III
Meanwhile the reform in Italian opera associated with Rossini made itself felt in Germany, where, in opera, the Italian style was still supreme, by way of one of the most remarkable figures in the history of music. Gassaro Spontini (1774-1851), the son of a cobbler of Ancona, had studied composition at the Conservatorio dei Turichi in Naples. By 1799 he had written and produced eight operas. Appointed court composer to King Ferdinand of Naples the same year, he was compelled to leave that city in 1800, in consequence of the discovery of an intrigue he had been carrying on with a princess of the court. Two comic operas, Julie and La petite maison (Paris, 1804), having been hissed, he determined to drop the buffa style completely. The production of Milton (one act) in 1804 was his first gage of adherence to the higher ideals he henceforth made his own.
He was influenced materially by an earnest study of Gluck and Mozart and through his friendship with the dramatic poet Étienne Jouy. La Vestale (1807), his first great success, was the result of three years of effort, and upon its performance at the Académie Impériale, through the influence of the Empress Josephine, a public triumph, it won the prize offered by Napoleon for the best dramatic work. In La Vestale, one of the finest works of its class, Spontini superseded the parlando of Italian opera with accompanied recitative, increased the strength of his orchestra—contemporary criticism accused him of overloading his scores with orchestration—and employed large choruses with telling effect. La Vestale glorified the pseudo-classicism of the French directory; Ferdinando Cortez, which duplicated the success of that opera two years later, represents an attempt on the part of Napoleon to ingratiate himself with the Spanish nation he designed to conquer.
The same year the composer married the daughter of Érard, the celebrated piano-maker, and in 1810 he became director of the Italian Opera. In this capacity he paid tribute to the German influences which had molded his artistic views by giving the first Parisian performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and organizing concerts at which music by Haydn and other German composers was heard. Court composer to Louis XVIII in 1814, he was for five years mainly occupied with the writing of Olympie, set to a clumsy and undramatic libretto, which he himself considered his masterwork, though its production in 1819 was a failure.
Five months after this disappointment, in response to an invitation of Frederick William III of Prussia, he settled in Berlin, becoming director of the Royal Opera, with an excellent salary and plenty of leisure time. In spite of difficulties with the intendant, Count Brühl, he accomplished much. Die Vestalin, Ferdinando Cortez, and Olympie, prepared with inconceivable effort, were produced with great success in 1821. But in the same year Weber’s Freischütz, full of romantic fervor and directly appealing to the heart of the German nation, turned public favor away from Spontini. In Nourmahal (1822), the libretto founded on Moore’s ‘Lalla Rookh,’ and Alcidor (1825) Spontini evidently chose subjects of a more fanciful type in order to compete with Weber. His librettos were poor, however, and the purely romantic was unsuited to his mode of thought. In Agnes von Hohenstaufen, planned on a grander scale than any of his previous scores, he reverted again to his former style. It is beyond all doubt Spontini’s greatest work. In grandeur of style and imaginative breadth it excels both La Vestale and Ferdinando Cortez. So thorough-going were Spontini’s revisions that when it was again given in Berlin in 1837 many who had heard it when first performed did not recognize it.
Spontini’s suspicious and despotic nature, which made him almost impossible to get along with, led to his dismissal, though with titles and salary, in 1841. Thereafter he lived much in retirement and died in 1851. His music belonged essentially to the epic period of the first French empire. The wearied nations, after the fall of Napoleon, craved sensuous beauty of sound, lullabies, arias, cavatinas, tenderness, and wit rather than stateliness and grandeur. Thus the political conditions of the time favored Rossini’s success and, in a measure, at Spontini’s expense. Spontini was the direct precursor of Meyerbeer, who was to develop the ‘historical’ opera, to which the former had given distinction, with its large lines and stateliness of detail, its broadly human and heroic appeal, into the more melodramatic and violently contrasted type generally known as French ‘grand’ opera.
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1863), first known as Jacob Meyer Beer, the son of the wealthy Jewish banker Beer, of Berlin, was an ‘infant prodigy,’ for, when but nine years old, he was accounted the best pianist in Berlin. The first teacher to exert a decided influence on him was Abbé Vogler, organist and theoretician, of Darmstadt, to whom he went in 1810, living in his home and, with Carl Maria von Weber, taking daily lessons in counterpoint, fugue, and organ playing. Appointed composer to the court by the grand duke two years later, his first opera, ‘Jephtha’s Vow,’ failed at Darmstadt (1811), and his second, Alimelek, at Vienna in 1814. Though cruelly discouraged, he took Salieri’s advice and, persevering, went to Italy to study vocalization and form a new style.
