Cecil Gray "A Note About Meyerbeer"

A Note About Meyerbeer

in "Contingencies and Other Essays" (Oxford University Press (1947)

By Cecil Gray*

*Gray was a Scottish composer and renowned critic.

See also, Cecil Gray, Excerpts from "The History of Music" concerning Meyerbeer

PROBABLY NO more dramatic reversal of contemporary opinion is to be found in musical history than is afforded by the case of Meyerbeer. In his lifetime he was not merely the most popular of composers with the general public, but also the greatest living master of music in the eyes of the majority of the cagnoscenti. By many, indeed, he was acclaimed as the legitimate successor to Beethoven no less; and among his most fervent admirers were not merely such literary men as Heine, who compared him to Goethe, and Balzac, who in his story Gambara, has painted a portrait of him which is intended to represent the ideal composer but also musicians themselves, such as Weber, Berlioz, and even Wagner himself who in 1842 wrote a glowing eulogy of Meyerbeer in which he compares the latter's achievement to that of Handel, Gluck, Mozart and Beethoven. (It is true that he thought and wrote differently in later years, but it would be difficult to say which of the attitudes was the more convinced or sincere that of the enthusiastic disciple or the unsuccessful rival.)

To-day, on the contrary, of all eminent names in the history of music, that of Meyerbeer is probably the one which arouses most contempt and derision, and the least sympathy, whether from the left, right, or centre parties of musical opinion. Whereas other composers may have equally strenuous detractors, they at least have also their passionate adherents; Meyerbeer alone would seem to have none. No one to-day has a good word to say for him. The familiar swing of the critical pendulum from admiration to aversion, or vice versa, has been so violent in the case of Meyerbeer that it has got jammed, and has never swung back again. That he was assuredly not the great master he appeared to be in the eyes of his dazzled contemporaries may be admitted, but is it so certain that he was the contemptible charlatan and time-server that he is represented to be to-day? Is it likely that many, perhaps most, of the finest minds of that time were completely wrong, whereas every musical newspaper hack of the present day, who has probably never seen or heard one of his operas performed as it should be performed, is necessarily right? One would need to be a singularly naive believer in the doctrine of evolution, and of the superiority of each successive generation over its predecessor, to believe that.

Certainly no one could be blamed for failing to discover what it was our ancestors found to admire in the music of Meyerbeer, from the melancholy travesty of a performance of Les Huguenots which was given at Covent Garden about a dozen years ago. To anyone who knew the score it was unrecognizable. Equally certainly no one can hope to discover it from strumming through a vocal score at the piano. Like all thinkers in terms of the orchestra, Meyerbeer sounds peculiarly inept on the piano, and even more than most. In default of a first-rate performance which, it seems, one can no longer expect, there is nothing for it but to study the full score for oneself, and there are few critics to-day who are willing to give time and take the trouble to do so. I can only say that, when lining over the pages of the full scores of Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots recently, I was as much struck as I was when I first became acquainted with them, some twenty years ago, with the extraordinary originality and imaginative power of the orchestral writing. Admittedly, in order to appreciate it to the full one has to exercise one's historical sense. One has momentarily to forget all that has come since his day and to place oneself in the position of the student or listener of his time. But when one realizes that the composition of Robert le Diable dates from the year of Beethoven's death (1827) it is, I maintain, impossible to deny that Meyerbeer was a great innovator -- one of the greatest innovators in the history of music.

The trouble with Meyerbeer is, of course, that as with so many innovators, all that was most fruitful in his discoveries was taken over and developed by his successors for their own purposes. To-day Meyerbeer is only credited with what is left over after generations of composers have sacked and looted his scores and carried off everything of value. Many of those who have done so have been honest enough to admit their debt, such as Berlioz in his treatise on instrumentation and several critical essays, and also Richard Strauss -- with whom, incidentally, Meyerbeer has much in common -- in his annotations to Berlioz's treatise. Others, such as Wagner, have not been so honest, and have sought to conceal their debt, but there can be little question that the German critic, Riemann, was right when he said that ' history will point to Meyerbeer's music as one of the most important transition steps to Wagner's art '.

It would take too long if one were to attempt to draw up a summary or inventory of the orchestral devices first exploited by Meyerbeer and adopted by his successors. It will suffice to mention a few outstanding examples: he was the first to employ and recognize the peculiar expressive aptitudes of the bass clarinet and the cor anglais, and of certain registers of the bassoon; the first, as Strauss has pointed out, to realize the possibilities of the violas, especially in the lowest register, for expression and fantastic colour, the first to write for the double basses alone (without the cellos), as in that striking and imaginative passage cited by Berlioz from the duet in the fourth act of Les Huguenots, in which he writes for a rich and subtle combination of cor anglals, clarinets and horn over a tremolo for the basses; the first to attempt systematically to obviate the deficiencies of the natural horns by writing for them in two or more keys; the first to practise the various doublings and divisis which are now the bread-and-butter of every orchestral composer. On a higher creative level is his dramatic employment of the chorus; he is the first composer to make the crowd articulate in opera. Both in this respect and in his invention of the historico-dramatic tableau he is the father of the Russian operatic composers; for all Moussorgsky's natural genius, Boris Godounov could never have been written without the example of Les Huguenot before him.

From this historical point of view, then, it is easy to understand the high opinion of Meyerbeer held by his contemporaries. In their eyes, rightly, he was seen to have enriched the expressive possibilities of music to a greater extent than any of his contemporaries with the exception, of course, of Berlioz, who, however, came rather later on the scene and, in any case, himself owed much to Meyerbeer. It was only natural that his immense gifts as an innovator should have blinded them to his equally incontestable faults which are now all we see in him since his innovations and discoveries have become common property.

There is, however, one other aspect of his work which, I venture to suggest, is of interest and importance to us to-day. In opera before his time the balance was all in favour of the voices; in that of Wagner and his successors, in favour of the orchestra. In the operas of Meyerbeer, with all their grave defects and countless trivial pages, one finds a perfect balance between the two elements which it should be the aim of future operatic composers to recapture.

Similarly, you may wish to research the following articles about Meyerbeer on this site:

Cecil Gray, Excerpts from "The History of Music" concerning Meyerbeer

Bernard Van Dieren, from "Down Among the Dead Men" and other essays

Moritz Moszkowski

George Sand from Lettres d'un voyageur

Reynaldo Hahn

Max Brod -- Embracing Meyerbeer: A Challenge to the Jews -- Some thoughts of Max Brod, Robert Ignatius Letellier and Chaim Nachman Bialik

Heinrich Heine

Giuseppe Mazzini -- thoughts and writings compiled by Marco Pellegrini in English and Italiano

Walt Whitman Poem from Leaves of Grass