Why a live performance LES TROYENS?

Inquisitive about why we’re providing Les Troyens à Carthage in
live performance? Listed here are a few of our causes:

Nice music. If you happen to’ve by no means heard this extraordinary
music by nineteenth-century France’s main composer, you’re lacking out.
Seattle music-lovers have been lucky, within the final decade, to have heard
a lot of Berlioz’s music performed by a fantastic Berlioz champion, Ludovic Morlot.
As Music Director of Seattle Symphony for a lot of the 2010s, Morlot led
terrific performances of Berlioz’s Requiem, Damnation of Faust, Les nuits
d’été, and the ever-popular Symphonie Fantastique. His Seattle Opera
debut got here in 2017 conducting Beatrice and Benedict, Berlioz’s frothy
love-letter to Shakespeare.

Morlot and the gamers of the Seattle Symphony are one good
cause to listen to Les Troyens. Our singers are one other. This opera has additionally
been on the wish-list of two of in the present day’s opera superstars, mezzo soprano J’Nai
Bridges, who sings Dido, and tenor Russell Thomas, starring as Aeneas. Each are
returning to Seattle Opera, as are basses Adam Lau, Andrew Potter, and baritone
Richard L. Hodges. Mezzo soprano Kelly O’Connor makes her Seattle Opera debut
as Dido’s sister Anna, who sings a beautiful double-mezzo duet with Dido within the
first scene and a splendid duet with Adam Lau in a while.

There’s a lot to take pleasure in in Les Troyens à Carthage. Right here’s
a SoundCloud playlist that includes excerpts from a 2000 recording, made in London
and starring Ben Heppner and Michelle DeYoung (contemporary from their unforgettable 1998
Seattle Opera Tristan). So as, you’ll hear the Dido & Aeneas love
duet, the “Royal Hunt and Storm” episode for refrain and orchestra, Aeneas’
aria, Dido’s aria, the Carthaginian anthem (theme music for Dido’s nation), and
the curse on the finish—which prominently options the Trojan march (theme music
for Aeneas’ nation). Plus one among Berlioz’s hanging ballets.

Uncover and picture. Live performance operas, or ‘semi-staged
operas,’ have been on the rise in America because the pandemic. There are a number of
good causes for this growth. When it comes to cash, live performance operas could be
extra inexpensive than fully-staged productions; and with solely two performances,
promoting out the tickets is much less of a problem. That’s a big
consideration with an unfamiliar title like Les Troyens—it’s a lot simpler
to promote tickets to Carmen, La traviata, or Madame Butterfly than some
opera that’s not within the ‘high 10.’ However there are in fact loads of nice
masterpieces that aren’t within the high 10, and the general public deserves an opportunity to
discover and uncover these, too. In reality, this concert-opera format, the place you
as spectator have to make use of slightly creativeness (since units and costumes aren’t
doing all of the give you the results you want) could also be the easiest way to discover and uncover your
subsequent favourite opera. If you contribute among the creativity, you’re
routinely extra invested within the expertise.

This is a SoundCloud playlist that includes highlights from
Seattle Opera’s earlier live performance opera presentation, after we gave Saint-Saëns’ Samson
and Delilah in January 2023. What a fantastic alternative that was to take pleasure in
some extraordinary music—and, with our imaginations stimulated by the music,
enter into that wild Bible story in a profound approach.

Manageable scope and scale. Les Troyens has
typically been described as a French counterpart to Wagner’s Ring. It’s
completely huge, a minimum of 4 hours of music, and in the event you add 4
intermissions (separating its 5 acts) you’ve received a minimum of six hours within the
theater. Les Troyens is definitely a pair of operas impressed by the
sprawling Aeneid: Acts 1 & 2, referred to as La prise de Troie or The
Seize of Troy, concentrate on Cassandra, the Trojan princess who can see the
future. Though Aeneas seems on this first half, he’s a minor character who
solely comes into his personal in Acts 3, 4, and 5, Les Troyens à Carthage (The
Trojans in Carthage). This second opera tells the story of Dido and Aeneas
and their doomed love-affair. Whereas there are opera firms which current all
5 acts on one night time, usually that turns into an endurance take a look at for performers
and viewers. In his lifetime Berlioz solely ever attended a efficiency, like
the one we’re giving, of Les Troyens à Carthage—which by itself is a
full-length and completely satisfying opera.

Berlioz and drama. Berlioz was an incredible composer.
He was a superb author, too, witness his wonderful Memoirs; nevertheless it’s
potential he would have carried out higher to collaborate with a librettist quite than
to write down his personal opera librettos, which is what he all the time did. As a dramatist
he wasn’t notably refined; he tends to current concepts and feelings
separately, which works nicely for music however could make for static drama.  There’s a joke concerning the time Berlioz
learn his libretto-in-progress for Les Troyens aloud to Richard Wagner,
who thought it a large number. Wagner wrote a pal: “At the very least he spared me the
potential embarrassment of my having to inform him how I felt…any try and
disillusion him would instantly carry a couple of breach and the lack of his
friendship.” Wagner, one among opera’s most refined dramatists, put it nicely
when he wrote, “Berlioz…is my reverse…he sees solely the element of the
topic earlier than him, and is critical due to his potential to grasp this
element in such a energetic vogue.” A smaller-scale, live performance manufacturing of Les
Troyens provides a chance to understand Berlioz’s mastery of element. And
if Berlioz himself by no means fairly noticed the forest for the timber, nicely, that received’t
come throughout as a fault in a manufacturing that doesn’t try and show the complete
forest.

The grandest of all French grand operas.
Opera in mid-nineteenth Paris achieved an opulence and a grandeur it’s
by no means had earlier than or since, in that chapter of opera historical past referred to as “French
grand opera.” The period of French grand opera was dominated by two creators: the
prolific librettist Eugène Scribe and the proficient composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Their
grand operas (Robert le diable, Les Hugenots, Le prophète, L’Africaine),
vastly standard of their day, are nearly by no means given in the present day. They’re
entertaining, however enormously costly, and missing that human conviction that
comes from a genuinely critical artist speaking a urgent message.

However that conviction is omnipresent with Berlioz and Les
Troyens. Berlioz had hopes, at one level, that the Paris Opéra would possibly
current his masterpiece; he designed it, definitely, following the patterns perfected
by Scribe and Meyerbeer. However his actual creative heroes had been Gluck, Beethoven,
and Shakespeare. Les Troyens wouldn’t exist with out the profound affect
these three artists had on Berlioz—to not point out his lifelong obsession with
Virgil. Berlioz had skilled a deep reference to the character of Dido as
slightly boy translating Latin. All his life he wanted to specific her magnificence,
her the Aristocracy, her tragic ardour. He lastly did so on this outstanding,
one-of-a-kind opera: the grandest of all of the French grand operas. Give it a
hear!