‘A machine so complicated as the [Paris] Opéra is like a maze: only people with long and profound acquaintance with the house can find their way through it.’ So wrote J.-T. Merle in De l'Opera in 1827. The truth is that no artistic enterprise before the creation of cinema could match grand opera in complexity; no mode of artistic production was comparable with what this theatre offered in uniting all the material and human factors that make up an operatic production, and to create the conditions necessary for its performance. It is no denial of the importance of creativity to assert that grand opera was the product of technology, albeit in a very wide sense of the term.

Grand opera developed and became a significant factor in European culture thanks to the power of this technology. For a more comprehensive understanding of this particular variety of opera, it is therefore necessary to describe the ‘machine’ in all its economic and political ramifications (that is to say, its ramifications in Parisian life and its relations with the French state) and also its cultural and moral ramifications (especially with censorship). In the nineteenth century, opera became the vehicle for both aesthetic and moral values indissolubly linked with the environment from which they sprang. Grand opera was born and grew up within a particular historical, institutional and legislative situation.

Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) established a strong but embattled reputation as a composer of grand opera, particularly through his first and most enduring work in the genre, La Juive. Although he wrote popular opéras comiques, two- and three-act operas, choral works, and the occasional ballet, Halévy's six five-act grand operas engendered the most prestige in his day, and played a substantial role in solidifying the genre. After the overwhelming success of La luive in 1835, Halévy composed, with various collaborators, Guido et Ginevra, ou la Peste de Florence (1838), La Reine de Chypre (1841), Charles VI (1843), Le Juif errant (1852) and La Magicienne (1858). In the judgement of Richard Wagner, who was among the composer's partisans, the essence of Halévy's inspiration lay not in comic opera but in the ‘pathos of high tragédie lyrique’. Another writer, although disparaging of both composer and genre, viewed Halevy an ideal creator of grand opera, who ‘gave himself body and soul to the mise-en-scène, the dramatic magnificence and the pomp, which he understands … better than anyone in the world'.

Before La Juive propelled the thirty-five-year-old Halévy to critical acclaim and membership of the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts and the Légion d'honneur, his skills had been well nurtured and honoured at the Paris Conservatoire as both student and teacher, and as professional musician of the theatre. As accompanist at the Théâtre Italien from 1826, then assistant chef de chant at the Opéra from 1829 to 1833 and, at the death of Hérold, main chef de chant from 1833 to 1840, the composer learned invaluable lessons about vocal sonorities and capacities, operatic conventions and effective collaboration with singers.

On 28 March 1884 Fibich's The Bride of Messina (Nevěsta Messinská – designated a ‘tragic opera’, but a music drama in all but name) was premièred in the nearly new Czech National Theatre, recently risen phoenix-like from the devastating fire of 1881 that had closed it only days after its long-awaited opening (see Fig. 28 opposite). Two days later there was a performance of Dvořák's four-act, grand opera Dimitrij, which had been premièred two years before in the latter days of the old Provisional Theatre. The Bride of Messina limped on for five performances in 1884 and a further two in 1885 to dwindling houses; by contrast, Dvořák's Dimitrij, which had run for fifteen performances in 1882 and 1883, was given twenty times in its revised version over a two-year period and by the end of the century was one of the most frequently performed of all non-comic Czech operas. The fact that Dimitrij filled the theatre while The Bride of Messina gradually emptied it tells us much about contemporary taste. Few if any Czech operas from the national revival (dating, loosely speaking, from the opening of the Prague Provisional Theatre on 18 November 1862) were more ideologically conceived than Fibich's Bride. The libretto was by Otakar Hostinský, one of Prague's foremost musical theoreticians and academics, a fine amateur artist, a man of letters and a well-known writer on aesthetics; the music was by the most evidently intellectual Czech composer of the day, the husband of one of the National Theatre company's most respected singers, Betty Fibichová, and the darling of Prague's Czech-speaking chattering classes.

