The most commonly cited hypotheses on the Meyerbeerian concealment are 1) the unevenness of the scores, 2) a reduced interest in the subject matter, and 3) the dearth of singers who are technically and stylistically capable of realizing the effects of the vocal writing. Among devotees, it’s the singing that is put forward as most determinant, and to which I’ll be paying the most detailed attention here. But this is partly because it is the only element on which we have some living documentation. The work’s mode of theatrical presentation, and its relation to both the more expositional passages of the score and the vocal effects themselves, is visible to only the mind’s eye. The questions of how Les huguenots might now be persuasively acted and produced may be as important as that of how it might be sung. So we must try to get at least an entry-level grip on the piece itself.

In the modern (but not postmodern) way of defining what’s important in an opera, we look to how the characters are revealed through the music, action, and words, and how the narrative is in turn advanced through them. We expect to be emotionally involved in the fates of the characters—to root for the protagonists and against the antagonists (though, in the best of cases, coming to understand the latter), and to be powerfully affected by the (usually) tragic or (rarely) triumphant outcome. In Les huguenots there are no fewer than seven principal characters (performances of it, after all, were the “nights of seven stars”) and between fifteen and twenty minor ones, depending on how one counts soloists with only a line or two; others who sing together but are intended to have soloistic presence (e. g., the three monks in the Benediction of the Swords); and which of them are sacrificed in whole or in part to cuts. And to us, there is a contradiction between the relative musical prominence of some of the characters and their significance in the drama. Thus, Marguerite de Valois is introduced with an elaborate double aria that is one of the opera’s two or three best-known excerpts; but she essentially disappears from the work, musically speaking, after the second of its five acts. The page Urbain, whose only plot function is to bear a summons from the aforesaid lady to our hero in Act 1, does so with a big display piece, then fades into the background—unless a  second “personality number,” inserted for the contralto Alboni in Act 2, is revived for some otherwise reluctant mezzo or contralto. So these two roles, requiring front-rank singers, strike us as decorative red herrings, while the main antagonist, the implacable St. Bris, has no aria that could be called such and assumes no major presence in the music till Act 4; and the largely arioso-and-recitative scoring for Nevers relies wholly on the interpretive gifts of the singeractor to establish the character’s intended stature.

The remaining characters—Raoul de Nangis and his servant, Marcel, and St. Bris’ daughter, Valentine—are the ones we are meant to care about. But their predicament only gradually claims our attention, in the course of a rather late shift from what seems to be one kind of opera (an entertainment spectacle with comique elements predominating) to quite another (a lyric tragedy of individuals caught up in the sweep of catastrophic events). Les huguenots is a  tale of high Romantic fiction set against the background of a late-Medieval historical happening of which its early audiences would have known enough to recognize its import, but not enough to dismiss it on grounds of inaccuracy. This was the St. Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of 1572, perhaps the most horrific of the many atrocities committed over the decades of the French religious wars between Catholics and Calvinists, known in France as Huguenots. This slaughter occurred shortly after the French king, Charles IX, had commanded a truce in the conflict but, almost immediately and evidently under the influence of his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, reversed the decision. For the Opéra’s audience of the time, the parallel with the liberalization laws of 1830 with respect to Jews, and to the anti-Semitic currents running through French society, was unmistakeable, particularly inasmuch as both Meyerbeer and Halévy, composers of the three greatest hits of the time, were Jewish. And the topic of religious war in general, however safely distanced in time, was controversial on the face of it. In France, there were objections to the portrayal of Catholics, and in Germany, of Protestants. Outside France, the opera’s conflict was sometimes represented as between, for instance, Guelphs and Ghibellines or Anglicans and Puritans. Touchy then, touchy now (see l’affaire Klinghoffer).