MEYERBEER

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Satan: That name I do not want to hear!

Witch: But why? What mischief hath it done?

GOETHE:Faust.

Every musician knows that there are names which goad readers to fury, names hardly to be mentioned in polite musical society. These are, apart of course from Liszt, mostly those of successful composers of grand opera, French or Italian. One may speak about Rossini, because genteel amateurs remember that after all he wrote the 'Barbiere'. Names like Thomas or Halevy can pass, because few people could say extempore what works they had written. But quite recently Donizetti was to be spoken of only in mild derision. The belated discovery of 'Don Pasquale' has restored some prudent forbearance to the critics of Italian opera. If Bellini is now tolerated as a subject for serious discussion, it is because his methods exemplify certain principles, and his works themselves are so rarely performed that, in this country at least, most musicians regard him as an antique from whom nothing is to be feared. If there is one composer who has not profited by these mitigating adjustments of critical opinion) it is Meyerbeer, whose name alone can still irritate contemporary opera-lovers beyond the point of gentlemanly patience. There is apparently something about him too bad for mention. In the period that has seen the triumph of Wagner and his principles, he is vividly remembered as the perpetrator of the worst vices against which pure dramatic aesthetics had to fight a battle that has left the temporary victors too exhausted to forgive.

No wonder that Meyerbeer seldom gets a hearing now, and is not treated dispassionately, in spite of the fact that he is I described as so hopelessly outmoded, over and done with, as to deserve no further attention. Had he not been so phenomenally successful in his lifetime there would have been no need to single him out as a favourite target of operatic reformers. As matters stand, generations that do not know the works and cannot remember the antagonisms, evidently still sense the aversion he once roused.

Meyerbeer was an idol and he has paid heavily for the painful privilege. Frobenius describes a dynasty of Negro kings killed after a reign of ten years by the high-priest electors. During their reign they were considered divine, but their power could not surmount the principle from which it derived. There is no recorded instance of one having survived his term of office. If some of the European musical idols, as relentlessly lulled by the high priests of aesthetics who first exalted them, meet in the valley of eminent shades, there must be prodigious winks exchanged. One can imagine kindly old Franz von Suppe passing Meyerbeer and sarcastically stroking his huge beard. And one can imagine how Meyerbeer would gulp. However carefully he guarded his copyrights, it must appear a barren effort in view of the relative sales of 'Robert le Diable' and the 'Poet and Peasant' overture.

All this seems very cruel to Meyerbeer, and yet it would be difficult to say whether it is any one's fault. The composer cannot very well be expected to defend himself against popularity, I and an adoring public is not really guilty for losing its earlier enthusiasm. People are childishly sure that a discarded idol lean have no right to a good word. They are relieved to see it found out and finally done with. With delight they snigger at the admiring pages of Goethe on Byron, wondering which bubble burst with the biggest bang and the smallest remains.

Perhaps this fulfils a purpose. We are reminded of the uncut copy of a first edition contemptuously preserved among the rubbish, for the delectation of a later, wisely sobered, and reconverted generation.

What makes the case of Meyerbeer hard is that he has been reproached for a boundless adoration which he did not court. He was eager to please, but he had as much artistic conscience as any opera composer. His earlier successes were so fantastic that later he necessarily had to try and live up to the legend of his name. He did it with such determination that his work suffered in spontaneity for what it gained in craftsmanship. If he did his best to serve his public, it was with an irreproachable object.

His hesitations and uncertainties, his fears and self-questioning, were all caused by a desire not to disappoint. He hoped to justify the esteem and affection he had conquered. This is different from the commercial exploitation of popularity. There was no abject soliciting, such as one might expect of an ambitious young man in search of success. Meyerbeer was not crudely flattering a potential public; he toiled to show himself worthy of the admiration of a world-wide audience whose loyalty he had already secured.

