Troy story

In the late 1970s the Royal Opera announced that it would be performing Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Wagner’s Ring in alternate years, the idea being that the two great 19th-century operatic epics would prove equally popular. We never found out whether they would have done, since while the Ring cycles continued, Les Troyens never got off the ground, and has not been performed complete at Covent Garden for 40 years.

My hopes for the new production were extremely high, and only moderately dashed by Jonas Kaufmann’s withdrawal from the role of Enée, one of grand opera’s least rewarding: as a character he is no less unsympathetic than Aeneas always is, and most of his music, especially his big aria of remorse and self-justification, is strenuous and unconvincing. Bryan Hymel made a decent job of it, but his voice was no more appealing than any of the others on offer in the main parts.