The vituperation heaped upon the German-Jewish composer of French grand opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, by Richard Wagner in such writings as “Judaism in Music” (1850) or Opera and Drama (1852) knew no bounds. Professional envy mixed with an element of persecution mania, exaggerated aesthetic convictions, and racial bigotry all contributed to this astounding flow of invective. In the notorious “Judaism in Music,” Wagner does not even deign to speak the name of Meyerbeer, but merely refers to “a widely renowned Jewish musician of our time” who has made a business of catering to the boredom and confused musical tastes of the contemporary public. This unnamed composer is called a master of “deception,” even self-deception, who foists on his bored audience a musical equivalent of Yiddish speech (Jargon), persuading them to accept it as a “smart and modern way of pronouncing all those trivialities” they had already become accustomed to hearing in their natural and undisguised banality.1 In the critique of contemporary opera that forms the basis of Part 1 of Opera and Drama, Wagner famously castigates Meyerbeer’s grand operas as the quintessence of the spectacular but superficial “effects” that constitute the core principle of the genre: “effect without cause.”2 To illustrate the depravity into which opera has fallen in recent times he has been obliged, so he says, to characterize the faults and excesses of Meyerbeer’s works with absolute candor: “In Meyerbeer’s music there is shown so appalling an emptiness, shallowness, and artistic nothingness, that—especially when compared with by far the larger number of his musical contemporaries —we are tempted to set down his specific musical capacity at zero.”3
If this is indeed what Wagner thought of his elder operatic colleague in 1851, how to explain the encomium to Meyerbeer and Les Huguenots presented below, which he appears to have written sometime between 1837 and 1841? Here Meyerbeer’s Huguenots is celebrated as the pinnacle of modern operatic achievement, the analogue in its own genre to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: “Just as the greatest genius would come to naught if he sought to perpetuate Beethoven’s development, given that his last symphony cannot possibly be outdone, so too it seems impossible to progress beyond what Meyerbeer has taken here to the utmost point.”4 Granted, Wagner seems to be making room for some new phase in the history of opera, to be led by a worthy (German) successor to Meyerbeer.5 Even so, the unstinting praise here for Meyerbeer as the most recent example of a great, specifically German tradition of synthesizing and “universalizing” the best traits of diverse national traditions is so diametrically opposed to the nearly libelous denunciation of the composer in Opera and Drama that—barring a diagnosis of critical schizophrenia or merely hypocritical mendacity—it is difficult to believe they were written by the same person.
The diagnosis of hypocrisy is easily surmised if we recall that, at the time this text must have been written, Wagner was planning a strategic assault on Paris and its Opéra, the most prestigious operatic institution of the day, and that with his second Parisian grand opera, Les Huguenots (1836), Meyerbeer had consolidated his claim to being the most prestigious composer connected with that institution. We also need to take into account that this essay was not actually published at the time it was written. Had it been calculated primarily as a piece of shameless, sycophantic flattery of the influential older composer, Wagner would certainly have realized by around 1841 that such tactics would never suffice to get his own work (the grand opera Rienzi) staged at the Opéra. The story of Meyerbeer’s sincere if cautious advocacy of the young Wagner and Wagner’s mounting suspicions of his benefactor is well known.6 Wagner’s letters to Meyerbeer between 1837 and 1841, starting when he introduced himself and his Parisian plans, display no lack of sycophancy—quite the opposite. (This abject deference to his successful colleague is at least one major factor in the vehemence of Wagner’s subsequent rancor.)
