Les Troyens Hol. 133

Les Troyens - The Trojans: Opera in 5 Acts

Berlioz composed Les Troyens towards the end of his life, drawing on Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid, which he had admired since his childhood. In his Memoirs he recounts how his father, a country doctor, read Virgil to him and how the story of Dido’s tragic fate reduced him to tears which he tried hard to conceal.

The score was finished in April 1858, but he was unable to persuade the Paris Opera to mount it (his earlier opera Benvenuto Cellini had been a failure there in 1838), and eventually he agreed to allow the last three acts to be performed under the title Les Troyens à Carthage. This took placeat the Théâtre-lyrique, an enterprising but ill-equipped theatre, in November 1863, and although it was much admired, there were no more performances before Berlioz’s death in 1869.

In the history of French music, Les Troyens stand out as a grand opera that avoided the shallow glamour of Meyerbeer and Halévy, 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.

• Urtext of the New Berlioz Edition
• Full score (BA5442) and vocal score (BA5442-90) available for sale
• Performance material (BA5442-72) available for hire