The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001

MATTHIAS BRZOSKA

Meyerbeer [Beer], Giacomo [Jakob Liebmann Meyer]

(b Vogelsdorf, nr Berlin, 5 Sept 1791; d Paris, 2 May 1864). German composer. The most frequently performed opera composer during the 19th century, linking Mozart and Wagner.

1. Early years and education.

2. The Italian operas.

3. Meyerbeer’s discourse: the grand historical operas.

4. Last years.

5. Reception and research.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Meyerbeer, Giacomo

1. Early years and education.

Meyerbeer was descended from distinguished families in the Jewish society of Berlin. His father Jakob (Juda) Herz Beer (1769–1825) was an industrialist and contractor to the Prussian army, and his mother Amalia (1767–1854) was the daughter of the banker Liebmann Meyer Wulff, whose family can be traced back to Jost Liebmann, a Jew at the court of the Great Elector. Amalia Beer received the finest minds of Prussia in her salon, including the future King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the poet A.W. Iffland and Alexander von Humboldt, with whom Meyerbeer maintained a close lifelong friendship. At an early age he took piano lessons from Franz Lauska, and by the time he was 11 he was a successful prodigy, although he encountered hostile anti-Semitism in his childhood.

After taking early lessons in composition from Zelter (1805–7) and Bernhard Anselm Weber (1807–10), he left the family home in 1810 to continue his studies with Abbé Vogler in Darmstadt. It was then that he began combining his maternal family name Meyer with his paternal surname Beer. He formed lifelong friendships with Vogler’s pupils Carl Maria von Weber, Gänsbacher, Gottfried Weber and Alexander Dusch; they founded a ‘Harmonischer Verein’ to support each other in the press. Meyerbeer made great progress in his piano lessons with Vogler and composed his first works, the most important of which is the opera Jephthas Gelübde, produced in Munich on 23 December 1812 though with minimal success. Meyerbeer attended the performance and in 1813 went to Vienna for the production of another youthful work, Wirth und Gast, originally written for Stuttgart and revised for Vienna as Die beiden Kalifen. At this period Meyerbeer was best known as an outstanding pianist; Moscheles thought his playing ‘incomparable’ and Weber described him in 1815 as ‘one of the best pianists, if not the best pianist of our time’ (Sämtliche Schriften, Berlin, 1908, p.308). Throughout Meyerbeer’s life his example was Mozart, whose piano concertos he frequently performed. In November 1814 he went to Paris, which he regarded as ‘the principal and most important place for my education in music drama’ (Briefwechsel, i, 248). He was overwhelmed by the metropolis, its art treasures and its theatrical life, and already entertained thoughts of making his début as a composer there. In December 1815 he visited London to hear the outstanding piano virtuosos of the time, who included Cramer, Kalkbrenner and Ries.

2. The Italian operas.

Meyerbeer visited Italy for the first time in 1816, on a study tour that was, with short interruptions, to last nine years. It was here that he truly became a composer of opera, and in gratitude to the country to which he owed his career he began to use the Italian form of his first name, Giacomo. He was to return to Italy regularly throughout his life, visiting many cities to hear the current repertory and above all the best singers. He was given his first contract in Padua, in 1817, to set a libretto by the famous librettist Gaetano Rossi, with whom he always remained friends. This work, Romilda e Costanza (19 July 1817), is in the tradition of rescue operas popular at the time, and as his début opera in Italy it brought Meyerbeer local success. In its melodies and instrumentation it owes more to Mozart than Rossini. At this stage, if not earlier, Meyerbeer began tailoring his parts for certain singers, taking their vocal and histrionic abilities into careful consideration. The title role of his next opera, Semiramide riconosciuta, was designed for the contralto Carolina Bassi Manna, a famous singer of the time, who excelled in the part at the work’s première in Turin on 3 February 1819. However, Bassi Manna made little use of her rights of exclusive performance, and this hindered the work’s wider circulation.

The success of Meyerbeer’s first commission in Venice, Emma di Resburgo, was thus all the more important to him. Rossi’s libretto skilfully transformed the fashionable Ossianism of the time into a sentimental domestic drama. This genre, incorporating a melodramatic child’s role, had been particularly popular ever since such works as Paer’s Camilla (1799). The Scottish local colour and romantic topoi of the settings (a castle, a knightly hall, a graveyard) gave Meyerbeer his first opportunity to show his skill in depicting character and scenic background. Critics immediately recognized the opera’s individuality, and the première, on 26 June 1819, was Meyerbeer’s first major success. There were further Italian productions, and the opera was staged internationally: in 1820 Weber produced his friend’s work in Dresden, and in 1820 and 1821 it was also performed in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Brno and Warsaw.

