The combination of a nasty technical glitch involving lost copy and an underestimate of required writing time has made this post a full day late. My apologies, and thanks for your indulgence. An Opera as Opera-related note: on his site Der Merker Redaktion.com, Thomas Prochazka, who gave my book its very first review in July, 2018, has written a splendid article focusing on the necessity of unifying singing and acting into a single unit of operatic expression, with several references to the book’s arguments. (See Die Oper: Kritische Zeit für eine Kunstform? (III), July 12, 2019. For any readers who have reached at least the gleaning stage in German, Der Merker is a go-to site for informed opinion on operatic doings in Vienna and environs.

The all-but-total concealment of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas, now over a century old, occasions wonderment whenever an opportunity for re-assessment presents itself—”enigmatic” is a common description of the situation. I don’t think much deep thinking is needed to solve the enigma, but it is still remarkable that in an age when operas strong and weak from every day, month, and year of the artform’s timeline pop up in productions and subsequent recordings whether or not their requirements can be more than modestly suggested in performance, these works, true cornerstones of the international repertoire for three-quarters of a century, remain rarities. In over seventy years of operagoing in one of the former strongholds of grand opera, I have seen staged productions of two of Meyerbeer’s pieces (Le Prophète at the Met and, just recently, DInorah, où le Pardon de Ploërmel by one of our smaller companies, the Amore Opera) and concert presentations of two more (Il Crociato in Egitto, starring Beverly Sills, and L’Africana [sic], with Richard Tucker as Vasco. I’ve missed a local event or two over the years, but that is all.

For this post, I first thought of exploring the two Parisian grands opéras that took Meyerbeer’s standing from that of a promising rival of Rossini to that of master of all that he surveyed, Robert le diable (1831) and Les huguenots (1836). The premieres of these operas happen to bracket that of Halévy’s La Juive (1835), to which I devote many pages in Opera as Opera, and to teeter on the edge of important developments in singing technique (ditto). But as I began listening, I became aware that to do any kind of justice to the “enigma,” one of these works would more than suffice, and I chose Les huguenots as the richer in available materials, with a note to self to get back to Robert, Le Prophète, and L’Africaine before too long. The materials include two “complete” live recordings, a wealth of recorded extracts from the last couple of decades of Meyerbeerian triumph, and some items from the scholarly and performance-criticism literatures. For this last, I’ll be consulting George Bernard Shaw, who for all his Perfect Wagnerism was quite taken with Les huguenots and wrote with some frequency on its London revivals throughout his tenure as music critic. This still leaves much untouched, but is enough to lead us into the mysteries of the work, and, by extension, its all-but-vanished world.