Shifting perspectives

Among the most long-lasting cultural effects of the French Revolution was a sense among the population of Europe of separation from its past. By and large, the eighteenth century experienced continuity with the past, in particular an affinity with the values of classical civilisation, but after the depredations of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, ‘all that had gone before seemed to belong to a world forever lost’. The consequence of this alienation from the past was not, however, the embracing of an exclusively modernist culture. On the contrary, at no time in European history have the forms, styles, and modes of the past been so assiduously cultivated as they were in the hundred years following the Revolution. In all phases of artistic activity, the past was recaptured and preserved, partly to deny its loss, partly to escape from the realities of contemporary life. The nineteenth century also identified with history periods that either offered parallels to unstable aspects of its own social and political life or reflected values important to contemporary society.

The historicist tendency that so characterises post-revolutionary culture had already begun to reveal itself in eighteenth-century Europe in, for example, the pre-Romantic movements of Gothicism in England and Sturm und Drang in Germany. In Paris too there were signs in the latter half of the eighteenth century that theatres were beginning to break away from the conventions of classical scenography in the cause of greater realism.

The familiar story of Russian opera in the nineteenth century begins in 1836, when the first performance of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar inaugurated Russian nationalism in music, and at the same time gave Russia its first all-sung opera. After this brief flash, two dark decades followed, when Russian audiences were distracted by the superficial brilliance of Italian opera, until a succession of powerful operas by Musorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky established Russia as a nation with a great operatic culture of its own. Such was the account provided by Soviet writers, and such is the account that has largely been accepted in the West. But this conflicts violently with events on the Russian stage during the nineteenth century, when many operas left out of the account enjoyed commercial success and critical prestige and, conversely, the operas figuring in the account were often failures in their earlier productions. The present canon of nineteenth-century Russian opera certainly owes little to the perceptions of nineteenth-century Russian audiences, critics and musicians.

Le Prophète

As he put the finishing touches on the vocal score of Les Huguenots in May 1836 Meyerbeer was already anxious, as he told his wife, to begin work as soon as possible on a third grand opera ‘in order to plant my dramatic system … on indestructible pillars’. Initially Scribe proposed an opera dealing with the career of John of Leyden, the infamous Anabaptist leader of Münster, but eventually this idea was rejected, probably because of the unsuitability of the principal roles to the current company at the Opéra. Instead, in May 1837, Meyerbeer commissioned Scribe to write the libretto of an opera called L'Africaine, a sprawling romantic tale set in Spain and darkest Africa with an intervening act on the high seas. Meyerbeer may have started composing the music, but if so he came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1838 after his friend Germain Delavigne warned him that the libretto was fatally flawed. His confidence badly shaken, the composer laid L'Africaine aside and in August signed a contract with Scribe for Le Prophète. Scribe's principal source was a passage in Voltaire's Essai sur les mæurs, recounting how in 1534 John (Jean) of Leyden (1509–36) established himself in grand style as prophet-king of Münster, espoused communism and polygamy, and withstood the attacks of his enemies until finally betrayed by his confederates. Around these bare facts the librettist wove an imaginary intrigue involving Jean's fiancée (Berthe), his mother (Fidès), three Anabaptist leaders who lead him astray (Zacharie, Jonas and Mathisen), and a lecherous nobleman who abducts Berthe (Oberthal). Laid out in four acts in deference to a short-lived fear that the Parisian public had tired of five-act operas, the libretto was soon rearranged in five acts, following the original plan of 1836.

There is no more astonishing evidence of the power of grand opera than A Life for the Tsar, first given at St Petersburg in 1836. Glinka's extraordinary genius was able to exploit most of the elements we still recognise in the genre: historical crisis, a personal tragedy, regional character (focused through musical local colour), active choruses, dance, and political imperatives refracted from the distant past towards the composer's present. Yet in 1836 grand opera was still a new phenomenon, originating in Paris. Glinka's opera clearly demonstrates that this genre rose to worldwide importance in the decade following Beethoven's death in 1827. Alongside contemporary advances in piano music – Chopin, Liszt, Schumann – grand opera was probably the most significant musical development of the 1830s and 1840s.

