OPERA: Still bleeding after all these years
A prelude to Meyerbeer’s Margherita d’Anjou
Who was the most successful opera-composer of the nineteenth-century? All those who answer Wagner, leave the classroom at once. It wasn’t even Verdi or Rossini — it was a man today all but forgotten, Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer, aka Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Now only gradually returning to rightful status, (as witness the extensive website of the Meyerbeer Fan Club), his masterpieces of grand opera, a genre which he virtually invented, were a vital and popular part of the staple repertoire of every opera house in the world for almost exactly a century, from 1831 to 1933. On November 2nd this year his early opera, Margherita d’Anjou (1819) is to get its first performance in England, (and, apparently, its first performance anywhere in 148 years), courtesy of the excellent Opera Rara organisation, at the Royal Festival Hall. I look forward to reviewing this premiere for ERO; but before that some introduction to the extraordinary career of Meyerbeer and his music may be apropos for those unfamiliar with them.
The storm of acclaim greeting the 1831 début of Meyerbeer’s Robert the Devil heralded a new era for the musical stage. Audiences went wild. Pirated versions, parodies and vaudevilles sprang up immediately all over Europe. Rossini, Meyerbeer’s junior by a year but until then undisputed maestro of the opera stage, read the future and confirmed his decision to retire. The success of Robert, combining a gothic storyline (in this case based on the rather unlikely figure of the father of William the Conqueror), lavish staging, bravura orchestration, melodic lines and singing, and sensationalist coups de theatre (in Robert, a ballet of the ghosts of ravished nuns), provided the template for a string of similar successes at measured intervals; notably Les Huguenots (1836) based on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Le Prophète (1849) which paraphrased the lurid revolt of the Anabaptists at Munster, and L’Africaine, produced posthumously in 1865, which offered audiences amongst other delights the spectacles of the Spanish Inquisition, a shipwreck and a volcanic explosion. Meyerbeer was a perfectionist; he insisted on the highest standards of performance, he refused to release his works for performance until he thought conditions appropriate (holding back Le Prophète for something like ten years), prepared where necessary to invest some of his own immense wealth when the management of the Paris Opéra refused to cough up. He was also a publicist of genius, inventing the Press Conference, well supplied with food and booze, to announce his new works. Think the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the nineteenth century, and you won’t be far wrong (except that Meyerbeer’s music is streets ahead).
Such success of course bred both envy and imitation — in the case of Richard Wagner, both of these simultaneously. Wagner had sent Meyerbeer a letter of introduction in 1837 of excruciating obsequiousness (‘O . . . How profoundly must I beg you for forgiveness of the liberty of denying you a few precious moments of your time . . in ardent admiration, I am your devoted servant’) and managed to meet his idol by chance in Boulogne in 1839. The maestro advanced the unknown composer money and even recommended Wagner’s work to the Dresden Opera House. So drenched in the style of the elder man is Wagner’s Rienzi (which was in fact produced in Dresden in 1841) that it has been called, unfairly to both parties, Meyerbeer’s best opera.
In this wicked world however few good deeds go unpunished, and Meyerbeer’s generosity as well as his success undoubtedly inspired Wagner’s vicious attack in 1850, Jewry in Music. In this notorious work, Wagner, who had previously never exhibited any symptoms of Jew-hatred, lashed both Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn for their extraction and condemned the supposedly Jewish traits in their music as being effete, decadent and un-German:
What issues from the Jew’s attempts at making Art, must necessarily therefore bear the attributes of coldness and indifference, even to triviality and absurdity.
