Robert le Diable at Covent Garden

[Derek Hughes]

I've been curious about Meyerbeer for over fifty years, and have taken every opportunity to satisfy my curiosity: listening to the 1963 BBC broadcast of L'Africaine, buying the Sutherland-Bonynge Huguenots as soon as it came out in 1970, and travelling 200 miles for the 1972 concert performance of Il Crociato in London (I far more recently saw the staging in Venice). I now have recordings of eight of his operas. Yet the satisfaction of my curiosity has brought increasing disappointment with the music.

The first Meyerbeer piece I ever heard--only retrospectively identified--was the Patineurs waltz, which was used as the signature tune for the early 1950s children's programme Mr and Mrs Mumbo. I still love that tune, with its lop-sided lugubriousness. The second piece was the coronation march from Le Prophète, which was in an old anthology of piano pieces in our piano stool. As I played through it as a fourteen-year-old, I remember thinking that the opening melody seemed artificially calculated rather than spontaneously invented, and that the conclusion of the piece bore no relation to the opening. This is still my view of about 70% of Meyerbeer's music. Only L'Africaine now seems to me to work in any sustained way. There are moments of enjoyable free invention in the Italian operas (I particularly like Emma di Resburgo), but--until L'Africaine--his invention seemed to get more and more short-winded and inhibited once he had moved to Paris. Most of Le Prophète is very feeble and trivial, and one can see why it made Wagner--who by then had written three of the four greatest operas so far produced in the nineteenth century--flip, even as one deplores the form that flipping took.

I'd seen a live Il Crociato and an amateur production of L'Étoile du Nord, but not one of the big Paris quartet, so I hoped that seeing Robert in a lavish production would finally make my love of Meyerbeer equal to my erstwhile curiosity about him. To give it the best chance possible, I bought a seat near the front of the stalls, which at least gave me a fetching view of the debauched nuns.

The plot of Robert le Diable has a strong central situation, which is sadly wasted through incoherence and dead ends, such as the episode of the magic branch, which leads nowhere. In its pitting an indecisive hero against an ambiguous demonic figure, and solving the conflict by the striking of a clock, the libretto recalls the far stronger one for Marschner's Der Vampyr (1828). Unfortunately, the director, instead of trying to rescue the situation, resorted to IRONY. As a result, my Row D seat gave me a close-up view not only of the nuns but of the silly facial expressions that the principals were at times obliged to adopt in order to convey IRONY. It was (I thought) a uniformly good musical performance, and the singers (grimaces apart) all looked their parts, but they deserved a better production. Arguably, they also deserved a better opera.

There is some good music. The prelude is evocative and there are spirited choruses in the opening scene. The bridal chorus in Act IV is charming, and 'Dieu tout puissant' really takes off, as (almost) does 'Robert, toi que j'aime'. There is a lively duet for Isabelle and Robert, and the seizing of Robert after he relinquishes the magic branch is fun. But alas for the remaining 70%. There is nothing memorable for the hero or villain, and the demonic dances and choruses are, uniformly, embarrassingly trivial. Covent Garden programmes are normally very good, but this one seemed to be padded with peripheral material. It was almost as though the opera could not generate a sufficient weight of relevant contextual commentary.

Yet, more than any other fallen or unrisen star (except, perhaps, Havergal Brian), Meyerbeer encourages hype from his champions. He's not merely a historically important figure who on that account merits occasional revival: he is great. Robert Letellier was at hand in the programme to declare just that, and to support his contention with some odd readings of the Meyerbeer libretti. Does L'Africaine really show 'the transcendence of the sacrificial self-offering of the redeeming heroine', as Letellier claims? I'm not au fait with the textual variants of this opera, but in the libretto I'm looking at (Paris, 1865) she approaches death in a state of drugged delusion: 'délire' and 'séduisante ivresse'. The ethereal chorus is a figment of her imagination ('que croit entendre Sélika dans son délire'). And then there is a chill awakening : 'C'était un songe!'--Vasco is not awaiting her in heaven but sailing away with another woman. Letellier seems to me to be cavalierly imposing on this ending the meaning he wants to be there.

Other justly eminent scholars seem to lose a sense of proportion where Meyerbeer is concerned. Thus, we are told that the motivic use of Senta's Ballad in The Flying Dutchman would be 'unthinkable' with the example of Robert, or that 'Act II of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg would never have existed without the model of Act III of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.' Well, both acts contain a night watchman.

The advantage of such claims is that they can never be disproved. They also, however, produce an infinite regression. If Wagner needed the example of Meyerbeer in order to create his night watchman, whose example did Meyerbeer need in order to create his? And so on, back to the ark. Is the bridal chorus in Lohengrin unthinkable without the bridal chorus in Robert?

