Europäische Rezeption der Berliner Hofoper und Hofkapelle von 1842 bis 1849

The subject of this contribution is the European reception of the Berlin Royal Opera House and Orchestra from 1842 to 1849 based on German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, Belgian and Dutch music journals. The institution of regular symphony concerts, a tradition continuing to the present, was initiated in 1842. Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy were hired as general music directors respectively conductors for the symphony concerts in the same year. The death of the conductor Otto Nicolai on 11th May 1849, two months after the premiere of his opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor, coincides with the end of the analysed period, especially since the revolutions of 1848 in Europe represent a turning point in the history of the continent. The lively music activities of these three conductors and composers are carefully studied, as well as the guest performances of foreign virtuosos and singers, and the differences between the Berliner Hofoper and the Königstädtisches Theater.

How to Catch the Devil? Performance Materiality and Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable

Stage machinery enters the historical narrative often enough through mishaps and interruptions. This article takes as its starting point a report of the Paris opera director Véron in order to think about the role of materiality in the analysis of past performances. The occasion, depicted in the report, is the opening night of Robert le Diable, written by Eugène Scribe and composed by Giacomo Meyerbeer. The article discusses two key questions on the historiographic value of the report as a source for performance analysis. (1) How can we unfold the performativity of a past performance through archival documents? (2) What is the impact of the materiality of machinery, bodies and space in the theatrical interplay?

Phantoms at the Opéra

This chapter argues that the reputation of Giacomo Meyerbeer went through a process of “de-canonization” after his death in 1868. More than those of other opera composers powerful in that time, views about his rise and eventual decline became firmly established by the fin-de-siècle. By re-examining the discourse surrounding this dominant figure, the chapter reveals larger tendencies of operatic canonicity in nineteenth-century Paris, illustrating the volatility of reputation and the peculiarly operatic ways of measuring canonic status. From Meyerbeer’s death, a gradual process took place by which his works either were dropped from repertories or discredited, long before Les Huguenots finally bowed out at the Paris Opéra in the 1930s. This chapter is paired with William Gibbons’s “The uses and disadvantages of opera history: Unhistorical thinking in fin-de-siècle Paris.”

Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion is a new history of grand opera as an art of illusion facilitated by the introduction of gaslight illumination at the Académie Royale de Musique (Paris) in the 1820s. It contends that gas lighting and the technologies of illusion used in the theater after the 1820s spurred the development of a new lyrical art, attentive to the conditions of darkness and radiance, and inspired by the model of phantasmagoria. Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno have used the concept of phantasmagoria to arrive at a philosophical understanding of modern life as total spectacle, in which the appearance of things supplants their reality. The book argues that the Académie became an early laboratory for this historical process of commodification, for the transformation of opera into an audio-visual spectacle delivering dream-like images. It shows that this transformation began in Paris and then defined opera after the mid-century. In the hands of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Robert le diable, L’Africaine), Richard Wagner (Der fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde), and Giuseppe Verdi (Aida), opera became an expanded form of phantasmagoria.

The School of Abbé Vogler

Chapter 1 tracks a line of improvisational influence that issued from the organ playing and theoretical teachings of Georg Joseph (Abbé) Vogler, whose most famous students were Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Although Vogler was in many respects a product of eighteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical dispositions, he also had a progressive, even experimental streak that manifested itself in his improvisations. He anticipated the figure of the modern virtuoso by touring and playing organ concerts that featured dramatic improvisations depicting biblical narratives. Most important, he made keyboard improvisation an integral part of his pedagogical method, requiring students to improvise simultaneously with him and with each other. While Vogler instructed his students in thoroughbass methods, his improvisational teaching featured freer types of contrapuntal and figural elaboration that influenced their performances and compositions. Vogler’s approach to improvisation encouraged harmonic experimentation that influenced Weber’s and Meyerbeer’s expanded use of tonality.

An Earnest Meyerbeer: Le Prophète at London’s Royal Italian Opera, 1849

When the grands opéras of Giacomo Meyerbeer were introduced to London audiences as a cluster in the mid-1800s, critics identified moments of understated musical and dramatic expression, and made little mention of more sensational dimensions, such as their impressive staging. With a focus on the 1849 staging of Le Prophète at the brand-new Royal Italian Opera in London, this article demonstrates that numerous critics were keen to endorse this new opera house, where most of the composer’s works were mounted, and that, to this end, they zeroed in on the most bare and restrained elements in his works so as to invest them with moral and intellectual relevance for Victorian audiences. Approaching Le Prophète as various London critics did is to see it anew and to consider alternatives to recent narratives which have taken material excess as a starting point for understanding the success of Meyerbeer’s grands opéras on the continent.