Modern Music an Integral Part of the Programme A Reform work That Stops Short Robert Maschka: Mozart's Idomeneo - 'given birth to in Salzburg' I succumbed to an irresistible temptation, I stilled a powerful passion Hector Berlioz: Les Troyens -Contents Between the Idyll of Love and the Trauma of War The Fidelity of Woman is like the Phoenix of Arabia In the terryfying shere of infernal spirits That is what makes love so wonderful The Magnetic Pole of Today's World is the West

I succumbed to an irresistible temptation, I stilled a powerful passion

Hector Berlioz, after finishing the Les Troyens score

Berlioz wrote to Emile Deschamps on 3rd March, 1858: "I am just coming to the end of the score (of Les Troyens) after having worked on it for eighteen months. What is going to become of this monster? God alone knows! And it's not even certain if He knows. But in writing it I succumbed to an irresistible temptation, I stilled a powerful passion that emerged in my youth and waxed ever more intense as I grew older."

Vergil satisfied my yearning for emotion

In a letter dated 19th February, 1830, Hecot Berlioz reminds his father of "those Sundays when you had me recite Vergil's Aeneid to you. Afterwards when attending vespers the peaceful, monotonous chant, in combination with certain words like In exitu Israel that told me of the past, had the effect of filling me with an almost infinite sadness. My imagination conjured up around me all my Trojan and Roman heroes, my heart breaking for the hapless Turnus in particular. The good king Latinus, Lavinia so submissive to her fate, all those glittering weapons which I saw shine in the Italian sunshine through the clouds of dust, those customs so very different from ours, and all these things mixed and multiplied with ideas from the Bible and with memories of Egypt and Moses, transported me into a condition of indescribable disconsolation and I would fain have wept my sorrow from my heart." Berlioz tried to explain his vocation as a composer by saying that music was for him a way of healing the sorrow he had suffered in childhood. "I found", he continued "only one way of satisfying this powerful yearning for emotion - music. Without it I certainly could not survive."

Music salves the wounds of childhood

His musical and Vergilian feelings being thus inseparably interwoven since his childhood, we now see the young Hector as he receives the grade "quite good" for his interpretation of Books 2 and 6 of the Aeneid at his school leaving examination in Grenoble in 1821. And we see him again in Italy as he visits the grave of Vergil on Mt. Posillipo (letter dated 2nd October, 1831) and engages in musical improvisation as he wanders throug the hills. "Sometimes having taken my guitar with me instead of a gun and retired deep into a landscape that was in harmony with my thoughts, a song from the Aeneid buried in my memory since childhood would suddenly come back to me with fresh life as I observed the beauty of the place I had arried in. For then I would improvise an unusual recitative above an even more unusual harmony, singing of the death of Pallas, the hopelessness of the good Evander, the funeral procession of the young warrior accompanied by his steed Ethon, without harness, with hanging mane and shedding streams of tears."
Later as a music critic Berlioz let no opportunity slip to introduce verses from his favourite poet into his reviews. "I admire Vergil and I love quoting him", he wrote in an article in the Revue et Gazette Musicale on 19th November, 1848. "That's a piece of madness in me that certainly hasn't escaped your attention."
However, in Berlioz' compositions prior to Les Troyens, there is nothing really Vergilian, except perhaps in the bucolic colouring of L'Enfance du Christ composed shortly before in 1852-1854. Hardly had he completed this unusual work when he wrote in chapter 59 of his Memoirs on 18th October, 1854: "For three years now the idea has been plaguing me of composing an opera on a grand scale, with text and music like that in my trilogy L'Enfance du Christ. I have resisted the temptation to put this idea into practice and shall, I hope, continue to resist it to the end. The theme is embracing, magnificent and thoroughly moving and this is probably the best indication that the audience in Paris would find it insipid and boring."

The attraction of classical antiquity

Spontini, the only contemporary composer whom Berlioz put almost on a par with Gluck, Beethoven and Weber and whose works La Vestale, Fernand Cortez and Olympie he knew by heart, died on 24th January, 1851. Berlioz, protector of the true dramatic tradition, was his successor in the aesthetic sense (at the Institute, however, preference was given to Ambroise Thomas).
On 16th April, 1851, Gounod's first lyrical composition, Sappho, was produced at the Opéra. Its classical content was very different from what was popular at the time. Berlioz did not fail to point this out in his article in Les Débats on April 22nd. Without wishing to underestimate the music - in many places it had moved him deeply - Berlioz claimed that he himself would have done a better job. In November, 1851, he received the scores for the choruses and stage music which Gounod had just written for Ulysse, a new work by Ponsard. When thanking him for it he gave the composer some valuable pieces of advice for the production.

