeneas, her betrayer, heaped around her, and, alas, the familiar couch bathed in her blood; but when I came to the despairing cries of the dying queen, “thrice rising on her elbow and thrice falling back” and had to describe her wounds and the anguish of her heart rent with its fatal passion, the cries of her distraught sister and nurse, and all the tortuous details of her death which moved even the gods to pity, my lips quivered and I could scarcely stammer out the words¹”

What initially may have seemed like a lively exercise in reading was in fact the beginning of a translation of The Aeneid and would become the precursor for the composition of Les Troyens. This writing on the self again allows Berlioz to merge with his subject, as demonstrated in the phrases directly translated from Virgil’s work which highlight the distress of the young Hector even more intensely than the agony of the Queen of Carthage.

To accurately transcribe his youthful emotion, Berlioz had to translate Virgil’s text with the same precision. The critics however, were not so enamoured with his translations. Indeed, some saw the work of a schoolboy: “At the time, Berlioz’s evil genie told Berlioz: You will copy me five thousand verses of The Aeneid to teach yourself how to write a libretto! And that’s how he gave us detention lines for an opera²”.

And yet, far from being a mere text for a preparatory literature class, the libretto for Les Troyens is a true poetic tour de force which works to combine the epic with the dramatic. This desire to reconnect with the dramatic dimension of the saga can be observed in certain translation choices, specifically, in the second act when Hector’s ghost appears and says: “Ah!… flee, son of Venus! The enemy holds our walls³”, which Berlioz translated from “Heu fuge, nate dea, teque his, ait, eripe flammis, // Hostis habet muros (he said, flee goddess son and save thee from the fury of this flame // Our enemies now are masters of the walls).⁴” If Berlioz does not take account of the entire verse, he does seem to offer a more accurate translation of certain expressions than his contemporaries. Case in point: “hostis habet muros” (Our enemies now are masters of the walls) which Félix Lemaistre translated in 1859 in the second edition of his translation of The Aeneid with “The enemy is inside our walls.⁵” An action verb of the subject “hostis” (enemy), the verb “habeo” (to have) assumes an epic connotation with Berlioz that is linked to the notion of a battle which allows him to dramatize the action. This nuance in the translation also allowed Berlioz to introduce the irreversible journey of the Trojans as they marched towards their destiny. The state of siege leaves him little alternative other than to flee and settle in Italy.

If, for Berlioz, Virgil embodies the epic passion of childhood, Shakespeare is synonymous with the major upheavals of the composer’s career. One cannot determine by reading the twenty-eighth chapter of his Memoirs whether Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson or Shakespeare himself when he went to the Odéon to see Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in its original language. The Elizabethan playwright became a model of dramatic creation for the composer of symphonies who would henceforth refer to Les Troyens as “a grand opera on the Shakespearian model”. The composer mobilises everything which in Shakespearian tragedy goes against the rules of propriety and plausibility governing classical tragedy. Thus, at the climax of the tragedy, when Dido prepares to kill herself, Berlioz introduces the ludicrous duet of two Trojan sentries (“By Bacchus! They are mad with their Italy!”). Berlioz seizes on the Trojan women’s tragedy-tinged bemoaning about the length of the journey (the fifth book of The Aeneid) and turns it into a duet of bacchanalian lamentations, offering some comic relief before returning to the drama. Under Berlioz’s pen, Virgil and Shakespeare become contemporary. Which is how the famous duet between Dido and Aeneas “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinite” came to be: “I’ve just finished the duet of the fourth act. It’s a scene which I have taken from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and I’ve Virgilized it. Those delightful, sweet nothings between Jessica and Lorenzo were lacking in Virgil. Shakespeare created the scene, I’ve borrowed it and endeavoured to combine the two.⁶”

More romantic than he seems when you listen to his work, Berlioz sought to make grand opera the manifestation of a primary emotion. His “Virgilian grief⁷” once charged with the power of Shakespearian love at first sight becomes a hybrid emotion that sustained and enlivened both the composition of Les Troyens and its reception. By “plagiarising Virgil and Shakespeare” who for him become two singers⁸, Berlioz finds the voice which enables him to find fulfilment in the genre of grand opera.

The history of The Trojans cannot be reduced to the duration of its composition and the ordeal of its first performance in 1863. The history of the work coincided with Berlioz’s most feverish inspirations and also with his most acute bouts of anxiety with regard to the musical institution of Paris. Cross-referencing Berlioz’s Mémoires with the score of The Trojans reveals a singular voice, that of an author who now wished for only one thing: to live his art.

