L'Africaine1

History, Myth and Music in a Theme of Exploration: Some Reflections on the Musico-Dramatic Language of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine

By Robert Ignatius Letellier

Other articles by Robert Ignatius Letellier at this site

Note: The following article was first presented in 1991, and was published in "Meyerbeer und das europäische Musiktheater", ed. Sieghart Döhring and Arnold Jacobshagen, Laaber 1998, pp. 148-168. Details at http://www.uni-bayreuth.de/departments/FIMT/ . Published at Meyerbeer Fan Club website with the express permission of the author.

Part I (posted February 27, 1999)

Go to Part II

On 5 September 1991 we celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Giacomo Meyerbeer. But this was not the only reason for festive remembrance in that year of anniversaries; on 25 December 1991 it was also two hundred years since the birth of Eugène Augustin Scribe, the famous librettist of Meyerbeer's operas, the author whose gripping stories delighted over a century of operagoers. and proved the enduring inspiration of Meyerbeer, Auber and so many others, perhaps the most influential playwright in the history of opera. It is peculiarly appropriate that Meyerbeer and Scribe should have been born within four months of each other: their joint achievements for the lyric stage changed the history of opera, and the extent of their achievement, hardly questioned in the last century, stands at the threshold of rediscovery and serious re-evaluation at the end of our own. Scribe died on 21 February 1861, a mere three years before the composer's own death on 2 May 1864. This was before the completion of their last collaboration, Vasco da Gama, the opera which had intermittently preoccupied them both since 1838, an opera that had become legendary as L'Africaine years before its completion, the Vecchia Africana of the long years of Meyerbeer's anxious labours on this most troublesome of his operas. The enduring power of this legend dictated the posthumous, and perhaps inaccurate, choice of the famous title of this swansong of two great creators of opera, sanctioned by Mina Meyerbeer in deference to the expectations of an adoring public who were to give Meyerbeer a tumultuous accolade on the première of L'Africaine a year after his death, 4 May 1865.

This opera which occupied Meyerbeer and Scribe's creative energies for so long includes in one last and splendid achievement many of the elements that had hitherto featured in varying degrees in all their other joint creations. Both composer and librettist were men of immense imagination and genius. Between them they created four works of great power and beauty that radically affected the history of opera, not in any violent or revolutionary sense, but by an evolutionary consolidation and highly original remoulding of all existing operatic resources. Operas like Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophete and L'Africaine could hardly have achieved their worldwide fame by negligible artistic means or shallow integrity: such renown is not won with shoddy goods, a fact admirably illustrated in the interplay of music and drama in the final product of their artistic collaboration.

1) Some Comments on the Music: Integrity of the Score

Ronald Crichton's refreshing article "Sketches for a Portrait of Meyerbeer" (Opera, December 1990) provides several observations that serve as thought-provoking points of departure in any fresh assessment of the composer and his work. In reviewing the new Virgin video of L'Africaine, he sees the opera as making its way back into the repertoire, and potentially as the most popular of Meyerbeer's four grands opéras.

Indeed, L'Africaine has been revived more frequently than any of the other works, and a survey of the more notable performances over the last 70 years leads one to ask whether this work has ever really disappeared from the repertory:

New York 1923 - Ponselle, Mario, Gigli, Didur

New York 1929 - Rethberg, Guilford, Gigii, Pinza

Verona 1932 - Raisa, Righetti, Gigli, Borgioli

New York 1933 - Ponselle, Morgana, Martinelli, Borgioli

Vienna 1937 - Konetzni, Gerhart, Piccaver, Jerger

Rome 1937 - Caniglia, Albanese, Gigli, Basiola

Brussels 1936 - Boons, Ysaye, Caujolle, Mancel

Berlin 1951 - Wasserthal, Beilke, Beirer, Metternich

Ghent 1962 - Granor, Balhaut, De Guise, Dubac

Munich 1962 - Bjoner, Fahberg, J.Thomas, lmdhal

Naples 1963 - Stella, Rinaldi, Nikolov, Protti

BBC 1964 (radio) - Veasey, Harper, R.Thomas, Herynkxs

New York 1966 (concert) - Stella, Elgar, Tucker, Manuguerra

Florence 1971 - Norman, Sighele, Luccheti, Guelfi

San Francisco 1972 - Verrett, Mandac, Domingo, Mittelmann

Barcelona 1977 - Caballé, Weidinger, Domingo, Sarabia

Munich 1977 (concert) - Arroyo, Brunner, Lamberti, Milnes

London 1978 - Bumbry, Rinaldi, Domingo, Carroli

London 1981 - Bumbry, Rinaldi, Bonisolli, Carroli

San Francisco 1988 - Verrett, Swenson, Domingo, Diaz

This list of performances hardly suggests a forgotten work. So many of the great singers of the twentieth century have sung in this work, while its special association with Gigli and Domingo who have appreciated the lyrical beauty of Vasco de Gama's music, is particularly interesting. The roll call of famous sopranos who have sung Selika is equally impressive. Yet until this day there is no commercial recording of this famous opera available to the public, an inexplicable omission that is surely extra-musical given the nobility and grandeur of this score.

