Hector Berlioz and Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Complex Friendship Revisited

His [Berlioz's] spirit touched to finer issues; he sings, not Berlioz, but humanity as a whole. He is now what every great artist is instinctively—a philosopher as well as a singer.

—Ernest Newman, in Musical Masterpieces

He [Meyerbeer] is one of the ablest composers in the history of music, the type who masters everything, knows everything, does everything correctly, and has at his command both taste and an unerring instinct. Thus he was one of the greatest, even among the virtuosi of his time—the Paganini, Liszt and Berlioz of opera, the great composer-virtuoso.

—Paul Bekkers, in From Bach to Stravinsky

The Men

WRITING to his friend Humbert Ferrand on 15 April 1836, Berlioz observed: "Now I must be off to the Débats with my article on Beethoven's C Minor. Meyerbeer is coming soon to superintend his Huguenots, which I am most anxious to hear. He is the only established musician who has shown a real interest in me." ¹ This comment has much to tell us about positive relations between these two composers, traditionally regarded as poles apart. Berlioz is now admired as the pure genius of richly challenging and original inspiration; Meyerbeer is still seen by many as the purveyor of a brash and eclectic type of music that does not warrant serious artistic consideration. To mention them in the same breath is almost insulting, such is the gulf between their perceived respective artistic achievements. ² This is carried over into personality as well. Berlioz is seen as the noble and misunderstood genius, ablaze with artistic integrity and uncompromising search for truth. Meyerbeer is thought of as somehow suspect, a wealthy wheeler-dealing opportunist using bribery and underhand influence to secure success for his shoddy wares.

Yet it is somehow ironic that the work which more than any other has taken the lead in securing Berlioz's glowing reputation since the Second World War is his huge opera Les Troyens, once set aside as unmanageable, now regarded as the very distillation of his art. Of course, it is written in the conventions of the traditional French grand opéra, with its five-act formula filled with pathos and sometimes violent emotion, processions, ballets, choruses, stage bands, and heroic lead parts. As Hugh Macdonald puts it, "Les Troyens was always intended to take its due place in an established tradition which Berlioz held in high honor, that of French classical opera and its more recent manifestation, French grand opera." ³ Nevertheless, the music is by Berlioz, the plot is based on Virgil, and the opera is understood to exist on an altogether higher ontological plane than any concoctions devised by Meyerbeer and Scribe. Les Troyens is now performed with some regularity, no matter what the challenges of its staging, while Les Huguenots (along with Don Giovanni, perhaps the most popular opera of the nineteenth century) is now hardly ever seen: a just readjustment of the disproportionate unfairness of history, some might say.

Nevertheless, even as Berlioz's long neglect has been so persuasively redressed, so there is at last a growing trend to reconsider Meyerbeer's artistic achievement, and even to find some interest in his life. He has been so systematically denigrated as both man and artist as to have been forgotten, let alone shunned as a pariah. Yet it was his achievement as an artist that set an indelible mark on the evolution of opera. William J. Collins assesses the importance of Robert le diable with insight: "Armed with his understanding of how both Mozart and Weber had treated drama in music, and with his understanding from his Italian operas of the capacities of the voice, Meyerbeer produced a work which changed the face of opera and influenced even those who would later become the composer's musical adversaries." ⁴

It is still politically incorrect in many circles to admire Meyerbeer. Biographers of...