“One is insufficiently aware, in general, of the cost of the labour by which the score of an opera is produced, and by what repeated efforts, far more arduous and more agonising still, is its public performance obtained.”

The composition of only three operas have been attributed to Berlioz of which but one “Grand Opera” in the generic sense of the term: The Trojans. The above statement taken from the closing pages of Berlioz’s critical work À travers chants sounds like an appeal to the reader to reconsider his work with indulgence. If one reads his Mémoires, the “thousand torments”, characteristic of the composition of an opera, assailed him constantly, whatever the work in hand. These torments and agonies, Berlioz considered to be characteristic of a period that had lost its faith in art, of a society which, at the opera, was more interested in discussing the stock market than in watching the performance in progress. Those spectators, despite reducing the opera house to the scene of their worldly preoccupations, imposed upon the artist, a “modern Sophocles”, endlessly to recommence without ever assuring his success.

Berlioz imagined himself in the skin of a “happy, powerful, radiant, almost god-like” author, the embodiment, in his view, of a tragic poet of Antiquity like Sophocles. In the composition and the performance of his works, he sought self-fulfilment and aimed to reveal, in the moment of realisation, the instant of inspirational truth. What was at stake in the composition of a grand opera like The Trojans, was a piece of mosaic from a musical portrait that was to bring resonance and logic to an entire tableau rendering him the ultimate dramatic composer of the 19^th century.

What the author of Soirées d’orchestre lacked in order to establish himself as an opera composer in the French musical landscape was above all a voice. As a child, Berlioz had had a “pretty soprano voice” (chapter 2 of his Mémoires) and, after abandoning his studies in medicine, auditioned to become a chorister. The young prodigy joined the chorus with the voice of a “mediocre baritone.” In narrating this episode, Berlioz has little compassion for his rivals and even gives the impression of unlimited arrogance when he claims that they sang “not like cowherds but like calves.” Although one can imagine the author’s pleasure in remembering this audition, one should first of all see here a rhetorical procedure permitting him to sketch out his destiny in terms of grand opera. “There was I then, until such time as I could become a damned opera composer, in the chorus of a second rate theatre, passed over and excommunicated right to the very marrow of my bones! I admire the way my parents’ efforts to snatch me back from the abyss were successful!” Berlioz never ceases to dramatise his approach to the voice and then to opera and, in the reader of the Mémoires, seeks to arouse understanding rather than compassion – even when he depicts himself as a composer cursed less by the muses of operatic inspiration as by opera directors and the mediocrity of the artists who peopled Paris at that time. The irony and sarcasm in his writing about himself underpins the sensitivity and genuine pain that he felt throughout his life, a life dedicated to the quest for the “master piece dreamed of in childhood”.

Known to music lovers for the revolution he instigated in the genre of the symphony, owing particularly to his Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz was obsessed by opera in every one of his compositions. This five-act symphonic poem is itself a grand opera whose dramatic action is expressed by the orchestra. However, each time he tackles the operatic genre, Berlioz makes a well-argued denial of the fact, as in the preface to Romeo and Juliet (1839): “There will doubtless be no mistake as to the genre of this work. Although voices are used, this is neither a concert opera nor a cantata, but a symphony with chorus.” He is, however, not the first composer to use a chorus in a symphony, and this prefatory precaution reads, then, like a desire to counter those who might have taxed his use of voices with being dramatic.

Already in 1823, the young Berlioz had plunged into the composition of a first opera, a “score as ridiculous, to say the least, as the play and the verse of Gérono” (whom he had asked to write a libretto based on Florian’s Estelle). Ten years later, when Berlioz composed the music for his first opera, Benvenuto Cellini, which was adapted from the life story of the Italian sculptor (La Vita), it was once again the libretto that jeopardised the success of the work. “I had been vividly struck by certain episodes in the life of Benvenuto Cellini, I had the misfortune to believe that they might offer subject matter for an interesting and dramatic opera, I begged Léon de Waily and Auguste Barbier, that dreadful poet of iambs to write me a libretto based on them. Their work, if I am to believe our mutual friends, does not include the elements necessary to what is called a “well-made” drama.” These mutual friends also, under the author’s pen, become but the wranglings of inner voices tending to raise him to the rank of opera composer. Was there room for anyone else in Berlioz’s creative process?
    

