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Metaphors for Meyerbeer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Cormac Newark
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Abstract

The avowed inability of nineteenth-century Parisian critics to express in words their impressions of music (whether instrumental or lyric) doubtless has something to do with a more or less general lack of training, but in the case of the works of Meyerbeer it also points to a particular idea of opera. An intense interest in orchestration (outlined here in reviews of Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète and L'Africaine; also in Berlioz's Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes) is articulated in enthusiastic examination of the instruments themselves, and in striking metaphors of science, technology and manufacture. The presence of this gloss on Meyerbeer in otherwise Romantic appreciations (for example Balzac's Gambara) suggests a way of reading opera reception in tune with the urban culture of the period.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , 2002 , pp. 23 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 2002

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References

1 Le garde national, 24 November 1831, unsigned; see Marie-Hélène Coudroy, La critique parisienne des grands opéras de Meyerbeer: Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète, L'Africaine (Saarbrücken, 1988), i, 10. Robert le diable was first performed, at the Paris Opéra (Académie Royale de Musique, Salle Le Peletier), on 21 November 1831.Google Scholar

2 La gazette de France, 23 November 1831, unsigned; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 11.Google Scholar

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7 See Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 184–7. Press commentary on these practices of Meyerbeer – perhaps understandably – did not really begin until after his death; thus there is a special kind of ‘Meyerbeer as we knew him’ air (not always eulogistic, and sometimes faintly anti-Semitic) about the criticism of L'Africaine that distinguishes it from earlier reception.Google Scholar

8 For the earliest sketches, see ‘Le prophète, opéra en cinq actes: Plan’, in Scribe's notebook for 1833–6, F–Pan n. a. f. 22562, ff. 663–70, and Meyerbeer's Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Heinz Becker and Gudrun Becker (Berlin, 1960–85), ii, 491. See also Alan Armstrong, ‘Meyerbeer's Le prophète: A History of its Composition and Early Performances’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1990).Google Scholar

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26 Berlioz's Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes (Paris, 1843) first came out as a series of articles entitled ‘De l'instrumentation’ in La revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1841–2). References will be to Lemoine's reprint of the 1855 second edition, Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration (Farnborough, 1970; first published c.1860).Google Scholar

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43 But see Catherine Join-Diéterle, ‘Robert le diable: Le premier opéra romantique’, Romantisme, 28–9 (1980), 147–66, and Sarah Hibberd, ‘“Cette diablerie philosophique”: Faust Criticism in Paris c. 1830‘, Reading Critics Reading, ed. Parker and Smart, 111–36 (p. 130), who suggest a number of real and literary sources for this scene. See also Max Milner, Le diable dans la littérature française de Cazotte à Baudelaire (Paris, 1960).Google Scholar

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45 Wagner used this phrase to describe Meyerbeer opera in general, in the context of a discussion (in Oper und Drama, 1892–9) of Le prophète in particular; see Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. and ed. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, 1995), ii, 95–9.Google Scholar

46 See William L. Crosten, French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (New York, 1948; repr. 1972), 1–7, where he outlines the distinction between state subsidy and private enterprise in the management of the Opéra.Google Scholar

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48 For more on these fascinating showcases of nineteenth-century technology (also those of 1878, 1889 and so on up to 1937), see Jean-Jacques Bloch and Marianne Delort, Quand Paris allait ‘à l'Expo‘ (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar

49 Douze livrets, ed. Cohen, 161.Google Scholar

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52 Revue et gazette des théâtres, 26 April 1849, Prosper Pascal; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 152. An unsigned review in Le messager des théâtres (22 April 1849) carried the following reassuring information: ‘toutes les toiles des décors ont été enduites d'une composition chimique qui les rend incombustibles’ (‘all the cloth used in the sets has been coated with a chemical compound to make it fireproof’; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 153).Google Scholar

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54 See Hibberd, ‘“Cette diablerie philosophique”‘, and Léon Guichard, La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955), 328. For a reading of how Gambara reacts to Robert le diable which tends slightly closer to the present discussion, see Pendle, Eugène Scribe, 430.Google Scholar

55 Quoted in the preface by Francis Claudon, Balzac, Gambara, 15.Google Scholar

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70 Crosten (French Grand Opera, 94) makes a similar point. Nicole Wild stresses that, after the era of Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, the imaginative element of staging was more and more replaced by historical exactitude; see ‘La recherche de la précision historique chez les décorateurs de l'Opéra de Paris au 19e siècle’, International Musicological Society Congress Report, ed. Heartz and Wade, 453–63 (p. 463). For mention of Scribe's use of footnotes to bolster pretensions to historical accuracy, see also Pendle, Eugène Scribe, 454.Google Scholar

71 L'Africaine is the most obviously ‘exotic’ of Meyerbeer's works; for more, see Roberts, John, ‘The Genesis of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1977), and Gabriela Cruz, ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine and the End of Grand Opera’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1999). Robert Wangermée has written about exoticism and materialism as two sides of the same coin; see ‘L'Opéra, sur la scène et à l'écran: A propos de Carmen’, Approches de l'opéra: Actes du colloque Association Internationale pour la Sémiologie du Spectacle, Royaumont, septembre 1984, ed. André Helbo (Paris, 1986), 251–8 (p. 252).Google Scholar

72 Emblematically, by those Beethoven symphonies being received so rapturously in Paris in the same period; for more on this huge topic, see the introduction to Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), in which he points out (p. 24) that composers writing symphonies in the late 1820s and 30s expected for the first time that their works, if they endured at all, would exist alongside, and not supersede, those of Beethoven. See also Lydia Goehr's meditation on some similar ideas, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

73 See note 42 above; also Cohen, ‘On the Reconstruction of the Visual Elements of French Grand Opera’, 475, note 8, and Wild, ‘La recherche de la précision historique’, 454, note 8. For an inkling of how much in the public mind the diorama was in 1820s Paris, see also Balzac's Le père Goriot, in which the word is Vautrin's catchphrase.Google Scholar