Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halevy's La Juive (review)

Fromental Halévy's five-act opera La Juive to a libretto by Eugène Scribe enjoyed enormous success following its premiere at the Paris Opéra in 1835. It became one of the most popular works of its day and, along with the operas of Giacomo Meyerbeer, the gold standard against which critics have measured other efforts in the genre of French grand opera. Lavish spectacle, vocal virtuosity, carefully articulated private and public spheres, rich orchestral resources, and attention to historical couleur locale in sets and costumes contributed to an artistic product that exuded national grandeur and savoir faire and also sustained claims as a thoroughly international genre because of its sheer eclecticism. Grand opera fell precipitously from favor after the First World War, but in recent decades numerous revivals have brought key pieces from this repertoire back into the public eye. La Juive has been one of the main beneficiaries of this attention, including a recent new production at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Diana Hallman's fine study of the ideological and political resonance of Halévy's work is thus timely indeed.

Grand opera stages the intersection of individual destinies with larger historical forces. Put in musicodramatic terms, it juxtaposes emotions generated by interpersonal relationships in arias and ensembles with chorus and ritual. La Juive takes place at the opening of the Council of Constance convened to end the papal schism in 1414. Although he gave an important place to the real historical figure of Cardinal Jean-François Brogni in the plot, Scribe played fast and loose with the historical record. Hallman is excellent on sorting out fact from fiction. For example, Sigismund appears in a magnificent stage procession as Holy Roman Emperor even though he did not ascend to this throne until almost twenty years later. The persecuted party is not the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, but an invented Jewish goldsmith named Eléazar and his daughter Rachel. When Eléazar is overheard working on a Christian feast day in the first act, both are dragged from their home and menaced by a crowd. Grand opera generally stages the delirious excesses of mob mentality with cogent effect, not the least because of music's affective power. Some have persuasively argued that such representations refracted the residual post-Terror angst among the rich and powerful in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. The twist in La Juive is that anti-Semitism feeds such irrational stirrings.

Cardinal Brogni soon appears as a figure of juste-milieu liberalism, urging clemency and tolerance. When the situation has calmed, Prince Léopold, who is married to the niece of the Emperor, enters in disguise as a Jewish journeyman named Samuel in order to continue an affair with Rachel. After the sacrilegious relationship is discovered - deemed offensive not because of adultery but because Léopold "eut commerce avec une maudite, une juive" - Eléazar and Rachel are condemned to a public execution, but Léopold's life is spared. Brogni falls back into line as an inflexible Church potentate. Now, Eléazar knows that Rachel is not his, but rather Brogni's daughter. At the end of the fourth act, he almost reveals this secret in order to save her, but explodes with vengeful wrath when he hears the crowd call for the demise of the Jews. Rachel, for her part, refuses to save herself by converting to Christianity. As she leaps into the boiling cauldron at the end, Eléazar reveals the truth about her paternity to Brogni.

One reason this study is important has to do with the general disrepute of grand opera in academic criticism, compared to, say, the works of Verdi, Puccini, or Wagner. Critics of grand opera generally avoid biography and the explication of aesthetic impact because of suspicions about the sincerity of composers and librettists who labored at the...