The rise and fall of Meyerbeer
- Tom Richards
- Mar 11
- 7 min read
Giacomo Meyerbeer is widely regarded as the link between Mozart and Wagner. He also linked German orchestration and Italian singing styles, and thereby launched French Grand Opera. His hugely successful operas were sung in French, not German, and premiered in Paris, not Berlin, though he was Prussian Court Kapellmeister (Director of Music) from 1832, and later Prussian General Music Director.
Becoming Meyerbeer
Born in 1791, Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer changed his surname in 1812 whilst in formal music training: (a fellow student was Carl Maria von Weber). He Italianized his first name to Giacomo during his period of study in Italy five years later, and wrote several operas following Rossini's style. One, Il crociato in Egitto— premiered in Venice in 1824 and in London and Paris in 1825.
It was the first Meyerbeer opera played in London, " the last opera ever written to feature a castrato, and the last to require keyboard accompaniment for recitatives. (More in Wiki here.) A London reviewer wrote: "Of all living composers, Meyerbeer is the one who most happily combines the easy, flowing and expressive melodies of Italy with the severer beauties, the grander accomplishments, of the German school." (More here.)
It was this combination that brought him fame, with his 1831 "grand opera", Robert le diable. Grand Opera ruled, not just in Germany. Rossini's Guillaume Tell premiered in 1829. More about Robert below.
Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard that helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century. ( Much more in Wiki )
And then there was Wagner
They first met in 1839, Meyerbeer was 48, Wagner 26, heavily in debt and on the run from creditors. Wagner read to Meyerbeer (whose authority and talent he had effusively praised) some of the libretto of his first opera, Rienzi. Meyerbeer agreed to read the score, and later recommended that it be performed in Dresden. The opera was well accepted but Wagner blamed Meyerbeer and also the whole culture of Paris and its Opera, after Tannhäuser flopped.
It's a complicated story, and still hard to piece together. These and many other of Wagner's depressed hatreds led to his infamous thesis (1850) on Judaism in Music. The derogatory comments had begun much earlier. "When Robert Schumann heard The Flying Dutchman in 1843 he commented to Richard on the 'unmistakeable echoes of Meyerbeer'. Richard reacted with bitterness, he could never draw inspiration from that source 'the merest smell of which, wafting in from afar, is sufficient to turn my stomach'. (More here.)
"His tracts against Meyerbeer are poisonous indeed. 'As a Jew, [Meyerbeer] owned no mother-tongue, no speech inextricably entwined among the sinews of his inmost being...' is a typical example. By the time he penned his notorious anti-Semitic tract Das Judenthum in der Musik (first published anonymously in 1850), his antipathy towards Meyerbeer was embedded in its accusation that Jews were only interested in art for the sake of commerce. (A lot more here.)
The rest is history. "The sheer popularity of Meyerbeer’s operas died down during the 20th century, though until the 1930s they kept a toe-hold in the repertoire. In 1890, the year before the Paris premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin, there were no Wagner performances at the Paris Opera, and 32 performances of Meyerbeer's four French Grand Operas. In 1909, there were 60 Wagner performances, and only three of Meyerbeer (Les Huguenots being the sole work performed). And Meyerbeer’s Judaism meant that with the rise of the Nazis, his operas disappeared and after the war they seemed not to fit in with the times. The re-discovery of Rossini’s operas was not paralleled by a re-discovery of those of his contemporary. " (More here.)
Robert le Diable - triumph in Paris
And that first triumphal opera? Like his later successes, Robert le Diable had as a librettist the very successful Augustin Eugène Scribe, who wrote librettos for 39 operas, and many composers, including Donizetti, Halévy, Offenbach and Verdi. Scorned by high brow critics for the stereotypes in his libretti, Scribe answered, "The theatre-goer loves me because I take care always to win his trust; he is in on the secrets of the comedy; he has in his hands the threads that pull my characters along; he knows the surprises that I am going to spring, and he thinks he is managing them himself; in short, I take him for a collaborator; he feels he created the play with me, and naturally he applauds." (Wiki here.)
Robert was a great success in Paris.
The fusion of dramatic music, melodramatic plot, and sumptuous staging in Robert le Diable proved a sure-fire formula, as did the partnership with Scribe, which Meyerbeer would go on to repeat in Les Huguenots, Le prophète, and L'Africaine. All of these operas held the international stage throughout the 19th century, as did the more pastoral Dinorah (1859), making Meyerbeer the most frequently performed composer at leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.
