Berlioz found it easier to make money as a critic than as a composer, and much of his music is essentially critical in character. Les Troyens, for example, can be understood as a critique of opera and a critique of epic.

In the French imagination, opera and epic were only hazily separated. In the Diderot-d’Alembert Encyclopédie, the author of the entry on opera (Louis de Jaucourt) defines opera as follows:

We may scratch our heads when we read this, because we’re accustomed to thinking of opera in quite a different way. For Jaucourt, opera was the godhaunted domain of Lully and Rameau, a place of superhuman emphasis of passion and impossibly expensive stage effects. But our most popular operas concern not Juno and Hippolytus and Zoroaster but a Spanish gypsy, a French prostitute, a barber in Seville, a Sicilian roughneck, and a clutch of starving young artists in Paris. If these operas are expensive, it's mostly because good singers aren't easy to come by. The staging itself of Carmen, La traviata, Cavalleria rusticana, La bohème, and so forth doesn't require flying machines, collapsing palaces, or panoramas of chaos resolving itself into cosmos.

And yet, if Jaucourt were hauled into the twenty-first century, he might be able to argue his thesis. Carmen is a gypsy, but an unusually potent kind of gypsy, as Théophile Gautier noted in an 1872 poem: