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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
In Berlioz's Aeneid the stage is, cumulatively, crowded, and the actors are concerned with a present or imminent crisis. There is no space for those emotional luxuries of events recollected in a leisurely and glowing context, on which Virgil was able to draw freely for one epic style. Aeneas is kept significantly on the move, noting rather than confronting a deteriorating situation at Troy, making his way up from a ‘scratch’ reputation at Carthage, letting himself go with Dido, being made to regret it, facing Dido for one awful interview, and eventually leaping to duty and his ship in a glow of religious patriotism, but without a theme to call his own. Nothing is left of the ‘I, Aeneas …’ with which he first revealed himself to an alien monarch. Nor does Berlioz exploit Cassandra's prophecies. Her visions of the new Troy, to which the whole drama leads, are peremptory and unrelated to the established patriotic theme (except for two distorted bars after Polyxena's suicide). The duty warnings of Hector and Mercury are equally uncoordinated. The orchestra underlines, without pursuing further, Dido's initial disturbance of spirit (dialogue with Anna). Her final greeting to death is prolonged but unreminiscent, apart from one phrase. The rest—Coroebus, Iopas, Hylas, sentries, Anna, Narbal—keep to their declared moods of male devotion, nature-worship, nostalgia, anti-nostalgia, match-making, politics, with more subtle but still impromptu examples of opposed motives in the ensembles. The peoples concerned move from one occasion to another, to smile or to frown. Orchestral interludes implement gaps for diversionary dance-drama and troop-movement.
1 In Virgil, Iarbas puts his case to his god (‘My tenant going round with this second Paris and his degenerates! Is this your reward for all our worship and sacrifices?’), and Mercury is at once despatched to send a humbled Aeneas packing. But here, as usual, once the button is pressed truth is the first casualty.
2 The main theme here seems to suggest a serenade by echoing—now in a sedate 4/4—the first phrase of a Provencal song, ‘O Magali, ma tant amade’ (6/8).
3 A return to Virgil's evocation of Hannibal, on Dido's dying lips, happily replaced a reference to the future supremacy of the French in North Africa, which Berlioz at first interpolated. That would have been to force the contemporary note; and there was always a danger that it might prove signally out of date. Berlioz was no fanatic supporter of colonial adventure.