Opern-Arien: Sopran, and: Opern-Arien: Alt/Mezzo-Sopran, and: Opern-Arien: Tenor, and: Opern-Arien: Bass/Bariton (review)

Giacomo Meyerbeer. Opern-Arien: Sopran. Editor, Peter Kaiser. Kassel: Bärenreiter, c1998. [Pref. in Ger., Eng., Fr., It., 6 p.; vocal score, 107 p. ISMN M-006-50279-0; BA 7544. 20.]

Giacomo Meyerbeer. Opern-Arien: Alt/Mezzo-Sopran. Editor, Peter Kaiser. Kassel: Bärenreiter, c1996. [Pref. in Ger., Eng., Fr., It., 8 p.; vocal score, 134 p. ISMN M-006-49874-1; BA 7543. 19.90.]

Giacomo Meyerbeer. Opern-Arien: Tenor. Editor, Peter Kaiser. Kassel: Bärenreiter, c1995. [Pref. in Ger., Eng., Fr., It., 8 p.; vocal score, 179 p. ISMN M-006-49846-8; BA 7541. 21.50.]

Giacomo Meyerbeer. Opern-Arien: Bass/Bariton. Editor, Peter Kaiser. Kassel: Bärenreiter, c1995. [Pref. in Ger., Eng., Fr., It., 8 p.; vocal score, 137 p. ISMN M-006-49847-5; BA 7542. 19.50.]

Most oltramontani who visited Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century—Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann among them—found a means there to reaffirm their Germanic superiority. Giacomo Meyerbeer, however, was one of the few (like Otto Nicolai) who was intoxicated by Italian music and entertained dreams of making a successful career as a composer of Italian opera. As he recounted the experience to his friend Jean F. Schucht in 1856: "I was as one bewitched in a magic garden. . . . All my feelings, all my thoughts, became Italian" (as cited by Philip Gossett in Giacomo Meyerbeer: Excerpts from the Early Italian Operas, 1817-1822, Italian Opera 1810-1840, 23 [New York: Garland, 1991], introd., p. [i]). Unlike Nicolai, who, frustrated by his Italian experience, eventually returned to his home in Berlin, Meyerbeer enjoyed great success. His sojourn in Italy was an artistic rite of passage; he traveled extensively, and eventually met Gaetano Rossi, who would become the librettist for five of his seven Italian operas.

Meyerbeer, like other composers, worked in the language of the theaters that commissioned his operas, and by consulting a list of his works, it is easy to perceive when he moved from Italy to France. While the Italian operas are all competently crafted and were generally very well received, they tend not to offer anything new, except for the numerous ensembles and grand spectacle of Il crociato in Egitto. But even in this opera the extreme end of the art of bel canto resonates in such uvula-quaking numbers as Adriano's "Queste destre l'acciaro di morte." Meyerbeer's four French grand operas—Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète, and L'Africaine—are the works that form his main legacy.

Peter Kaiser's four-volume collection of arias for solo voice with piano accompaniment (one each for soprano, alto/mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass/baritone) includes a number from nearly every one of Meyerbeer's operas, from his first complete Italian work, Romilda e Costanza, to L'Africaine, his final effort for Paris—and for this alone we should be grateful. The Italian selections from Romilda e Costanza, Emma di Resburgo, Margherita d'Anjou, L'esule di Granata, and Il crociato in Egitto are indeed rarities, but they are not all published firsts despite Kaiser's claims (see, for example, the notes to the selections from Romilda e Costanza and L'esule di Granata in the alto/mezzo-soprano volume), since several pieces from Romilda e Costanza, Emma di Resburgo, and L'esule di Granata already appear in Gossett's facsimile edition cited above.

As noted in the preface to each volume, Kaiser's intention is "[to enrich] vocal teaching and the art of the human voice" (that is, they are primarily intended for teaching and study), and on the surface, such reasoning seems unassailable, since the publication of worthwhile music that is inaccessible or difficult to find is always welcome. Except by making comparisons with Gossett's above-mentioned facsimile edition of early Ricordi publications and his two-volume facsimile...