11

Grand Opera

In 1946, the American publisher Simon & Schuster brought out a musical anthology called A Treasury of Grand Opera. Designed for opera lovers who might also be aspiring musicians, the book includes excerpts from seven operas, all in simplified vocal score, with English translations under the vocal lines for immediate access. The original languages are given only in italics below the English, and all arias entailing professional-calibre high notes are transposed comfortably down, sometimes by drastic intervals. Each opera has its own chapter, the musical excerpts preceded by a synopsis illustrated with charcoal and pastel drawings (see Figure 26). This post-war collection marked the end point of a long historical tradition of adapting and publishing opera for amateur performance at home. Such arrangements go back at least to the eighteenth century and usually involved voice and/or keyboard, or accommodations for other instruments. When Wagner was living in Paris in the late 1830s, he earned part of his meagre living by adapting popular French operas for various combinations – by no means the only fledgling composer to rely on such hack work. By the later nineteenth century, at the height of music-at-home, popular operas would emerge in literally dozens of instrumental formats. One patient bibliographer has unearthed over 400 separate publications that serve up excerpts of La traviata for amateur consumption. There’s even a version of the entire opera for solo clarinet, a daunting prospect for that slow Sunday evening in the parlour.¹ Most of this homespun activity took place before the advent of the gramophone and radio, in those halcyon days when the way to take opera home was in a form you could play or sing yourself. Amid all this book’s talk of theatres and premieres, there’s an important point here: taking opera home has always been part of its pleasure. Almost as long as there have been live performances, a passion for repeating the experience in some form – on demand, away from the theatre and its professionals – has remained compelling.

What was meant by Grand Opera back in 1946? Don Giovanni, Lohengrin, La traviata, Faust, Aida, Carmen and Pagliacci. These works were hugely popular in Britain and America in the years before the Second World War. They were staples at elite theatres such as Covent Garden and the Metropolitan, but were also served up (and sometimes boiled down) in innumerable more modest venues. Often they were tweaked to fit the mould better: Lohengrin might be given in Italian, still opera’s default language, not to mention its default repertory; Carmen and Faust were usually equipped with recitatives rather than spoken dialogue. But one point the anthology insistently makes is that Grand Opera had few limitations. It could be written by French, Italian or German composers, and although it was mostly a matter of nineteenth-century tragic works, an exception could always be made for Mozart. Nor did Grand Opera always condemn us to hour after hour and act after act: Pagliacci detains its audience for no more than seventy-five minutes. Nor does it necessarily require virtuosic performance: Carmen makes no such demands. It may parade massed choruses and dazzling visual spectacle (the Triumphal Scene from Aida is biggest and best here); but not always, since apart from a few party scenes La traviata and Don Giovanni are chamber pieces by comparison. Judging by the Treasury, Grand Opera in 1946 was not so much a genre as something you associate with a long-deceased great aunt, fondly recalled for the ropes of pearls, the mink and the whiff of mothballs. It’s a repertory, an attitude and a mark of status all rolled into one, and wrapped up in conventions for staging and costumes whose sentimental realism is captured so perfectly by those charcoal illustrations.

Grand Opera does not, then, simply mean general operatic grandeur or glamour. We have already seen a great deal of that in emphatically pre-Treasury repertoires. Seventeenth-century opera at Versailles gave us Lully’s five-act spectaculars, with their fantastic décor and outrageous flattery of the monarch; as did eighteenth-century opera seria, with its kings and emperors, its warriors and flying machines, with the stateliness of their comings and goings. But even if Grand Opera was as broad as the Treasury made out, most of its repertoire (Mozart was the big exception) nevertheless owed some debt to a very specific and limited genre. This second, restricted sense of the term started in France, and is best given its French designation, grand opéra, a term describing certain works written for the Paris Opéra between the late 1820s and the late 1860s. It’s important to remember that in French the word ‘grand’ also means ‘big’, so that grand opéra is both magnificent opera and, quite simply, opera that is seldom over much before midnight. Grand Opera in the broader, Treasury-endorsed sense is mostly a phenomenon of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but, as we shall see later in this book, it was largely formed out of the diffusion of the effects and conventions of the French form, of grand opéra.

LUMBERING TORTOISES

The middle years of the nineteenth century in Paris were extraordinary, creating an operatic microclimate that had never occurred before and that allowed grand opéra to emerge. It was permitted by state subsidies that were unprecedented by nineteenth-century standards. The directeur-entrepreneur of the theatre in the late 1830s and 1840s generally received around 600,000 francs per annum, in addition to free use of the theatre.² In spite of this, very few directeurs made any money. The costs of putting on a new production were astronomical. The bill for Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots came to over 100,000 francs just for scenery, costumes and props. Then there was the problem of ever-rising star singer salaries (the best of them, such as the tenor Adolphe Nourrit or the soprano Julie Dorus-Gras, were getting 25,000 francs a year, with ‘appearance fees’ on top). The eighty chorus members, eighty-piece orchestra and thirty ballet dancers were also a constant drain, even though the poorest among them were paid a pittance. In 1836, the year of Les Huguenots, the triangle player, one Dauverné junior, received an annual salary of 300 francs (the orchestra’s leader, François-Antoine Haberneck, was on 8,000 francs); some of the female corps de ballet were paid so little that they could not afford food and lodging and turned to prostitution.³

All this money went to create an international operatic event whose scenic, vocal and orchestral splendour was unprecedented. So much so that the behind-the-scenes complexity became notorious. One dyspeptic onlooker, whose composer partner was more used to the last-minute, budget-strapped Italian scene, but who was trying to make a financial killing with a grand opéra in Paris, complained about the ‘tortoises of the Opéra’.⁴ She was referring to the various people entrusted with details of staging, who would – she said – argue for twenty-four hours about whether a singer’s gesture required merely a finger or the entire hand. Staging and movement were no longer left to chance or to singers’ whims, as they had been for much of opera’s history. It was as if the maxims of choreography were flowing over from the ballets that had for long been integral to French serious opera, spilling out into the management of sung scenes. The obsession with creating a picture, the idea of meticulously managed scenic tableaux, was new and significant. The effect on audiences was undeniable. When it worked (which was by no means all the time) this species of opera so captured the imagination that its impact was felt throughout Europe. Foreigners were perpetually amazed at the lavishness on show. As one wide-eyed American put it in 1838:

They call this French opera, the ‘Académie Royale de Musique’, … the ‘Grand Opera’; this latter name because it has a greater quantity of thunder and lightning, of pasteboard seas, of paper snow storms, and dragons that spit fire; also a gorgeousness of wardrobe and scenery not equalled upon any theatre of Europe. It is certain its ‘corps de ballet’ can outdance all the world put together. Mercy! How deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments.⁵

Librettists, composers and scene designers from Catania to Stockholm, from Lisbon to Moscow, also felt its power and tried to emulate it. Hardly anyone succeeded. The sad fact was that, outside Paris and its state subsidies, no one found a way to pay the bills.

