The Sounds of a Nation

Presented by the Bard Music Festival

The 2024 Bard Music Festival will explore the many strands of Hector Berlioz’s contributions and his crucial role in the musical life of nineteenth-century Europe and of today.

Program Three offers an orchestral snapshot of mid-19th century France. Originally conceived as the climax of a symphony celebrating Napoleon Bonaparte, Berlioz’s choral setting of the Te Deum hymn is one of his greatest religious works, combining architectural mastery with grandeur of expression.Les Troyens, his grand opera based on Virgil’s Aeneid, is yet more monumental in scope. An epic tour de force that, to his chagrin, the composer never saw performed complete, the opera is represented here by the “Trojan March,” the tone poem “Royal Hunt and Storm,” and the Merchant of Venice-inspired duet “Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie.”These share the program with Berlioz’s stirring arrangement of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, together with overtures by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber and Christoph Willibald Gluck, the composer Berlioz deemed, with Beethoven, one of music’s “two supreme gods.”