Meyerbeer's Music of the Future

Abstract

I cannot exist as an artist in my own eyes or in those of my friends, I cannot think or feel without sensing in Meyerbeer my total antithesis, a contrast I am driven loudly to proclaim by the genuine despair that I feel whenever I encounter … the mistaken view that I have something in common with Meyerbeer. Richard Wagner's well-known words to Franz Liszt of 1851 pose the problem of grand opera for posterity. The genre's historiography begins, as Thomas Grey noted, with a disavowal in four parts—Wagner's denial of a Meyerbeerian affiliation in The Artwork of the Future, Judaism in Music, A Communication to My Friends, and Opera and Drama.2 The writings have left a mark, even if current scholarly respectability dictates a certain distance from the words of the master in addressing the subject. We know that the author of Rienzi was a Meyerbeerian, and long after he cast Meyerbeer in the role of his antithesis, musicologists still find Wagner secretly engaged in a more respectable and properly Hegelian path of artistic sublation. In this spirit, John Deathridge has written on the commonalities that bind the allegories of revolution in the earlier Robert le Diable and the later Götterdämmerung, and Thomas Grey has annotated various exemplary moments in which Wagnerian drama discreetly takes on grand operatic themes, procedures, and a sense of theatricality.3 These are recent additions to a long established Wagnerian theme of affiliation, a subfield of musicological inquiry that has contributed a salutary sense of time and place to the Wagnerian project. My concern here is less with this ongoing historicist exercise, than with its largely unrecognized flip side: the obscure and marginal position that the once dominant culture of grand opera—and most particularly Meyerbeer's oeuvre—holds in contemporary histories of opera. This peripheral positioning is largely a Wagnerian effect. Playing the historiographic game of precedence and consequence—wherein the artistic promise of the Parisian genre comes to historical fulfillment in the hands of Wagner and Verdi (Verdi himself a more recent alternative)—has made narratives of nineteenth-century opera impervious to the notion that grand opera once held its own promise for modernity.

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