Joseph Stallaert, La mort de Didon (c) Musée de Burxelles/Roger-Viollet

At the beginning of 1852 Berlioz again attended a performance of Sappho. "There's nothing more delightful, more entertaining, more cheerful, more Vergilian than the song of the shepherd. That is repose, that is peace, that is happiness brought in to alleviate the unending misfortune of the dying heroine whose broken heart bleeds to death drop by drop." Berlioz wrote these words in Les Debats on 7th January and on 14th he tells his sister Adèle that he had dined with Ponsard. However, he didn't feel himself particularly drawn towards the illustrious dramatist who is described in Larousse as "serious, conscientious but cold". The encounter led nowhere, for in a letter he wrote to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein on 25th December, 1856, the composer, who had already begun composing Les Troyens, asks: "Have you read that trite tittle-tattle of Ponsard's? It's hardly possible to imagine such a provincial Voltairean! One, moreover, who, without any particular occasion, comes to nibble and gnaw at Shakespeare's honour!... A nincompoop! A dolt!"
No wonder Berlioz chose rather to write the text and music himself than collaborate with Ponsard.

Wagner's suggestion

It is perfectly possible that when Berlioz went to Weimar in November 1852 to be present at the re-staging of Benvenuto Cellini Liszt passed on to him Wagner's suggestion that he give him the poem Wieland der Schmied to set to music. "Let Berlioz write a new opera", he said. "It would be a great misfortune for him not to do so, for there is only one thing can save him - drama." Apart from the difficulties which a French translation would have involved, Liszt made the following observation on the topic: "There is reason to fear that it would not be to the liking of the Parisians." Even if he didn't know exactly what Wagner intended - "He needs a poet who takes hold of him, who has fire and enthusiasm to force him forward, who is to him what a man is to a woman" - Berlioz could guess what working with him would involve. He loved, Wagner wrote to Liszt, "to adapt poets to his musical phantasy, to adjust Goethe and Shakespeare to his own tastes". Berlioz rejected Wagner's offer and wrote the libretto to L'Enfance du Christ himself.
At that time he was considering more seriously making an opera out of the Aeneid. In his letters, quotations from Vergil, rather few up to then, began to appear more often. In the end, in a letter he wrote to his uncle, Félix Marmion, on 24th June, 1856, Berlioz made the following comment on the libretto to Les Troyens which he was just composing: "I have been pondering over it for two years". It appears that it was only in 1854, after dreaming about it for three years, that the definitive theme for an opera based on the classics finally took shape: the first books of the Aeneid. The unexpected success of L'Enfence du Christ on 10th December, 1854 - "an insult to the other works" - was, as Berlioz expressed it, decisive in spurring him on to finally bring to realisation the great work he had in mind.

