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.

At the end of the Viking Age the establishment of three separate Nordic kingdoms hardly seemed a self-evident course of future events. The prospect of direct Danish rule over most of southern Scandinavia, combined with an indirect overlordship of other parts of the region, must have appeared at least as likely. Yet, in the course of the early Middle Ages the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden came to comprise most of their later territories on the Scandinavian peninsula and developed far enough for their survival to be secured. During the same period Christianity was firmly established in all Scandinavian-speaking communities and its Church reached the organisational stage where bishops ruled territorial bishoprics from permanent sees with cathedrals, monastic institutions were firmly established, and payment of tithe was being introduced. From the beginning of the twelfth century the Nordic churches were also organised as a separate church province under the supremacy of the archbishop of Lund (Part II).

All this does not mean that the political and ecclesiastical situation was stable at the onset of the high Middle Ages in the mid-twelfth century. The three kingdoms lacked centralised systems of government and their unity was seriously threatened by dynastic rivalry and succession disputes. In Iceland the original distribution of power among numerous chieftains within an all-embracing community of laws was in the process of being disrupted by the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of prominent families whose leaders ruled territorial lordships. As a separate legal entity on a smaller scale, the archipelago of Føroyar seems to have been dominated by chieftains and large landowners.

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.

The word ‘Scandinavia’ first occurs in the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder (d. AD 79), in the form of Scadinavia or Scatinavia. In later manuscripts of this work an n was added in the first syllable and the name became Scandinavia, as it still is. Pliny used the name to denote what he believed to be a large island in the Baltic. As the basis for his original Latin version of the name, a Germanic form *Skapin-aujō or *Skaðin-aujō has been reconstructed. The last part of this compound, meaning ‘land on the water’ or ‘island’, causes no difficulty, but the interpretation of the first element is disputed. Half a score of conjectures have been suggested. One of the more plausible ones, accepted by some of the leading scholars in the field, is that the first part is derived from the Germanic stem of *skaðan – ‘danger, damage’. Scandinavia would then originally mean ‘the dangerous land on the water’ or ‘the dangerous island’.

Pliny also refers to a group of islands in the north called Scandiae. In the following century they reappear in the geographical writings of Ptolemy. He places the four islands of Skandiai east of Jylland (Jutland) and singles out the largest and most easterly as the proper Skandia. This is clearly Skåne (Scania), the southernmost region of present-day Sweden, and the territory north of it; the other three and smaller Skandiai would be Danish islands. It appears, then, that Pliny’s Scadinavia was also one of the islands which he called Scandiae.