What were the essential ingredients of grand opéra? Our culinary metaphor, the idea of a recipe, is deliberate. No less than Handelian opera seria or Rossinian comedy, grand opéra had its prerequisites, designed to match a set of audience expectations that seemed largely unchanged over several decades. To merit the name grand opéra, you had to concoct something large-scale, serious, French and almost always in five acts. History of a monumental brand furnished plot material, often the history of religious conflict: Jews or Muslims against Christians, perhaps, or Protestants against Catholics. While tragic opera often involved clashing tribes of some kind, librettists writing for the Opéra defined those tribes as whole nations or faiths, not just Montagues and Capulets. You needed a long ballet, one that you were obliged, often with desperate ingenuity, to weave into the plot. Charlemagne (or some other grand historical personage) broods on the eve of an important battle? In that case, what could be more fitting than the sudden appearance of a troupe of ballerinas, impersonating nearby gypsies, to beguile his melancholy with dance? To attempt grand opéra, you also had to deploy large choral forces in several acts. Your libretto would be set in a decently remote historical period, ideally the Middle Ages or a little later. And you would of course write for the Paris Opéra, an institution that survived the French Revolution and whose changes of name over the course of the nineteenth century track the nation’s tumultuous political history: the Académie Royale de Musique (during the Bourbon restoration), the Académie Impériale de Musique (when various Napoleons were in charge) and the Académie Nationale de Musique (during republican times).

Any list of its most successful composers immediately reveals that, although grand opéra was always sung in French and almost always first produced in Paris, it was in many senses an international genre, with Italian, French and German composers mixing and matching modes, all of them important in the stylistic miscellany. What’s more, the master practitioners made a point of being musically international, as adept at German harmonic exploration and orchestral nuance as they were at French declamation and delicate programmatic touches, or at Italianate vocal lyricism and ornamental extravagance (although this last mode was typically reserved for the lead soprano and no one else). All these styles would be required during the long evening’s entertainment. One influential contemporary critic, Joseph d’Ortigue, went even further, announcing that an early grand opéra, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (Robert the Devil, 1831), had inaugurated a new, eminently French genre that fused Rossinian bel canto with Beethovenian symphonism.⁶ Such a formulation, yet another example of that emerging Italian/German opposition we have discussed in earlier chapters, was surely exaggerated: neither of d’Ortigue’s musical extremes would have been suitable to the delicate balance of grand opéra at its best. But his sentiments, and the height of the ambition he claimed, were typical. What’s more, the genre’s vaunted internationalism was often enriching rather than merely bewildering. The sheer variety of modes and tones in grand opéra make comparisons with the historical novel, that dominant literary genre of the nineteenth century, hard to avoid.

There was, as always with new artistic departures, resistance to grand opéra, especially from those who felt that the entire business was too grandiose, and that audience delight in scenic spectacle overpowered all other aspects. Heinrich Heine, whose condescending caricatures of Donizetti and Bellini we met in Chapter 9, suggested that ‘nothing exceeds the luxury of the grand opera, which is now become a paradise for the hard of hearing’.⁷ Wagner put it more bluntly when he talked, in the context of an attack on Meyerbeer, about ‘effects without causes’.⁸ But there was no going back. Grand opéra raised the stakes, with a richer, denser sonic landscape, louder instruments and more complex orchestration, and voices that could hold their own against such increased sonic competition. These requirements would over subsequent decades become prerequisites for composing serious opera in any language, with the shift to heavier voices especially significant. From the late eighteenth century to the 1840s, the sound of operatic singing would change radically in several ways. We’ve already seen how, in Italian opera, heroic tenors supplanted altos and sopranos (whether castrati or female) in starring male roles after the 1820s. Though the light, supple voices that had dominated operatic singing did not change overnight into clarion Brünnhildes or red-faced Manricos, the diffusion of grand opéra increased a sense, already felt in the Italy of Donizetti and Verdi, that force, with or without agility, would be the new fashion.

The late 1820s in Paris were, then, a significant juncture in the history of operatic voices. Just as important, they saw the beginnings of a new visual regime. A crucial change was the formation of a staging committee at the Opéra, the so-called Comité de mise-en-scène, which included those in charge of scene painting, props and general stage management. This made manifest a newfound seriousness about staging practices (what the French call mise-en-scène); when wedded to elaborate scenic pictures and machinery it made Paris the centre of all things visual so far as opera was concerned. A key to these scenic developments was the idea that the expanding bourgeoisie of Paris, the new audience that flocked to the Opéra, needed a novel and more sophisticated form of theatrical representation, one in which the old, rough-and-ready historical clichés would no longer be acceptable. As Jean Moynet, an Opéra scene-painter, put it:

Under the influence of Romanticism, the study of local colour became a necessity. One no longer contented oneself with the ‘approximate’ or old devices which had served until then. … The theatre was asked to make its characters live in the actual environment in which they had lived.⁹

What is more, the variety of styles and effect that was so important to the music of grand opéra also became critical in the visual domain. The doyen of scene design in the early days was Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri (1782–1868), a landscape painter whose concern for realism took him on a visit to the Swiss Alps in preparation for his sets for Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (William Tell, 1829). By the extravagant 1830s, each act of an opera tended to have its own particular scenic character, and was farmed out to specialist ateliers, ones dealing with the intricacy of architecture and interiors, or with effects of light on water, or with Romantic contrast.¹⁰

STAY PERFECTLY STILL

As if on cue, grand opéra found its first long-lasting repertory works at precisely this time: in La Muette de Portici (The Dumb Girl of Portici, 1828), music by Daniel Auber (1782–1871) to a libretto by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861); and, the very next year, in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. It’s worth pausing over Tell, which was Rossini’s last opera. The difference from his earlier, Italian manner has much to do with the power local Parisian conditions could exert over composers. The libretto was not particularly French and certainly not Italianate: it was based on a play by the German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who was a friend of Goethe and a writer revered by the Romantics. Schiller’s plays turned out to be a major resource for opera in the nineteenth century, although not in German – as with Goethe, German librettists shied away from turning national literary monuments into fodder for sopranos. Neither Schiller’s play nor Rossini’s libretto is tragic, but rather a serious political drama set in Switzerland in the thirteenth century. The Austrians have occupied Switzerland and are oppressing the people; this sets the stage for a classic love-versus-duty conflict that duly arises when Arnold (tenor), an ardent Swiss patriot, falls in love with Mathilde (soprano), an Austrian princess. The villain of the piece is Gesler (bass), a local Austrian enforcer who murders Arnold’s father (in revivals of Schiller’s play, Gesler is the plum role and always goes to the alpha-male actor). William Tell (baritone), an equally ardent Swiss patriot and expert crossbowman, rescues a friend who has killed an Austrian soldier attempting to rape his daughter. This gets Tell into trouble and, in the opera’s most famous scene (Act 3, scene 2), Gesler sadistically tests Tell’s nerve by forcing him to shoot an apple from his son Jemmy’s head. Tell succeeds to general rejoicing, but Gesler nonetheless arrests him as a traitor. In the closing scenes Arnold, Tell and the Swiss populace rise up in rebellion. Tell shoots Gesler, freeing the canton from Austrian rule.

