“An odyssey of ash and desire”

Les Troyens is a work that is epic and intimate, monumental and mental. In this opera by Berlioz a particularly touching quality comes from the insistence with which the composer strove to convey his awe after reading Aeneid as a boy and which he remembered his entire life. Much of this work is influenced by what Freud characterised as a “primitive scene”.
The two parts of the duologue – The Capture of Troy and The Trojans in Carthage – present symmetrical views of the fate of two cities and two women. Troy and Carthage are doomed to die – as are Cassandre and Didon who embody these cities. Troy perishes before the eyes of the audience while Carthage will be destroyed later, though its sad lot is predestined.
Both Cassandre and Didon die on the stage: the former as a powerless witness of the catastrophe that befalls her native land, alone among her countrymen and not understood by them, and the latter in despair at the treachery of her beloved.
Regardless of the factual similarities, the two parts of the duologue are radically different to each other although these worlds at times coincide – for example, in the finale of the second part when the ghosts of the Trojans who perished when Troy was taken appear in Carthage.
The Capture of Troy is presented, as in Virgil’s epic poem, through Énée’s tale of the same to the Queen of Carthage: these are like “flashbacks” connected with events and people, wandering through the labyrinthine city, a sensation of supernatural powers...
The city is a timeless architectural labyrinth, a prison for the besieged Trojans trapped within. At times, on the stage we see fragments of a ruined district, the remains of human bodies, ghosts... Cassandre, Andromaque and other women of Troy who have chosen death – tragic figures, so well-known to us in this convulsive world.
The compassion felt by the composer did not preclude the brutal clarity of his vision of the blindness of peoples who do not believe in the inevitability of disaster.
In The Trojans in Carthage the light and colours of the Mediterranean fill the space: sultry southern landscapes drive away memories of the east. The Fauvist colours of Matisse are replaced by the classicism of Gérôme and the exoticism of Vernet.
The contrast between ancient Troy, which absorbed a centuries-long memory of ages, and the recently founded Carthage is very sharp indeed. Troy appears as a grey and pestilent city, while Carthage is bright and clean. Nature reigns in Carthage: forests, sunsets, the sea breeze, thunderstorms, summer nights that envelop the soul and which are filled with life... At the centre of all this there are the two lovers – Didon and Énée. The story of their love passes through every stage between two polar opposites – from ecstasy to abandonment, treachery and death.
His dream of Italy which embodies his desire to unite the past with the future is Énée’s one and only obsession. He is a unique character, alive and human, who is present in Les Troyens from the very start to the very end of the action. Énée is a prisoner of his own destiny like all ancient heroes, and he realises this when he meets Didon – his female counterpart.
It is fate (or destiny) that is the protagonist in Les Troyens – in the Romantic and ancient senses of that word.