Opera has naturally made no start at all in 2013 in the UK, the month surrounding Christmas being a culture-free zone. By contrast the New York Met has entered the new year with a thrilling production, revived from 2003, of Berlioz’s Les Troyens, a resounding success in all major respects except one. Lovers of this great masterpiece usually have a chance to see it about once a decade, but only a few months ago it was staged by the Royal Opera in a production that had a muted response.
Les Troyens is one of those works which either shakes you to the core or leaves you mildly, or even very bored. It aims at the comprehensive vision of great classical epics, indulges a leisureliness of narrative, and has a low-life scene of regrettable banality, but which at least is brief (the two Trojan sentries chatting about the availability of Carthaginian girls). Most importantly, it proposes a concept of nobility that is truly classic and is incarnated in the opera’s two heroines, both of whom, by virtue of their capacity for unillusioned proclamation or acceptance of the truth, go to their deaths: the first, Cassandra, in ecstasy, the second, Dido, in agony, not only the physical agony of stabbing herself but also the appalled recognition that, though she may be temporarily avenged by Hannibal, Rome, founded by her betrayer Aeneas, will be eternal.
Berlioz does nothing to entice the spectator and listener at the opening. Manic chattering winds, bottom-light, evoke the idiot frivolity of the Trojans, celebrating the Greeks’ retreat without a thought that they might have sinister motives. Berlioz is only concerned to provide the ideal setting for Cassandra to come forward and pronounce Troy’s doom, which she does in the grandest possible manner, knowing that she will be ignored. She must be instantly imposing, and unfortunately Deborah Voigt wasn’t. Her voice is now hard and pinched, and she can’t colour it, so the alternations between impassioned warnings, tender laments at the thought of the doom that awaits her beloved Coroebus, visions of ruin, go for nothing. In close-up it is impossible not to notice that Voigt seems to be smiling in the most inappropriate places.
The contrast between her acute limitations and the warmth and variety of tone that Dwayne Croft — looking magnificent and singing wonderfully, as Coroebus, not a grateful role — was cruel. Still, the momentum of the music in the flawless opening act was tremendous, thanks to Fabio Luisi, conducting this as he conducts almost everything, not with ideal insight but with a confident grasp of idiom and pace.
Despite Berlioz’s contempt for the crowd, one of his most enduring characteristics, he gives it superb music to sing in Les Troyens, and that, together with Francesca Zambello’s masterly control of mass movements, made Part I, The taking of Troy, exciting in almost all ways. The sets are simple, monumental, unimpeding of action, and evocative. In Part II, The Trojans at Carthage, everything conspired not only to vanquish Dido’s remorse — the words she sings that open the magical succession of quintet, septet and duet that constitute the opera’s most lovely music — but also to render the flaws in Berlioz’s structure as inconspicuous as possible. Nothing can hide the fact that the opera does get bogged down in a series of celebrations and entertainments that Dido herself says she finds going against her mood, but at least the dances, which were so ridiculous at Covent Garden, are done at the Met with simple elegance.
The lovers at the centre of the action were ideally cast. Bryan Hymel sang the role as a stand-in at the Royal Opera, and again in the Met production; but he is the most persuasive Aeneas I have ever seen and heard — excepting, as always, Jon Vickers. If there is any justice in the world of opera, it will be Hymel that people will be excitedly anticipating seeing, and I imagine him in a variety of roles where there is at present an apparently total void. At Covent Garden he was adequate, at the Met he is resplendent, much more confident, and even made some kind of plausible shape of his huge unwieldy aria ‘Inutiles regrets!’
He blended perfectly in the love duet with Susan Graham. Her assumption of the role of Dido was without question one of the supreme things I have seen on an operatic stage, and all the more moving because in the cinema so much of the devastating final scenes was in close-up. Performed with this intensity, taste and command of her vocal resources, the last 20 minutes of Les Troyens seems uniquely great, combining dignity and passion, heroic resolution and all-too-human vacillation, to unbearable effect. The insensitivity of the Met audience in applauding after her aria ‘Adieu, fière cité’ shows that Berlioz’s scorn for the crowd is still appropriate, even for the crowd that goes to witness Les Troyens. What follows is one of the most extraordinary passages in opera, with dissonant and jagged orchestral phrases alternating with Dido’s moans and whispers as she moves towards her death. Dido’s expression is adequate to her pain, and Berlioz, in his greatness, makes us feel how much more that matters than the eternity of Rome.
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