The Overture to 'Les troyens'

Abstract

The one thing upon which most people will agree about Berlioz is his unconventionality. Pierre Boulez, however, makes an exception of Les troyens, finding it 'in relation to a certain classicism, an obviousness of form', less preposterous than Berlioz's earlier symphonic works (1976:18). The absence, or disguise, of an overture to Les troyens is only one reason for disputing this opinion. Despite Berlioz's own reasons for dispensing with the customary instrumental preface (see below), I hope to show that he may also have been motivated by a need to avoid tautology. Les troyens needs no overture; or rather, its first number, a chorus, serves as overture. But this can only be maintained through an overview of the whole opera. So elaborate an approach is a condition of the subject; for this opera is sui generis, and for most of its 125-year existence has been notorious only for being misunderstood. The most pernicious misconception of Les troyens concerns its genre. An exact contemporary of Tristan, it may have been written in response to the challenge posed by Wagner.' But this is purely a biographical matter, affecting neither form nor style. Berlioz wrote his own poem, and his heroine dies in flames, but Les troyens is not half a Wagnerian tetralogy; it is a single opera. This at least has been recognized since its first complete publication, in 1969 (NBE). We should not, however, go to the other extreme and attempt to understand it purely through the contemporary French genre regarded by Wagner as the nadir of opera. Les troyens has the outward semblance of Grand Opera: five acts, a duration of over four hours, ballet, spectacle, individual tragedy. But in spirit and form it has only a loose connection with the commercial opera of the bourgeois monarchy and second Empire. Regarded as Wagnerian music-drama or as Grand Opera, it is a failure; intuitive belief that it is, on the contrary, a masterpiece, demands a search for another category, or better, the avoidance of categories. With typical eccentricity, Berlioz produced a neo-classical epic. His libretto is rooted in the verse-forms and idioms of the eighteenth century (Rushton 1965). His musical idiom, as idiosyncratic as ever, approaches more closely than before that of his idol Gluck. The term 'epic' should be understood as a matter of spirit rather than form. Les troyens is not an epic in the Wagnerian