Why a live performance LES TROYENS?

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

Nice music. In case you’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 as we speak’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 stunning 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 (recent 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 considered one of Berlioz’s placing 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 improvement. When it comes to cash, live performance operas might be
extra reasonably priced than fully-staged productions; and with solely two performances,
promoting out the tickets is much less of a problem. That’s a major
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 after all 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 just a little creativeness (since units and costumes aren’t
doing all of the be just right for you) could also be one of the simplest ways to discover and uncover your
subsequent favourite opera. While 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, once 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 means.

Manageable scope and scale. Les Troyens has
typically been described as a French counterpart to Wagner’s Ring. It’s
completely huge, not less than 4 hours of music, and in case you add 4
intermissions (separating its 5 acts) you’ve bought not less than six hours within the
theater. Les Troyens is definitely a pair of operas impressed by the
sprawling Aeneid: Acts 1 & 2, often known 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 evening, 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 author, too, witness his wonderful Memoirs; however it’s
doable he would have completed higher to collaborate with a librettist reasonably than
to write down his personal opera librettos, which is what he at all times did. As a dramatist
he wasn’t notably subtle; he tends to current concepts and feelings
separately, which works nicely for music however could make for static drama.  There’s a joke in regards to the time Berlioz
learn his libretto-in-progress for Les Troyens aloud to Richard Wagner,
who thought it a large number. Wagner wrote a buddy: “At the very least he spared me the
doable embarrassment of my having to inform him how I felt…any try to
disillusion him would instantly deliver a couple of breach and the lack of his
friendship.” Wagner, considered one of opera’s most subtle 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 capability to grasp this
element in such a full of life vogue.” A smaller-scale, live performance manufacturing of Les
Troyens presents a chance to understand Berlioz’s mastery of element. And
if Berlioz himself by no means fairly noticed the forest for the bushes, nicely, that received’t
come throughout as a fault in a manufacturing that doesn’t try to show your 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 often known 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 common of their day, are virtually by no means given as we speak. They’re
entertaining, however enormously costly, and missing that human conviction that
comes from a genuinely severe 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 have 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
just a little boy translating Latin. All his life he wanted to precise 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!