The apple-shooting scene became a classic. Wagner, who otherwise had little good to say about Rossini, spared nothing in praising it. Guillaume Tell even seems to have haunted his sleep: in a diary entry from the later 1850s, he recounts a dream in which he is surrounded by singing antagonists and remembers Gesler.¹¹ What accounts for the scene’s power? Tell’s nerve and bowmanship are only one part of a multi-section finale in which Rossini uses free, declamatory music. Anyone used to the flights, ornaments and regular phrases of his Italian operas will find the style almost unrecognizable. Singing itself has been damped down. Tell’s solo address to his son, ‘Sois immobile’ (Be still), is introduced by a solo cello whose melody and timbre anticipate the vocal line, as if to say that heroic voices such as Tell’s are descendants of the orchestra, communal and not individual. The message is plain: the stakes are too momentous for anything remotely frivolous or narcissistic in the vocal department. It is in this sense significant that ‘Sois immobile’ makes a cameo entrance in the famous encounter between Wagner and Rossini in 1860 (discussed in Chapter 7). The two composers have been sparring about melodic style in opera. Wagner is, as one might expect, in favour of the flexible and the declamatory; Rossini sees this, again predictably, as ‘a funeral oration for melody’. But Wagner persists, citing Rossini’s own ‘Sois immobile’ as an example of what he means. A cunning move, one might think. But Rossini, nimbler than he looks in those photographic portraits in old age, counters with a barbed joke: ‘So I made Music of the Future without knowing it’.¹² Whether Wagner was deflated by the barb is not known; somehow one doubts it.

There is, though, more to the scene’s power than its musical innovations. In one sense, William Tell becomes a hero not because he risks his son’s life, but because he displays physical prowess in a single moment of intense concentration and sang-froid. This is, in other words, an iconic act. The child, the apple, the bow and arrow are caught in a frozen moment; the opera springs back to life only when the bowstring is finally released. There is almost no music when Tell lifts his bow for the shot, only a single pitch from the tremolo strings, and that is significant. This almost-silence and almost-stasis is the epitome of tense anticipation, allowing the audience to concentrate on what they see rather than what they hear. The freeze frame, compressing the idea of heroic rebellion into one image, becomes the symbolic inspiration for a mass political uprising, and this process of part representing whole – what grammarians call synecdoche – turns out to be an important technique for the entire genre. French grand opéra was famous for its attraction to iconic visual moments, frozen stage pictures or tableaux that, captured in lithograph and distributed widely through Paris’s print media, could represent or recall the massive sound and slow, sonorous time that bracketed the scene in actual performance.

Guillaume Tell and its predecessor, La Muette de Portici, another grand ‘tableau’ opera, have significant similarities, not least in their use of colourful geographical locations (in French, couleur locale) and of The People as a new dynamic force – a force quite different from those routine, scene-setting choruses of previous decades. But they also have notable individual traits, again suggesting the stylistic variety that grand opéra could accommodate. La Muette ends with an extravagant disaster scene in which the heroine flings herself into the lava of an erupting Vesuvius, and the simplicity of the music at this climactic moment (nothing more than a sequence of mechanically repeated scales) is like the spare tremolo in Tell’s apple-shooting scene. An absence of musical interest underlines the fact that the visual element is meant to carry all before it. On the other hand, and unlike La Muette, Rossini’s musical ambitions and past glories ensured that Tell had much more. Its greatest moment of pure visual splendour – the revelation of a magnificent Alpine landscape in the last finale – is accompanied by music that aspires to translate the sublime scenic effect into sound, its grand musical gestures seeming to slow down the very passing of time as man contemplates nature.

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF GRANDEUR

In the 1830s and 1840s a small number of similar works joined La Muette de Portici and Guillaume Tell, with them dominating the repertory at the Paris Opéra for several decades. Three of these blockbusters were written by Meyerbeer, a German expatriate with an Italianized first name (he was born Jakob Liebmann Meyer). The international aspirations of grand opéra are summed up in Meyerbeer’s career. After a conventional musical apprenticeship in Germany he went on a prolonged sojourn in Italy; there, inevitably, he became a follower of Rossini, but his last Italian opera, Il crociato in Egitto (The Crusade in Egypt, 1824), already shows an emancipation from Rossinian style in its tendency to more complex orchestration. He then moved to Paris, where he remained until his death in 1864. Meyerbeer’s first French opera, Robert le diable, was begun as early as 1827 but did not reach the stage of the Opéra until four years later. Over this period, with La Muette and Tell showing the way, Meyerbeer turned his score from a three-act opéra comique into an authentic five-act grand opéra. In its latter guise it was enormously successful and, as we have seen from d’Ortigue’s comment about its fusion of Rossini and Beethoven, was recognized as an important milestone. By 1835, Robert had been exported to ten other countries, enjoying a vogue that rivalled even Rossini. Over the next decades, Meyerbeer would define classic grand opéra. His next works in the genre, Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849), achieved a repertory status matched only by Jacques Fromental Halévy’s La Juive (The Jewess, 1835) and Gaetano Donizetti’s La Favorite (The Favourite, 1840). For Chopin, of all people, Robert was ‘a masterpiece of the new school, where the devils sing through speaking-trumpets and the dead rise from their graves’, a work that had made Meyerbeer ‘immortal’.¹³ Into the 1850s he was routinely hailed, Verdi notwithstanding, as the greatest living opera composer.

There is a temptation to see the rise and fall of grand opéra in France as a matter of social barometers. Contemporary documents remind us again and again that what defined grand opéra was not just the shape of the works, but the shape of the audiences – their needs and fantasies. Louis Véron, who was appointed directeur of the Opéra in 1831, and who ran the place as a private venture (albeit with the state subsidy and its attendant controls still in place), was unequivocal about his social mission in the wake of the 1830 revolution: ‘The July Revolution is the triumph of the bourgeoisie: this victorious bourgeoisie will be fond of lording it, of having a good time; the Opéra will become its Versailles.’¹⁴ According to Véron, the image of this ruling class in their modern court also had a diplomatic function, announcing to the world that the image of France as a font of violent revolution had at last come to rest: ‘Successful performances of musical masterpieces need to attract foreigners to the Opéra, where they must see loges occupied by an elegant and carefree society. The Opéra’s successes and receipts need to give the lie to the riots.’¹⁵ To see and be seen, to display one’s social status on a public stage, was critically important for this aspirant audience. Small wonder that one of the central features of the newly spacious public spaces in the Opéra were large mirrors in which the public could see themselves and others reflected in all their finery.

If grand opéra was a barometer, by what means did it read the pressures of its time and the tastes of its audience? What were its chief characteristics, and what value does it have for us now, at the start of the twenty-first century? Almost all the most successful grands opéras had at least one overwhelming scenic tableau or iconic visual moment, designed to elicit wonder and noisy acclaim. One of the most talked-about was the great Imperial procession in Act 1 of La Juive. Before the Emperor appears, we have seen guards on horseback, buglers, standard-bearers, twenty crossbowmen, cardinals, bishops, guildsmen, abbots, twenty pages, 100 soldiers, and so on and on. Newspaper critics dutifully listed all these extras, one of them quipping that ‘if we’re not careful, the Opéra will become a power capable of throwing its armies into the balance of Europe’.¹⁶ This remark displays a nice turn of French irony, but it also gives voice to a peculiar process: you experience the performance with awe because it overwhelms the senses, but when it’s over, you sober up and see something overdone – faintly ridiculous and absurdly expensive. The during-versus-after effect is characteristic of grand opéra’s reception today. Perhaps, though, we are now spoiled by cinema, which can do things (again very expensively, but with an unprecedented mass of spectators) that Meyerbeer could not even dream about.

