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Meyerbeer, in a far corner, was still on the trail of his sensation. He thought that he might get an article out of it with the help of Count Ploare and Zoug-Zoug. Who was Zoug-Zoug? He exulted in her picturesqueness, and he determined to lie in wait. He thought it a pity that Comte Ploare was not an Englishman or an American; but it couldn't be helped.
Besides these additions he had written the words which Barbier and Carré should have done. The rehearsals were tedious. Meyerbeer wanted Faure and Madame Carvalho in the leading rôles but one was at the Opéra-Comique and the other at her own house, the Théâtre-Lyrique. The work went back and forth from the Place Favart to the Place du Châtelet.
A beautiful opera, not like Meyerbeer, nor even quite Mozart, but, in its way, perhaps even more lovely; something classical and of the Golden Age about it, chaste and mellow, and the Ravogli 'almost worthy of the old days' highest praise he could bestow.
For this coterie Rossini and Meyerbeer were suspects, intruders, who must be repulsed at any cost. The government had the good sense to take no account of this ridiculous opposition, which refused to recognize that art should be cosmopolitan. Before seeing his name on the bills of our first lyric stage, Rossini required no less than nine years of patience.
No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti.
She even visited his wife occasionally, and gave gifts to his children; and the mother trusted her and told her her trials. And so the thing went on, and the people talked. As we said, she turned her eyes to Gaston's box. Instantly they became riveted, and then a deep flush swept slowly up her face and burned into her splendid hair. Meyerbeer was watching through his opera-glasses.
In the nineteenth century it was no longer necessary to be a born pattern designer in sound to be a composer. One had but to be a dramatist or a poet completely susceptible to the dramatic and descriptive powers of sound. A race of literary and theatrical musicians appeared; and Meyerbeer, the first of them, made an extraordinary impression.
Bertram disappears, and the scene changes to the cathedral, where Isabella in her wedding robes awaits the saved Robert. From the musical point of view "Robert le Diable" is interesting, as it marks the beginning of a new school of grand opera. With this work, Meyerbeer abandoned the school of Rossini and took an independent course.
Meyerbeer was, then, excusable to a certain extent, but he abused all indulgence in such matters. In order to preserve intact his musical forms even in recitatives, which are, as a matter of fact, only declamation set to music he accented the weak syllables and vice versa; he added words and made unnecessarily false verse, and transformed bad verse into worse prose. He might have avoided all these literary abominations without any harm to the effect by a slight modification of the music. The verses given to musicians were often very bad, for that was the fashion. The versifier thought he had done his duty by his collaborator by giving him verses like this: Triomphe que j'aime! Ta frayeur extrême Va malgré toi-même Te livrer
Louis XIV practiced it; Napoleon I perfected it; and Napoleon III had till then pursued it in the same spirit with singular success. In Paris, in July, 1870, the war was brought out like an opera of Meyerbeer. One felt one's self a supernumerary hired to fill the scene.
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