Facing all adversities for the sake of Dido and Cassandra

In Februar, 1855, Berlioz sojourned again in Weimar, where Liszt had organised a second Berlioz Festival. This time Les Troyens was a more serious proposition: in a letter to Peter Cornelius dated 21st February, and in a family album belonging to a certain Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Berlioz entered two quotations from the second song of the Aeneid. Furthermore, as he didn't understand German, the language of Vergil was used both in the address of welcome spoken in his honour and in the improvised songs that followed. On 28th February, 1855, Berlioz wrote to his friend Pier Angelo Fiorentino: "I am being pressed, I am being bullied, I am being mosquitoed into writing a great work for the stage. I must have your advice in this matter and we must continue the discussion we started in the Rue Saint-Georges about the material impossibility of such a work in view of the traditions at the Opéra de Paris." Badgered by Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt's friend, was Berlioz thinking at this time of accepting help with the libretto after all? Fiorentino was theatre and music critic with La France, an author of poems and dramas. Further, he had translated the Divine Comedy, that tremendous work of homage to Vergil. Fiorentino knew the Aeneid - they could talk about it.
In his article about Jaguarita, the new opera by Halévy, which appeared on 19th May, 1855, Berlioz again quotes from the Aeneid: "Pendent opera interrupta" ("the interrupted works are uncertain"), punning on the word "opera" (which means musical opera in French) and making sarcastic reference to the "value" of the poet-librettists of the time. But he cannot make up his mind to write his libretto. His coinage "I am being mosquitoed" seems to indicate that he was being drawn out, comparison being made with Wagner who was working on his Nibelungen at the very same time.
In June, 1855, Berlioz met Wagner anew in London and their relationship became closer again. Shortly afterwards he wrote to Liszt: "For me Wagner has some special attraction, and if there is some rugged ground between us at least it is common ground. He is wonderfully passionate, his heart is warm, and I confess that even his vehemence is captivating." Wagner encouraged Berlioz in his plans. In September Berlioz wrote to Wagner: "I have got your Lohengrin. If you could also let me have your Tannhäuser I should be more than delighted."
And still Berlioz returned to Weimar in February, 1856, without having got any further with his Les Troyens project. Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein got furious and spoke the decisive words quoted later by Berlioz in the epilogue to his Memoirs: "If you shy away from the trouble and difficulty which this work can and must cause you, if you are so weak and cowardly that you will not face all adversities for the sake of Dido and Cassandra, then never come to me again for I don't want to see you anymore."
Immediately after his return, Berlioz pulled himself together to risk a "wonderful" (letter to Marc Suat dated 15th March, 1856) or a "hopeless" (letter to Liszt dated 12th April, 1856) leap. It must be added that Lohengrin was also the subject of discussion in Weimar. Did Liszt attend the performance, as he told Wagner he did? At least he had received a copy of the score (without, however, understanding the text) and did not hesitate to express his displeasure with the long recitatives, the tremolos, the ideas intimated but never developed, the peculiar modulations. On 23rd May, 1865, he wrote to Morel: "We had incredible quarrels in Weimar about Wagner's Lohengrin; it would take too long to tell you everything. As a result stories appeared in the German press which were believed for a long time."
It was a question, then, of showing that things could be done differently and better. Without denying the beautiful elements in Lohengrin, where Wagner abandons the operatic forms still present in Tannhäuser in favour of a recitative and an orchestral symphony - which possess neither the fluidity nor the diversity of the Tetralogy -, it can still be established that there is more music in Les Troyens and that Berlioz won his bet.

The libretto

Berlioz - for reasons of superstition, as he said later - began work on the libretto on a famous date, May 5th, "an epic date, if there is such a thing". His uncle, Félix Marmion, to whom he wrote this (letter dated 24th June, 1856), a brilliant officer of the Empire, was aware, of course, that May 5th was the anniversary of Napoleon's death.
On 21st August, 1848, shortly after the death of his father, Dr. Berlioz, who had brought him up to admire Vergil, he wrote to his sister Adèle: "My life seems to me to have no purpose anymore. In all my endeavours I instinctively orientated myself towards my father; I wanted to know what he thought of my work, I hoped he would be proud of it ... and now ..." Berlioz believed neither in the immortality of the soul nor in any contact with the beyond. He believed his father would as little hear Les Troyens as he did any of the previous works, but he also believed it would have particularly moved him had he heard it.
Berlioz completed the text for Les Troyens in two months (May and June, 1856). At the beginning it caused him great emotional upheavals. On 17th May he wrote to Princess Carolyne: "I will not tell you through what successive phases of discouragement, joy, disgust, delight and fury I have passed." But soon he was completely absorbed in the work, despite the commitments which his candidacy at the Institute involved. "Every morning I got into the carriage with my album in my hand and all the way I pondered not about what I would say to the immortal I was going to visit but about what I would have my characters say." (Letter to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein dated 24th June, 1856.)
After completing the text at the beginning of July - at first it had no title: Aeneas, Dido, Troy and Carthage, Italy were considered in turn but rejected again - it was subjected to many emendations after being read by a small circle of friends. In the fifth act the duet of the guards, the chorus of the Trojan leaders and the song of Hylas were introduced in order to give a better plot. The final duet between Dido and Aeneas wasn't introduced into the libretto until 1859, one year after the musical composition had been completed. Contrariwise, in order to speed up the action, other scenes were not set to music: for example, that in which at the beginning of the third act Dido tells Anna about her premonitions and about a "stranger with noble mien" who appeared to her as she lay awake at night - like Virginie in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel. (Letter to Princess Carolyne dated 12th August, 1856.)
Berlioz followed in broad outline the story as told by Vergil at the end of Book I and in Books II and IV of the Aeneid. In places he expanded on what the poet had only hinted at, e.g. the love between Choroebos and Cassandra and the important role it played, or Jopas' Hymn to Ceres, etc. But he also took greater liberties. Thus he invented the mass suicide of the Trojan women instigated by Cassandra - in the legend she is taken prisoner - in order to create a finale that is more dramatic than imagining the physical fall of Troy.
In the fourth act he borrowed the words for the duet between Dido and Aeneas, "Par une telle nuit" ("On such a night as this") from The Merchant of Venice (Act V, Sc.1). Remembering his own son, Louis, he invented the character of the young Hylas who sails the wide seas. He creates a Shakespearean effect in the duet of the two guards which stands in sober contrast with the rest of the proceedings. Similarly, Berlioz has the shades of Hector, Cassandra, Choroebos and Priam appear. And, finally, Berlioz bestows on the dying Dido the gift Cassandra had of foreseeing the future - as if he wanted to establish an organic relationship between his tragic heroines. That future vision included the birth of Hannibal, the destruction of Carthage and the triumph of Rome.

