Word: berlioz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...speaker is not a madman, nor is he running a fun house or shifting the population of a prison across a body of water. He is Chris Mahan, executive stage manager of the Metropolitan Opera, unwinding after a rehearsal of Berlioz's Les Troyens, the crown jewel in a season beset by financial and artistic problems. First performed last fall [TIME, Nov. 5], it is back again this month. The eleven performances are the first ever in New York City, and the work has been staged only twice previously...
...Price. Small wonder. Berlioz was a genius of unbridled imagination who sought the impossible routinely and was willing to pay the price-neglect-to achieve it. Consider the bill of particulars for Les Troyens, based on Vergil's account of the wanderings of Aeneas before the founding of Rome...
...composer's lifetime-he died in 1869-Les Troyens was impossible to stage. The music seemed to be an occasional interval in the vast silence of the scene changes. Berlioz even tried breaking the work into two parts-"The Capture of Troy" and "The Trojans at Carthage"-but could get only an inadequate staging of the second half. The Metropolitan's $45.7 million dollar plant-which houses four enormous stages on two levels, a 57-foot turntable, and the most intricate theatrical lighting system in the country-can accommodate the composer's billowing visions, but only...
Holmes took down his violin and played an air that fortunately our guest did not recognize: Berlioz's March to the Scaffold. Then he brightened. "I have but one motto, Watson...
...BERLIOZ: LA DAMNATION DE FAUST (Philips, 3 LPs). Conductor Colin Davis' exemplary latest chapter in the resurrection of Hector Berlioz...