Critical Evaluation
Only knowing the work from a piano score, the British critic W.J. Turner declared that Les Troyens was "the greatest opera ever written" in his 1934 book on Berlioz, much preferring it to the vastly more popular works of Richard Wagner. American critic B. H. Haggin heard in the work Berlioz' "arrestingly individual musical mind operating in, and commanding attention with, the use of the idiom with assured mastery and complete adequacy to the text's every demand". David Cairns described the work as "an opera of visionary beauty and splendor, compelling in its epic sweep, fascinating in the variety of its musical invention... it recaptures the tragic spirit and climate of the ancient world." Hugh Macdonald said of it:
In the history of French music, Les Troyens stands out as a grand opera that avoided the shallow glamour of Meyerbeer and Halevy, but therefore paid the price of long neglect. In our own time the opera has finally come to be seen as one of the greatest operas of the 19th century. There are several recordings of the work, and it is performed with increasing frequency.
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