Epic proportions: Dido and Aeneas had been the subject of many operas through the centuries. But in Les Troyens, Berlioz gave their legend a heroic grandeur it had never had before.(Opera Review)

In January 1858, just before Berlioz completed work on Les Troyens, he gave a private reading of The Aeneid to Richard Wagner, who was then on a visit to Paris. Wagner was appalled by what he heard, and by Berlioz's "singularly dry and theatrical delivery." Despite his proclaimed debt to Greek tragedy and his long immersion in northern epics, Wagner had little interest in the Homeric world and was shocked that a modern composer would revert to the gods and goddesses of antiquity as a subject for an opera. That, by common consent, was a preoccupation of the old world of Rameau and Gluck, buried under the ashes of the French Revolution and replaced by the historical dramas ...