It is only too easy to trace the line from these remarks to the removal of Mendelssohn’s and Meyerbeer’s works from the German repertory in 1933, (and indeed the subsequent horrifying catastrophes of the Nazi regime). Seventy years later, the critical assessment of both these composers has still not recovered. Many specious reasons are given for not reviving Meyerbeer’s operas; that they need too many star singers to be effectively produced, that their plots are ridiculous, that the music is unattractive. And yet, for example, we regularly get revivals of the early operas of Verdi which fail far more drastically than Meyerbeer’s on these accounts. (Not that I wish in any way to be deprived of early Verdi). On the rare occasions where a production is actually forthcoming, producers too often take fright and try to tart the evening up with concepts, such as the disastrous 1991 Covent Garden Huguenots — its first outing there since 1927 — set in a modern city with a hotel bathing pool and a swimming-costumed chorus. This did at least provoke one of the few occasions when British audience members were sufficiently moved to shout out Rubbish! during the curtain-calls.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a harbinger of the crop of musicians who established a new image for the Jew as artist during the nineteenth century (and whose story may eventually be read in my book on the topic, if I ever finish it). In mid-century, the (gentile) piano virtuoso von Bülow famously wrote ‘Il y a trois B dans la musique — Bach, Beethoven et Brahms. Tous les autres son crétins’. By the end of the century the (Jewish) virtuoso Moskowski was able to parody this: ‘Il y a trois M dans la musique: Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer et Moskowski. Tous les autres sont chrétiens’.
Born to one of the wealthiest families of Berlin, Meyerbeer was of the first generation of Jews whose parents could afford, and were motivated, to provide their children with a full secular education. His father and mother took a leading part in cultured Berlin society, but were also practising Jews and leaders in the early attempts of Jewish religious reform. One of his brothers, Michael, became a noted poet, another an amateur astronomer who helped compile the first maps of Mars and the moon. Jakob, as he then was, proved to be a natural piano virtuoso, and appeared in public for the first time at the age of 9. The finest music tutors were always available, including the Abbé Vogler, where his fellow-pupil and close friend was Carl Maria von Weber. From 1816 to 1824, having by now adopted Meyerbeer as his surname, he spent most of his time in Italy, composing operas in the style of Rossini, amongst them Margherita and, in 1825, his first international success, (in both London and Paris), Il Crociato in Egitto.
After the success of his new style in Robert le Diable Meyerbeer established himself between Paris, where he was the major force at the Opéra, and Berlin where he acquired a succession of honours, in 1847 being appointed Musical Director General to the Prussian Court. His whole life was one of wealth, success and acclaim. But none of these could offset Meyerbeer’s biggest problem, which was, paradoxically, his integrity. He was a Jew, and unlike virtually all of his musical Jewish contemporaries, he did not even attempt to mask this by conversion. He saw it as his duty to live out those principles of a humanitarian Judaism presaged by the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and which his parents attempted to put into practice. He took seriously, therefore, the duties of charity and his many beneficiaries other than Wagner included his troublesome compatriots the poet (and family connection) Heinrich Heine and the journalist (as he was at the time) Karl Marx. His personal philosophy undoubtedly informed his choice of libretti, and it is no accident that each of his masterpieces deals with the problem of religious intolerance, (certainly not chosen for its marketability).
And, of a piece with his depressive, hypochondriac temperament, he knew that whatever he did or achieved, he would never quite be accepted. In 1839, he wrote movingly (and prophetically) to Heine:
I believe that Jew-hatred is like love in the theatres and novels: no matter how often one encounters it in all shapes and sizes, it never misses its target if effectively wielded . . . What can be done? No pomade or bear grease, not even baptism, can grow back the foreskin of which we were robbed on the eighth day of life; those who, on the ninth day, do not bleed to death from this operation shall continue to bleed an entire lifetime, even after death.
Meyerbeer’s life — and his artistic after-life — form a classic case study in the grotesque tragi-comedy of German-Jewish relations which demarcates a significant fault-line in European social history and whose after effects are still with us in Europe and the wider world. His voluminous diaries and correspondence, which were preserved unread for a hundred years by a set of bizarre adventures which are a saga in their own right, have slowly been published in German since 1960 (we are now at volume 6), and the diaries up to 1856 are available in English in an excellent version by the scholar Robert Letellier. They offer a unique perspective on the tastes and profound social changes of the mid-nineteenth century which seem to us both closer and more alien than those of the centuries on either side. The same can be said of Meyerbeer’s great operatic achievements. Though I look forward to Margherita d’Anjou, I thirst for a decent Prophète.
Allen Buchler writes on Opera for ERO
Allen Buchler, October 29, 2002 11:23 AM