Because of its various musical challenges and Tsar-centred narrative, Glinka's opera was harder to export than those grand operas showing more nuanced leading figures, but the fact remains that this masterpiece dates from the same year as the more widely exported Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer. Had Carl Maria von Weber lived longer and written German equivalents to A Life for the Tsar, the ‘map’ in Table 1.1 would have required less emphasis than it presently does. As this book shows, the genre of grand opera (taken as a nexus of properties: dramatic, formal, vocal) was sufficiently powerful to continue developing in time and space: through the 1840s and beyond, and across an increasing number of countries.

The chorus puts the ‘grand’ into grand opera. In Act III of Les Troyens, when Berlioz moves the action from Troy to Carthage, he establishes the grandeur of Carthage by joining a supplementary chorus to the regular house chorus, so that there are ‘two or three hundred voices, men, women, and children’ to sing the National Song, ‘Gloire, gloire à Didon’ (Ex. 5.1). Beyond sheer size of chorus, it can be choral complexity that makes grand opera grand, as in the third-act finale of Les Huguenots, when the Catholic newly-weds, Valentine de Saint-Bris and the Comte de Nevers, are joined by dancing gypsies and a five-part mixed chorus of wedding guests as they make their way from the bank of the Seine on to a festive wedding boat, where a band is playing for them. These festive sounds make themselves heard against the very different sounds of the ongoing sectarian dispute emanating from the shore: the solo voices of the Catholic queen and of Valentine's disappointed Huguenot suitor Raoul and the choral voices of seigneurs of both faiths, as well as Catholic students (a two-part chorus of tenors) and Huguenot soldiers (a two-part chorus of basses) (Ex. 5.2).

These two numbers push the resources even of grand opera to their limits. Berlioz was dreaming, and he knew it: in the score of Les Troyens (a work he composed with no promise of performance) he allowed in a footnote that ‘the supplementary chorus is not obligatory’. And even the score of Les Huguenots, which Meyerbeer wrote to order for what he called the (immense resources' of the Paris Opera, shows where a cut was made to the Act III finale in the original Paris production.

Grand opera and opera-ballo

The formative phase of post-Verdian grand opera spanned more than twenty years. Among its earliest notable works was Mefistofele by Arrigo Boito (1868): provocative and iconoclastic, this opera swept away many rules or ‘formulas’ (as its composer disparagingly called them) of traditional opera. This explains why its first performance at La Scala, Milan was a complete failure. However, Italian assimilation of French grand opera had already matured as a result of three factors: aesthetic discussions in the press, vigorous publishing and promotion policies by the firms of Ricordi and Lucca, and various theatre managements open to new European products. This assimilation can be traced back several decades. The writing of (grand operas' continued into the early 1890s, as shown in Table 19.1. The last of these works are contemporary with the first attempts at a new genre, one which was to be an antithesis in many (but not all) of its attributes: ‘verismo’ opera. Verismo's dramatic norms were instead based on narrative concision, unobtrusive structure and the absence of dance.

Among the last Italian grand operas were Cristoforo Colombo (1892) by Alberto Franchetti, based on the adventures of the discoverer of the New World; and I Medici (1893) by Ruggero Leoncavallo, actually the first part of an unfinished operatic trilogy on the Italian Renaissance entitled, with deliberate Wagnerian echoes, Crepusculum. In Cristoforo Colombo the grandiose scale, with crowd scenes, dances and pezzi concertati in Acts III and IV, was prompted by a particular festive occasion: the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America.

Thus Wagner begins his account of Tannhäuser's rough treatment at the hands of the Parisians. His well-publicised frustration over the director's insistence that a ballet be added to this work, and his bitterness over the opera's rude reception by the ballet-mad Jockey Club, might lead one to believe that all ballet in Parisian opera of his day was imposed artificially from without. Yet it makes far more sense to regard the French insistence on creating ballets within grand opera as nothing more than an extension of the well-entrenched Baroque custom of mixing dancing and singing (in various proportions) within a single work. Indeed, opera and ballet had always gone hand in hand at the Opéra.

