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Madame Wesendonck has given me a gold pen of indestructible power, which has once more turned me into a caligraphic pedant. The scores will be my most perfect masterpiece of caligraphy. One cannot fly from his destiny. Meyerbeer years ago admired nothing so much in my scores as the neat writing. This act of admiration has been my curse; I must write neat scores as long as I live in this world.
Besides the great works already discussed, Meyerbeer wrote two works for the Opéra Comique, 'L'Étoile du Nord' and 'Le Pardon de Ploërmel. Meyerbeer was far too clever a man to undertake anything he could not carry through successfully, and in these operas he caught the trick of French opéra comique very happily.
Meyerbeer, who had not yet discovered his man, though he had a pretty scandal well-nigh brewed. Count Ploare was no more, Gaston Belward was. Zoug-Zoug was in the country at Fontainebleau, working at his picture. He had left on the morning after Gaston discovered Andree. He had written, asking his nephew to come for some final sittings.
On its decorative side, it was the same phenomenon in music as the Baroque school in architecture: an energetic struggle to enliven organic decay by mechanical oddities and novelties. Meyerbeer was no symphonist.
On the 26th of July, 1859, Meyerbeer conducted the work himself at Covent Garden, London, with Mme. Miolan-Carvalho as Dinorah, and it was also produced in the same year in English by the Pyne-Harrison troupe. The first representative of Dinorah in this country was Mlle. Cordier.
Speaking of an infant child, our composer would say merrily, "That boy will be a true Mozart, for he always cries in the very key in which I am playing." Mozart's musical greatness, shown in the symmetry of his art as well as in the richness of his inspirations, has been unanimously acknowledged by his brother composers. Meyerbeer could not restrain his tears when speaking of him.
As an artist I cannot exist before myself and my friends, I cannot think or feel, without realizing and confessing my absolute antagonism to Meyerbeer, and to this I am driven with genuine desperation when I meet with the erroneous opinion even amongst my friends that I have anything in common with Meyerbeer.
The first performance of his Prophet had been preceded by the customary diner de la veille, and when Berlioz excused himself for staying away, Meyerbeer first reproached him tenderly, then challenged him to make good the great injustice he had done him, by writing 'a real nice article' about his opera.
'Rienzi, the next in order of Wagner's operas, was written on the lines of French opera. Wagner hoped to see it performed in Paris, and throughout the score he kept the methods of Meyerbeer and Spontini consistently in his mind's eye. There is very little attempt at characterisation, but the opportunities for spectacular display are many and various.
He had unbounded confidence in his own ability, and what increased his hopes of a Parisian success, was that he had already completed two acts of a grand historic opera, "Rienzi," based on Bulwer's novel, and written in the sensational and spectacular style of Meyerbeer.
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