Taking chances. (Viewpoint).(Les Troyens.)(Opera Review)

Daniel Barenboim once turned a standard aphorism on its head when discussing the challenge modern music faces gaining a foothold in the symphonic repertory. "Contempt breeds unfamiliarity," he said, adding, "One simply has to have the patience not only to let time evolve but to repeat the pieces that one considers important, until with further and further hearings, they become more accessible."

Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens did not suffer from contempt during its composer's lifetime; it was simply considered unperformable. The Met first took it on in 1973 and revived it a decade later, in observance of the company's centennial. This season's new production is only the second the opera has had at the Met, a strangely low tally for an opera whose partisans consider it one of the greatest works of the nineteenth century. During the preview to ChevronTexaco's broadcast season, the Met's artistic director, James Levine, said he hopes that this production, directed by Francesca Zambello, will finally win Les Troyens the place it merits in the company's repertory.

Levine is fascinated by the "tension between [Les Troyens's] classical structure and communication of emotion to its verismo limits." Other writers admire the "rightness" with which Berlioz paints his scenes musically--how, for example, he differentiates between the clash of battle in Priam's doomed Troy and the Mediterranean languor of Didon's Carthage. In "Epic Proportions" (p. 22), Berlioz authority Hugh Macdonald looks at the sources from which the composer drew in writing his libretto and particularly how he shaped those sources to suit his purposes. Our February cover subject is the redoubtable Deborah Voigt, who sings Cassandre in Les Troyens. Profiled by features editor Brian Kellow beginning on page 14, she comes across as a person who has every right to be a diva but just doesn't want to give up the one thing divas aren't supposed to have: common sense.

Vincenzo Bellini's Il Pirata does appear to have suffered the fate Borenboim has described. Written some thirty years before Les Troyens, Pirata received its Met ...