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Updated: June 25, 2025
But perhaps the most wonderful exhibition of her vocal skill and pliancy and of her active intimacy with nature was in the Trio Concertante, with two flutes, from Meyerbeer's 'Camp of Silesia. Exquisitely her voice played in echo between the tasteful flute-warblings of Messrs. Kyle and Siede.
'Les Huguenots' shows Meyerbeer at his best Even Wagner, his bitterest enemy, admitted the dramatic power of the great duet in the fourth act, and several other scenes are scarcely inferior to it in sustained inspiration. The opera is marred as a whole by Meyerbeer's invincible self-consciousness. He seldom had the courage to give his genius full play.
He was obliged to admit quite frankly that the expectations I had cherished as to the result of Meyerbeer's recommendation to him would not come to anything. He said there was no likelihood of my getting a commission for a composition, even of a light opera, for the next seven years, as his already existing contracts extended over that period.
But despite the fact that Meyerbeer's operas contain such strange scenes as phantom nuns dancing, girls bathing, sunrise, skating, gunpowder explosions, a king playing the flute, and the prima donna leading a goat, dramatic music owes to him new accents of genuine pathos and an addition to its resources of rendering passionate emotions.
"Douarnenez, for Audierne, Brittany," was the legend written in Meyerbeer's note-book. And after that: "Journey twenty hours change at Rennes, Redon, and Quimpere." "Too far. I've enough for now," said Meyerbeer, chuckling, as he walked away. "But I'd give five hundred dollars to know who Zoug-Zoug is. I'll make another try." So he held his sensation back for a while yet.
The first act, interpreted according to the taste of the Quiquendonians, had occupied an entire evening of the first week of the month. Another evening in the second week, prolonged by infinite andantes, had elicited for the celebrated singer a real ovation. His success had been still more marked in the third act of Meyerbeer's masterpiece.
Though the plot of "L'Africaine" is often absurd, many of its incidents preposterous, and some of its characters unattractive, the opera is full of effective situations, and repeatedly illustrates Meyerbeer's powers of realization and his knowledge of effects. Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born at Salzburg, Jan. 27, 1756.
The last twelve years of Meyerbeer's life were spent, with the exception of brief residences in Germany and Italy, in Paris, the city of his adoption, where all who were distinguished in art and letters paid their court to him. When he was seized with his fatal illness he was hard at work on "L'Africaine," for which Scribe had also furnished the libretto.
Weber, indeed, always looked upon Meyerbeer's Italian operas as a sad falling away from grace, and in a letter written to his brother, Godefroy, the fourth of the little group of Darmstadt students, says, "Meyerbeer has promised on his return to Berlin to write a German opera. God be praised for it! I appealed strongly to his conscience in the matter."
The testimony of Dr. Véron, who was manager of the Grand Opera during the most of the composer's brilliant career, is of great interest, as illustrating this trait of Meyerbeer's composition. He tells us in his "Mémoires," before alluded to, that "Robert" was made and remade before its final production.
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