Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Mozart and Wagner". With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors, he gave the genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition. These were employed in the context of sensational and melodramatic libretti created by Eugène Scribe and were enhanced by the up-to-date theatre technology of the Paris Opéra. They set a standard that helped to maintain Paris as the opera capital of the nineteenth century.
Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Meyerbeer began his musical career as a pianist but soon decided to devote himself to opera, spending several years in Italy studying and composing. His 1824 opera Il crociato in Egitto was the first to bring him a Europe-wide reputation, but it was Robert le diable which raised his status to great celebrity. His public career, lasting from then until his death, during which he remained a dominating figure in the world of opera, was summarized by his contemporary Hector Berlioz, who claimed that he 'has not only the luck to be talented, but the talent to be lucky.' He was at his peak with his operas Les Huguenots and Le prophète ; his last opera was performed posthumously. His operas made him the most frequently performed composer at the world's leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.
At the same time as his successes in Paris, Meyerbeer, as a Prussian Court Kapellmeister from 1832, and from 1843 as Prussian General Music Director, was also influential in opera in Berlin and throughout Germany. He was an early supporter of Richard Wagner, enabling the first production of the latter's opera Rienzi. He was commissioned to write the patriotic opera Ein Feldlager in Schlesien to celebrate the reopening of the Berlin Royal Opera House in 1844, and he wrote music for certain Prussian state occasions.
Apart from around 50 songs, Meyerbeer wrote little except for the stage. The critical assaults of Wagner and his supporters, especially after Meyerbeer's death, led to a decline in the popularity of his works; his operas were suppressed by the Nazi regime in Germany, and were neglected by opera houses through most of the twentieth century. In the 21st century, however, the composer's major French grand operas have begun to reappear in the repertory of numerous European opera houses.
Early years
Meyerbeer's birthname was Jacob Liebmann Beer; he was born in Tasdorf, near Berlin, then the capital of Prussia, to a Jewish family. His father was the wealthy financier Judah Herz Beer and his mother, Amalia Wulff, to whom he was particularly devoted, also came from the moneyed elite. Their other children included the astronomer Wilhelm Beer and the poet Michael Beer. He was to adopt the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather and Italianize his first name to Giacomo during his period of study in Italy, around 1817.Judah Beer was a leader of the Berlin Jewish community and maintained a private synagogue in his house which leaned towards reformist views. Jacob Beer wrote an early cantata for performance at this synagogue. Both Judah Herz Beer and his wife were close to the Prussian court; when Amalia was awarded in 1816 the Order of Louise, she was given, by Royal dispensation, not the traditional Cross but a portrait bust of the Queen. The Beer children were provided with a fine education; their tutors included two of the leaders of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia, the author Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn and Edmund Kley, to whom they remained attached into their maturity. The brothers Alexander von Humboldt, the renowned naturalist, geographer and explorer, and the philosopher, linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt were close friends of the family circle.
Beer's first keyboard instructor was Franz Lauska, a pupil of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and a favoured teacher at the Berlin court. Beer also became one of Muzio Clementi's pupils while Clementi was in Berlin. The boy made his public debut in 1801 playing Mozart's D minor Piano Concerto in Berlin. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: 'The amazing keyboard playing of young Bär, who carried off the difficult passages and other solo parts with aplomb, and has fine powers of rendition even more rarely found in one of his age, made the concert even more interesting'.
Beer, as he still named himself, studied with Antonio Salieri and the German master and friend of Goethe, Carl Friedrich Zelter. Louis Spohr organised a concert for Beer at Berlin in 1804 and continued his acquaintance with the lad later in Vienna and Rome. A portrait of Jacob commissioned by the family at this time shows him 'confidently facing the viewer, his hair romantically dishevelled... his left hand rests on the keyboard, and his right hand grasps a musical manuscript... plac its subject in the tradition of the young Mozart'. Beer's first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin. His formal training with the Abbé Vogler at Darmstadt between 1810 and 1812 was, however, of crucial importance, and at around this time he begins to sign himself 'Meyer Beer'. Here, with his fellow students, he learned not only the craft of composition but also the business of music. Forming a close friendship with Weber and other pupils, Meyerbeer established the Harmonischer Verein , whose members undertook to support each other with favourable press criticism and networking. On 12 February 1813 Beer received the first of the string of honours he was to accumulate throughout his life when he was appointed 'Court Composer' by Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt. He was also in close contact with Ludwig van Beethoven as he played timpani at the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in December 1813. Beethoven complained that Meyerbeer was “always behind the beat”. But nonetheless, Beethoven saw musical potential in the young Beer.
Throughout his early career, although determined to become a musician, Beer found it difficult to decide between playing and composition. Certainly, other professionals in the decade 1810–1820, including Moscheles, considered him amongst the greatest virtuosi of his period. He wrote during this period numerous piano pieces, including a concerto and set of variations for piano and orchestra, but these have been lost. To this period also belongs a Clarinet Quintet written for the virtuoso Heinrich Baermann who remained a close friend of the composer.
