Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1791–1864

Extract

A hundred years after Meyerbeer's death his name can be read a hundred times in the pages of opera-histories for every single time that it appears on the hoardings outside an opera-house. It is, indeed, a name generally dishonoured among musicians, though more by vague generalisation than by detailed criticism. The aesthetic canons of today are as different as possible from those of the French ‘Grand Opera’, which Meyerbeer stabilised and perfected, if he did not invent; and although those canons in many ways resemble those of late seventeenth-century Italian opera—which laid quite as much emphasis on the spectacular element—the French 1830's have decidedly less historical interest for scholars. And so historians are usually content to saddle Meyerbeer with the responsibility for the most conventional passages in the early or middle works of Wagner, Verdi and Bizet without a thought of how this convention was first formed and then came to be accepted by men of such intrinsic originality. Every age numbers some Meyerbeers among its most admired composers—artists, I mean, who will be remembered less for their own works than for the influence they exercised on their successors, for having created the convention which provided the starting-point of new discoveries.