Ballet's vital role at the Paris Opéra in the nineteenth century was far from restricted, however, to the dances that were woven into grand operas. The same great ballet-masters who created choreographies for operas also created independent ballet-pantomimes, dramatic pieces from which singers were excluded, and which told a complete story in dance and mime. Without understanding ballet-pantomime, we cannot fully understand the role of dance in grand opera, because the latter absorbed so many elements from the former. Such narrative works had first appeared at the Opéra in the eighteenth century after a handful of reform-minded choreographers, such as Gasparo Angiolini and Jean-Georges Noverre (already active in London, Vienna, and elsewhere), had insisted that ballet could flourish not only in opera, but as a self-sufficient dramatic genre.

Robert le Diable

The origins of Robert le Diable

Meyerbeer came to be considered one of the foremost composers in Italy towards the end of the 1820s, especially after the international triumph of his Italian opera Il crociato in Egitto (Venice, 1824; Théâtre Italien, Paris, 1825). Goethe, for instance, did not think anyone but Meyerbeer could set his Faust to music: ‘Mozart should have composed Faust. Meyerbeer would perhaps be capable; but he would not touch anything of the kind; he is too much engaged with the Italian theatres.’ Not surprisingly, Meyerbeer attracted the interest of the French too; since Piccinni's time down to the era of Spontini and Rossini they had always been able to attract the leading Italian operatic composers. Though initial contacts with Meyerbeer had been made by the director of the Paris Opéra in 1823, it was Guilbert de Pixérécourt, at that time director of the Théâtre Royal de l'Opéra Comique, who in 1826 offered him a commission for a three-act opéra comique. Because Pixérécourt relinquished his post the year after, nothing came of the plan. But this marked the start of intense collaboration between Meyerbeer and Eugéne Scribe, who was to remain the composer's chief librettist for the remainder of his life.

The original libretto of what was to become the nineteenth century's most frequently performed and highly rated opera, given at the most far-flung theatres, was the fruit of collaboration between Eugène Scribe and Germain Delavigne, who was responsible for the first sketches. He borrowed the title Robert Ie Diable from a Breton legend well known since the eighteenth century thanks to its inclusion in 'la Bibliotheque bleue' (cheap blue-covered books sold by hawkers) and through a host of subsequent melodrame and vaudeville adaptations.

Late grand opera: Massenet's Le Cid

In his review of the world première of Jules Massenet's Le Cid (1885) at the Opéra, the critic Victor Wilder took the composer to task for smothering Corneille's tragedy ‘with all the spices customarily used to season that indigestible dish called grand opera’. Wilder listed the ingredients he detected: religious scene, formal ballet (‘for the enjoyment of abonnés [subscribers] who arrive late’), Moorish dancing girls in a military camp, the fantastic apparition of St James, warrior chorus ‘in the manner of the Marseillaise’, and ‘inevitable’ procession. Characteristically meticulous about the latter, the libretto lists its participants: six seigneurs, six ladies in waiting, six pages for the king, six pages for the Infante, two officers, eight Moorish chieftains … and on it goes. ‘What more could the most exacting abonné want?’ asked Wilder, ‘A cardinal, perhaps?’ A swipe at Halévy's La Juive, premièred fifty years before at the same house, highlighted the generic colours of Massenet's work.

Besides spectacle, Wilder might also have noted Massenet's skill at creating rapid action sequences and manipulating the sharp contrasts and spatial effects essential to grand opera. One instance is the scene in Act II where Chimène discovers that her beloved Rodrigue has killed her father, the Comte de Gormas. Here events from the opera's literary antecedents (Guillén de Castro's Las Mocedades del Cid and its latter reworking by Pierre Corneille as Le Cid) are considerably compressed and melodramatically embellished.

