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Updated: June 25, 2025
The other day he said to me, "Cousin Lillie, I will take you out for a walk in recess." I said, "Nothing I should like better, but I can't go." "Why not?" said he. "Because I must go and be a beggar." "What do you mean?" he asked. "I mean that there is a duet that Mrs. Agassiz favors just now, from Meyerbeer's 'Le Prophete, where she is beggar number one and I am beggar number two." He laughed.
I believe, however, that recent improvements have averted this disaster in a certain measure, and that there is now a place for the drums. But we shall never hear the six harps again. We must say something of the genesis of Meyerbeer's works, for in many instances this was curious and few people know about it.
In that week, by whistling to him in my leisure hours, I taught him to perform almost perfectly that lively aria of Meyerbeer's, 'Folle è quei che l'oro aduna, and also to mimic beautifully the chirping of a cricket. Well, I sent Don Juan out, and received due information of his safe arrival. The medicine acted like a charm.
For my own part, if one pleasurable sensation, besides that received from Parepa's singing, distinguished itself from the rest, it was that given by the performance of the exquisite Coronation March from Meyerbeer's "Prophet;" but I say this under protest of the pleasure taken in the choral rendering of the "Star-Spangled Banner."
So I was again forced to enter into negotiations with the Tuileries about the letting of the Opera House and its orchestra free of charge. By this means I hoped to penetrate into the presence of Meyerbeer's admirer, the unapproachable and terrible Minister of State.
Later he discovers that a plot against himself has been hatched by some of the Anabaptist leaders, and he destroys himself and them by blowing up the palace of Munster. Meyerbeer's music, fine as much of it is, suffers chiefly from the character of the libretto. The latter is merely a string of conventionally effective scenes, and the music could hardly fail to be disjointed and scrappy.
Thirty years ago this campaign was mentably ascribed to the professional jealousy of a disappointed rival. Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously.
His four years of study at this time were also years of activity in creative experiment, as he composed four operas. His first opera of note was "Rienzi," with which he went to Paris in 1837. In spite of Meyerbeer's efforts in its favor, this work was rejected, and laid aside for some years.
So, as his little money was speedily gone, he had to live for a while on what his relatives and friends could give him, and afterwards by what he could earn by writing for Schlesinger's Gazette Musicale. This is what Meyerbeer's introductions were worth. However, he found and made friends, some, though not all, as poor as himself.
Though this great work excited transports of enthusiasm in Paris, it was interdicted in many of the cities of Southern Europe on account of the subject being a disagreeable one to ardent and bigoted Catholics. In London it has always been the most popular of Meyerbeer's three great operas, owing perhaps partly to the singing of Mario and Grisi, and more lately of Titiens and Giuglini.
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