A First Look at the Soon-

A First Look at the Soon-to-be Published
Meyerbeer Diaries in English

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New!! December 10, 1999 -- Volume I (to 1839) has been published! Meyerbeer Fan Club members may order Volume I of The Meyerbeer Diaries at a special discount price! (In fact, the discount covers almost the entire cost of lifetime membership). Please inquire by registering on our Membership and Feedback page or writing to meyerb@meyerbeer.com

The shameful neglect in our times of the music of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in English speaking countries can hardly be expected to be reversed without English language source material. The door opened ever so slightly with the publication, within the last decade, of Meyerbeer: A Life in Letters by Amadeus Press, translated by Mark Violette. [Bibliography] For the first time, a small portion of the lifelong work of Heinz and Gudrun Becker to expose the Meyerbeer letters and diaries became available in the English language. Indeed, our own Meyerbeer Fan Club was inspired from the publication of the letters.

Though the composer died 134 years ago, the diaries have never been completely published, even in German. Thankfully, all that is about to change. The well known Meyerbeer scholar Dr. Robert Ignatius Letellier has now completed a five year effort; beginning in 1999, the Meyerbeer diaries will be published in English. What follows is his description of the diaries and his work.

Stephen A. Agus

The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer

Dr. Robert Ignatius Letellier

Written between 1811 and 1864, the diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer were initially spasmodic records of special times in the composer's life; but from 1846 until his final illness, were made as a continuous daily chronicle. They survive in the Meyerbeer Nachlass held by the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin in a folio manuscript of some 640 handwritten pages, in a copy made by the Prussian scholar Wilhelm Altmann, before the original was lost in World War II. To date, Meyerbeer's Briefwechsel und Tagebücher have been published in the original languages in four volumes, in the yet to be completed edition of Heinz Becker (De Gruyter, Berlin 1959-85), bringing the composer's life to 1849. Meyerbeer himself never intended his diaries to be published. His heirs jealously guarded his privacy until after World War II when his grandson, Raoul Richter gave Prof. Becker access to the archives.

Meyerbeer's diaries are one of the few examples of such a personal record kept by a major composer. Taken as a whole, they unfold a very detailed firsthand account of artistic life in the major centers of European culture over a period of fifty years. In particular, they capture the vibrant life of Paris during the heyday of the Opéra when it was the musical capital of the world. The diaries may lack the picaresque provocativeness of Berlioz' Memoirs, the ideological self-consciousness of Wagner's Mein Leben, or the speculative commentary of Delacroix's Journal, but they nonetheless provide a very important missing link in the musicological record of the 19th century, and throw much light on the life and times of the composer, who in his time enjoyed a popularity such as Puccini's today.

Consisting of short, straightforward entries about an artist's life, the diaries may seem dry and sometimes provokingly minimal in their observations, but the detail and the consistency of the coverage of the artistic events they record surely make them one of the most sustained annals of their time. Not only are there details of his almost daily attendance of performances of operas and ballets all over Europe -- especially in Paris and Berlin -- but also of his voracious love of the theater (French, German, Italian and English plays), orchestral and chamber concerts and religious music. It is an extraordinary record of the repertoire across the board for half a century. Added to this are his dealings with singers and performing artists of every kind, impresarios, librettists (most especially with his chief collaborator Scribe) and literary figures and musicians of every sort. They also offer a close account of his compositional and production methods, since the genesis of all his major operas is recorded from inception to final production, as well as details of subsequent performances all over the world.

The ubiquity of his operas and his concern with their major productions meant that he traveled constantly, so that the diaries also give a lively account of many historical and social issues in the depiction of his journeys and modes of transport, and brief but vivid vignettes of the political scene as he saw it. His position as Generalmusikdirektor in Berlin provides a fascinating document of his dealings with the Prussian Royal Family and the whole of the German musical establishment (e.g.. with Schumann and Wagner) with unique details about working conditions of artists, royalties, copyrights, etc.

Lastly, the diaries provide a moving picture of a man whose life was totally devote to art: his education, his experiences, triumphs, fears and weaknesses in dealing with his family, his troublesome health, his Jewish faith, the press and his contemporaries.

Since hardly any source material on Meyerbeer is available to the English speaking world, a translation of his diaries will be of invaluable use to the history of opera and the music loving public in helping to ascertain the truth about this neglected and misunderstood composer, and in revising received opinions about him.

They have been translated with scrupulous attention to the original German text, with the provision of a commentary, and a glossing of the many unfamiliar names which constantly occur.

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