‘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.