At the same time there is ample evidence—not least of all Rienzi itself—that in his twenties Wagner looked to the most successful examples of French grand opera by Auber, Halévy, and Meyerbeer as models for his own work. From the time of his first published essay, “On German Opera” (Zeitung für die elegante Welt, 10 June 1834) up to the end of his early Paris sojourn (an extended appreciation of “Halévy and the French Opera” published in the Revue et gazette musicale in 1842) Wagner repeatedly articulated an ideal of cosmopolitan stylistic synthesis as an answer to the identity crisis of German Romantic opera.7 In an article explicating the nature of la musique allemande to Parisian readers in 1840, Wagner concludes with sentiments very similar to those expressed in the Meyerbeer essay, presumably written about the same time. Germans have not yet developed “dramatic music on a grand scale,” but their native musicality and capacity for cultural synthesis now positions them to take the lead in opera. The German, he writes—obviously reflecting wishfully on his own present circumstances—“possesses the power to go to another country, develop its art to its highest peak, and raise it to the plane of universal validity.” Originally he went on to assert, in a passage that was omitted from the publication of his own German text in the first volume of his collected writings: “Handel and Gluck proved this abundantly, and in our time another German, Meyerbeer, has provided a fresh example.” The Germans—first Meyerbeer, and now Wagner—were uniquely poised to take French grand opera to the next level. Expressing his high hopes for his own bid to become the new Meyerbeer, and at the same time closing his essay on a note of entente cordiale toward his French hosts, he writes: “At any rate, so far as dramatic music is concerned, one can assume that at present the French and the German are identical…. That the two nations are joining hands and reinforcing each other means that the foundations of one of the greatest artistic epochs are being laid. May this splendid alliance never be dissolved, for one can conceive of no brotherhood of nations likelier to lead to greater and more perfect results for art than between Germans and Frenchmen, since the genius of each supplements what is lacking in the other.”8 With the failure of his hope for launching an international career in Paris, Wagner’s attitude toward his “German” colleague Meyerbeer—no less than toward the French themselves—became markedly and rapidly less charitable.
By February 1843, a month after his decidedly German opera Der fliegende Holländer had been produced in Dresden, Wagner was already chiding Robert Schumann for claiming to hear Meyerbeer’s influence in his work. “I do not know what in the whole wide world is meant by the word ‘Meyerbeerian,’ except perhaps a sophisticated striving after superficial popularity.” Shortly before, in the Huguenots essay, the aspiring composer of a new breed of German grand opera had been able to sing the praises of Meyerbeer’s “German” virtues, his “naïveté and modesty of feeling,” his “chastely virginal features of a deep soul” and his “spotless” aesthetic conscience. In these admirable traits he could discern the “deep spring” whence issued the imposing waves of a vast, Meyerbeerian operatic ocean upon which he thought to chart his future. Back in Germany and increasingly convinced of Meyerbeer’s “treachery” toward his own career aspirations, Wagner’s earlier metaphor turned rancid: “I confess that it would have required a wonderful freak of nature for me to have drawn my inspiration from that particular source, the merest smell of which, wafting in from afar, is sufficient to turn my stomach.”9 A more far-reaching irony is to be found in another, later inversion of a passage from the essay. “Meyerbeer wrote world history,” enthuses the young Wagner over the exciting, engaging qualities of grand opera as historical drama; “he destroyed the shackles of national prejudice and the constraining boundaries of linguistic idioms; he wrote deeds of music.” When, decades later, Wagner famously entertained the grandiose notion of classifying his great music dramas as “deeds of music made visible,” he surely had long forgotten this early, discarded tribute to the man subsequently demonized as the veritable Antichrist of modern music.10
The early textual history of this short essay remains obscure. Wagner’s autograph first surfaced in a catalog of the Berlin antiquarian dealer Leo Liepmannssohn in December 1886. The music scholar Max Kalbeck published extracts in the Neue Wiener Tagblatt (1902) and in the journal Die Musik (1911), but a complete text only appeared in one of the supplementary volumes of the expanded edition of Wagner’s writings.11 The editor of that edition, Richard Sternfeld, surmised that the piece was written as early as 1837, noting resemblances to the letter Wagner wrote introducing himself (from Königsberg) to Meyerbeer on 4 February 1837.12 Considering there is no evidence Wagner had any chance to see Les Huguenots before he arrived in Paris in September 1839 (or for that matter, a score of the opera), it seems most likely that the essay was written sometime between 1840 and 1841, while he continued to nourish hopes of a Parisian success. Heinz Becker, in his edition of Meyerbeer’s letters and diaries, has suggested that the essay may have been written as late as the winter of 1841-42, in appreciation of Meyerbeer’s assistance to him in Paris, “but that Meyerbeer refused to allow it to be published on the grounds that its obsequious tone showed neither party in a favorable light.”13
RICHARD WAGNER
On Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots
(1840?)