One element that differentiated grand opéra from even the most elaborate Italian serious works was decoration in a very broad sense, not just the vocal decoration that had long graced Italian opera, but a much larger array of effects that could enliven and intensify experience. There were of course lavish props and trudging supernumeraries, but just as important were musical numbers that existed merely for colour, not as vehicles for the plot or direct expressions of emotion. The most obvious of these decorative objects were the elaborate ballets precariously embedded in the centre of the plot. They were at base eye candy for the gentlemen of the audience, the most privileged of whom (the season-ticket holders) were granted access to backstage areas and, in particular, the so-called foyer de la danse, where they could meet the (female) dancers and aspire to take their visual and other pleasures further. But in most grands opéras there are also choruses and even solo arias that do little more than act as extensions of the scenery.

Many opera historians have disapproved of opera when it gets easy on the eye; they worry that if music drops too far out of the frame, prestige will be lost.¹⁷ It is as well, then, to remind ourselves periodically that whenever opera becomes more visually orientated, when singing diminishes or is turned over to a colourful choral mass, the chance to feed the eye is also a chance for the ear to relax. This can be tremendously important, and composers (both French and others) have rarely been blind to its advantages. We’ve already mentioned that the conventions of grand opéra resurfaced in its international diaspora in many subsequent decades, with episodes like the Triumphal Scene in Aida right out of the Meyerbeer playbook. Such scenes are not so much ballet as a choral, processional, marching-band extravaganza: a twenty-minute tour de force whose comforting qualities should be evident even to the most austere critic.

In grand opéra, most bountifully in Meyerbeer, we also find links between visual and symbolic musical gestures on the small scale, links that were later thought characteristic of Wagner. In Robert le diable a narrative ballad (‘Jadis regnait en Normandie’, There once reigned in Normandy) simultaneously establishes plot background by describing a villain and his son (the opera’s anti-hero, Robert) and links the story to certain musical motifs. The motifs introduced in the ballad will recur not only to accompany verbal allusions to the characters, but also to announce these characters’ appearance on stage. This is one primal form of what became known as the leitmotif – that all-important link between a musical fragment and a visual or verbal manifestation. And while certainly present in earlier composers such as Weber, leitmotif was manipulated and organized by Meyerbeer in ways that prefigure early Wagnerian habits. Senta’s ballad in Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (1843), whose melody also recurs over the course of the opera, is unthinkable without the model of Robert. What is more, in using small, visual-musical recurring units, Meyerbeer escaped the boundaries of single numbers, a formally radical step which had, as we have seen, been anticipated in French opera going back to the eighteenth century, but which Wagner in Oper und Drama (1851) identified as an innovation of the 1840s – and one that, as those who know his literary style might expect, he claimed as his own.

Concentration on great political events will have an inevitable acoustic consequence: because in the past making history was unambiguously the province of men, grand opéra often involved multiple starring roles for low male voices. Ensembles involving four or more male singers, none of whom could manage a high A, are an acoustic flavour special to grand opéra, and one of its enduring pleasures. In Les Huguenots the Act 4 blockbuster is a conspiracy scene in which the Count of Saint-Bris, starring bass and arch-Catholic, whips his supporters into a murderous frenzy. It opens after elaborate orchestral recitative with a sextet of sensual male voices led by Saint-Bris in a manly, foursquare theme, ‘Pour cette cause sainte’ (For this sacred cause). Throughout the scene, which lasts a good fifteen minutes, this male ensemble splits apart and comes together into duets or solos, rejoining in close harmony (without orchestra) for the scene’s iconic moment: the daggers that will massacre the Protestants are raised up and consecrated, ‘pious blades, be blessed by God!’ Even the arch-radical Berlioz loved this number, and conducted it several times in Paris concerts. Its avant-garde aspects include stretches of through-composed, free-flowing music in which individual subsections cede to one another; but it also has a reprise of the opening melody (‘Pour cette cause sainte’) at the end, with absolutely everyone on stage joining in (by now there are scores of conspirators), accompanied by trombones and ophicleide. In this formal aspect the number is no less radical than such famously advanced Wagnerian episodes as the ‘Rome Narrative’ in Act 3 of Tannhäuser (1845).

After consecrating the daggers and after the crowd has trailed off the stage, the benighted lovers Raoul (tenor, Protestant) and Valentine (soprano, Catholic) spring from the hiding place where they have overheard all and sing a desperate duet. The passage tears both a character and music itself in two, as Raoul, hearing the massacre that is taking place outside, becomes frantic to rush to the defence of his religious comrades, and sings ever more loudly against the sounds he hears. It inspired even Heine – like Meyerbeer an expatriate German – to ambiguous praise:

Meyerbeer did not accomplish this through artistic means, but through natural ones, inasmuch as the famous duet speaks of a series of feelings that have perhaps never before been introduced into opera – not at least with such verisimilitude. But they are, for those Sprits of our age, fiercely sympathetic feelings.¹⁸

Act 4 of Les Huguenots exemplifies grand opéra’s teeming variety, as a mass in which musical and dramatic styles are hefted and cantilevered into ungainly wholes. This ungainliness was part of its visual character as well, and explains, perhaps, the designers’ prevailing taste for imposing asymmetrical sets. Look at any of the classic Meyerbeerian stage pictures. Alarming foliage will threaten to engulf an outdoor scene (Les Huguenots, Act 2), or a huge ship will lurch sideways as if about to topple over (L’Africaine, Act 3; see Figure 24). In visual terms this is emphatically not the world of the so-called juste milieu, not a world classical symmetry in which everything balances and the status quo is unproblematic. At the level of plot, this sense of imbalance plays out chiefly in all those tales about how warring political factions put such strain on private emotions and relationships. Stage spectacle is typically a presentation of public life in all its grandeur, a show of power and consensus; but grand opéra libretti undermine this potential stability by including the affective presence of troublesome individuals and their problems. Within the kaleidoscope of characteristic scenes, amid the high-calorie orchestral effects and massive choral numbers, comes music for these soloists, intimate encounters and Italianate duets that unfold the private sphere and its interior emotions.

The glory days of grand opéra continued into the 1840s, but the revolutions of 1848 were a serious impediment. This was not so much in the financial sense, since the Paris Opéra continued to function more or less as before in terms of expenditure. Rather, by the 1850s and 1860s, the spirit and culture that had given impulse to works like Guillaume Tell were past. There were, inevitably, complex reasons for its decline. One is certainly the new strain of more virulent nationalism that emerged after 1848: an atmosphere in which the cosmopolitan virtues of grand opéra no longer held sway. The great line of foreign composers who had contributed to grand opéra (Rossini, Meyerbeer, Donizetti, Verdi) petered out in the second half of the century – Verdi’s Don Carlos (1867) was the last nineteenth-century premiere at the theatre not written by a Frenchman. What’s more, Paris’s claim to represent the operatic avant-garde, strong in the decades before 1850, was severely weakened by Verdi’s middle-period works and, later, by Wagner.