As for motivic reminiscence, I concede that it is used a lot in Robert, but importance is not merely a matter of feet and inches. One of the most dramatically profound early instances of motivic reminiscence occurs in a German opera of 1833. Early in the opera, a sidekick of the hero sings a misogynistic ballad about a beautiful woman who turns out to be an ugly old witch in diguise. Later, in a terrible moment, the hero curses the heroine, and as he does so the orchestra intones the melody of the misogynistic ballad: the cynicism of his comrade has been released from its latency in his own mind. This is a moment of psychological penetration far beyond Meyerbeer. The composer was, of course, Wagner; the opera, Die Feen. It postdates Robert by a couple of years, but no-one to my knowledge has suggested a debt to Meyerbeer. If the 19 year-old Wagner could do this, he didn't need any lessons in leitmotif from Meyerbeer.

One can admire Moscheles without equating him with Chopin, or Marschner (my favourite unsung composer) without equating him with Wagner, but for Meyerbeer fans it often seems to be all or nothing. Aut Caesar aut nullus. And perhaps it is absurdly excessive enthusiasm, such as Letellier's, that creates an extreme and opposite reaction. Some of the hostile press reviews of Meyerbeer's contribution to the evening were fun, but a bit OTT in their condemnation. For a particularly good example of unfair fun, see http://www.opera-britannia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=829:robert-le-diable-royal-opera-6th-december-2012-&catid=8:opera-reviews&Itemid=16. I'd award this 70% for accuracy.

[Mark Thomas]

Thank you Derek for such a well-reasoned and thoughtful review of Robert. I'm afraid that I have yet to listen to the recording I made of the Radio 3 broadcast, so I don't know if your assessment of Stephen Jay-Taylor's review as 70% accurate is itself accurate (!), but if it is then you are being remarkably restrained both about Meyerbeer's music and the production. A friend of mine, an avid Meyerbeer enthusiast, who saw the production rated it and the performance highly but, as I say, he is a Meyerbeer fan. For myself, LP sets of Les Huguenots and Le Prophète were amongst the first unsung operas I owned and the former in particular I have always felt to be a very dramatic and exciting piece which wears its length well, although episodic and short-windedly repetitive to be sure. On the other hand, I saw a  traditional production of Le Pardon de Ploermel in Compiègne a few years ago and was bored witless by it.

I don't share my friend's evangelical belief in Meyerbeer's greatness. He was very much "of his time" as you have illustrated much more cogently than I could, but I do think that Les Huguenots in particular is worthy of revival form time to time. It sounds as if Robert isn't, though.

[Alan Howe]

His music may be long-winded small (Meyer)beer, but he is a Very Important Historical Figure - of that I've no doubt. As I listened to Acts 4 and 5 of the ROH relay in the car coming back from London last Saturday evening, I heard all sorts of pre-echoes - mainly, it has to be said, of Verdi, who did it all much better, of course. But then Meyerbeer was writing this sort of thing in the early 1830s when Joe Green was still in short trousers, compositionally speaking.
So I think it's important to revive Meyerbeer - occasionally. But I think he should be staged as straight as possible - postmodern irony just doesn't work. The current ROH production is clearly just another instance of a director interposing his clever-clever ideas between opera and audience. Poor old Meyerbeer. I'm glad I was just listening in the car...

[Gareth Vaughan]

I heard a few bits of Robert Le Diable when it was broadcast recently (my evening kept being disturbed by phone calls, etc.), and what I heard was pleasant enough, but made no great impression. I agree that L'Africaine is possibly his strongest piece (at least amongst the music I know - I haven't heard Les Huguenots, I must confess). I certainly have fond memories of the 1978 Covent Garden production with Placido Domingo and the glorious Grace Bumbry. This was a "traditional" production in a lavish 19th century style and served the composer (and the piece) well.

[JimL]

Probably the best number from Robert is the one Henselt used for his concertante variations, Op. 11.  And it's probably best used in that work.

[Josh]

Count me as one of the ones who rates Meyerbeer quite highly.  I really enjoyed the first post in this thread, but please don't judge us Meyerbeer fans too harshly!  Pretty much a lot of what you say about Meyerbeer, I would turn around onto Richard Wagner, a composer of which I think very little; at best, I would call Wagner a squandered talent.  I like only his earliest works (including Die Feen, by the way, which I actually do consider to be very good).  The same I would say for Verdi.  I just don't get his mid-to-late music, and think ... well, I don't know that anyone here would like reading the negative adjectives I would use to describe late Verdi or late Wagner, but let's just say that they are two composers that wrote some of the chronologically earliest music familiar to me which I outright loathe.

