A Win for the Trojans

It is the hairiest thing we have ever done. The moving of people is just so scary. The seven towers are single units--the five center ones are cranked by hand--two men in each tower. Gravity is the thing. Rows of boats without tracks. They run like hell on cue. Boat No. 5 is always late--more weight on that one. The ghosts are in the prow. It's early Halloween to make that one work. Three of us run the show. There are two of me and the third runs the supers.

The 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 in the U.S.

The 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.

The music takes four hours to sing. There are 13 major scene changes. A cast of hundreds is required, including two choruses, a corps de ballet and three stage bands. Also hunters on horseback, ships sailing out of the harbor, a stream that turns into a waterfall, several ghosts and, most of all, a wooden horse.

In the 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 by stretching human and mechanical resources to the fullest. Said Stage Designer Peter Wexler: "It beats anything Cecil B. De Mille was ever up against."

What the Met has mounted, in addition to a first-rate vocal ensemble consisting of Jon Vickers, Christa Ludwig and Shirley Verrett, is a true theatrical spectacular. The colossal scale is reinforced by eliminating the frame provided by the famous gold curtain. The audience sees the vast set as it enters--just as it would in Hair. Musically, the opera is a series of epic climaxes; there is, for instance, no overture. Except to the most committed Berlioz aficionado, part one is a stark musical landscape with none of the lyricism that is to follow. To compensate--and in effect illustrate the fall of Troy--Wexler and Director Nathaniel Merrill have conjured up six full scene changes spinning around on the turntable. Complete with a dazzling procession, the horse, plus three more huge icons of animals, it is a mesmerizing panoply.

The horse is actually on film, and because the image is too impressionistic, it may be the least effective part of the scene. Later in the second act, film projections--being used for the first time at the Met--are much more powerful. The spectator first sees an eye in the scrim curtain. Like the opening in a Faberge Easter egg, it reveals colts romping in a field of daisies, hunters on the chase, a shadow man and woman walking hand in hand through a forest--all fine, unselfconscious, pre-Freudian images for the awakening love of Dido and Aeneas. The cinematic montage is both opulent and sensual.

Still, the real show may be behind the scenes. Any performance of Les Troyens is a miracle of calibration. In the pit, Conductor Rafael Kubelik uses everything but radar to maintain contact with seven assistant conductors. They are backstage with walkie-talkies to communicate with each other as they herd bands and choruses around the platforms, often walking in the opposite direction from the motion of the turntable. When film sequences start to roll, Kubelik's tempos must not vary by more than four seconds from performance to performance.

Director Merrill calls Chris Mahan the "only indispensable man I know. If he ever didn't show up, we could not do Les Troyens." Mahan sees himself as a "cross between a nanny and a top sergeant. You must be aware of everything that happens on the stage. That includes some vague lady in the chorus who does not know right from left. You must allow for everything--like where you put 60 swords. It is like being a garage mechanic: you have the problem and then work backward."

Human Ghosts. All the backstage sergeants have their favorite nightmares. Merrill's personal fear is that the five schooners that must tilt and collapse when a wind machine blows at the beginning of the opera will jam some night and halt the entire production. Another perilous moment occurs in the Royal Hunt and Storm scene in the second act. Four human ghosts must descend from 60 feet in the air into the audience's vision, while the giant turntable is about to spin forward, all without disclosing the projection equipment. Any electrical trouble then would end the evening.

The Met's courage in taking almost all of Berlioz's bizarre imaginings literally, instead of opting for a neo-Bayreuth impressionism, is to be applauded. Still, certain directions are changed. The Royal Hunt scene calls for an allegorical pantomime ballet. That is now depicted on film. "The alternative," says Merrill, "is to have a lot of little ballet girls running around with flaming branches. They did that in the 19th century, you know. That is why so many opera houses burned down."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.