Scribe and the term ‘grand opera’

As we saw on p. 3, ‘grand opera’ is not a generic term with secure historical credentials. Since William Crosten's book French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (1948) it has gained currency in musicology for a not very precisely definable subspecies of nineteenth-century opera that is French and influenced by France. From the late 1820s, long before the emergence of the generic paradigm, librettists and composers did, according to Anselm Gerhard, use the term to ‘characterise individual works’, but not very systematically. In 1803, for instance, when Henri Berton dedicated his Aline, reine de Golconde to Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, he referred to the ageing Monsigny's 1766 setting of the same libretto as follows: ‘With your tuneful songs you enriched the poem La Reine de Golconde, grand opera’. In fact, the older work had been designated as a ballet héroïque and as an opéra. Critics of Auber's operas at their first performances did not use the generic label ‘grand opera’; nor did Scribe and Auber when their works were printed. It is, however, found in a number of Scribe's manuscript librettos for five-act operas such as Le Prophète and Noëma (intended for Meyerbeer and containing elements that were reused in L'Enfant prodigue), for four-act operas such as Dom Sébastien (set by Donizetti), for one-acters such as La Tapisserie or for the adaptation of Auber's opéra comique Le Cheval de bronze as a three-act opera-ballet for the Opéra.

Introduction

Verdi's publisher, Léon Escudier, nicknamed the Paris Opéra the ‘grande boutique’ (‘big shop’, but with pejorative undertones), an appellation that the composer cheerfully adopted. Of all the Italian composers who wrote for the Opéra during this period, Verdi had the most mixed feelings about the institution and the requirements for success. Yet even he felt obliged, at times against his inclination, to try to meet the challenge, and even after he no longer wished to compose for it, wanted to stay up-to-date about developments there.

Why was Paris, and specifically this theatre, such a magnet for musiciens transalpins, ‘musicians from the other side of the Alps’, as the French called them? Even before Spontini's arrival in 1803 (see Chapter 1) Antonio Sacchini and Antonio Salieri scored major triumphs in Paris before the Revolution; several of their works – notably Dardanus (1784) and Ædipe à Colone (1786) by the former, and Tarare (1787) by the latter – were performed well into the nineteenth century. Success in Paris after the Restoration of 1815 brought substantial financial advantages. Composers were assured of continuing honoraria for every performance at the Opéra (unlike the situation in Italy – not yet politically united – during the first half of the nineteenth century). The thriving music publishing industry provided another important source of revenue, since resident composers’ rights were protected by law. The sheer size of the Opéra's establishment was an attraction and a challenge. Finally, Paris was the literary capital of Europe.

The ‘first’ grand opera, La Muette de Portici, has been remembered since its première in 1828 for its revolutionary sentiments: the depiction of a violent but unsuccessful revolt in seventeenth-century Naples, resonant with the events of 1789. Two years later it was performed following the successful July Revolution in Paris and it apparently sparked the Belgian revolt against the Dutch in the same year, which resulted in the independence of Belgium. Thereafter it was regularly recognised in France as a symbol of national spirit, during such events as the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. At this same moment, Wagner famously associated the opera with subsequent political events, recalling how ‘[La Muette], whose very representations had brought [revolts] about, was recognised as the obvious theatrical precursor of the July Revolution, and seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection with a world-event’. More than a century after Wagner, Jane Fulcher commenced her book on the political role of opera in nineteenth-century Paris with an assessment of La Muette as a dangerous and seditious work with a populist message.

Yet, in spite of the undoubted turbulence in Paris in 1828, it was not the political aspect of the opera that exercised its first audiences and critics, but rather its mute heroine. This is shown not only by the reports of the Opéra's literary committee and by newspaper reviews, but also by the unprecedented response of various state-funded and commercially run theatres in the city.

‘The devil who steals Peter Schlemihl's shadow’

In an 1841 puff piece on the soprano sensation of the moment, Sofia Loewe, Henri Blaze de Bury related that Giacomo Meyerbeer had recently become so infatuated with Loewe's voice that he had gone religiously to hear her sing in Berlin, hiding himself behind the curtains of a loge and noting down details of her technique, hoping to cast her in his next opera. Blaze de Bury concluded:

The vaguely sinister image of the composer scribbling furiously in the obscure depths of his opera box is given an extra uncanny tinge by the allusion to Peter Schlemihl, a folk character immortalised in an 1814 novella by Adalbert Chamisso, who sells his shadow (in reality, his soul) to the devil in exchange for limitless wealth.