The phenomenon of Meyerbeer’s music, especially in his latest work, Les Huguenots, has acquired such a distinct, well-rounded consistency that the time is come to locate the position of this oeuvre in the larger history of music. Thus the present attempt to place something still fresh and living in a historical perspective. If we observe the phenomenon of Meyerbeer we will be instinctively reminded—by general tendencies as well as by some specific external features—of Handel and Gluck; even some significant aspects of Mozart’s training and musical direction seem to be replicated in this case. Above all one should never lose sight of the fact that those two earlier figures were Germans, like the composer in question here. For in that wretched, de-nationalized condition of Germany can also be found the basis of the external destinies, relationships, and artistic traits of these artistic phenomena, whose inner significance is so intimately connected.
We must in particular attribute to Germany’s decided non-existence as a nation the fact that geniuses raised on German mothers’ milk exhibit so few distinctive traits of their place of birth. So often we see them develop far away from their homeland; their music seeks our hearts while clothed in words of other, foreign tongues, and it is only recognition abroad that succeeds in drawing the attention of their own countrymen to them. We see how quickly they assimilate the various national characteristics native among their neighbors; and having done so, the Germans are able to find a firm standpoint from which their own inborn creative genius can freely take wing and soar above any limiting national boundaries. In this way it almost seems the ordained lot of German genius to search among its neighbors for that which it cannot find at home, and in the process to free what it has borrowed from its original, narrow limitations, so as to make of it something general and accessible to the whole world. Many have been inspired by such an impulse and have followed similar lines of study, only to remain stuck in place just where they are poised to begin in earnest; that is, they have wormed their way into a foreign nationality that cannot, in and of itself, provide the basis for something genuine on their part, so long as they have sacrificed the truest legacy of their mother country: the chaste modesty of feeling that constitutes their most valuable dowry and one they should never squander, for this alone will allow them to traverse all manner of cultural itineraries and still emerge pure and genuine. This naïve candor of which the German is capable (and it is the general quality that most compensates for the lack of specific nationality) is what places him above the circumscribed limitations that represent the disadvantage of national identity. The quiet seriousness and scholarly bent of his upbringing eventually puts him in a position to handle the technical aspects of his art like a true master. Yet he soon discovers, to his dismay, that he lacks a foundation, some broadly fraternalistic feature whose cultivation might establish a rapport with his own countrymen, that is, with the millions who speak the German language. Say that as a Prussian, for example, he has managed to strike some native provincial note; he knows all too well, alas, that this will only make him all the more alien to the Austrians. Soon enough he realizes that the cultivation of those natural tools necessary to his art is not likely to prosper at home: there he lacks that ideal of singing which he must either borrow from the Italians or else do without. The majority are destroyed by this sorry situation, or at least it prevents them from reaching the heights of which the German genius ought to be capable. It is a lucky one who does succeed in cultivating that which essentially eludes his native land—and such a lucky one is that great hero, Meyerbeer.
The victories that have made the name of Meyerbeer one of the most brilliant in the musical firmament are still new and fresh, but nonetheless they have already conquered most of the civilized world. Even where they found no civilized terrain, they have been able to level the ground in order to erect the temples where these happy victories of the art might be fitly celebrated.
Thanks to his excellent musical training, as well as a general education in the arts and sciences, Meyerbeer found himself early on in a position to master all the technical demands of his art; so, too, was he able to see, earlier and more clearly than most others, what was not available to him at home and what he must therefore seek to master elsewhere if he were to enjoy a perfect command of that art. Thus still in his earliest youth he saw Italy, and heard it; his well-favored mind understood exactly the beauty of those forms which, even if they have taken on a rather too coarsely sensual character among the more recent Italians, are nonetheless nowhere to be so well appreciated even by a truly artistic sensibility as in that happy land.