Romani’s adaptation of the popular melodrama Marguerite d’Anjou, by Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1810), was Meyerbeer’s first encounter with modern French drama. The action, set in 1462, depicts an episode in the wars between England and France. The army commander Lavarenne represents the type of the ‘irresolute hero’, unable to choose between two women, and there is a new note of comedy in the character of the cunning doctor Michele Gaumotte. Meyerbeer created distinctively pastoral, Scottish and martial atmospheres in the manner already familiar from Emma di Resburgo, and drew musical and dramatic capital from the contrasting depiction of the two nations. He also employed a spatial dimension, positioning a band behind the stage to signal the decisive shifts in the confrontation in the introduction and the first finale. Margherita d’Anjou was Meyerbeer’s first opera for La Scala, Milan, where an Italian composer’s international success was usually decided. It lived up to Meyerbeer’s expectations, with scenery by the distinguished Italian stage designer Sanquirico, and a brilliant cast, including (as Carlo) Nicolas Levasseur, for whom Meyerbeer was to write his most important bass roles, Bertram and Marcel. Soon after its triumphant première on 14 November 1820 it was produced on the stages of many European capitals.

After the relatively unsuccessful L’esule di Granata (12 March 1822, Milan), Meyerbeer surpassed even the success of Margherita with Il crociato in Egitto (7 March 1824, Venice). This work has a unique place in operatic history, for while it adheres to the contemporary Italian style of domestic drama, with the addition of an ‘irresolute hero’ and a colourful historical background, the leading part, written for Velluti, is one of the last castrato roles. He makes a virtue of this anomaly by skilfully incorporating many neo-Baroque references and other archaisms into the score, while developing the illustrative techniques that had proved successful in Margherita. The introductory scene now becomes a monumental tableau, and national confrontation is expressed in the opposition of two bands of musicians (no.11, finale primo), intercutting with each other in the stretta and combining with the chorus and orchestra. The exotic subject, an encounter between Egyptians and Crusaders, inspired Meyerbeer to instrumentation of a new kind to depict character: the Egyptians’ janissary music employs percussion and five clarinets in C, supported in the upper register by the piercing timbre of a piccolo flute and a piccolo clarinet in F, and in the lower register by a serpentone, a trombone and two bassoons. The reminiscence motif of the romanza ‘Giovinetto Cavalier’ in the central recognition scene (Act 1, terzetto, no.9) is introduced with a similarly new effect. The romanza is a kind of parable relating to the action, telling the tale of an unfaithful knight, as all three characters, the two women and the hero, recall the melody torn between them, they recognize each other.

With Il crociato Meyerbeer became the leading Italian operatic composer after Rossini. His status is illustrated by the fact that Goethe envisaged someone ‘like Meyerbeer’ setting his Faust (see J.P. Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Leipzig, 1837–48/R). Writing on 12 February 1829, he saw Meyerbeer as Mozart’s only true successor: ‘Mozart would have been bound to compose Faust. Meyerbeer might be capable of it, but will not embark on such a venture’.

As early as 1823 the director of the Paris Opéra had approached Meyerbeer, through Levasseur, to enquire about his interest in the French stage. In September 1825 Rossini, as director of the Théâtre Italien in Paris, produced Il crociato, with a brilliant performance by Giuditta Pasta in the leading role. It was followed by a production of Margherita with French dialogue at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. Meyerbeer was now planning several French projects, but they were deferred in 1826 when Pixérécourt commissioned him to write a three-act opéra comique. He began working on Robert le diable with Scribe on 1 January 1827; the first reading of the libretto with the director took place on 24 February. However, when Pixérécourt resigned as director of the Opéra-Comique in the summer of 1827, Meyerbeer interrupted his work on the composition, and did not begin to revise it for the Opéra until some time later: he signed his first contract with the world’s leading opera house on 29 December 1829.

Before this, however, family duties recalled him to Berlin. After his father’s unexpected death on 27 October 1825, Meyerbeer, as the eldest son, was expected to found a family of his own, and he married his cousin Minna Mosson on 25 May 1826. There were five children of this marriage, but only the three daughters survived childhood. Plans for the couple to move to Paris were never realized because of Minna’s frail health, and for the same reason she seldom accompanied Meyerbeer on his frequent professional tours. However, they often took a cure together at such popular spas of the time as Bad Ems, Baden-Baden, Ischl and Spa, or in Italy. Although Meyerbeer could be a tough negotiator on artistic issues, he was personally anxious and vulnerable, and his family provided essential support in the real and imagined crises of his life. This strong family feeling sprang from his profound Jewish faith. He had a particularly close relationship with his mother, whose blessing he asked on every important occasion, and he was also very close to his brother Michael Beer, a gifted dramatist, whose premature death in 1833 deeply affected Meyerbeer, as did the early loss of his friend Weber in 1826.