When Giacomo Meyerbeer died on May 2 in 1864 in Paris, he was one of the most performed composers of his time. In the last decades, his music has been enjoying a renaissance. Get more information on Meyerbeer in this contribution by Reinhold Quandt, Editor of the Critical Meyerbeer Edition.


Among the surviving manuscript documents in the Meyerbeer archive in Berlin is to be found a prayer that Giacomo Meyerbeer wrote on 8 December 1863, a few months before his death:

"Great almighty God! … Preserve the five French operas that I composed in the repertoire of all the theaters in the world, for the rest of my life, and for another half century after my death."

In addition, Meyerbeer wished for a stellar success of his Vasco da Gama, and through Vasco, fame after his demise. The prayer was answered: 0n 28 April 1865, almost one year after Meyerbeer’s death, Vasco was staged in Paris, under the title L’Africaine, and was a rousing success. Even the fifty successful years of staging Meyebeer’s operas became a reality, before they became casualties of European history.

2 May 2014 is the 150th anniversary of Meyerbeer’s death. In life, the master of French Grand Opéra, creator of Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, and Vasco de Gama (L’Africaine), was the leading musical figure of the nineteenth century. When he died, the world mourned. Today, Meyerbeer is a mostly forgotten, marginal figure of the operatic scene. But why?

Certainly his music retains its fascinating qualities. His treatment of the genre Grand Opéra and the structure of his works, dramaturgically conceived with attention to the smallest detail, is resistant even to the designs of contemporary directors. Audiences attending the Paris Opéra in Meyerbeer’s day did so expecting greatness. Even Richard Wagner, as late as 1850, wrote to composer and music critic Theodor Uhlig, after having attended a performance of Le Prophète:

"During this time I also saw for the first time the Prophet—the prophet of the new world:—I felt happy and uplifted, let go of all wretched plans that seemed ungodly to me, as the pure, noble, sacrosanct truth and the divinely human already resides so closely and warmly in the blessed here and now."

And yet, it was Richard Wagner himself who shortly thereafter became a mouthpiece for all those who with mockery and antisemitism would assault Meyerbeer’s historical significance. Even today Wagner’s Judaism in Music, an antisemitic essay that he wrote in 1850 as well, during his sojourn in Zurich, remains influential. This essay still is the manifesto of all enviers and opponents of Meyerbeer. We are still confronted with astonishing and untenable charges of eclecticism and the inability to create something truly novel, whenever Meyerbeer and his music becomes a matter of conversation.

Burgeoning nationalism and smoldering, ever-escalating antisemitism would put an end to Meyerbeer’s presence on the operatic stage, by the outbreak of the First World War at the latest. In a way, the composer fell between the two fronts, and when the national socialists started consolidating their reign of terror, all memories of Berlin’s great son were brutally excised and his music implicated.

The way back from this is long and arduous. First attempts at reintroducing Meyerbeer to the stage quickly escalated into scandal, as evinced by the Berlin performance of Le Prophète in 1966. As recently as 1998 the run-up to the Vienna production of the same opera yielded copious reminiscences of well known prejudice.

In 1913 a committee was formed in Berlin with the aim of erecting a monument for Meyebeer; it became a casualty of German history. Even the installation of a plaque on Meyerbeer’s birth house in Berlin, Pariser Platz 6a (inner courtyard!) derailed into a prolonged farce, until finally on 9 September 2013 this small gesture became reality.

In the autumn of this year the Deutsche Oper Berlin embarks upon a four-year Meyerbeer cycle. One can only wish that, in the spirit of Meyerbeer’s prayer of 1863, this endeavor be a rousing success, signaling a true homecoming of the composer to his birth town.

- Reinhold Quandt