We may plausibly assume that Meyerbeer, so early warmed by the ardor of these forms, soon found himself subject to a bitter inward conflict. The majority of German artists feel a marvelous sense of artistic patriotism, but one whose external manifestations are generally founded on a serious misapprehension. Indeed, this sentiment reveals a most peculiar contradiction. The same Germans who are so ready to absorb every foreign influence, who are so willing to remain quietly in the background when foreign guests are received, or even to be altogether forgotten—we can hear these same Germans inveighing with great rigor against the tendencies of foreign art, even against the decided advantages of these, and rehearsing their arguments in the strangest phraseologies to the point where they feel themselves quite convinced of them. The point of pride to which these arguments refer is a perfectly honorable one, if misunderstood: namely the fact that so many great heroes of music have been German—and here they cite their Handel, Gluck, or Mozart. Oddly enough, however, they choose not to notice how Handel exhaled in England the cantabile he had inhaled in Italy; how Gluck fought for the cause of French dramatic music in Paris, and how even Mozart must be regarded as the most refined product of the Italian school.
Even Meyerbeer has felt the burden of the Germans’ peculiar traits; his genius, too, was fettered by the struggles they occasion, and we can imagine that he was likewise close to foundering just where he saw the hopes of many others dashed. Meyerbeer was so much a German, however, as to follow in the footsteps of his old German forebears; they had journeyed across the Alps with all their northern vigor and conquered for themselves the beauties of Italy. And was not this course justified? Does not the beautiful belong to him who has the strength to win it?
So Meyerbeer traveled to Italy, and soon he had even the hedonistic sons of the South reveling in his music—this was his first victory. Must it not fill one with pride to succeed not only in making foreign beauty one’s own, but even to compel those from whom it has been wrested to admire how this beauty has been ennobled in the process? Yet the German genius does not even rest satisfied with this; this victory is only one piece of his education. The hazy, indistinct mists of spirituality have formed themselves into a figure of warm, beautiful flesh, but one with pure, modest German blood flowing in its veins; the figure of the man is now complete and flawless; now he is ready to work, to bring about deeds worthy of posterity.
That Meyerbeer should not stop here, stretching himself out comfortably to lie in the shade of his own reputation—this then remained to make him perfect.
Just at this time the French school had reached is finest heights.14 The masters of this era achieved things—independently, but also in full sympathy with their nation—as great as we might find in the history of art in any country. Their works embodied both the virtues and the character of the nation. The endearing chivalry of old France still inspired a work like Boieldieu’s splendid Jean de Paris; the native vivacity, spirit, wit, and grace of the Frenchwoman all flourish in that typically, exclusively French genre of the opéra comique.15 French dramatic music reached its absolute apex in Auber’s incomparable Muette de Portici: any country would be lucky to boast even one national artwork of this caliber.16 This tumultuous power of action, this ocean of feeling, of passions painted in the most vibrant colors, suffused with its own characteristic tone and melodic style, this admixture of delicacy and force, grace and heroism—is this not all a perfect embodiment of modern French history? Could such an astounding artwork have been created by anyone but a French artist? There is no other way to put it but to say that the new French school reached its very highest point here, achieving simultaneously hegemony over all the civilized world. How amazing, then, that Meyerbeer dared to compete on this terrain! Who but he would have had the courage and the power to do so? For what a terrain this is: the most attractive, but the most fearful! Attractive, because it was the most glamorous and brilliant; fearful, because of the danger of burning oneself on the very brilliance of it. Yet Meyerbeer needed just such a terrain for his artistic manhood to develop into a true universality.
Here Meyerbeer found what is needed to accomplish great things: a nation capable of the enthusiasm to achieve the greatest—but, we must also realize, a nation such that aimed to encompass the whole world, a nation whose deeds, under Napoleon, served as the measure of world history. If a simple Corsican might come along to provide the momentum to such deeds, why not a German as well? Armed with German solidity and Italian beauty, Meyerbeer plunged into French enthusiasm. There exist terribly prosaic expressions for all things; should we care to employ one of the plainest among these, one much favored by a certain party, we might say: he learned German, he worked through Italian, and now he started on French.17 Who could deny that Meyerbeer now went about appropriating the forms of French opera? The French manner had reached its full flower; it had reached an attractive maturity and, more than any other style, it was capable of universal deployment. But have we not also witnessed how, in the hands of its creator[s], the style has gradually succumbed to the drawbacks of any manner, which is to say, it has become mannered? These French masters18 became complacent in their conquests; their compositional style became flat by relying on external conventions, manners, exposing over time the disadvantages of any purely national style. Soon it seemed confined to a repertoire of hackneyed phrases and clichés, losing sight of its noble intentions.