In Venice Rossini’s influence affected him so powerfully that, giving up all idea of developing a style of his own, he produced the seven Italian operas already mentioned, with brilliant and unlooked-for success, which, however, did not impress his former fellow student, Weber, who deplored them as treasonable to the ideals of German art. Meyerbeer himself, before long, regretted his defection. In fact, the last of the operas of this Italian period, Il Crociato in Egitto (Venice, 1824), is no longer so evidently after the manner of Rossini. It was given all over Italy, in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and even at Rio de Janeiro. Weber considered it a sign that the composer would soon abandon the Italian style and return to a higher ideal. The success of Il Crociato gave Meyerbeer an excellent opportunity of visiting Paris, in consequence of Rossini’s staging it at the Italiens, in 1826, where it achieved a triumph. The grief into which the death of his father and of his two children plunged him interrupted for some time his activity in the operatic field. He returned to Germany and until 1830 wrote nothing for public performance, but composed a number of psalms, motets, cantatas, and songs of an austerely sentimental character, among them his well-known ‘The Monk.’ This was his second, or German, period.
It is probable that in 1830 he planned his first distinctively French opera, Robert le Diable, for which the clever librettist Eugène Scribe wrote the book. The first performance of that work, typically a grand romantic opera, on November 22, 1831, aroused unbounded enthusiasm. Yet certain contemporary critics called it ‘the acme of insane fiction’ and spoke of it as ‘the apotheosis of blasphemy, indecency, and absurdity.’ Schumann and Mendelssohn disapproved of it—the latter accused its music of being ‘cold and heartless’—and Spontini, because of professional jealousy, condemned it. Liszt and Berlioz, on the other hand, were full of admiration. There is no doubt that text and music had united to create a tremendous impression. The libretto, in spite of faults, was theatrically effective; the music was pregnant, melodious, sensuously pleasing and rendered dramatic by reason of shrill contrasting orchestral coloring. So striking was the impression it made at the time—though from our present-day standpoint it is decidedly vieux jeu—that its faults passed almost unobserved.
From the standpoint of the ideal, the work is lacking in many respects. First intended for the opéra comique, its remodelling by Scribe and Meyerbeer himself had built up a kind of romantic and symbolic vision around the original comedy. The Robert (loyal, proud, and loving) and Isabella (tender and kind) of the original were the same, but the characters of Bertram and Alice had been elevated, respectively, to the dignity of angels of evil and of good, struggling to obtain possession of Robert’s soul, thus exalting the entire work. The change had given the score a mixed character, somewhat between drama and comedy, making it a romantic opera in the manner of Euryanthe or Oberon. Still, excess of variety in effects, the occasional lack of melodic distinction, and want of character do not affect its forceful expression and dramatic boldness. The influence of Rossini and of Auber, whose Muette de Portici had been given three years before, of Gluck and Weber was apparent in Robert le Diable, yet as a score it was different and in some respects absolutely novel. If Meyerbeer had less creative spontaneity and freshness than Rossini and less ease than Auber, in breadth of musical education he surpassed them both.
In a measure both Spontini and Rossini may be excused if they thought that Meyerbeer, in developing their art tendencies, transformed and distorted them. Spontini, no doubt, looked on him as a huckster who bartered away the sacred mysteries of creative art for the sake of cheap applause. The straightforward Rossini probably thought him a hypocrite. And therein they both wronged him. An eclectic, ‘an art-lover rather than an artist,’ Meyerbeer revelled in the luxury of using every style and attempting every novelty, in order to prove himself master of whatever he undertook. But he was undeniably honest in all that he did, though he lacked that spontaneity which belongs to the artist alone. And in Les Huguenots, his next work, first performed in 1836, five years after Robert, he composed an opera which in gorgeous color, human interest, consistent dramatic treatment and accentuation of individual types, in force and breadth generally, marked a decided advance on its predecessor.
Les Huguenots was not a historical opera in the sense of Tell. In Tell Rossini showed himself as an Italian and a patriot. The Hapsburgs of his hero’s day were the same who, at the time he wrote, oppressed his countrymen. Gessler stood for the imperial governor of Lombardy, his guards for Austrian soldiers; the liberty-loving Swiss he identified with the Lombards and Venetians whose liberties were attacked. But, though the subject of Meyerbeer’s opera is an episode of the ‘Massacre of St. Bartholomew,’ that episode is merely used as a sinister background, against which his warm and living characters move and tell their story. Les Huguenots may be considered Meyerbeer’s most finished and representative score. Not a single element of color and contrast has escaped him. In only two respects did its interest fall short of that awakened by its predecessor. So successful had the composer been in his treatment of the supernatural in Robert that the omission of that element now was regretted; and, more important, the fifth act proved to be an anti-climax. The opera, when given now, usually ends at the fourth act, when Raoul, leaping from the window to his death, leaves Valentine fainting. In psychological truth Les Huguenots is undoubtedly superior to Robert. There is a double interest: that of knowing how the mutual love of Valentine the Catholic and Raoul the Protestant will turn out; and that of the drama in general, against which and not out of which the fate of the Huguenots is developed.