It is curious that his most distinguished qualities should have been singled out for merciless criticism by his later detractors. His very modesty and conscientiousness have been denounced for meanness and commercialism. Yet how many artists would have remained equally unspoilt in the unparalleled position Meyerbeer held?  Heine wrote, and with good reason, that the mother of Meyerbeer was the second woman in history to see her son accepted as divine. The description was scarcely exaggerated. Few people to-day know how complete the public's surrender had been. Everything was expected of Meyerbeer's genius. He was the unique personality who summed up everything that dramatic and symphonic music, through the individual efforts of its greatest exponents, had ever attained.

He may not have deserved such idolatry more than any man ever did. Nor did he deserve the almost universal contempt with which a fickle world avenged itself on him for its erstwhile infatuation. When his power and his influence (once so welcome to many a struggling composer) had gone, when his very nimbus had faded -- how bravely the old lickspittles came hurrying to kick the dying lion! They never stopped to reflect that they attacked the taste of a public they had led. They found it profitable now to proclaim that Baal had fallen, and that they were the men who had hacked through the feet of clay. [1] At the same time they were ready to start a dance round a new brazen image, as convinced as ever that this time it was the right one. Yet, these Meyerbeer-haters had contrived to stay unheroically in the shade so long as his operas drew full houses.

When once audiences began deserting him, there appeared from dark corners an army of critics who had till then hidden their rancour with conspicuous success. Thus, during a revolution, appear from nowhere crowds of malcontents that have never evinced their vehement convictions before. We have seen something like it happen, although in miniature, not long ago. Between 1915 and 1918 the London musical public, under professional guidance, developed an affectionate interest in the activities and products of the lesser natives. But they were rapidly forgotten in the relief afforded by the return of international figures. The guiding advocates not only abdicated their leadership, but became as sarcastic as before they had been generous. Not so long ago Stravinsky was received in London very much as The B.P. is at a Scout Gamp. Then he started trying to write like Czerny and betrayed a fantastic incompetence in his affectation of simplicity. He lost so much prestige that writers who hysterically lauded everything that came from him or his clownish imitators, unexpectedly revealed themselves as champions of the cause of musical purity. They became slashing now; their ruthless dissection cut right down to the diseased heart of the subject. But they had been hiding their fervour well and long. They had been reticent and self-denying when their services were badly required; when the abstract-ballet-cum-rational-heartlessness racketeers were having things all their own way. Most of them paid a heavy penalty, for, the fever once overcome, Fleet Street had no further use for their catchpenny-as-line-can sycophancy. There is enough moral in this to last Aesop for an Olympiad. Artists and their advertisers when they specialize in popularity share the danger that immediate success may have to be paid for with the sacrifice of enduring fame. These ci-devant idols together experience the agony of watching their privileges dying within and out of them by inches. It is understandable that the painfully acquired knowledge of this ghastly process makes them antagonistic to any one suspected of original genius.

When we think of the torments artist and critic must undergo when their popularity wanes, we come automatically to the conclusion that the man of genius should bear the brunt. If he succumbs, there will be time enough to make up for it by the erection of monuments to his blessed memory. We console ourselves with the conviction that a great man can desire nothing better than posthumous homage, for in his quality of genius he ought to scorn 'the facile plaudits of the crowd'! 'As long as we do not commit the old mistake of calling a lame horse a certain winner', say the wise ones, acclaiming the newly discovered man. And the study of his work leaves them no time for others. The little artists who are neither particularly good nor bad, but just good enough, always profit. They are like the beauty chorus walking in a circle through the spotlights, when every girl gets her turn to display her attractions.

Occasionally the judges have a shock when they find that a man who deserved laurels has been first tortured and then judicially dispatched. They ease their consciences by indiscriminate generosity lavished on the next who comes up for judgement; if they think he deserves hanging they give him a spiritual pension instead, and sleep in the certainty of justice restored. Should it happen that history concludes they have let a guilty wretch go free, that, without praising him, they failed to see impartial justice done, they refurbish their magisterial severity and for a while distrust everybody's innocence.