So it was left to Meyerbeer to further develop the French manner, indeed, to elevate it to a generally valid classical idiom. He led this modern idiom beyond certain conventional and popular rhythmic and decorative gestures toward a style of grandiose simplicity, but one with the great advantage of having a strong basis in the heart and the ear of the people—not merely the refined invention of some innovation-happy speculator, some vague castle in the air without any real, solid foundations.
Meyerbeer also staked out his new terrain in an exceptionally strategic way, through his choice of subjects: in one case a folktale, disseminated by the voice of the people; in the other case, a moving episode of that people’s history.19 If we accept that some lively national interest is essential for any work in a grand style, Meyerbeer was in the position of drawing such an impulse from the national identity of a people who, at this period, enjoyed the widest international sympathy. But what Meyerbeer constructed on this foundation was not propagandistic praise to flatter national vanity; rather, he succeeded in elevating such feelings to a universal level.20
Meyerbeer wrote world history, a history of hearts and feelings; he destroyed the shackles of national prejudice and the constraining boundaries of linguistic idioms; he wrote deeds of music—music such as Handel, Gluck, and Mozart wrote before him. They were Germans, and Meyerbeer is a German. We may ask how it was possible for this German not to be limited by the emotional perspectives of one or another of the national manners he adopted, not to lose his way between these, after perhaps a brief moment of brilliance, and how he avoided becoming a mere slave to foreign influences?
He preserved his German legacy: naïveté and modesty of feeling. These chastely virginal features of a deep soul are the poetry and the genius of Meyerbeer. This genius has preserved a spotless conscience, a lovable consciousness; even within products of vast scope and highly refined invention the chaste rays of this consciousness still shine forth demurely, recognizable as the deep spring from which arise all these imposing waves of a majestic ocean.
Is not the strong impulse for religious expression in Meyerbeer’s works a striking manifestation of the master’s deep, inward intentions? Is not this feature precisely one that reminds us movingly of his German origins? In Germany one finds less ostentation in the divine service than in other Christian countries, and there is more division among different creeds; perhaps in an outward sense there is as little, or less, religion than elsewhere, for the German is a rationalist and a philosopher. But whether a German holds with the saints, with Luther, with Calvin, or with Kant, there lives in every German heart a wonderfully moving, simple, childlike strain of religiosity, such that the mere sound of the organ can coax tears from his eyes, even if he has not set foot in a church since the age of fourteen.
There is no longer any need to compose grand, learned, liturgically correct masses and oratorios; we have learned from this son of Germany that religion can just as well be preached from the stage—when amid all this splendor and passion such a noble, simple, virginal sense can be preserved, the source from which Meyerbeer draws for all his thrilling creations.
Let us assume it is the task of all universal genius, not so much to provide the first impulse to a whole new artistic period, but rather to develop such impulses into the most perfect possible ideal of the period. As such, the first impulses arise of their own accord over time, guided by the particular tendency of a people and its character, and even by the individual vagaries brought about by the changing historical times. In Handel we have seen an artistic culmination of the clear, powerful tendencies of Protestantism; in Gluck we have seen the antique classical tendency of French tragedy reach its highest, most dignified phase, here in the realm of dramatic music. Mozart raised the Italian school, strictly speaking, to an ideal point. And so each of these musical heroes marked the outermost boundary of an artistic period. Dramatic music could not reach any further heights in the same direction after Gluck and Mozart—on the contrary, we see it flatten into mannerism and then disappear altogether in a lack of talent and application. In Germany, Beethoven remained almost entirely aloof from dramatic music, throwing nearly the whole weight of his immense genius into the field of instrumental music, such that he quickly brought this important branch of music to dizzying, indisputable heights, while from the stage Weber’s lyrical Romanticism won the hearts of all Germans and the ears of all the world; and during this there developed in other quarters a whole new epoch of dramatic music that would become, in fact, one of the most brilliant ones. —
We would have to identify the beginning of this period with Rossini; with genial frivolity (which alone could enable this) he tore down whatever remained of the old school, whose forms had indeed shriveled to a mere skin and bones. His joyful song fluttered forth into the world, and his best features—forms of lightness, freshness, and sensuous appeal—were systematically adopted everywhere, above all by the French.
