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 In La Vestale, one of the finest works of its class, Spontini superseded the parlando of Italian opera with accompanied recitative, increased the strength of his orchestra—contemporary criticism accused him of overloading his scores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.