Les Troyens (The Trojans)

Royal Hunt and Storm

Ballet music from Act IV:

    Dance of the Egyptian Girls

    Dance of the Slaves

    Dance of the Nubian Girls

Berlioz’s surpassing masterpiece, his epic opera Les Troyens – “a great work, greater and nobler than anything done hitherto,” as he modestly described it – was never performed complete in his lifetime. The last three of the five acts were staged in Paris in 1863 but the first two acts were not heard until 1879 and even then only in concert performance. The first complete stage production in an authentic edition was mounted by Scottish Opera under the direction of Sir Alexander Gibson in Glasgow on the centenary of the composer’s death in 1969.

In compensation for the unfortunate history of Les Troyens in the opera house, some of the more attractive items of orchestral music – the Royal Hunt and Storm from the fourth act, an exotic ballet episode from later in the same act, and the Trojan March – have long had a life in the concert hall. Even without the chorus of nymphs and fauns which briefly adds a dimension of wildness to the scene in the original score, the Royal Hunt and Storm is irresistible as a piece of nature music, beginning and ending in serene tranquillity but passing through a raging storm in the meantime. Although no word is spoken, it is also a turning point in the story – derived by Berlioz himself from Virgil’s Aeneid -– since it is while sheltering from the storm in a cave that Dido and Aeneas consummate their love, with ultimately tragic consequences.

The pastoral scene is set by first violins drawing an exposed but tenderly expressive line over woodwind harmonies and by trilled and chattered imitations of bird song. As two water-nymphs make their entry, just after a first and very distant rumble of thunder on timpani, another lyrical melody is introduced by flute and clarinet. With the approach of the royal hunt, signalled by offstage horns, the atmosphere begins to change and is completely transformed as the huntsmen themselves make their heavy-footed way across the stage. The storm blows in on a threatening trombone and is whipped towards a climax while horn calls echo from every direction and Dido and Aeneas are seen to enter their cave. The storm and their passion rise in intensity and then gradually subside. In the restored tranquillity towards the end the water nymphs cautiously return and finally, to the accompaniment of one last horn call, disappear.

Although the last three of the five acts of Les Troyens (the only part of opera the composer was to hear) were first performed at the Théâtre Lyrique, the opera was always intended for the Opéra de Paris, which august institution demanded that every opera put on there must include ballet. Far from dismissing this as a tiresome convention, Berlioz took it seriously and exercised much care with the dances he wrote for the fourth act, doing his best to make them, as he thought, authentic and going so far in the Dance of the Numidians as to introduce exotic instrumental and (in the opera version) vocal effects.

Presented not long after The Royal Hunt and Storm, the three dances are part of the celebration of the victory of Dido’s Carthage, with help from Aeneas’s Trojans, over the hostile Numidians. The violin melody with a downward chromatic sigh at an early stage in the Dance of the Egyptian Girls is amply contrasted with livelier material on woodwind and, later, brass. There is a similar contrast in the Dance of the Slaves, although in this case the livelier material comes first and alternates with a seductive swinging melody on bassoons and lower strings. Both themes are developed and played off against each other on a climax towards the end. The Dance of the Nubian Girls is short but fascinating study in exotic    percussion and woodwind colouring. Among he instruments Berlioz specifies in the score are tambourine, tarbuka (a drum tapped with the hand) and antique cymbals.