For Berlioz to produce an opera and fulfil himself as a “happy, powerful, radiant” artist one voice was missing: his own. In The Trojans, it is not his “pretty soprano voice” that the author wishes to find again, still less his “mediocre baritone”, but that which from childhood onwards “wavered and cracked” on reading the fourth book of the Aenead. As a “masterpiece dreamed of in childhood and accomplished through experience” (Rémy Sticker), The Trojans leaves no room for any other voice but his own: “As I have already said, if I am to organise the performance of a great work such as this one in a suitable manner, I must have total mastery of the theatre as I have of the orchestra when I rehearse a symphony; I must have the willing cooperation of all and everyone must obey me without the slightest comment.” Berlioz dreamed of the absolute. A “total work of art” (sacrilege – he would never have used this expression) requires a total artist - unfettered genius. Music, libretto, staging, lights, everything is the composer’s business.

However, Berlioz very nearly failed ever to produce the piece of mosaic that would give meaning to his musical life as a whole. Once again, this reticence is the expression of his fear of the opera genre, and more particularly of the way he perceived the institutional maltreatment of operatic works in his 19^th century. Thus, one reads in the dedication addressed to the Princess of Wayn-Wittgenstein with which the score of The Trojans begins: “I had just spoken of my desire to write a vast operatic composition based on the fourth book of the Aenead. I added that I would studiously avoid undertaking it, knowing all too well the grief that such a work would necessarily occasion me in France, in our day, with our strange literary and musical habits, and the puerile instincts of the mob.” The composer was, in that moment of reflection, in full possession of his work, it was his own in the sense that he recognised himself in it, was fulfilled by it but he agonised – less over the manner with which the public might receive it as over how the theatres were going to treat it.    

Berlioz never was the absolute master in the theatre as he wished to be. His voice was altered not by the inspiration and the emotion that accompanied it but by the choices made by the theatre director, Léon Carvalho, to whom Berlioz entrusted the staging. During his lifetime, Berlioz never heard the Capture of Troy; having found the work too long and ill-adapted for the stage, Carvalho amputated the first part and offered the public only one episode from Antiquity, a passage more common in opera since Purcell, the meeting between Dido and Aeneas. Berlioz recounts with humour all the modifications that were demanded of him and to which he finally consented:

“Carvalho persisted with incredible determination, in spite of my resistance, in cutting the scene between Narbal and Anna, the dance aria and the sentinels’ duet, the familiarity of which seemed to him incompatible with the epic style. Iopas’s verses disappeared with my consent, because the singer cast in the role was incapable of singing them well. It was the same with the duet between Aeneas and Dido: I had acknowledged the inadequacy of Madame Charton’s voice in this violent scene which tired the artist to the point at which she no longer had the strength, in the fifth act, to sing the formidable recitative: “Dieux immortels! il part!” and her last aria and the sacrificial pyre scene. Finally, Hylas’s song which had been found highly pleasing during the initial performances and which the young Cabel sang well, disappeared whilst I was laid up in bed afflicted with bronchitis. Cabel was required in the piece that was to be played the night following the performances of The Trojans and as his contract only obliged him to sing fifteen times a month, he would have had to have been paid two hundred francs for each additional evening.”

In these lines, the operatic institution seems to be solely responsible for the tribulations of the composer, who claims to have undergone an ordeal and speaks of his work as a “score carved up, in the music merchant’s shop window, like a calf on a butcher’s block, of which small bits are cut off as one might sell little scraps of meat to regale the porters’ cats!” It is true that the critics were scarcely merciful towards the work’s premiere performance. However, what Berlioz depicted as a failure was far from being any such thing. “Les Troyens à Carthage had only twenty-one performances”. For the period, this number is far from derisory and did not by any means represent a failure for the Théâtre Lyrique. Indeed, Berlioz himself received considerable honours as a result of these performances. He evoked particularly a series of concerts in which extracts from The Trojans were performed – concerts which he attended incognito but at which he was quickly recognised and acclaimed. But the greatest honour that the composer drew from The Trojans at the Théâtre Lyrique was, ironically, institutional and social. Being both the work’s composer and its librettist, Berlioz received royalties permitting him to end his collaboration with the Journal des débats and thus divest himself of the mask of critic so as finally to live by his art.

“At last, at last, after thirty years of slavery, here I am free! I have no more articles to write, no more platitudes to justify, no more mediocre people to praise, no more indignation to suppress, no more lies, no more play-acting, no more cowardly compliance, I am free! I need never set foot in an opera house again, never speak of them, never hear about them, never even laugh over what they’re cooking up in those musical chop houses! Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis!! It is to The Trojans, at least, that this unhappy scribbler owes his deliverance.”