In the third act especially the opera develops a breadth and eloquence maintained to the end. The varied shadings of this picture of Paris, its ensembles, contrasted yet never confounded, constitute, in Berlioz’s words, ‘a magnificent musical tissue.’ Les Huguenots, like Robert, made the tour of the world. And, as Tell was prohibited in Austria, for political reasons, so Meyerbeer’s opera was forbidden in strictly Catholic lands. This did not prevent its performance under such titles as The Guelphs or The Ghibellines at Pisa; a letter to Meyerbeer shows that he refused an arrangement of the libretto entitled The Swedes before Prague!
After Les Huguenots had been produced Meyerbeer spent a number of years in the preparation of his next works, L’Africaine and Le Prophète. Scribe[71] had supplied the librettos for both these works, and both underwent countless revisions and changes at Meyerbeer’s hands. The story of L’Africaine was more than once entirely rewritten. In the meantime the composer had accepted (after Spontini’s withdrawal) the appointment of kapellmeister to the king of Prussia and spent some years in Berlin. Here he composed psalms, sacred cantatas, a secular choral work with living pictures, Una festa nella corte di Ferrara; the first of his four ‘Torchlight Marches,’ for the wedding of Prince Max of Bavaria with Princess Mary of Prussia, and a cantata for soli, chorus and brasses, set to a poem of King Louis I of Bavaria. In 1843 he produced Das Feldlager in Schlesien (The Camp in Silesia), a German opera, based on anecdotes of Frederick the Great, the national hero of Prussia; which, coldly received at first, was at once successful when the brilliant Swedish soprano, Jenny Lind, made her first appearance in Prussia in it, as Vielka, the heroine. Three years later he composed the incidental music for Struensee, a drama written by his brother Michael. The overture is still considered an example of his orchestration at his best.
His chief care, however, from 1843 to 1847 was bestowed on worthily presenting the works of others at the Berlin Opera. Gluck’s Armida and Iphigenia in Tauris; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Zauberflöte; Beethoven’s Fidelio; Weber’s Freischütz and Euryanthe; and Spohr’s Faust, the last a tribute of appreciation. He even procured the acceptance of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Rienzi, that ‘brilliant, showy, and effective exercise in the grand opera manner,’ whose first performance he directed in 1847.
In 1849 Meyerbeer produced Le Prophète in Paris, after many months of rehearsal. The score shows greater elevation and grandeur than that of Les Huguenots, but it is marred by contradictions and inequalities of style. In spite of its success and many undeniably beautiful sections, it betrays a falling off of the composer’s creative power; and it suffers from overemphasis. His two successful efforts to compete with the composers of French opéra comique on their own ground, L’Étoile du Nord and Le pardon de Ploërmel (‘Dinorah’), were heard in Paris in 1854 and 1859, respectively. L’Étoile du Nord was practically Das Feldlager in Schlesien, worked over and given a Russian instead of a Prussian background. Its success was troubled by the last illness and death of the composer’s mother, to whom he was passionately attached. A number of shorter vocal and instrumental compositions were written during the five years that elapsed between its première and that of his second comic opera. This, Le Pardon de Ploërmel, was set to a libretto by Carré and Barbier. It is a charming pastoral work, easy, graceful, and picturesque. Its music throughout is tuneful and bright, but its inane libretto has much to do with the neglect into which it has fallen.
From 1859 to 1864, besides the shorter compositions alluded to, Meyerbeer worked on various unfinished scores: a Judith, Blaze de Bury’s Jeunesse de Goethe, and others. He left a quantity of unfinished manuscripts of all kinds at his death. But mainly during this period he was busy with the score of L’Africaine, his last great opera. When at length, after years of hesitation, he had decided to have it performed and it was in active preparation at the opera, he was seized with a sudden illness and died, May 2, 1864. He had not been spared to witness the first performance of this which he loved above all his other operas and on which he lavished untold pains. It was produced, however, with regard to his wishes, April 28, 1865, and was a tremendous success. Scribe’s libretto contains many poetic scenes and effective situations and gave the composer every opportunity to manifest his genius.