Career
In Italy
Despite performances of his oratorio Gott und die Natur and his early operas Jephtas Gelübde and Wirth und Gast in Germany, Meyerbeer had set his sights by 1814 on basing an operatic career in Paris. In the same year, his opera Die beiden Kalifen , a version of Wirth und Gast, was a disastrous failure in Vienna. Realizing that a full understanding of Italian opera was essential for his musical development, he went to study in Italy, enabled by the financial support of his family. He arrived in Italy at the beginning of 1816, after visits to Paris and London, where he heard Cramer play. In Paris, he wrote to a friend, 'I go from museum to museum, library to library, theatre to theatre, with the restlessness of the Wandering Jew'.During his years in Italy Meyerbeer became acquainted with, and impressed by, the works of his contemporary Gioachino Rossini, who by 1816, at the age of 24, was already director of both major opera houses in Naples and in the same year premiered his operas The Barber of Seville and Otello. Meyerbeer wrote a series of Italian operas on Rossinian models, including Romilda e Costanza, Semiramide riconosciuta, Emma di Resburgo, Margherita d'Anjou and L'esule di Granata. All but the last two of these had libretti by Gaetano Rossi, whom Meyerbeer continued to support until the latter's death in 1855, although not commissioning any further libretti from him after Il crociato in Egitto. During a visit to Sicily in 1816, Meyerbeer noted down a number of folksongs, and these in fact constitute the earliest collection of folk music of the region. In a birthday greeting from Rossi's wife in 1817 occurs the earliest use discovered of Meyerbeer's adopted forename 'Giacomo'.
Recognition
The name Giacomo Meyerbeer first became known internationally with his opera Il crociato in Egitto—premiered in Venice in 1824 and produced in London and Paris in 1825; incidentally, it was the last opera ever written to feature a castrato, and the last to require keyboard accompaniment for recitatives. This 'breakthrough' in Paris was exactly what Meyerbeer had been aiming for over the past ten years; he had been carefully preparing for it, developing contacts, and fully reaped his reward.In 1826, shortly after the death of his father, Meyerbeer married his cousin, Minna Mosson. The marriage which may have been 'dynastic' in its origins turned out to be stable and devoted; the couple were to have five children, of whom the three youngest survived to adulthood. In the same year, following the death of Carl Maria von Weber, Weber's widow asked Meyerbeer to complete her husband's unfinished comic opera Die drei Pintos. This was to cause him much trouble over future years, as he found the material insufficient to work on. Eventually, in 1852 he settled the matter with Weber's heirs by handing them Weber's drafts and cash compensation..
With his next opera Meyerbeer became virtually a superstar. Robert le diable, produced in Paris in 1831, was one of the earliest grand operas. The libretto, originally planned in 1827 as a three-act opéra comique for the Opéra-Comique theatre, was refashioned after 1829 in a five-act form to meet the requirements of the Paris Opéra. Its revised characterisation as a 'grand opera' placed it in succession to Auber's La muette de Portici and Rossini's Guillaume Tell in this new genre. The composer undertook further work on the opera in early 1831 adding ballet episodes, including the "Ballet of Nuns", which was to prove one of the opera's great sensations, becoming an early example of the ballet blanc genre. He also rewrote the two major male roles of Bertrand and Robert to suit the talents of Nicolas Levasseur and Adolphe Nourrit, respectively. At the invitation of Nourrit, Cornélie Falcon made her debut at the age of 18 at the Opéra in the role of Alice on 20 July 1832, and she made a vivid impression on the public, which included on that night Auber, Berlioz, Halévy, Maria Malibran, Giulia Grisi, Honoré Daumier, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. On hearing her in the role, Meyerbeer himself declared his opera at last 'complete'.
The success of the opera led to Meyerbeer himself becoming a celebrity. In January 1832 he was awarded membership of the Légion d'honneur. This success – coupled with Meyerbeer's known family wealth – inevitably also precipitated envy amongst his peers. Berlioz – who had commented that 'Meyerbeer not only had the luck to be talented, he had the talent to be lucky' – wrote 'I can't forget that Meyerbeer was only able to persuade to put on Robert le diable... by paying the administration sixty thousand francs of his own money'; and Frédéric Chopin lamented 'Meyerbeer had to work for three years and pay his own expenses for his stay in Paris before Robert le diable could be staged....Three years, that's a lot – it's too much.' King Frederick William III of Prussia who attended the second performance of Robert le diable, swiftly invited him to compose a German opera, and Meyerbeer was invited to stage Robert in Berlin. Within a few years the opera had been staged with success all over Europe, and also in the USA.
The fusion of dramatic music, melodramatic plot, and sumptuous staging in Robert le diable proved a sure-fire formula, as did the partnership with Scribe, which Meyerbeer would go on to repeat in Les Huguenots, Le prophète, and L'Africaine. All of these operas held the international stage throughout the 19th century, as did the more pastoral Dinorah, making Meyerbeer the most frequently performed composer at leading opera houses in the nineteenth century.