4. Last years.

Meyerbeer’s undisputed leading position in international musical life brought him many honours and many requests for help. On 11 June 1842, after the change of government in Prussia had brought the enlightened monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the throne in 1840, Meyerbeer was appointed Generalmusikdirektor of Prussia through the offices of Alexander von Humboldt. However, he took permanent leave of absence in 1846 because of constant disputes with the intendant, Küstner, and on 26 November 1848 he resigned the post although he remained director of the Royal Court Music. The works he conducted most frequently were those of Gluck and Mozart; among his contemporaries, Spohr occupied a prominent place in his concerts. He also conducted many performances of his own works on his numerous tours.

Meyerbeer wrote several occasional works for the Prussian court; the most important is the patriotic festival Singspiel Ein Feldlager in Schlesien, written for the re-opening of the Berlin opera house on 7 December 1844 after a fire. The author of the libretto was named as the Berlin music critic Ludwig Rellstab, but in fact Rellstab merely translated and versified Scribe’s outline. The opera tells the story of an incident from the life of Frederick the Great, and the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom Meyerbeer had discovered in Paris in 1843, excelled in the leading role of the gypsy Vielka. A revised version tailor-made for the same singer was performed in Vienna in 1847 under the title of Vielka. Meyerbeer later used six numbers from this opera in L’étoile du nord, one of his two operas written for the Opéra-Comique in the long interval between Le prophète and L’Africaine. It had a new libretto by Scribe, and the première was on 16 February 1854. On 4 April 1859 it was followed by Le pardon de Ploërmel (also known as Dinorah). This time the libretto was not by Scribe but by Jules Paul Barbier and Michel Florentin Carré. Both operas employ the procedure that had proved its worth in Le prophète, combining various motifs within the mad scene typical of the genre: in L’étoile (Act 3, finale) this links quotations from the preceding acts as ‘fragments of memory’ (PEM). Vielka’s famous virtuoso flute aria is cleverly used to bring about a cure, a theme which had been favoured subject matter in semiseria opera since Paer’s Agnese. Dinorah’s central mad scene (Act 2, no.11) unites analogous dramatic themes to create an extensive scenic complex: in the aria in which the heroine dances with her shadow, her mental disturbance is signalled by excessive virtuosity. The ensuing melodrama is a montage of themes setting out the psychological motivation of her madness. Both works became central to the repertory of the Opéra-Comique in following decades. Outside France, versions were performed with recitative composed by Meyerbeer to replace the spoken dialogue.

Among his many other minor and occasional works, Meyerbeer’s lieder deserve special mention. He developed the French salon romance into a small-scale drama. Many settings of German texts, such as Heine’s Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube and Müller’s Der Garten des Herzens, may be ranked with the works of the great German lieder composers. Fétis commented that the romance was ‘a product of Germanic genius … as it alone has these forms, these details, these hints, which complete a thought and give it an air of creation’ (Revue et gazette musicale, 1841).

Meyerbeer was regarded as the only composer to have united the national schools of Europe. In his grand operas he created the prototype of a synthetic and synaesthetic work in which different arts merge to create new perspectives. The cosmopolitan nature of his conception has never been in dispute; however, it is this very aspect that nationalistic criticism was bound to see as a flaw. He was the first composer to be given a funeral cortège worthy of a state funeral, on both sides of the Rhine, which his body crossed for the last time in a special train on the night of 6 May 1864.