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Updated: May 17, 2025
The thought that they might meet again in the small apartment of the Rue Spontini was so painful to her that she discarded it at once. She preferred to think that an unforeseen event would prevent their meeting again the end of the world, for example.
The influence of Gluck was not confined to Cherubini, but was hardly less manifest in molding the style and conceptions of Méhul and Spontini,* who held prominent places in the history of the French opera. * It is a little singular that some of the most distinguished names in the annals of French music were foreigners.
Spontini, who was then the musical autocrat of Berlin, conceived a violent dislike to her, and his bitter nature expressed itself in severe and ungenerous sarcasms.
Literature and art alternate with politics: we have now a sketch of George Sand or a description of one of Horace Vernet’s pictures; now a criticism of Victor Hugo or of Liszt; now an irresistible caricature of Spontini or Kalkbrenner; and occasionally the predominant satire is relieved by a fine saying or a genial word of admiration.
Unlike Méhul and Spontini, with whom in point of style and method Halévy must be associated, he was not in any direct sense a disciple of Gluck, but inherited the influence of the latter through his great successor Cherubini, of whom Halévy was the favorite pupil and the intimate friend.
The Germans themselves were contentedly jogging on with the hybrid music of Spontini, Bellini, Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn; and Wagner never tired of telling them to create an art of their own, or really he would have to do it for them. He did as well as talked and wrote; he produced the nearest thing he could find to pure German opera for instance, Marschner's Adolph von Nassau in 1845.
Anna Milder, who had been a lady's maid, but became a famous singer and married a rich jeweller and quarrelled with Beethoven and with Spontini, was a sort of muse to Schubert, sang his songs in public, and gave him much advice. Mary Pachler was a friend of Beethoven's, and after his death seems to have turned her friendship to Schubert, with great happiness to him.
'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.
Afterward Weber would groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?" In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischütz," in which Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two, was forced into a dramatic comparison.
Spontini, the famous composer of the "Vestals," whose score he had dedicated to the Empress Josephine, remained after her divorce a true and devoted admirer of the empress; and in Malmaison, as well as in the castle of Navarra, he showed himself as faithful, as ready to serve, as submissive, as he had once been in the Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, in the days of Josephine's glory.
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