The opera is rarely performed today, partly because it is hugely long, and partly because the vocal requirements of lead singers and challenging. But the plot is hard to present to current audiences. Commenting on the ROH production we'll view, Guardian correspondent writes:
Premiered in Paris in 1831, Meyerbeer's opera took Europe by storm and made its composer, for a while, the most important musician in the world. The subject – the moral redemption of the sensualist son of a mortal woman and a demon – touched prurient 19th-century nerves. And the music, combining florid Italianate lyricism with progressive harmony and instrumentation, was considered shockingly original.
Its eclecticism now strikes us as leading to stylistic disunity. If you wrote operas in the 19th century, however, Meyerbeer was the competition, and Robert le Diable became one of the most imitated scores in musical history. That bits of it sound like Verdi, Wagner, Berlioz or Offenbach is because the composers all drew on it, even while professing to detest it.
Who was Robert le Diable?
Was he a real person? He is sometimes identified with Robert I Duke of Normandy, the father of William I of England - but only by the 16th Century, whereas the original legend dates from 13th Century France. Robert I was certainly a warlike leader, attacking all around him, even the duchies of his various family members (which unsuccessfully included England under his uncle Aethelred.) He attacked the Church too, locally held by his uncle Robert Archbishop of Rouen, then attacked the bishop of Bayeux.
Pangs of conscience (we suppose) led him to reconcile with the Church, reinstate his uncle, restore Church property and as penance undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where, fittingly perhaps, he died. Get the gory details from the article on him in Wikipedia.
That life of warfare and attacks on Christianity is not unlike the Legend of Robert le Diable, a Norman knight, son of Satan, living a life of banditry “robbing, burning, murdering, ravishing”, killing all the nuns in a nunnery; and then getting remorseful. A pilgrimage of penance to Rome followed, and he weds a beautiful princess and is blessed by God.
Conflating that character with Robert I is perhaps not unsurprising. Meyerbeer’s character and what he got up to in the opera are certainly similar to the legendary Robert.
But Meyerbeer and his librettist Scribe had other ideas for the opera than fidelity to legend. In it, Robert is more a vehicle for exploring Meyerbeer’s concern with “issues of faith, history, society and personal choice…in the milieu of intransigent religion and politics.” (From the notes on our production by Robert Letellier).
These themes lasted into the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1876, Degas would paint the scene of dancing dead nuns (above).
For a full synopsis go here !
Our production
Royal Opera House staged the opera in 2012, with a splendid cast led by Brian Hymel, and Pappano conducting, but the approach taken to the dreadful story by director Laurent Pelly was much criticised.
Fiona Maddox's Guardian review is here
Everyone agrees the singing was superb, despite the demands of Meyerbeer's score.
Gramophone: "There are heaven and hell here for lovers of French opera, though unfortunately rather more of the latter. The operas of Meyerbeer come round so rarely in recordings, let alone on DVD, that a new Robert le diable has to be taken seriously. The high standard of filming and sound is indeed everything one would expect from Opus Arte. It is the staging that is the problem.
"Its first outing at Covent Garden for more than 100 years comes as a major revelation of its historical importance. It's a shame, therefore, that the Royal Opera entrusted the production to Laurent Pelly, who directs it with knowing flippancy rather than taking it seriously. Choruses of knights sway in time to the music before setting off to their tourneys on multicoloured plastic horses. Robert's virginal foster sister, Alice (Marina Poplavskaya), and his demonic father, Bertram (John Relyea), fight for his soul in front of a flimsy-looking pasteboard hell's gate. Even Lionel Hoche's brilliantly creepy choreography for the still-notorious ballet of ghostly nuns doesn't alleviate the pervasively camp tone." More here from Tim Ashley.
This reviewer highlights the distance of Meyerbeer's opera world from today's. "Laurent Pelly has taken a risky decision. In an attempt to leaven the extravagance and deflate the promposity he risks trivialising the piece with his own very distinctive brand of Gallic parody. It’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail meets Camelot with a touch of surrealist pantomime thrown in for good measure.
Toytown sets (Chantal Thomas) and gaudily coloured fairground horses cut the sprawling melodrama down to size, a craggy mountainside became molten with a cheesy animation of hellfire and damnation. You get the picture. And mostly it looked hideous. But short of attempting a full-blown recreation of the bombastic original, what else could Pelly have done, you may well ask? Well, there’s no answer to that except “why do it at all?”
To be discussed!
Lyn, 11/3/26
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