Giacomo Meyerbeer

Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Meyerbeer began his musical career as a pianist but soon decided to devote himself to opera, spending several years in Italy studying and composing.

[4] He was to adopt the surname Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather Liepmann Meyer Wulff [de] (1812) and Italianize his first name to Giacomo during his period of study in Italy, around 1817.

[6] Both Judah Herz Beer and his wife were close to the Prussian court; when Amalia was awarded in 1816 the Order of Louise, she was given, by Royal dispensation, not the traditional Cross but a portrait bust of the Queen.

The Beer children were provided with a fine education; their tutors included two of the leaders of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia, the author Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn and Edmund Kley, (later a reform movement rabbi in Hamburg) to whom they remained attached into their maturity.

The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reported: 'The amazing keyboard playing of young Bär (a Jewish lad of 9), who carried off the difficult passages and other solo parts with aplomb, and has fine powers of rendition even more rarely found in one of his age, made the concert even more interesting'.

[14] Beer's first stage work, the ballet Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen (The Fisherman and the Milkmaid) was produced in March 1810 at the Court Opera in Berlin.

[16] Here, with his fellow students (among whom was Carl Maria von Weber), he learned not only the craft of composition but also the business of music (organising concerts and dealing with publishers).

Forming a close friendship with Weber and other pupils, Meyerbeer established the Harmonischer Verein (Musical Union), whose members undertook to support each other with favourable press criticism and networking.

Berlioz – who had commented that 'Meyerbeer not only had the luck to be talented, he had the talent to be lucky' – wrote 'I can't forget that Meyerbeer was only able to persuade [the Opéra] to put on Robert le diable ... by paying the administration sixty thousand francs of his own money'; and Frédéric Chopin lamented 'Meyerbeer had to work for three years and pay his own expenses for his stay in Paris before Robert le diable could be staged....Three years, that's a lot – it's too much.

[51] By the end of 1841, Meyerbeer had completed the first draft of Le prophète, but refused to stage it because the then director of the opera, Leon Pillet, wished to cast his mistress, Rosine Stoltz, in the part of Fidès, the hero's mother.

As this patriotic opera 'needed' Prussian creators, Meyerbeer arranged that whilst the trusted Scribe would write the libretto, Rellstab would translate it and take the credit (and the royalties).

Meyerbeer had hoped to have Jenny Lind (for whom he had written the part) sing the lead role of Vielka, but the opera premiered on 7 December 1844 without her (although she did appear in subsequent performances).

(In a further incarnation, the music was later used by Meyerbeer for a revamped libretto by Scribe featuring Peter the Great, and produced as an opéra comique in Paris (L'étoile du nord, 1854)).

Amongst those at the 47th performance in February 1850 was Richard Wagner, now an impoverished political exile; the success of a work so fundamentally against his own operatic principles was one of the spurs to his spiteful anti-Jewish denunciation of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850).

Following this he began on two new projects, an opera by Scribe based on the biblical story of Judith, and an opéra comique, Le pardon de Ploërmel, (also known as Dinorah, the title given to the Italian version performed at London) to a libretto by Jules Barbier.

[61] A special train bore Meyerbeer's body from the Gare du Nord to Berlin on 6 May, where he was buried in the family vault at the Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee.

He philosophically resigned himself to being a victim of his own success: his extensive diaries and correspondence – which survived the turmoil of 20th-century Europe and have now been published in eight volumes[62] – are an invaluable source for the history of music and theatre in the composer's time.

[66]It was perhaps this attitude that led Meyerbeer never to enter public controversy with those who antagonized him, either professionally or personally, although he occasionally displayed his grudges in his Diaries; for example, on hearing Robert Schumann conduct in 1850: 'I saw for the first time the man who, as a critic, has persecuted me for twelve years with a deadly enmity.

[72] Throughout his career he wrote his operas with specific singers in mind and took great care to temper his writing to their strengths; but at the same time he seemed little interested in expressing the emotions of his characters, preferring to use his music to underline the larger-scale machinations of the plot.

Meyerbeer's contribution was revealed at this stage to be the combination of Italian vocal lines, German orchestration and harmony, and the use of contemporary theatrical techniques,[77] ideas which he carried forward in Robert and his later works.

[79] Typical of Meyerbeer's innovative orchestration is the use in Robert le diable of dark-toned instruments – bassoons, timpani and low brass, including ophicleide – to characterise the diabolical nature of Bertram and his associates.

[88][89] Meyerbeer's large choral 'tableaux' also made a major contribution to the overall dramatic effect; the composer particularly sought opportunities to write such large-scale crowd scenes, and preferred libretti which offered such possibilities.

[91][92] This marketing and commercialisation of opera was reinforced by Meyerbeer's Paris publisher Maurice Schlesinger who had established his fortune on the back of Robert, and even persuaded Honoré de Balzac to write a novella (Gambara) to promote Les Huguenots.

It looks for its salvation to the German Messiah, Meyerbeer; if he keeps it waiting much longer, its death agonies will begin...It is for that reason...that one only sees Robert le Diable and Les Huguenots turning up again when the mediocrities are forced to withdraw.

[106] Schumann's attack on Les Huguenots was clearly a personal diatribe against Meyerbeer's Judaism: 'Time and time again we had to turn away in disgust...One may search in vain for a sustained pure thought, a truly Christian sentiment...It is all contrived, all make believe and hypocrisy!...The shrewdest of composers rubs his hands with glee.

'[107] Wagner's disciple Theodor Uhlig followed Schumann's Judaeophobic line in his 1850 review of Le prophète: 'To a good Christian [it] is at best contrived, exaggerated, unnatural and slick, and it is not possible that the practised propaganda of the Hebrew art-taste can succeed using such means.

'[108] Uhlig's phrase 'the Hebrew art-taste' was to be used by Richard Wagner to spark off his attack on Meyerbeer, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Jewishness in Music) (see below).

[116] Without specifically naming Meyerbeer, he interpreted the popular success of the latter as the undermining of German music by alleged Jewish venality and willingness to cater to the lowest tastes, and attributed the supposed poor quality of such 'Jewish music' to Jewish speech and song patterns, which 'though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they shew an impertinent obstinacy in cleaving to him'.

[120] These attacks on Meyerbeer (which also included swipes at Felix Mendelssohn) are regarded by Paul Lawrence Rose as a significant milestone in the growth of German anti-Semitism.

However, successful productions of some of the major operas at relatively small centres such as Strasbourg (L'Africaine, 2004) and Metz (Les Huguenots, 2004) showed that this conventional wisdom can be challenged.