It is the most consistent of his works. In it he displays remarkable skill in delineation of characters and situations. His music, in the scenes that occur in India, is rich in glowing oriental color. Nowhere has he made a finer use of the hues of the orchestral palette. And in the fifth act, which crowns the entire work, he exalts to the highest emotional pitch the noble and touching character of his heroine, Selika, who sacrifices her love for Vasco da Gama, that the latter may be happy with the woman he loves. In dignity and serenity the melodies of L’Africaine surpass those of the composer’s other operas. Its music, though in general less popular than that of Les Huguenots, is of a finer calibre, and the ceaseless striving after effect, so apparent in much of his other work, is absent in this.
The worth of Meyerbeer’s talent has long been realized, despite the fact that Wagner, urged by personal reasons, has ungratefuly called him ‘a miserable music-maker,’ and ‘a Jewish banker to whom it occurred to compose operas.’ Granting that his qualities were those of the master artisan rather than the master artist, admitting his weakness for ‘voluptuous ballets, for passion torn to tatters, ecclesiastical display, and violent death,’ for violent contrast rather than subtle characterization, he still lives in his influence, which may be said to have founded the melodramatic school of opera now so popular, of which Cavalleria rusticana is perhaps the most striking example. As long as intensity of passion and power of dramatic treatment are regarded as fitting in dramatic music his name will live. Zola’s eulogy, put in the mouth of one of the characters in his L’Œuvre, rings true:
‘Meyerbeer, a shrewd fellow who profited by everything, ... bringing, after Weber, the symphony into opera, giving dramatic expression to the unconscious formula of Rossini. Oh, what superb evocations, feudal pomp, military mysticism, the thrill of fantastic legend, the cries of passion traversing history. And what skill the personality of the instruments, dramatic recitative symphonically accompanied by the orchestra, the typical phrase upon which an entire work is built.... An ingenious fellow, a most ingenious fellow!’
The French grand opera of Rossini and Meyerbeer was the musical expression of dramatic passionate sentiments, affording scope to every excellence of vocal and orchestral technique and even to every device of stage setting. It is not strange that it appealed to contemporary composers, even Auber, Hérold, Halévy, and Adam, though more generally identified with the opéra comique, attempted grand opera with varying success.
Auber, in his La muette de Portici (‘Masaniello’), given in 1828, meets Spontini, Rossini, and Meyerbeer on their own ground with a historical drama of considerable beauty and power. Its portrayal of revolutionary sentiment was so convincing that its first performance in Brussels (1830) precipitated the revolution which ended in the separation of Holland and Belgium. Hérold united with Auber’s elegance and polish greater depth of feeling. Zampa (1831), a grand opera on a fanciful subject, and Le pré aux clercs (1832) are his best serious operas. His early death cut short the development of his unusual dramatic gift. Halévy even went so far as to distort his natural style in the effort to emulate Meyerbeer. Of his grand operas, La Juive (1835), La Reine de Chypre (1841), Charles VI (1834), La Tempesta (1850), only the first, a work of gloomy sublimity, with fine melodies and much good instrumentation, may be called a masterpiece. Adam’s few attempts at grand opera were entirely unsuccessful, though his comic operas enjoyed tremendous vogue.
But the influence of Rossini and Meyerbeer on grand opera has continued far beyond their own time. The style of La Patrie by Paladilhe is directly influenced by Meyerbeer. Verdi, in his earlier works, Guido, Trovatore, I Lombardi, shows traces of his methods. Gounod, in the ‘dispute’ scene in the fourth act of Romeo et Juliette likewise reflects Meyerbeer; and Wagner was not above profiting from him whom he most scornfully and unjustly belittled.
In summing up the contributions of Rossini and Meyerbeer to the history of music, it may be said that their operas, and in particular those of the latter, are a continuation and amplification of the heritage of Gluck. Édouard Schuré says in his important work, Le Drame Musical: ‘The secret of the opera of Meyerbeer is the pursuit of effect for effect’s sake.’ Yet it will be remembered that Gluck himself wrote in the preface of his Alceste: ‘I attach no importance to formulas; I have sacrificed all to the effect to be produced.’ The art of Gluck and the art of Meyerbeer have the same point of departure, and each is expressed in formulas which, while quite distinct and individual, denote the highest dramatic genius. Both Rossini and Meyerbeer increased the value of the orchestra in expressing emotion in all its phases in connection with the drama; and helped to open the way for the later development of French grand opera and the innovations of Richard Wagner. Weber and Schubert had both died before Meyerbeer began to play an important part. Succeeding Spontini and Rossini as the dominant figure of the grand opera stage, his real successor was Richard Wagner. But, though Rossini, Meyerbeer, and their followers had enriched the technical resources of opera, had broadened the range of topic and plot, yet they had not turned aside the main current of operatic composition very far from its bed. The romantic and dramatic tendencies which they had introduced, however, were to bear fruit more especially in French romanticism and the development of the evolution of the French opéra comique into the drame lyrique.