Up next at Seattle Opera: a concert presentation of Part Two of Les Troyens, the epic based on Virgil’s Aeneid by Hector Berlioz. For two performances only, January 17 and 19, Seattleites will have a chance to hear this incredible show, rarely given in the United States, starring some of today’s leading singers, and with an orchestra of 80 and chorus of 60. Opera-lovers who heard Seattle Opera’s extremely successful concert presentation of Samson and Delilah in 2023 have an idea of what to expect. Although there won’t be full costumes, hair and make-up, sets, props, or complex staging, you’ll enjoy the music and follow the story thanks to lighting, supertitles, and intense performances by singers focused on touching you with their voices.
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| Mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges in our 2023 concert presentation of Samson and Delilah. Photo by Sunny Martini. |
Curious about why we’re offering Les Troyens à Carthage in concert? Here are some of our reasons:
Great music. If you’ve never heard this extraordinary music by nineteenth-century France’s leading composer, you’re missing out. Seattle music-lovers have been fortunate, in the last decade, to have heard much of Berlioz’s music conducted by a great Berlioz champion, Ludovic Morlot. As Music Director of Seattle Symphony for much 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 came in 2017 conducting Beatrice and Benedict, Berlioz’s frothy love-letter to Shakespeare.
Morlot and the players of the Seattle Symphony are one good reason to hear Les Troyens. Our singers are another. This opera has also been on the wish-list of two of today’s opera superstars, mezzo soprano J’Nai Bridges, who sings Dido, and tenor Russell Thomas, starring as Aeneas. Both 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 gorgeous double-mezzo duet with Dido in the first scene and a splendid duet with Adam Lau later on.
There’s so much to enjoy in Les Troyens à Carthage. Here’s a SoundCloud playlist featuring excerpts from a 2000 recording, made in London and starring Ben Heppner and Michelle DeYoung (fresh from their unforgettable 1998 Seattle Opera Tristan). In order, you’ll hear the Dido & Aeneas love duet, the “Royal Hunt and Storm” episode for chorus and orchestra, Aeneas’ aria, Dido’s aria, the Carthaginian anthem (theme music for Dido’s nation), and the curse at the end—which prominently features the Trojan march (theme music for Aeneas’ nation). Plus one of Berlioz’s striking ballets.
Discover and imagine. Concert operas, or ‘semi-staged operas,’ have been on the rise in America since the pandemic. There are several good reasons for this development. In terms of money, concert operas can be more affordable than fully-staged productions; and with only two performances, selling out the tickets is less of a challenge. That’s a significant consideration with an unfamiliar title like Les Troyens—it’s much easier to sell tickets to Carmen, La traviata, or Madame Butterfly than some opera that’s not in the ‘top 10.’ But there are of course plenty of great masterpieces that aren’t in the top 10, and the public deserves a chance to explore and discover those, too. In fact, this concert-opera format, where you as spectator have to use a little imagination (since sets and costumes aren’t doing all the work for you) may be the best way to explore and discover your next favorite opera. When you contribute some of the creativity, you’re automatically more invested in the experience.
Here's a SoundCloud playlist featuring highlights from Seattle Opera’s previous concert opera presentation, when we gave Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah in January 2023. What a great opportunity that was to enjoy some extraordinary music—and, with our imaginations stimulated by the music, enter into that wild Bible story in a profound way.
Manageable scope and scale. Les Troyens has often been described as a French counterpart to Wagner’s Ring. It’s absolutely vast, at least four hours of music, and if you add four intermissions (separating its five acts) you’ve got at least six hours in the theater. Les Troyens is actually a pair of operas inspired by the sprawling Aeneid: Acts 1 & 2, known as La prise de Troie or The Capture of Troy, focus on Cassandra, the Trojan princess who can see the future. Although Aeneas appears in this first part, he’s a minor character who only comes into his own 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. While there are opera companies which present all five acts on one night, typically that becomes an endurance test for performers and audience. In his lifetime Berlioz only ever attended a performance, like the one we’re giving, of Les Troyens à Carthage—which by itself is a full-length and entirely satisfying opera.
Berlioz and drama. Berlioz was an amazing composer. He was a good writer, too, witness his excellent Memoirs; but it’s possible he would have done better to collaborate with a librettist rather than to write his own opera librettos, which is what he always did. As a dramatist he wasn’t particularly sophisticated; he tends to present ideas and emotions one at a time, which works well for music but can make for static drama. There’s a funny story about the time Berlioz read his libretto-in-progress for Les Troyens aloud to Richard Wagner, who thought it a mess. Wagner wrote a friend: “At least he spared me the possible embarrassment of my having to tell him how I felt...any attempt to disillusion him would immediately bring about a breach and the loss of his friendship.” Wagner, one of opera’s most sophisticated dramatists, put it well when he wrote, “Berlioz...is my opposite...he sees only the detail of the subject before him, and is significant because of his ability to master this detail in such a lively fashion.” A smaller-scale, concert production of Les Troyens offers an opportunity to appreciate Berlioz’s mastery of detail. And if Berlioz himself never quite saw the forest for the trees, well, that won’t come across as a fault in a production that doesn’t attempt to display the entire forest.
The grandest of all French grand operas. Opera in mid-nineteenth Paris achieved an opulence and a grandeur it’s never had before or since, in that chapter of opera history known as “French grand opera.” The era of French grand opera was dominated by two creators: the prolific librettist Eugène Scribe and the talented composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Their grand operas (Robert le diable, Les Hugenots, Le prophète, L’Africaine), hugely popular in their day, are almost never given today. They’re entertaining, but enormously expensive, and lacking that human conviction that comes from a genuinely serious artist communicating a pressing message.
But that conviction is omnipresent with Berlioz and Les Troyens. Berlioz had hopes, at one point, that the Paris Opéra might present his masterpiece; he designed it, certainly, following the patterns perfected by Scribe and Meyerbeer. But his real artistic heroes were Gluck, Beethoven, and Shakespeare. Les Troyens would not exist without the profound impact those three artists had on Berlioz—not to mention his lifelong obsession with Virgil. Berlioz had experienced a deep connection with the character of Dido as a little boy translating Latin. All his life he needed to express her beauty, her nobility, her tragic passion. He finally did so in this remarkable, one-of-a-kind opera: the grandest of all the French grand operas. Give it a listen!
Hector Berlioz's epic Les Troyens in Concert is on stage January 17 & 19, 2025 at McCaw Hall.
For tickets and information, visit seattleopera.org/troyens.
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