But such explanations only tell part of the story. Another might emerge from looking again at Guillaume Tell, the work that helped form and define the genre in its heyday. Its famous Overture is, like many at the time, a potpourri type; but instead of quoting vocal numbers from the opera, it uses some of the opera’s iconic moments, music associated with landscapes or tableaux. In the first, slow section a solo cello is set against four other cellos and the double basses, prefiguring Tell’s ‘Sois immobile’ and with timpani rolls that stop everything dead and anticipate the frozen moment before Tell pierces the apple. The second section, a furious musical storm, is openly descriptive and is concluded by a pastoral in which local colour is supplied by a ranz des vaches, cow-herding pipes that signify Switzerland but also create a sense of real space, of sound that exists in a landscape and for a purpose. Then comes the famous closing section, the fanfares of trumpets and horns calling the populace to arms and the gradual crescendo of excitement. The music in this finale is visceral – it tells us to get up and move, a summons that can hardly be ignored – and with it the marvellous energy of early nineteenth-century idealism appears in almost pure form. As so often in grand opéra, the idea of political action, that one should not just listen but should do something, is transformed into a musical effect. That idea could not endure. Once the revolutions of 1848 had petered out into inaction, this illusion of the will to action seemed to belong to the past. It was a past that was actively nurtured by the audiences, indeed Tell and the other grand opéra standards of the 1830s were repeated endlessly through to the end of the century. But new operas in the same vein increasingly seemed irrelevant or emptily grandiose – effects whose causes had long passed into history.

LOST DECADE AND FOUND OBJECTS

In the 1850s, then, the Opéra looked increasingly to the past. With repeat performances of Meyerbeer’s warhorses mounting into the hundreds, repertory fatigue set in. Even Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, although it entered the lists in 1849 and might have been the last hurrah of the old regime, was not a runaway success. Its scenic marvels included a ballet on skates, as well as the first use of electric lighting in the theatre – an arc light used to depict a sunrise. We are so accustomed today to miracles of lighting technology that it’s hard to imagine how stunning electric light might have seemed when first witnessed. But that sense of ‘effects without causes’ – of the absent sublime – became more insistent. The Opéra administrators in the 1850s tried hard to discover a Guillaume Tell 2 or a Young Huguenots, and duly commissioned elephantine works such as Halévy’s Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew, 1852) and Charles Gounod’s La Nonne sanglante (The Bleeding Nun, 1854). Both satisfaction and success were elusive, and desperation took hold. Even a work specifically written for the Opéra by Giuseppe Verdi (Les Vêpres siciliennes – The Sicilian Vespers – 1855) did only moderately well. Verdi’s partner, Giuseppina Strepponi, the dyspeptic onlooker we mentioned earlier, blamed it on the Opéra’s petrified ways. When the theatre decided to import Wagner’s Tannhäuser (1845) in 1861, it was not just because Tannhäuser looked, tasted and sounded like grand opéra, but because it had demonstrated box office success over much of Europe in the 1850s.

Talk of such success leads, albeit uncomfortably, to the operatic career of Hector Berlioz (1803–69), a composer who would dearly have loved those epithets lavished on Tannhäuser. Part of the problem, then as now, is that his music so stubbornly defies categorization. Though Berlioz was a self-confessed admirer of Gluck, Spontini and Beethoven, his copious and entertaining operatic criticism is often dismissive of grand opéra, not to mention the products of the new Italian school. Even so, he was (at least in early life) an enthusiastic admirer of Meyerbeer, in particular of his skill in orchestration. It is possible to see much of Berlioz’s music during this early period as the strivings of an opera composer manqué. In spite of misgivings and reluctance, he agreed to help in converting Weber’s Der Freischütz into a work suitable for the Opéra in 1841. As he wrote to the theatre’s director, Léon Pillet, ‘I do not think one ought to add to Freischütz the recitatives you ask me for; however, since without that condition it can’t be put on at the Opéra, and if I didn’t write them you would entrust their composition to someone less familiar with Weber than I am and certainly less dedicated to the glorification of his masterpiece, I accept your offer on one condition: Freischütz will be performed exactly as it is.’ Berlioz stood firm on this condition even when Pillet – ever searching for variety – suggested that the ball scene from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) might make a good addition.¹⁹ Berlioz’s only original work for the Opéra was Benvenuto Cellini (1838), which fared badly with the public in spite of its innovative, Meyerbeer-influenced orchestration and rhythmic energy.

There is, though, no doubt that his operatic masterpiece, Les Troyens (The Trojans, composed 1856–8), was intended for the Opéra and was for this reason equipped with all its prerequisites – and more – in terms of size and scenic ambition: the opera was inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid and laid out in five mighty acts. But Les Troyens was not thought a safe enough financial prospect by the Opéra management (Berlioz was primarily known as a conductor and composer of instrumental music). Although the last three acts, which take place in Carthage, and have Dido and Aeneas as their protagonists, were first given at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863, the entire opera (with its first two acts set in Troy and featuring Cassandra) was not performed during the composer’s lifetime, and only found general recognition in the Berlioz renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of the fact that modern-day revivals of Les Troyens are routinely trumpeted as special events, impossible to compare with other, more commonplace operatic experiences, the work has much that will remind us of classic Meyerbeerian practice, and not just in its ostentatious show of unusual orchestral effects. There is also the standard collection of reminiscence motifs (such as the ‘Trojans’ March’ in Acts 1, 3 and 5), innumerable choruses both on and off the stage, and plenty of conventional operatic numbers, even though some of Berlioz’s most impressive moments are so-called ‘monologues’ that blur the manner of recitative and aria.

One crucial grand opéra element lacking in Les Troyens, however, is the ‘frozen moment’, which had been so important a part of the genre’s early attraction. The first two acts have little to do with the last three in conventional narrative terms, and are primarily bound together not by developing characters and their tussles with public/political forces, but by a more abstract sense of destiny constantly in the wings. Perhaps for this reason, more conventional operatic numbers such as the Act 4 love duet between Dido and Aeneas, in which the focus is on the characters’ interaction, tend to fall back on earlier models. ‘Nuit d’ivresse et d’extase infinie!’ (Night of rapture and boundless ecstasy!) sing the two lovers in caressing parallel intervals over a pulsating orchestra. The number is self-consciously beautiful and aspires to a kind of simplicity of effect reminiscent of Berlioz’s beloved Gluck, even down to the rather antique, unusually purposeful modulations to closely related keys. But characteristically Berliozian traits also intrude in the form of piquant additional harmonies and bursts of elaborate, attention-seeking orchestration.

More successful – indeed, Berlioz at his operatic best – is the start of Act 4. A ‘ballet-pantomime’ called the ‘Royal Hunt and Storm’ is staged, in which water nymphs are frightened away by hunters, who are then themselves dispersed by a violent storm that forces Dido and Aeneas to take shelter in a cave. The whole passage is best seen as an elaborate symphonic interlude in which some of the most conventional operatic/orchestral clichés (the hunt, the storm) are imbued with a new level of detail, the whole episode coming to a tremendous climax with offstage choral cries of ‘Italy!’ to mark the fact that Aeneas must soon depart on new conquests. Here Berlioz comfortably meets grand opéra traditions on his own orchestral terms, ones in which the characters become puppets in an instrumental drama. The finest vocal moments do something similar, with the characteristic Berlioz monologue format best seen as a dialogue between the character and the orchestra. Dido’s final ‘monologue and air’, ‘Je vais mourir’ (I am going to die) in Act 5, is a wonderful example in which there is a productive tension between the character’s individuality and more abstract forces of fate represented by the orchestra.

