Les Troyens - Composition History

Composition History

Berlioz began the libretto on 5 May 1856 and completed it toward the end of June 1856. He finished the full score on 12 April 1858. Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and he had admired Virgil since his childhood. The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a prime motivator to Berlioz to compose this opera. In his memoirs, he gives a detailed account of how he embarked upon an opera based on The Aeneid:

I happened to be in Weimar with the Princess Wittgenstein, a devoted friend of Liszt's, a woman of rare intelligence and feeling, who has often comforted me in my fits of depression. Something led to me to speak of my admiration of Virgil and of an idea I had formed of a grand opera on the Shakespearean model, to be founded on the second and fourth books of The Aeneid. I added that I was too well acquainted with the necessary difficulties of such an undertaking ever to attempt it. "Indeed", replied the Princess, "your passion for Shakespeare, combined with your love of the antique, ought to produce something grand and uncommon. You must write this opera, or lyric poem, or whatsoever you choose to call it. You must begin it, and you must finish it." I continued my objections, but she would hear none of them. "Listen", said she. "If you are shirking the inevitable difficulties of the piece, if you are so weak as to be afraid to brave everything for Dido and Cassandra, never come to see me again, for I will not receive you." This was quite enough to decide me. On my return to Paris, I began the poem of Les Troyens. I attacked the score, and after three years and a half of corrections, changes, additions, etc., I finished it.

On 3 May 1861, Berlioz wrote in a letter: "I am sure that I have written a great work, greater and nobler than anything done hitherto." Elsewhere he wrote: "The principal merit of the work is, in my view, the truthfulness of the expression." For Berlioz, truthful representation of passion was the highest goal of a dramatic composer, and in this respect he felt he had equalled the achievements of Gluck and Mozart.

In his memoirs, Berlioz described in excruciating detail the intense frustrations he experienced in seeing the work performed. For five years (from 1858 to 1863), the Paris Opéra -- the only suitable stage in Paris—vacillated. Finally, tired of waiting, he agreed to let a smaller theater, the Théâtre Lyrique, mount a production. However, the management, alarmed at the size, insisted he cut the work in two. It mounted only the second half, given the name Les Troyens à Carthage. Berlioz noted bitterly: "it was manifestly impossible for them to do it justice... the theater wasn't large enough, the singers insufficiently skilled, the chorus and orchestra inadequate." Many compromises and cuts were made and the resulting production "an imperfect" one. In view of all the defects, Berlioz lamented "to properly organize the performance of so great a work, I should have to be master of the theater as absolutely as I am master of the orchestra when rehearsing a symphony."

Even in its less than ideal form, the work made a profound impression. For example, Meyerbeer attended 12 performances. Berlioz's son Louis attended each performance. A friend tried to console Berlioz for having endured so much in the mutilation of his magnum opus and pointed out that after the first night audiences were increasing. "See", he said encouragingly to Berlioz, "they are coming." "Yes", replied Berlioz, feeling old and worn out, "they are coming, but I am going."

Berlioz never saw the first two acts, later given the name La prise de Troie, performed. The first five-act performance of the "complete" Les Troyens, spread over two nights, only took place at Karlsruhe in 1890, 21 years after Berlioz's death. In subsequent years, wrote British Berlioz biographer David Cairns, the work was thought of as "a great sprawling white elephant, product of declining creative vitality, beautiful in patches but fatally uneven and quite unstageable——apart from anything else, because of its length."