But part of this is actually the point I wanted to make. If Meyerbeer is very much of his time, maybe some listeners are, also. I feel at home with the overall soundscape and "feel" of his music in a way that I don't even with Dvořák, and I like most of Dvořák's music.  When it comes to such later-Romantic composers, they employ harmonies or note sequences that sound to my ears like they should not exist, that they are completely unnatural and not suitable to be inflicted on decent Human beings.  Move into the 20th century and you start getting things that outright physically repel me, and even make me experience sensations very close to full-blown nausea.  But even in the mid-to-late Romantic, I hear sounds that "shouldn't" happen.  Almost the musical equivalent of gibberish to me.

So some of the people really into Meyerbeer, like myself, probably consider him to be on our turf.  He's one of our soundscape countrymen.  I may visit Dvořák and enjoy the visits, but that's never home for me. Just keep in mind there are some out there that will take Meyeerbeer in large doses and be glad to get it, and would just as soon leave any Wagner opera (other than perhaps Die Feen) to collect dust on a shelf somewhere, and be read about in books about how important or influential it was. Just keep those awful sounds away from our Meyerbeer-loving ears!

And as far as that article goes, you can take pretty much any trashing of Meyerbeer from it, and any praise of the more modern composers in it, and completely reverse it, and you'd have the actual, genuine feelings of myself and probably many other people who do truly like Meyerbeer's music.  Britten's Billy Budd, from what little I could stand before... well, to my personal taste, it's absolutely incomprehensible that anyone would suggest that over anything I've ever heard of Meyerbeer. But then, these days, people consider throwing random bits of paint onto a canvas to be "art", which is about the musical equivalent for me.  They're not "wrong", I guess, but you definitely can't expect everyone to agree.

[Alan Howe]

There were many - used to the more refined musical expression of early nineteenth century opera - who said everything which you are saying with regard to mature Verdi and Wagner about Meyerbeer. He was, after all, considered rather noisy and showy in his day...

[Richergar]

A lovely series of posts, and frankly at far higher a level than most of the critical discourse (sic) that has accompanied the ROH revival. I scheduled my most recent trip around this, and saw the final perforamnce (Dec 21). At the moment I am racing against time to get caught up from the trip, and hope I can find some time to post a little more extensively later about it, but suffice it to say that I thought the evening was first rate. The program book has an excellent short essay by Cormac Newark on the strengths and liabilities of the work and I would be glad to upload that if that's ok. In a nutshell, Newark's point is that, yes, Meyerbeer doesn't yet totally accomplish what he was able to do later on - the whole is not quite equal to the sum of the parts - but in truth that's not different than a lot of composer's early works in a new medium, which grand opera surely was at this point. I think one of the difficulties I have NOT seen alluded to often with Meyerbeer is that his melodies are not in typical binary form....nor are they easy ABA form. Quite frequently they defy expectations of conventional shape, and thus don't really easily linger in the listener's mind (and thus also make rather unusual demands of the singers). It isn't a coincidence, I think, that the big Meyerbeer tunes that have survived all have that predictable shape, and while it doesn't put off audiences in the flesh, it seems to do so to critics.

More later.

I will post the essay, which is about 4 pages max, if that is ok.

Richard

[Alan Howe]

Oh please do, Richard. Thanks!

[Derek Hughes]

There's a thoughtful and very positive review of the opera, libretto, and production in the current TLS.

I was also struck by Richergar's point about Meyerbeer's asymmetrical melodies. I'm all in favour of melodic asymmetry: Berlioz can do it very well. Meyerbeer's asymmetries struck me as being more in the nature of non sequiturs: he runs out of steam and bolts a quite different idea on the one that has just expired. This happens even towards the end of 'O Paradis': a lovely melody which unfolds effortlessly under its own inner momentum, suddenly giving way to jerkier and unrelated ideas. But Richard, and the TLS reviewer, argue the opposite case well.

[edurban]

"...I'm all in favour of melodic asymmetry: Berlioz can do it very well. Meyerbeer's asymmetries struck me as being more in the nature of non sequiturs: he runs out of steam and bolts a quite different idea on the one that has just expired..."

I've always thought that this sort of description of the 'Meyerbeer melody' perfectly described the "Berlioz melody."  Some years back, it seems to me, before Berlioz became the critics' darling he is today, 'melodic non-sequitors' was a pretty standard description of the typical Berlioz melody: starts out well, composer then flounders around trying to decide what to do next...see any number of the overtures for examples.

David

[Richergar]

I don't mean to seem as dumb as I am <g>, but I have the article available to upload and can't quite figure out how to attach it! Any help would be appreciated (sigh)

[Mark Thomas]

You'll need to upload it somewhere on the web (like Mediafire or a similar service), get the url and then put that in a post here.

[JimL]

Mark, there has GOT to be a better way to attach files and images in posts.  Isn't there some kind of import function we can add on?  I've noticed there's an insert email button on the 2nd row.  Couldn't it be used to insert an attachment?

[Derek Hughes]

And if we're discussing topics like melodic asymmetry, it would be helpful to be able to paste in short passages of musical notation . . .