L'Africaine is infused with moments of intense lyricism as again and again the usual inexorable dramatic propulsion so familiar in Meyerbeer's operas is arrested and the characters lose themselves in the emotions elicited from the action. Even the recitatives, so vital in his operas, reveal this strong lyrical emphasis, as declamation more than ever before broadens out into arioso with enrichment of the vocal line by string and woodwind doubling -- a feature not found in his other scores. The recitative, as usual in Meyerbeer's work, is carefully composed, each bar being important and carrying as much emotional weight as the set pieces. Further, the orchestration is typical of Meyerbeer's legendary accomplishment in this field. The pellucid orchestral colours of the overture, the tonal variety of the Marche indienne, the ethereal accompaniment of Selika's death scene and the vaporous final chorus provide instances of orchestral colours that delight and astonish (the "filmy, luxuriant" textures referred to by Ronald Crichton). Moreover, the score is profuse in beautiful melody, with tunes lavished on even a few bars of recitative and never used again, the composer's favoured technique of the ligne-brisé forming genuine instances of unendliche Melodie, of sustained tableaux in which the dignified melodies are fused in patterns of sound that blur the outlines between recitative and set numbers (as in the Council Scene in Act 1 and the whole of Act 4). The elaborate genesis of L'Africaine, the fact that Meyerbeer died before the performing edition could be prepared, its immense popularity in the last century, its half-life even in the years following on the First World War, and its growing current reemergence, all single out this work as providing important points of reference in the new discussion of Meyerbeer.

Perhaps the first and most important observation is the need for scholarship in the study of the composer and his operas. The appearance of the English translation of an anthology of his letters selected by Prof. Heinz Becker from the definitive Briefwechsel und Tagebücher (four volumes to date, published by De Gruyter in Berlin, 1960, 1970, 1975, 1985) has drawn attention to this monumental work and provided the scientific basis for any new biographical study. Similarly the re-publication of the full orchestral scores of his seven major operas by Garland Press of New York (1975), the re-appearance of the lost original manuscripts from their wartime hiding place, now housed in Cracow, and the work of scholars like Prof. Becker and Prof. Sieghart Döhring, mean that there can be no excuse for approaching the life and work of Meyerbeer without the same scientific scrupulousness and academic impartiality as is now taken for granted in the re-assessment of even less famous figures in the history of music. There are now new biographies in German (Becker 1980, Wessling 1984 and Zimmermann 1991) and French (Segalini 1985), but apart from the academic efforts of some American scholars (R.W.Gibson 1972, T.L.Thomson 1976, J.H.Roberts 1977), only the new translation of the selected letters has emerged in English.

When considering the San Francisco video of L'Africaine, Ronald Critchton rightly asks: "But is this version, with presumably time-honoured cuts, L'Africaine? And what, one might ask, is L'Africaine anyway?" The questions are very pertinent to several important issues, central to the half-hearted revivals to date, and must underpin any attempts to consider Meyerbeer as a serious composer of opera. In the recent revivals of his works, beginning with the clutch of performances in 1962 (Gli Ugonotti at La Scala, L'Africana at the San Carlo), the public has been presented with versions of his operas that can only be called travesties of the composer's intentions; and this in spite of the legendary fame enjoyed by the Milan revival of Huguenots. Hardly a single piece is presented in its structural whole; many numbers and pages of recitative are cut; no act is presented in its structural integrity.

Nearly every reference to Meyerbeer's operas contains a statutory observation about their impossible length, even though the composer's diaries reveal the extent to which he undertook the judicious pruning and dramatic shaping of his works in rehearsal. The printed scores of Robert le Diable, Les Huguenots and Le Prophète are the results of just such careful considerations, and are no longer than Tannhauser, La Forza del Destino, or Boris Godounov, for example. Yet every performed version in contemporary times has been slashed in ways that are damaging to their musico-dramatic structuring. There is no more apt an illustration of the musical world's reluctance to take Meyerbeer seriously than this tendency to disregard the dramatic integrity of his scores in a way that would now be regarded as sacrilegious in the works of Mozart and Wagner, and unheard of in the Verdi canon. If Meyerbeer is to be properly reassessed, and ones hopes, reintegrated into the repertory, his scores must be treated with the respect and scholarship that is now the hallmark of earnest music-making. The two most important revivals of L'Africaine in recent times (Covent Garden and San Francisco) both omitted the finale of Act 4 which is vital if the themes of the opera are to make cogent dramatic sense. The performance at Naples reduced the score to a skeleton, while the Barcelona version was a barely a succession of highlights.

