Informed opera devotees are certainly aware of the significant presence of dance in grand opera, and its line of descent from the early French ballet-opera. What we may have given insufficient weight is the influence of this pantomimic action, how closely it was tied to composers’ settings, and how much dance and pantomime dictated the overall acting and production styles of these works. We might know of the singular success of Auber’s La muette de Portici, with a dancer in the title role (a mute girl), but we’ve never seen the piece, which after all was an anomaly. And it should be noted that although the role’s originator, Lise Noblet, was one of Paris’ foremost ballerinas (to use our term) and evidently a bewitching performer, the role was mimed, not danced, and the two languages of mime and song were in constant interchange. Here in New York, our only acquaintance (mine, anyway) with parlante scenes would be in the pantomimic passages remaining in the American Ballet Theatre’s productions of traditional story ballets such as Giselle, La Bayadère, Don Quichotte (a title role that is almost entirely acted rather than danced), La fille mal gardee, etc. In my experience these are with rare exceptions done with insufficient conviction and/or deftness to be dramatically convincing, and the thought of even highly accomplished artists of the two realms (Natalia Osipova and Jonas Kaufmann?) “conversing,” while intriguing, seems farfetched.

As Smith observes, the acting style that would have emerged from this choreographed, pantomimically influenced way of staging, with the chorus treated gesturally almost as a corps, would undoubtedly strike us as stilted and unnatural. And in our theatre a director would be the determinant influencer, in charge of co-ordinating all the stage elements and working with the conductor and orchestra to find some way of establishing the many minor characters and realizing the small, seemingly incidental, interchanges that could conceivably make the populous scenes living tableaux, and a suitable context for the High Romantic vocalizing of the principals—all in a singingacting style that a modern audience would find compelling. That implies a whole new way of rehearsing, dependent on a whole new way of training. But, especially in the absence of any version of greatvoiced French singing, it seems to me the only way into Les huguenots and its genre for us.

The four leading singers of the first Les huguenots were Julie Dorus-Gras (Marguerite), Cornélie Falcon (Valentine), Adolphe Nourrit (Raoul), and Nicolas Levasseur (Marcel). This was the same quartet who a year earlier had originated the principal roles in La Juive (Eudoxie, Rachel, Eléazar, and Brogni, respectively), and were at the moment established at the Opéra as securely as the foursome of Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache over at the Théâtre des Italiens. In terms of vocal type, this means a strong coloratura soprano, a dramatic soprano, an older-style dramatic tenor (see below), and a powerful, long-ranged basso. The part of Urbain was designated for soprano (to judge from the writing, a lighter one than the Marguerite’s), and those of Nevers, St. Bris, and Marcel (in roughly descending order as to timbre and tessitura) all for bass. The rehearsal period for the Les huguenots premiere was long and complicated. The directorship of the Opéra had changed from Louis Véron to Charles Duponchel, whom Meyerbeer viewed as, among other things, “miserable . . . completely incompetent.” (“In this insane environment,” he wrote, “it will soon be just as embarrassing to succeed as it used to be to fail.”) There were state-induced pressures (Meyerbeer and Scribe were forced to delete two major characters, including that of Catherine de’ Medici, who was supposed to appear in the conspiracy scene of Act 4), and Nourrit exerted his customary creative influence—probably, as with La Juive, all for the better. But the event was a triumph, and Les huguenots remained a fixture of the international repertory into the WW1 years, its musical, vocal, and theatrical qualities gradually changing with fashion till it ran out of room for further adaptation.