Robert Ignatius Letellier

Meyerbeer's third Italian opera, Emma di Resburgo (Emma of Roxburgh) was premiered at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice on 26 June 1819 only three months after Semiramide had appeared at Turin, and scored a success that far surpassed that of both of its predecessors. It was indeed the work that established Meyerbeer's reputation in Italy, and extended it even beyond the Alps into Germany. It was also the opera that brought him into close contact with Rossini, the most important figure of the second decade of the century, whose work was a major influence on all his contemporaries, Meyerbeer included. Rossini's Eduardo e Cristina was given on 24 April and Emma on 26 June. Both operas triumphed, and the two composers became very good friends, a relationship that was to continue later in Paris. Meyerbeer's opera went on to be staged in Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence and Padua. Translated into German, it was given in Vienna, Dresden, Frankfurt, Berlin and Stuttgart, and even reached Warsaw in 1821. The story of Emma di Resburgo concerns dynastic rivalry in Lowland Scotland at the time of the Norman conquest; its libretto was the third written for Meyerbeer by Gaetano Rossi. The text covers the same material as that of one of Méhul's operas Héléna (1803). Mayr had also set this plot as Elena as recently as 1814, as an opera-semiseria, re-adapted for La Scala in the autumn of 1816, where Meyerbeer may well have heard it. The action of Emma, transferred from Provence to Scotland, takes place in the Castle of Tura and in Glasgow, and predates by three months Rossini's Walter Scott opera, La donna del lago (Naples, San Carlo, 24 September 1819), which is set in the Scottish Highlands. With its focus on a wild and violent Scotland, and with its themes of kidnap and usurpation, disguise and impersonation, lost relationships and restored fortunes, condemnation and rescue, Emma makes its own contribution to Italian Romantic opera. Meyerbeer's fluent and beautiful appropriation of the Rossinian idiom is given a further dimension by the composer's technical mastery and richness of invention, particularly evident in relation to the treatment of the Romantic subject. The new musical colours, appearing here even before similar developments in Rossini's La donna del lago, are not used in the depiction of nature, but in the realistic situational transposition of the drama. This is particularly forward-looking in the big tableaux: the Chorus of Judges, rightly admired in its day, through-composed as an integral part of the action, and the graduated act 1 finale, dramatic in its contrasts. The sombre Death March in the act 2 finale, with its writing for the bassoons, looks forward to Meyerbeer's French operas. The lieto fine, or happy ending of the opera, looking back to the eighteenth century, is still infused with the old ideals of the Enlightenment, typified in the clemency shown in the end by the tyrant. However, Meyerbeer had learned to infuse this Utopian spirit, so characteristic of a past epoch, with the vibrant new sensibility so characteristic of Romanticism. Emma di Resburgo marked a milestone in Meyerbeer's career and brought him the greatest honour any composer could aspire to in Italy—a commission from La Scala Milan that would result in his next work, Margherita d'Anjou (1820).

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) was a great musical dramatist in his own right. The fame of his operas rests on his radical treatment of form, his development of scenic complexes and greater plasticity of structure and melody, his dynamic use of the orchestra, and close attention to all aspects of presentation and production, all of which set new standards in Romantic opera and dramaturgy. This book carries forward the process of rediscovery and reassessment of Meyerbeer’s art ”including not just his famous French operas, but also his German and Italian ones”placing them in the context of his entire dramatic oeuvre, including his ballets, oratorios, cantatas and incidental music. From Meyerbeer’s first stage presentation in 1810 to his great posthumous accolade in 1865, some 24 works mark the unfolding of this life lived for dramatic music. The reputation of the famous four grand operas may well live on in the public consciousness, but the other works remain largely unknown. This book provides an approachable introduction to them. The works have been divided into their generic types for quick reference and helpful association, and placed within the context of the composer’s life and artistic development. Each section unfolds a brief history of the work’s origins, an account of the plot, a critical survey of some of its musical characteristics, and a record of its performance history. Robert Letellier examines each work from a dramaturgical view point, including the essential”often challenging”philosophical and historical elements in the scenarios, and how these concepts were translated musically onto the stage. A series of portraits and stage iconography assist in bringing the works to life.

The genesis of Meyerbeer's last opera, L'Africaine, is something of a legend. He had first considered the subject in 1837 when Scribe presented him with two new drafts, intended to clinch the triumphant successes of Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836). The composer began composing Le Prophète immediately, but had the other project ever in his mind. By 1843 a piano score was ready, but the subject as it stood then, concerning Fernando da Soto explorations in West Africa, did not satisfy Meyerbeer. Scribe was asked to rewrite the libretto in 1851, with the hero changed to Vasco da Gama, and focussed on his epic voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to India. A new contract was signed in 1857, and the greater part of the opera was written between 1857 and 1863, in spite of the Meyerbeer's growing debility. A copy of the full score was delivered to composer the day before he died on 2 May 1864. The opera was performed in a version prepared by François-Joseph Fétis a year later, 28 April 1865, and was a glorious posthumous tribute to its creators. It caused tremendous enthusiasm, and became enormously popular, being performed 60 times in the first four seasons, and eventually receiving 485 performances in Paris until the end of the century. In its glorious vocal writing, resplendent orchestral colouring and fragrant exoticism, it was a source of delight to many, like Franz Liszt. Even in the midst of his residency in the hallowed grounds of the Vatican in May 1865, he was working at Meyerbeer's last opera: "L'Africaine was the newest sensation of the theatrical music. The heavy brassy Rococo of its strains, its military ensembles, the number of its figurants, as numerous and diverse as a circus train met with upon the road, these worldly contrasts were such a delight to Liszt that his fantasia upon the opera assumed double form and took up two volumes."1 L'Africaine also shows a progression, even a deepening, in Meyerbeer's style, with a melodic language that is more Italianate in concept and line, as if Meyerbeer's sojourn in Italy in 1856 had it subliminal effects.2 Tunes are more like recitatives in style, and come across as much loftier, more serene and aloof:3 It certainly appealed to the singers of the Golden Age, and during the first part of the twentieth century was a favourite of many great tenors (Caruso, Martinelli, Gigli, Bjorling, Piccaver), and later of Domingo. This facsimile of the composer's manuscript is particularly fascinating. It is clear and hardly annotated at all, and uniquely gives us Meyerbeer's original intentions before the process of editing and adjustment which he always undertook at rehearsals, in response to dramaturgical exigencies and pressures of time.