Because of its difficulty and idiosyncrasy, Les Troyens had virtually no impact on operatic history until its revivals in the 1960s. Since that time is has often been cast as an antidote to Wagner (Greek vs Teutonic myth). In historical terms, though, the unexpected success of another French work of that period was far more influential, and far more indicative of the way the old grand opéra mould was decaying. This was Gounod’s Faust, first seen at the Théâtre Lyrique in 1859. Gounod had tried and failed at the Opéra with La Nonne sanglante in 1854, but in Faust he created an opera that was to be enshrined a century later in Simon & Schuster’s Treasury, and that remained until recently one of the most often performed works in the international repertory. Gounod’s unfortunate past Opéra experience was no doubt important as Faust took shape. The opera is, for example, distinctly undersized by the usual standards of the genre. Although in five acts and with four star singers, it uses spoken dialogue rather than recitative (at least in its original version), has no half-hour choral numbers and no world-historical event with political conflicts or war-and-peace stakes as a background to the central romantic entanglement; nor does it feature orchestral depictions of bad weather or natural catastrophe. Indeed, history is almost entirely absent. We are instead plunged again into the Freischütz world of German Romanticism, with supernatural insurgency given form in the person of Mephistopheles.

What strikes the ear in listening to Faust against the background of earlier grand opéra is the concision of its numbers. One of the most famous moments, the final trio for Faust (tenor), Marguerite (soprano) and Mephistopheles (bass), actually seems too short. We are in a dungeon. Faust, with Mephistopheles’ help, has arrived to rescue Marguerite from execution. But again and again she refuses to leave, trusting in God as her saviour. The trio’s recurring refrain, ‘Anges purs, anges radieux’ (Pure angels, radiant angels), in 6/8 metre with woodwind pulses enforcing the beat, has the air of a transfigured march in which Marguerite’s adamant voice will lead to heaven, come what may. Each time the refrain recurs it is sung a half-step higher, raising the stakes both in the drama – Faust’s pleas become more urgent – and in the performance, as the tenor and soprano climb progressively up the register. The sense that grand opéra’s leisurely musical forms have been radically curtailed links nicely with the devil’s best number, ‘Le veau d’or’ (The golden calf), which can even be heard as a mockery of big opera per se. Mephistopheles sings his strophic song to a festive chorus that ebulliently echoes his refrain: gold, wealth, dancing and splendour, these are all Satan’s snares! The grotesque, thumping low brass that accompanies this devilish ditty is exactly the kind of odd, trombone-and-ophicleide-heavy instrumentation that Meyerbeer loved, and used without irony in every one of his French works. In Gounod’s hands, though, this classic grand opéra effect is lampooned as lively but moribund, as danse macabre.

By the 1860s, the Opéra was at a crossroads: forever trying to find new big opera to add to its fading repertory; nervously looking abroad at disturbing signs of the musical future; increasingly aware of the new tastes represented by younger Frenchmen such as Gounod and, a little later, Camille Saint-Saëns and Georges Bizet, a generation who would seldom encounter those remembering the eighteenth century. Meyerbeer’s final opera, L’Africaine, was produced posthumously in 1865. He had been working on it, on and off, for nearly thirty years. Some thought it a great monument, but it struggled to achieve the success of his earlier operas. Above all, it seemed belated. Another sign that the end was near occurred in 1869, when the Opéra sought to capitalize on Faust’s success by treating it to a prestigious and expanded revival. Gounod had already added recitatives, and now included the obligatory ballet and other bulk items. In essence, though, it was the same old Faust. Embarrassingly, it outstripped nearly all the Opéra-reared products: by the time Gounod died in 1893, Faust had been played more than a thousand times at the Opéra. Even in France, grand opéra had now entered its afterlife, sustained as a lingering taste for precious objects and dancing girls in the serious, Oriental-themed operas that swept through Paris in its wake. One of the first of these, Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila (1877), was in fact commissioned by the Archducal Theatre in Weimar under Franz Liszt, a circumstance that demonstrates how fully the internationalism of the original genre was taking new forms in its descendants.

WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST ATTENTION

Those new forms were at their most potent as products of the troubled relationships that the two greatest nineteenth-century opera composers struck up with grand opéra. Neither Wagner nor Verdi was immune to Meyerbeer-envy: there was a time, and not in their earliest years, when Meyerbeer was the most envied musician on the planet. What’s more, every aspiring opera composer dreamt of a commission from the Opéra, of commanding all those lavish musical and scenic resources, not to mention the high fees and royalties a Parisian success would bring.

Not surprisingly, grands opéras were sometimes produced without commission by aspirant composers. Wagner graduated to first maturity with a classic instance, a five-act, historical, heavily orchestrated curio called Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes, 1842). He brought his partially completed score with him to Paris in 1839 and asked Meyerbeer to intercede in its favour at the Opéra. In spite of Meyerbeer’s attempts at advocacy (he wrote numerous letters on the younger man’s behalf),²⁰ Wagner’s Parisian ambitions went nowhere, apart from helping to engender a lifelong animosity towards his hapless helper, an attitude fuelled – in the words of one modern commentator – by a heady mix of ‘personal envy … persecution mania, exaggerated aesthetic convictions and racial bigotry’.²¹ When opera historians identify Wagner’s grand opéra lineage, it is almost always Rienzi that serves as the exemplary case. One can hear why even from the overture, heavy on foursquare brass themes that have some of the wonderful, loud vigour of ‘Pour cette cause sainte’. But, as we shall see, to lean too heavily on Rienzi is to hide the fact that Wagner’s French side is evident in almost every opera he wrote. When in 1861 he finally brought a work to the Opéra – the revised Tannhäuser, with a token ballet – it had numbers that were hailed as virtually home-grown.

First among them was the all-male septet in Act 1, scene 4. Although it would be a simplification to explain (away) Wagner’s genius by saying that he simply did French opera better than anyone else, sometimes the claim is just. The septet in Tannhäuser takes the idea of big, joyous, onstage noise to stratospheric levels. The basic drama is of a prodigal’s return. Tannhäuser (tenor), prostrate in the Thuringian woods, is discovered by six former companions, virtuous knights led by Landgrave Herrmann (bass). They recognize him as a long-absent associate and urge him to rejoin their number. Tannhäuser, suffering from something like a moral hangover (he has been expelled from the underworld by the Goddess Venus, soprano), refuses until his friend Wolfram (baritone) reveals that Princess Elisabeth (soprano) still loves him and pines for him. He agrees to accompany the knights, a decision that provokes general rejoicing. Throughout a long, free-form introduction, the male voices blend and separate, coming together over a brief, gorgeous melody (‘Gegrüsst sei uns, du kühner Sänger’ – Be welcome, you valiant singer) that seems to emerge and then dissolve within seconds. Then begins a solo for Wolfram, who will consistently sing the most sensual music in the opera, a number designed to foreground a voice type that is unusual in Wagner, a true baritone. Wolfram’s melody is taken up by all the other men, and when Tannhäuser finally gives in there’s a final stretta in which the voices, taking turns to show off their high notes, are joined by fanfares from onstage hunting horns. In most performances, the entire stage seems to be vibrating with sound by this point: the horns, the voices, the pit orchestra, even the rumbling tread of those rushing in just before the curtain falls, all contribute their part. The septet conveys a kind of lyric optimism, a surfeit of hope and energy, that is a characteristic flavour in Romantic opera before 1848, before the disillusion of so many foiled revolutions set in.