The French lent character to the Rossinian style, which also gained a more dignified appearance thanks to the steadiness of their national bearing.
Any further progress on this terrain, where the national tendency of an art has already reached such a complete, insuperable phase of development, can only be effected by means of a universalizing turn (as we suggested above); this is also the direction by which any artistic period will achieve its highest potential.
All the external features of Meyerbeer’s music confirm this to be so. A style that first struggled to absorb the influence of diverse schools has raised itself to a noble, ideal level of independence, free from any of the weaknesses of the individual manners it drew upon, while at the same time uniting all their best aspects. A gigantic, almost oppressive extension of forms has achieved a pure, pleasing sense of proportion. This is the area in which Meyerbeer’s mastery is perhaps most strikingly manifest: this clarity, even cold-blooded calculation in matters of structural disposition characterizes him above all other things, raising him from the outset to an objective standpoint—indeed the only correct point from which his works, in all their massive abundance, can be clearly and perceptibly organized. To best support this claim I would cite here above all the greatest thing that has been achieved along these lines: the famous conspiracy scene in Act 4 of Les Huguenots.21 Who can fail to be amazed at the disposition and development of this tremendous piece, at how the composer has been able to maintain a continuous intensification throughout the astonishing length of this number, never once letting up, but reaching, only after a tumult of raging passions, the highest fever pitch—the very ideal of religious fanaticism.
And then, having plumbed the depths of such repellent fanaticism, he fulfills the highest task of art: he idealizes this tumult of passions and—if such an expression might be permitted in this context—he dignifies it with the stamp of beauty! For who can hear the last, intensified repetition of the main theme at the close of this scene without feeling his soul fill not simply with horror, but exaltation?
Here we see the simplicity of means that Meyerbeer applies to achieve his ends. How clear and simple, how noble and sustained is this main theme that begins and ends the number; how carefully and thoughtfully the master commences the flow, which does not lose itself in confused rapids but issues, instead, in a grand, imposing sea! —It is difficult to see how anyone could achieve anything greater in this line; we sense that truly a culmination has been reached; just as the greatest genius would come to naught if he sought to perpetuate Beethoven’s development, given that his last symphony cannot possibly be outdone, so, too, it seems impossible to progress beyond what Meyerbeer has taken here to the utmost point.
Thus we must stand by our view that the most recent great epoch in dramatic music has been brought to a close by Meyerbeer, that with him, as with Handel, Gluck, Mozart, and Beethoven before him, a perfected ideal has been achieved that marks the end of an artistic period. Now we must expect that the restless creative spirit of time will usher in a new artistic era, one in which there will be as much to accomplish as those earlier heroes have accomplished in their own epochs. And yet he is still alive among us, and at the height of his powers,—so let us not get ahead of ourselves, but rather wait and see what new things his genius will yet produce!
1. Richard Wagner, “Das Judentum in der Musik,” Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1887-1911) (henceforth GSD), 5:82; see also “Judaism in Music,” in Richard Wagner: Stories and Essays, trans. and ed. Charles Osborne (New York, 1972), 37.
2. Wagner, Opera und Drama, GSD, 3:301; see also Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis (London, 1893-99; repr. Lincoln, Neb. and London, 1993-95), 2:95.
3. Opera and Drama in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 2:100; see also GSD, 3:306.
4. Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1911-16) (henceforth SSD), 12:30.
5. See the last paragraph of this essay: “Thus we must stand by our view that the most recent great epoch in dramatic music has been brought to a close by Meyerbeer…. Now we must expect… a new artistic era….”
6. See, for example, Helmuth Weinland, “Wagner und Meyerbeer,” in Richard Wagner zwischen Beethoven und Schönberg, Musik-Konzepte 59 (Munich, 1988), 31-72, which also discusses possible influences of Les Huguenots on the later acts of Rienzi (those composed after Wagner arrived in Paris). Stewart Spencer notes that “Meyerbeer’s diaries for the months between October 1839 and December 1840 contain no fewer than thirty-four references to Wagner, whom he introduced to members of the French musical establishment and whose cause he championed in innumerable letters to colleagues.” Spencer, Wagner Remembered (London and New York, 2000), 31.