The score

Although Berlioz resisted the temptation to begin with the music before the text was complete, he made an exception for the duet Par une telle nuit. Before beginning to write the music he confided to Princess Carolyne on 12th August, 1856: "The emotions that have to be expressed here move me too profoundly. That is of no use. One has to try and treat these burning matters cooly." He had already written to her on 17th May: "It is going to be a magnificent structure. Would it could be made of burnt bricks and not of bricks of clay like the palaces of Nineve. If the bricks are not burnt they soon become rubble." And as he had the reputation, since the Lohengrin affair, of having old-fashioned points-of-view, he added mischievously: "There will also be a gondola song for Laakon's snakes." In August, 1856, Berlioz started on the composition proper. He finished the first act, the longest, at the beginning of February, 1857, and then worked on the fourth act, the love act (the previously-drafted Duo, the Septuor, the Chasse royale - Royal Hunt), which he completed in the first days of April. Then he wrote the music for the second act (the fall of Troy), which was finished on 26th June, and afterwards brought the fourth act to completion. Finally he devoted himself to the last act, working on it from 30th November 1857 to 7th April, 1858. Apart from the three ballet melodies, which he didn't compose until autumn, 1859, he considered his work as finished. He began to write the piano score. "(I am) discovering mistakes, correcting... Now and again I have one or two acts played to me so that I can get clear on the details." In 1859 he introduced the last duet between Dido and Aeneas in the fifth act, which he thought he should or could do without. As he was still not satisfied with the grand finale that he had composed in 1858, he endeavoured to cut things out and then came on the idea of overlapping the curses of the Carthaginians with the march of the Trojans, which originally occurred after each other. He proceeded more radically with the scene with Sinon, the Greek spy, which he had placed in the first act, between the Pantomime of Andromache (nr. 6) and Aeneas' arrival (nr. 7): he destroyed the music without regret. When he began composing Les Troyens on 12th August, 1856, Berlioz had written to Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein: "The terribly difficult thing about this is that one has to find the right musical form, that form without which the music doesn't exist or is only the degraded slave of the words. Herein lies Wagner's crime: he wants to dethrone form, to reduce it to an expressive emphasis by exaggerating Gluck's system (the latter, fortunately, did not succeed in putting his ungodly theory into practice). I am for the music which you yourself describe as free. Yes, free and proud and perfect in its completeness and thirsting for conquest. I want it to embrace everything, to assimilate everything. It has to fight its own battles, not leave it to its lieutenants. I have no objection if it has by its side in the battle, so far as this is possible, well-ordered ranks of good verse, but it has itself to go into battle like Napoleon, to march at the head of the troops like Alexander. Music is so powerful that in some cases it would be victorious on its own and would have a thousand reasons to say, with Medea, "Me! That's enough!". To try and give it back the old role of reproducing classical choruses is the most incredible and, fortunately, the most nonsensical piece of madness in the history of art. To find a way of being expressive and truthful without ceasing to be a musician but rather giving music new dimensions of effectiveness: that is the task."
This letter is very important, for Berlioz here makes known his position with regard to the age-old question of whether music or words should predominate in opera. His allusion to "Gluck's system" - Berlioz was always opposed to systems - is a reference to a remark ascribed to Mozart: "For a very long time, Mozart said, composers have flagellated their musical inspiration in order to subjugate it to the text. How long will it take until somebody comes and writes the text in submission to the music. That would be something far more natural." On condition, Berlioz added, that only words were permitted that stood in close and direct relationship to the music. Even if these words do not come from Mozart, at least they give expression to the musical difference that exalts Idomeneo above the best tragedies of Gluck. Les Troyens does, in fact, appear to us to be closer to Mozart's first masterpiece than to Alceste or Lohengrin. In 1789 Grétry raised the same question in his Essays on Music (vol. 1, on Andromaque): "Why is not music set to words, just as words have long been set to music? ... Could music not be given the freedom to go on ahead in full flourish? ... How is a composer to develop a happy motif when he is constantly under the tutelage of the plot?".
Berlioz exercised precisely this right in the great duet between Cassandra and Choroebos, and also in Châtiment effroyable (Terrible Chastisement), which he considered one of the best parts of his work.
Some were astonished that the score of Les Troyens with its clearly separated numbers (recitatives, arias, duets, ensembles, choruses) still paid homage to the "old model" precisely at a time when the new approach, that of Wagnerian drama, was gaining the upper hand. However, it must be pointed out that Berlioz shared with his "modern" contemporaries the concern of seeing to it that applause was not the only thing that linked the individual numbers, and that he tried hard to create natural transitions (even though he wanted each piece to be a complete unit on its own). In addition, he does employ "realistic" recitative scenes but always on the condition that they merge into the great musical panorama which they anticipate. Berlioz' worries about renewal result from his relentless efforts to renew.
He never tires of creating compositional problems and solving them again.
Apart from style, another way in which Les Troyens differs from other operas of the same period is the brilliance of the orchestral colours: not their mass effects but the variety of the tone qualities produced as they are mixed in undisrupted flow. Everything that is written rings out clearly with singular effectiveness and a feeling of immediacy. Bizet, whose Pearl Fishers had been premiered shortly before, didn't miss one single note of Les Troyens (his enthusiasm in public even led to his being challenged to a duel!), and the orchestra in Carmen would probably not be what it is if it hadn't been influenced by Les Troyens.