When Meyerbeer's fame was at its height, there were found on all sides additional reasons to show why and how well it was deserved. Germany hailed him as one of her sons. Her academic critics proudly pointed out how he had stiffened the muscular structure of Grand Opera with the skeleton of Teutonic formalism. At the same time modernist German authors praised him for softening the contours of Latin precision with the fluorescent haze of Zauber-Romantik. Italian admirers were happy to see how the triumphant exponent of Opera Seria at its apotheotic summitat its most Parisian had adapted it to Italian traditional methods by his effective use of the unison chorus and Rossinian dramatic fioritura. France perceived a final justification of the triumphant art-form and militant institution that had grown on her soil, when Meyerbeer came to the capital to pour into the mould that was its special creation the compound stream of his aggregate inspirations, at a time when none of these had yet resulted in a fully acceptable national form.

As, however, the time arrived when from sheer surfeit people had lost appetite, and Meyerbeer's works lost their hold on the public, a complete change occurred with astonishing rapidity. German critics now perceived that he had prostituted their country's chaste traditions; in Italy it was at last recognized that in order to give a spurious unity to a shameless jumble of styles he had abused the race's precious heritage, and by this time the French themselves recognized with disgust that a perfected shape on which they prided themselves had been exploited for personal ambition. Once it was too late, all were shocked to find how a charlatan had been burning borrowed plumes on the altar of success under their very noses, without by the warning stench waking them from their aesthetic torpor.

When there was no longer any risk, it was inquired on every side whether this purveyor of hybrid monstrosities should be allowed to parasitize further on the presumably undefiled body of operatic art. It was strenuously denied that only quietism and hedonism had made this scandal possible. Critics were anxious for their readers to understand they had not attempted any earlier revolt because it would have been premature. The time, they said, had not been ripe for scouring the sham blackamoor. How could one have called the bluff when vested interests were so alert that at the merest show of the critical sponge-bag they would have mobilized to keep the right tint?

But when the dangers of critical warfare had dwindled with the numbers of defenders, no words were bad enough for 'this banker-composer'. People who had made use of his exceptional position were the first to forget how they once expected moral and material support from him. 

It is true that Wagner did not risk much when he aimed the arrows of his wit at the almost dethroned monarch. [2] He was comfortably drawn onwards with the anti-Semite current which he proposed to direct. We have seen too much of the complexity of motives that cause pogroms not to forgive Wagner for being 'Nordic' and 'Aryan', and 'Teutsch'.[3]

Footnotes to Part I

[1]  One of the representative lexicographers, Reinecke (means 'the little fox'!), has told us that 'it was discovered that the colossus had feet of clay, but it still needed terrific efforts to overthrow him'. 

It was 'der unbestreitbare Wert der einzelnen Gesangnummern' that made this such a hard job. He expatiates with blissful insouciance on the 'grim necessity' of getting him down 'at any cost', so that 'composers might breathe again' and have a chance for their own works. This was the authentic German tone. It is true that 'Grove' has an eminently reasonable article on Meyerbeer; but is 'Grove' ever positively unkind to any one? 

[2]  It is painfully noticeable that in Das Judenthum in der Musik the name of Meyerbeer is never mentioned, an endless string of allusions making up for the omission.  'Mendelssohn-Bartholdy', and 'Heine', and 'Borne', but: 'a certain famous opera composer' or 'a fashionable writer of Grand Operas,' &c.! Did Wagner fear that the lion was not quite dead yet, and discretion indicated for even so valorous an onslaught? 

[3]  The Teuton of Teutons loves this legendary spelling. Nietzsche has explained how it derives from 'täuschen', i.e. to deceive. It reminds the German of his reputation of being very 'deep'.

End of Part I

Go to Part II 

Go to Part III

Go to Part IV

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