Les danaïdes - Inclus livret

Description

“One evening, I went to the Opéra. Les Danaïdes, by Salieri, was being performed there. The pomp, the brilliance of the spectacle, the harmonious mass of the orchestra and the choruses, the moving talent of Mme Branchu, her extraordinary voice, the grand roughness of Dérivis [.] put me into a state of turmoil and exaltation that I shall not try to describe.” It is in these exalted terms that Berlioz recounts his first encounter with one of the most revolutionary operas of the Ancien Régime. It is to Antonio Salieri, an eminent pupil of Gluck, that we owe the foresight of the stirrings of nascent Romanticism and the infusion into the tragic fate of Hypermnestre of a pathos and vehemence that his teacher himself only achieved intermittently. The horrible plot hatched by Danaüs and his daughters leads the listener from glittering palaces to dark caverns and ends in the very heart of hell, where Demons, Furies, and vultures will avenge the collective murder of the sons of Egyptus.