In all his operas, Meyerbeer wrote more music than could be comfortably fitted into one evening at the opera house. Verdi was confronted with the same problem in Don Carlos and pruned accordingly; however, we thankfully possess Claudio Abbado's recording of the entire conception as it initially was envisaged. The guide to a successful staging of Meyerbeer must be the score that he authorized for publication. Even here though there are omissions which were made against the composer's better judgement. He perceived, for example, that his concept of Marcel in Les Huguenots was too startling to be fully understood in his own times, and hence removed Marcel's extended monologue which precedes his duet with Valentine in Act 3, the spiritual heart of the work. We will never have a complete picture of Meyerbeer's complex intentions in this great opera until this is restored, like the scene for Valentine which should properly open Act 3 as she witnesses an attempted assassination of Admiral Coligny. Both have been made available in the new Peters Edition of the vocal score prepared for the Leipzig performance of 1975.

The case of L'Africaine is even more complicated. Here Meyerbeer died before he could prepare the performing edition. Fortunately he completed the score in its entirety; the performing version was prepared by the Belgian musicologist and long-time friend of the composer, Francois-Joseph Fétis, at the request of Meyerbeer's widow. Whether his options and choices were appropriate in all respects is questionable. However, the full score contains virtually all the music as completed by the composer, so performances are not bound to Fétis's conception. This has been given practical expression in recent revivals where the tendency has been to restore Inez's Act 5 arioso ("'Fleurs nouvelles, arbres nouveaux") omitted from the vocal scores, and restored for the sake of the seconda donna, one suspects, rather than out of a perception of dramaturgical necessity. Yet how appropriate is this restoration; how important it is in further filling out Inez's character before her moving confrontation with Selika in their succeeding duet, again central to the deeper meaning of the opera.

These considerations are even more pertinent to Act 3. Ronald Crichton observes of the San Francisco production; "even with the essential, potentially sensational spectacle of the third act (shipwreck) much reduced, the opera makes an effect". Act 3 indeed, more than any other part of L'Africaine has suffered from Fétis's arrangement and from the vagaries of all modern revivals. The Maggio Musicale and Covent Garden productions stressed the visual potential with their caravel sailing through the waves, straight out at the audience; San Francisco provided an elaborate shipwreck. But this act is meant to be more than just a spectacle. The opening of the third acts of Meyerbeer's operas are devoted to what one must call "epic presentation", to the portrayal of local colour, or circumstance, as a deepening of dramatic implication, a thickening of thematic texture, to provide a more nuanced background for the unfolding of the central dramatic conflict. In Robert le Diable the wild landscape of the cavern of St. Irene is the background to a series of three duets which develop Bertram's satanic character and provide increasing instances of the demonic implications or the plot which come to a high point in the Valse infernale and the évocation. In Les Huguenots the epic tendency becomes even more emphatic in the re-creation of the busy life of Paris in the Pré-aux-Clercs as the townspeople, Huguenots soldiers, Catholic women and gypsies interact and confront each other in the growing atmosphere of religious conflict. Le Prophète depicts the camp life of the Anabaptists and serves to intensify their zealous and fanatical character in apposition to John of Leyden's idealistic integrity, bravery and growing disillusionment. In L'Africaine the opening of Act 3 is devoted to the evocation of the ocean and life on board ship. The entr'acte is one of the composer's most sustained tone paintings, evoking as it does the passage of the ship through the water, the rocking arpeggios and oboes in thirds conjuring up the nocturnal seascape. The prelude begins with the lonely beauty of the theme of Vasco's farewell to the Tagus which opens the overture, and recurs throughout the opera as the motif of Vasco's Portuguese heroism. The action continues with the chorus of the women, the reveille of the sailors, and the prayer of the ship's company. What follows in the full score is the morning meal of the sailors, their eating and drinking broken in upon by the women singing the theme of the Tagus, counterpointing the secular activity of the sailors as if to remind them of a higher calling in their heroic exploration (Appel au repas du matin and Ronde bacchique). This restatement of the chief symbolic motif of the opera, and in the context of such dramatic juxtapositioning, has never been heard in any of the revivals, and focuses the force of Meyerbeer's epic technique. This is especially emphasized by the high point of the maritime imagery which ensues in Nelusko's Ballad of Adamastor, god of the tempest. The usual practice is then to move through the confrontational duet between Vasco and Don Pedro to the storm and shipwreck as quickly as possible, with small regard for the composer's original dramatic conception. The act becomes a rapid succession of scenes with little organic connection or dramatic motivation, contrary to Meyerbeer's usual schema for the third act where the epic opening scenes prepare for the growing complication of the plot. Fétis's arrangement omits the climactic septet registering the reactions of the principals to the arrest of Vasco by Don Pedro. This septet is the emotional high point of the act, and the counterpart of the similar alignment of characters in Act 2. To omit it is to deprive the act of its emotional burden, to weaken its dramatic force and to disturb the careful structure of the whole.

A very important decision must then be made about the rest of the act. If the original version is performed (has it ever been?), Don Pedro, his life threatened, orders the death of Selika and Nelusko, who share a short duet as they prepare to face death together. (The principal melody was shifted to the end of the opera by Fétis.) This is important for developing the relationship between the Queen and her devoted servant, a relationship which is otherwise delineated in every act, a deep association of loyalty, love and stability operating under the surface commitment of Selika to Vasco which is never realized except ephemerally, and is doomed to disillusionment and loss.

End of Part I (posted February 27, 1999)

Go to Part II