7. See Thomas Grey, “Wagner and the Legacy of French Grand Opera,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 2003), 321-43, particularly 322-38.
8. “German Music,” in Wagner Writes From Paris …, ed. and trans. Robert Jacobs and Geoffrey Skelton (London, 1973), 50. The published German version can be found in GSD, 1:166. The sentence beginning “Handel and Gluck” is omitted, as is the rest ofthat paragraph. The subsequent homage to a French-German musical alliance, however, was retained.
9. Richard Wagner to Robert Schumann, 25 February 1843. In Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York, 1988), 105.
10. The phrase comes from the 1872 essay “Über die Benennung ‘Musikdrama’” (On the name “Music drama”), GSD, 9:302-8 (here, 306). See also the essay by Lydia Goehr in this volume.
11. SSD, 12:22-30.
12. The letter was a follow-up, in part, to an earlier missive to Meyerbeer’s collaborator, the librettist and playwright Eugène Scribe, in which Wagner proposed that Scribe versify in French a scenario Wagner had drafted on the subject of Heinrich Koenig’s historical novel Die hohe Braut (The high-born bride).
13. Spencer, Wagner Remembered, 30, quoting Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Heinz and Gudrun Becker, with Sabine Henze-Döhring (Berlin, 1960-99), 3:396.
14. Wagner is speaking of the period around 1825, when Meyerbeer arrived in Paris from his period of Italian operatic apprenticeship to oversee a production of his Il crociato in Egitto at the Théâtre-Italien, and 1831, when his first French opera, Robert le diable, premiered. During this period the productions of the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Théâtre-Italien were setting standards for genre, style, and performance throughout Europe.
15. Jean de Paris, an opéra comique in two acts by Adrien Boieldieu (1775-1834), premiered in Paris, April 4, 1812. Along with La dame blanche (1825) it was a popular piece in the repertoire of smaller German theaters up through the time of Wagner’s youth.
16. La muette de Portici was the first five-act grand opera by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871), first performed at the Paris Opéra on February 29, 1828. Famous for its semi-legendary role in propagating the Belgian Revolution of 1830, it was also a formative work in the operatic education of the young Wagner. He recalled the tremendous impact the work had made on him as a youth when writing an obituary essay on the composer (who died at age eighty-nine amid the chaos of the last days of the Paris Commune, on May 12, 1871): “Erinnerungen an Auber,” GSD, 9:42-60 (on La muette in particular, 45-48); and see Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, 5:37-55, esp. 38-43.
17. In the original: “er hatte Deutsch gelernt, hat das Italienische durchgemacht, und fing nun Französisch an.” The allusions to “a certain party” and to a favorite expression of the same are both obscure.
18. Wagner speaks first of “the creator” of French opera, then of its “masters” (in the plural). Presumably he means both Boieldieu and Auber; Rossini would have a claim to the title as well, with Guillaume Tell (1829), but since he wrote no more operas, French or otherwise after that, he cannot be included in this critique. In some of his other writings from the early Paris time (and later) Wagner issued a similar critique of Fromental Halévy regarding his works after La juive (1835). The 1871 essay on Auber (see note 16) laments the rapid decline of his inspiration after the early years, around 1830—and Wagner was hardly alone in that opinion.
19. The reference is to Robert le diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), the only two grand operas Meyerbeer had composed at the time Wagner was writing. Wagner’s phrase describing the Robert material—“eine Volkssage, die in dem Munde des Volkes lebte”—makes for an ironic pre-echo of the later musical-dramatic ideology Opera and Drama, in which of course Meyerbeer has become a veritable Antichrist. The libretto by Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne, as Steven Huebner points out, actually “had very little to do with a widely disseminated medieval mystery play in which Robert leads a life of debauchery and crime but then, Tannhäuser-like, journeys to Rome to seek papal absolution and subsequently heads an important assault of the forces of Christendom against the Infidel.” Huebner, “Robert le diable,” New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London and New York, 1992), 3:1357.
20. It is unclear if Wagner means to say that Meyerbeer specifically elevated “national vanity” or its praise to a higher level; grammatically, it is the praise his text talks about.
21. That is, the “Conjuration et bénédiction des poignards” (Conspiracy and benediction of the daggers), the central number among the three that make up Act 4.