Les Troyens
Les Troyens ([le tʁwa.jɛ̃]; in English: The Trojans) is a French grand opera in five acts, running for about five hours,[1] by Hector Berlioz.[2] The libretto was written by Berlioz himself from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid; the score was composed between 1856 and 1858. Les Troyens is Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety. Under the title Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred with many cuts by Léon Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, at their theatre (now the Théâtre de la Ville) on the Place du Châtelet in Paris on 4 November 1863, with 21 repeat performances. The reduced versions run for about three hours. After decades of neglect, today the opera is considered by some music critics as one of the finest ever written.
This article is about the opera. For other uses, see Trojan (disambiguation).Les Troyens
Publication of the score[edit]
At the time of the 1863 production of Les Troyens à Carthage, Berlioz permitted the Parisian music editors Choudens et Cie to publish the vocal score as two separate operas. Only 15 copies of the first edition were printed, at the composer's expense.[18] In this published score, he introduced a number of optional cuts which have often been adopted in subsequent productions. Berlioz complained bitterly of the cuts that he was more or less forced to allow at the 1863 Théâtre Lyrique premiere production, and his letters and memoirs are filled with the indignation that it caused him to "mutilate" his score.
In his July 1867 will Berlioz lamented that Choudens had failed to meet their contractual obligation to engrave the full score and asked his executors to ensure the opera "be published without cuts, without modifications, without the least suppression of the text — in sum exactly as it stands." In the late 1880s, after a lawsuit, the firm printed the full scores of La prise de Troie and Les Troyens à Carthage, orchestral parts, and an improved vocal score, but only the vocal score was sold. The remaining material was only made available for short-term hire.[18]
In the early 20th century, the lack of accurate parts led musicologists W. J. Turner and Cecil Gray to plan a raid on the publisher's Paris office, even approaching the Parisian underworld for help.[17]
In 1969, Bärenreiter Verlag of Kassel, Germany, first published the full score of Les Troyens in a critical edition containing all the compositional material left by Berlioz.[19] The preparation of this critical edition was the work of Hugh Macdonald, whose Cambridge University doctoral dissertation this was.[20] With its publication, as well as the release in 1970 of the first complete recording (based on Covent Garden performances conducted by Colin Davis), "it was finally possible to study and produce the whole work, and to judge it on its own merits."[21]
In early 2016 the Bibliothèque nationale de France bought the 1859 autograph vocal score, which included scenes cut for the orchestral autograph score; the manuscript also includes annotations by Pauline Viardot.[22]
Berlioz specified the following instruments:[52]