In Les huguenots, the key twist of the plot—as in countless such scenarios—involves the hero’s fatal misunderstanding of the heroine’s moral status or intentions. In Act 1 Raoul, a Protestant gentleman invited to a Catholic gathering chez Nevers as a gesture of reconciliation, sees through a window the beautiful woman he has already recounted falling in love with upon rescuing her from a group of rough students. She is conversing with Nevers in the garden. Given the social context, he not-too-unreasonably assumes her to be Nevers’ mistress. Then, in Act 2, when Marguerite, intending to further the peace by marrying Raoul to a Catholic lady, presents to him this same woman—none other than Valentine, daughter of St. Bris—Raoul forcefully rejects the union. Valentine, as enamored of Raoul as he is of her and with every reason to expect a joyous reception, is wounded; her father, St. Bris, is enraged; and everyone else is baffled (big finale). Thus, the personal romantic misapprehension is woven into the calamitous political and religious doings, and the story proceeds to a tragic conclusion. The parallels to many other operatic narratives of lovers’ misunderstandings are obvious. (For a particularly pertinent example, see Cammarano’s libretto for Lucia di Lammermoor, then recently arrived in Paris, whose action is set in motion by the same rescue-with-love-at-first-sight device. Cammarano repeated the pattern for Verdi in Il Trovatore.) There is also Scribe’s own re-use, though to nowhere nearly as powerful an effect, of the shock-relevation ending from La Juive, wherein a highly placed Catholic (Cardinal Brogni in La Juive, the Comte de St. Bris in Les huguenots), discovers just at the fall of curtain that his own daughter is victim of his actions—to say nothing of Rigoletto’s equivalent discovery, not yet in operatic form in 1836 but familiar from its source in Hugo’s play. The problem for us is that in Meyerbeer’s opera, these often effective operatic tropes are embedded in a looser and less discriminating dramaturgical structure, filled with figures and diversions that do not bear on the central relationships in any necessary way, and that tend to inspire only generic responses from the composer. Our patience with divertissements and side-play is short by comparison with that of the Paris audience of the 1830s, at least in works of ultimately serious intent; nevertheless, they are integral to the progression of this work, and I’m not at all sure that the way to quiet our impatience is by giving them only token attention.

In her valuable exploration of the offerings of the Opéra during this period (see the minibibliography below), Marian Smith shows that opera and ballet alternated at the house on approximately equal footing; that there was much intermingling of the responsible artistic personnel as well as of the audience for both artforms; and further that the scenarios and performance styles of ballet and opera bore striking similarities. Among the several intriguing tables she includes, one is of the parallels in plot situations between operas and ballets, and another is a detailed, almost moment-to-moment breakdown of the plot developments and character interactions in the first acts of Les huguenots and Giselle. Of particular interest to me, as one with only the sketchiest purchase on ballet history, is Smith’s emphasis on the pantomime sequences of ballet (the works were, in fact, termed “ballet-pantomimes”), which she reports have been progressively reduced in favor of the dance element. Giselle itself, she demonstrates, was originally a much longer and more dramatically complex work than the one we know today, owing to the presence of these parlante passages. She argues, with solid evidence from original sources, that composers, librettists, and choreographers worked closely together to ensure that even the smallest pantomimic actions were reflected in the music, and thus that such music’s primary value lay in its relation to these actions, rather than in the aesthetic properties of the music considered independently. Moreover, she maintains that such collaboration carried over into the performance preparation of grand opera as well.