Tannhäuser was booed off the Opéra stage in 1861 after only three performances. The token ballet, added as a curtain raiser in the Venusberg scene, was in the wrong place. It was customary for large factions of the Opéra audience to arrive late, usually during Act 2, and that was why the ballet numbers were invariably placed mid-way through an opera. Such traditions should again remind us that opera, until a very late historical point, was on many occasions little more than an addendum to social interaction. One reason audiences found the hours and hours of grand opéra so palatable was that many of them didn’t show up for the whole thing. They strolled in for the good bits and (as we have seen) even then did not always pay attention. In Alexandre Dumas’s novel Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo, 1844), several scenes set at the Paris Opéra in the 1830s record this custom in detail. In Chapter 88, the Count arrives for Guillaume Tell at the beginning of Act 2. In between scene changes, and even while the opera is being performed, there is a great deal of talking and even a challenge to a duel, delivered in the Count’s box. Unbothered, the Count stays put: ‘according to his usual custom, until Duprez had sung his famous “Suivez-moi”, then he rose and went out’. An earlier chapter (53) is set at a performance of Robert le diable and spells out local habits in no uncertain terms:

The curtain rose, as usual, to an almost empty house, it being one of the absurdities of Parisian fashion never to appear at the opera until after the beginning of the performance, so that the first act is generally played without the slightest attention being paid to it, that part of the audience already assembled being too much occupied in observing the fresh arrivals, while nothing is heard but the noise of opening and shutting doors, and the buzz of conversation.

Chapter 53 makes clear that the stage is also widely ignored during Act 2 (‘The second act passed away during one continued buzz of voices’), and although Act 3 seems to catch the audience’s attention, once again the Count goes early, this time before Act 4 begins. One character comments acidly that the Count does nothing like other men: he walks out before the big number everyone else has been waiting for. But for us today, reading Dumas’s novel might above all encourage heretical thoughts. Perhaps Meyerbeer’s work is lost to us because it cannot survive the attentiveness that modern audiences have felt obliged to bring to all opera. Perhaps a truly enterprising, twenty-first-century general manager will bring back Meyerbeer performances as social events, with all the grandeur intact but with listeners nonetheless free to come and go, to ignore Act 1 and dine after Act 3.

The erratic behaviour of audiences did nothing to interrupt the allure of grand opéra for composers of many nations during its golden years before 1848. A generation of Italians found the operatic journey to Paris an essential career move – a way of escaping what was seen both inside and outside the peninsula as an increasingly parochial and insular national muse. As we have seen in earlier chapters, during the 1830s Bellini and Donizetti both staged works successfully at Paris’s Théâtre Italien (which was dedicated to Italian-language opera); and Rossini and Donizetti went further, creating grands opéras (Guillaume Tell and La Favorite respectively) that proved among the most successful and long-lived examples of that risky, failure-prone genre. Part of their success was that, unlike Berlioz, they tended to be less than idealistic when adapting themselves to local taste. Here is Donizetti in 1839, writing about his conversion of an Italian opera (Poliuto, which the previous year had been banned by the censors in Naples) into a grand opéra called Les Martyrs (1840). It was to be:

expanded into four acts, instead of three, and translated and adjusted for the French Theatre by Scribe. This means that I’ve had to re-do completely all the recitatives, make a new finale for Act I, add arias, trios and a ballet such as they use here, so that the public won’t complain (rightly) that the shape is Italian. French music and poetry for the theatre have a cachet all their own, to which every composer must adapt himself. … There can be no [Rossinian] crescendi, and none of the usual cadential repetitions felicità, felicità, felicità; and between the two verses of a cabaletta there’s always poetry which moves the action forward, without the usual repetition of lines that our poets do.²²

Here is a true treasury, a native informant’s take on the differences between grand opéra and Italian serious opera. The French variety needed to be longer, with an internal ballet, more frequent finales and different kinds of lyrical pieces, etc. But equally important was that French audiences were more impatient than their Italian cousins about ‘musical architecture’: they wanted the action to move forward more quickly in set pieces, and were less tolerant of elaborate, repetitious vocal warbling as numbers come to a close – what Donizetti charmingly calls ‘repetitions felicità, felicità, felicità’, using as his descriptor a word endlessly repeated at the close of many an exuberant Italian cabaletta.

What’s missing from Donizetti’s account is any suggestion that writing a grand opéra entailed profound musical rethinking of his earlier modus operandi. True, the shape and sometimes the manner of an Italian opera had to change; but in many ways Italian opera was already influenced by its grander French cousin, and of course vice-versa. The notion is strengthened by looking at Verdi’s first attempt at a French-language work for the Opéra, his Jérusalem (1847). Like Donizetti before him, Verdi made this, his debut at the Opéra, by revising an existing Italian work, I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards at the First Crusade, 1843). The changes were again largely on the surface. To Donizetti’s list of alterations, Verdi added denser, Meyerbeer-like orchestration, an increased sense of local colour, and – probably related – some experiments with a wandering kind of chromatic harmony, rarely essayed in his Italian operas. In the end he produced an opera judged barely worthy of the occasion; it was soon dropped from the Opéra’s repertory.

‘JE DORMIRAI DANS MON MANTEAU ROYAL’

During the next two decades, Verdi’s encounters with Paris, in particular with the shadows cast by French grand opéra and opera production, were frequent. He spent a two-year period in Paris (1854–5) during which he completed Les Vêpres siciliennes. In a letter to his librettist, the inevitable Scribe, he made clear that he had Meyerbeer firmly in his sights when he asked for:

a grandiose, impassioned original subject, calling for an impressive, overwhelming production. Ever before my eyes I have the many, many magnificent scenes to be found in your librettos; among others, the Coronation Scene of Le Prophète! No other composer could have done with that scene what Meyerbeer did: but with that spectacle, and above all with a situation so original, grandiose and at the same time so impassioned, no composer, however little feeling he had, would have failed to produce a great effect.²³

A desire to compete with the most imposing Parisian successes of the 1830s and 1840s is obvious (note how Verdi uses the word ‘grandiose’ twice in the space of three sentences). Probably because he was writing to Scribe, Verdi is politely deferential to Meyerbeer; his partner Giuseppina Strepponi put the matter more crudely a few years later, calling Les Vêpres an attempt to ‘make the Jew die of an attack of publicity’.²⁴ On another level, though, this insistence on spectacle and effect is curious because since the later 1840s Verdi had tended to more intimate, private subjects. It might also have been against the Parisian times: as we have seen, the later 1840s and 1850s saw hardly any successful attempts to re-create the great spectacular successes of the 1830s.

The picture becomes even more confusing during the later 1850s and 1860s, when Verdi’s correspondence is routinely punctuated by diatribes against the French, in particular for their blague, their insolent politesse and their contempt for all things foreign.²⁵ The grandest diatribe of all came in a much-quoted letter from the late 1860s:

Everyone wants to express an opinion, to voice a doubt; and the composer who lives in that atmosphere of doubt for any length of time cannot help but be somewhat shaken in his convictions and end up revising, adjusting or, to put it more precisely, ruining his work. In this way, one ultimately finds in one's hands not a unified opera but a mosaic; and, beautiful as it may be, it is still a mosaic. You will argue that the Opéra has produced a string of masterpieces in this manner. You may call them masterpieces all you want, but permit me to say that they would be much more perfect if the patchwork and the adjustments were not felt all the time.²⁶

The letter places the blame squarely on staging conditions in Paris, in particular on the inevitably collaborative nature of the enterprise. But the problem was also internal, within the very nature of modern opera; the works were threatening to become too complex to be under any single person’s exclusive jurisdiction.