Instruments and instrumentation

When one reads the list of instruments one sees that the orchestra in Les Troyens is the same as that usually employed in the theatre and there is room for it in the traditional orchestra pit. As modern harps are louder, their number can be reduced without negative consequences, whereas the more strings employed the better the tonal quality. The trumpet parts were written for non-valve instruments, which cannot play chromatic figures. It is a mistake to believe that the role of the cornet consisted solely in making up for this insufficiency and that the cornet parts can be played by chromatic trumpets without any loss of effect. These instruments are very different for Berlioz, in their sound and especially in their effect in the orchestra: the cornet fuses much better with the woodwind and the brass because it does not have that penetrating tone that almost always makes the trumpets stand out.
The horn parts are written alternately or together for natural horns and for horns with valves. The latter have the advantage that they can produce all chromatic notes without the bell having to be muffled with the hand, whereas the simple horns have to resort to this device to produce the notes which the instrument is normally not capable of producing. Berlioz was so familiar with what the simple horn could do that it was never a problem for him to have those notes played open which he wanted "open" and those played closed which he wanted "closed". In Les Troyens the chromatic horns which he occasionally requires enable him to make use of a greater number of open and closed notes. Mostly he composed for simple horns, which means that even today certain notes have to be played closed because only chromatic horns are now used. These sequences of open and closed notes, no longer available as such on modern instruments, were used to great advantage by Berlioz. It is only when one is aware of the extreme nicety with which Berlioz carried out the orchestration that one realizes how important the question of instrumentation was. In most pieces he employed almost the whole range of instruments, not taking out, for instance, the piccolo, the trumpets, the trombones or the bass drum for the brilliant passages. But this did not prevent him from achieving an endless variety of colour. This was brought about by the way he combined not only the instruments themselves with each other but also their various registers.
The same could be said about his deployment of the voices in choruses and ensembles, of which there are very many in Les Troyens. For Berlioz was just as ingenius in this area as he was in orchestration.

The requirements of interpretation

It was claimed for a long time that Berlioz wrote badly for the singer. The truth is that he demands a lot of the singers and that the unusual modulations and the many chromatic sequences make intonation difficult. Still he knows how to get the best out of the voices without ever forcing them to overstrain by having to compete with a loud orchestra. Berlioz detested screeching and in the roles of Cassandra and Dido there are only a few exceptional passages where he goes above F". The role of Aeneas presents a problem similar to that of Arnold in William Tell: it requires just as much gentleness as heroic courage, but the tendency is to sing it too loud. It contains only one high C (in the aria Inutiles regrets), which there is no reason to sing with full voice. The same goes for the C flat in the duet with Dido.
A close familiarity with the thousand details of the score is a sine qua non for the conductor if he is to master all the subtleties it contains. In addition, special importance attaches to the basses: in Berlioz they hardly ever flow unobtrusively into the harmony but often maintain a meaningful tension with it as counterparts. It is only when the basses are clearly audible that the logic and function of what was long referred to as Berlioz' "wrong basses" is revealed. Likewise it is only through the tone colour that one understands his harmonic arrangements, which sound harsh when one plays or studies them on the piano. Only the person who goes through the music at home and then listens to it in the theatre will be in a position to experience first the hopelessness and then the joy that lie at the heart of Berlioz' work, will be able to appreciate the inscrutability of this immortal music.