The confusion arises because, just before the time of this letter, Verdi had spent another two years in Paris and had created Don Carlos (1867), his third and last grand opéra, and a work now generally thought the one durable masterpiece of the genre (Rossini’s Tell would be its nearest rival). In many ways it has all the classic ingredients. There are five long acts; an imposing historical backdrop; royal dynasties in France and Spain in the mid sixteenth century; with the Inquisition to boot; freedom fighters for the Protestant Netherlands; and a sexy temptress providing local colour. There are elaborate love-versus-duty conflicts – Carlos (tenor), heir to the Spanish throne, falls in love with French noblewoman Elisabeth de Valois (soprano), but then his father, Philip II of Spain (bass), decides to marry her himself; and that’s just in Act 1. And there is, of course, also a magnificent iconic-moment tableau in Act 3, out-Meyerbeering Meyerbeer with a public clash between Carlos and his father in a large square in front of Valladolid Cathedral, and then, at the curtain, victims of the Inquisition writhing on the stake accompanied by a Voice from Heaven assuring them of future bliss. Perhaps small wonder, with Verdi at close to the peak of his international fame, that the Opéra’s vast resources ground into motion, producing a spectacle that rivalled Meyerbeer in expense and luxury. One mind-boggling statistic is that the opera required no fewer than 535 costumes: 177 recycled gratefully from the Opéra’s store cupboard; 118 altered to suit the occasion; and 240 brand-new.²⁷

However, and in spite of all these competitive moves, it’s significant that when Verdi was first approached about the subject, which is again taken from Schiller, he immediately singled out two relatively intimate vocal confrontations (one a clash between the Grand Inquisitor and King Philip) as catching his imagination. The significance is that, while Verdi’s first insistence for Les Vêpres siciliennes was that it must have grandiose scenes, in Don Carlos his focus was from the start on individuals. While Don Carlos might seem identical to the classic Meyerbeer model on the outside, it is actually best seen as a grand opéra inside out. In Meyerbeer one senses that the public world is always threatening to overwhelm private emotions (the Act 4 love duet in Les Huguenots is typical); in Don Carlos it’s the other way around, with individual expression constantly threatening to overwhelm public display. A good instance comes in Act 1, in which Carlos falls in love with Elisabeth only to lose her almost immediately. At the close of the act, Verdi sets in extreme musical contrast two opposing emotions, Carlos and Elisabeth’s private despair versus the public celebrations of the crowd announcing Elisabeth’s marriage to Philip. All seems set for a noisy finale à la Meyerbeer; but then, at the very end, the chorus carries Elisabeth away and Carlos is left alone onstage. His line disintegrates, becoming breathless and fragmentary; the musical certainties of the chorus disappear, and the act ends with a close focus on a moment of individual despair.

Time and again this trajectory recurs in Don Carlos. Individuals, the opera tells us insistently, matter more than crowds. Another instance is at the start of Act 4, where we are shown the tragedy of Philip. The act begins with his famous aria, ‘Elle me n’aime pas’ (She doesn’t love me), which takes place near dawn, the king leaning wearily on a table overflowing with official papers, the nearly spent candles marking the end of a long night wrestling with duties of state. The stage seems set for a contemplation of the melancholy verities of public life, but Philip begins instead with a simple, tragic statement about his marriage to Elisabeth: ‘She doesn't love me’, a bare utterance clothed musically in the simplest of means – made, that is, into an iconic moment in which restrained accompaniment, simple declamation and one melodic outburst serve to etch the emotion into our minds. Philip’s subsequent historical reveries in this aria, in particular his dreams of wielding a royal power he so obviously lacks in the private sphere, employ martial rhythms and themes from past public moments in the opera; but they lead nowhere. They sound as if heard at a distance, already foregone. At the end, Philip closes where he began – he can do no more than repeat his impassioned outburst of personal loss, ‘She doesn’t love me!’, a retreat from the public ambitions that have deluded him, a descent into the labyrinth of the soul.

In spite of all this concentration on the individual, or perhaps because of it, Don Carlos did not succeed at the Opéra. Verdi, not for the last time and to his profound irritation, was accused of Wagnerism, which in this case was an easy shorthand for ‘not like his earlier, Italian self’. Sometime later he cut the opera down to manageable Italian length, jettisoning almost the entire first act in the process (performing, if you want, the kind of surgery less painfully achieved by Dumas’s Count). In terms of Simon & Schuster’s Treasury, this turned his grand opéra into simply a Grand Opera. It was practical too: Don Carlos mostly trod the twentieth-century boards in its reduced form. Current attempts to recapture the original French version, sometimes even adding sections that Verdi cut during those interminable rehearsals at the Opéra, have proved musically revelatory; but, as with so many grands opéras, there will always be an embarrassing surplus of music. To experience such resurrections we must arrive at 6 p.m. and depart after 11 p.m.: modern life is against such profligacy. We will do this for Don Carlos; we will also – when we get the chance – do it for Berlioz’s Les Troyens; at least for the time being, though, we will not do it for Les Huguenots.

The difference between Verdi’s and Meyerbeer’s modern fortunes may partly be a matter of simple quality. Don Carlos captivates us precisely because individuals are at its centre: Verdi had the ability not only to amaze and impress, but also to engage us with his characters. But we should be cautious of such conclusions, which too easily congratulate our present-day taste at the expense of countless musicians and others who in 1850 thought Meyerbeer had brought opera to some kind of pinnacle. The caution might be increased by recalling that it is eternally difficult to separate the quality of operatic music from the quality of the performance it receives. Les Huguenots was, for example, dubbed ‘the night of the seven stars’, because that is how many top-flight, highly paid singers are needed to perform it convincingly. If such a constellation could be assembled today, it would surely be enough to raise any self-respecting opera lover’s heart rate. But when Meyerbeer is performed nowadays, cautious impresarios are reluctant to spend lavishly enough to cast all seven parts with superstars, and this becomes a self-defeating economy, one often repeated by stage designers and procession-planners. Before a note is heard, the opera has been gravely disabled.

So: we can if we wish retreat into vague statements about musical values to explain the demise of almost all grand opéra, and thus feel reassured that our present musical world is more discerning. But, at least as historians, it is better to think instead about the sheer cosmopolitan variety that characterizes the genre, a trait so suited to the times in which it flourished but so much less in tune with the newly nationalist and increasingly racist atmosphere of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After 1848, Meyerbeer’s fall was hastened by anti-Semitic abuse from Wagner and many others, and his reputation in the twentieth century reached a low point from which it has barely emerged since. When the notion of the ‘cosmopolitan’ became a threat rather than something to be proud of, it is easy to see how the idea of Meyerbeer – a Jewish composer born in Germany, trained in Italy, master of Paris – would become distasteful. Once the break had been made, the overwhelming difficulty of staging his works, and their unfamiliarity to singers, then formed an effective barrier, ensuring that they would remain in the wilderness. By such means is the operatic canon made and unmade; by such means did the greatest operatic composer in the world in 1850 fall from grace.