Topics

I tried to download this, but became suspicious of the extra goodies which were bundled with it, and went to the YouTube recording instead. Despite my stopping the download, one or two pieces of adware have installed themselves: jdj.openmace and the Bandoo Media Movies Toolbar. These may or may not be linked. Kaspersky Antivirus doesn't regard them as threats, but various sites on the Web do. If I try to uninstall the Movies Toolbar through Control Panel, I am directed to Bandoo Media's proprietary uninstallation program, of which I am naturally wary. Is any Draeseke fan also adept in removing malware?

Mangold's Tanhäuser is to be performed in Annaberg next year: http://www.winterstein-theater.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=213&Itemid=435. I see that there was a performance in Darmstadt in 2006, but I can't find any link to a recording thereof. Does anyone know of one?

The ranking of Victorian composers in the Frederic Cowen thread made me think of Edward German. Although his operettas date from the reign of Edward VII, the greater part of his oeuvre was produced in the reign of Victoria.

Twenty years ago, when my daughter started piano lessons, I recommenced them myself, in order to get Grade 8. Our teacher was Mrs Winifred German, niece-in-law of Sir Edward. Since Sir Edward's real name was Edward German Jones, I think her late husband had changed his name as an act of piety.

Mrs German and her husband had received half the great man's possessions, including some manuscripts, which she had recently sold to the Pforzheimer. The other half--including more manuscripts--had gone to another relative and, she said, been destroyed in a house fire.

Although the MSS had gone, there were many physical mementoes of Sir Edward's career: most impressively, a large silver bowl presented to him by (I think) the Lyceum in appreciation of the music he provided for their productions. Another relic was Sir Alexander Mackenzie's autobiography, dedicated in to Sir Edward in Mackenzie's hand. There was also oral tradition. On one occasion, Mrs German started animatedly to tell me how beastly W. S. Gilbert had been to Sir Edward, but the phone rang and the story was never finished.

I of course became interested in German's music. There wasn't at that stage much available on CD, but she had private recordings which I borrowed. The music is uneven. The 6/8 pastoral mode can become a bit mechanical, though there are good pieces. At his best, however, he seems to me to be very good indeed. I particularly admire the incidental music to Romeo and Juliet. There's a real musical sense of the unfulfillable in the Prelude , and this piece, in particular, reveals him to be a man who can create a large musical structure out of long-evolving and beautiful melodies, with a capacity for symphonic thought that one would not have expected from the better known works. The Pastorale is an outstanding example of German in his melancholy pastoral mode. Haunting modulations, and a breathtaking melodic surprise about 90 seconds into the piece. This, for me, is a benchmark of music that is unjustly neglected (as opposed to merely neglected). How stupid that one has to buy two different CD anthologies in order to get all the Romeo and Juliet music.

Although it marks a retreat from German's best work, Merrie England seems to me worthy of more attention than it currently receives, and I'm pleased to see that there were some revivals in Jubilee year. Tom and Ben are an embarrassment, but there is some very strong music. It's not quite Gloriana but, despite her great aria, the portrayal of Elizabeth I is not quite as idealized as one would expect.

One thing which Mrs German didn't have was a recording of the Norwich symphony. I realize that I have never heard this, and have ordered it from Amazon.

I've been curious about Meyerbeer for over fifty years, and have taken every opportunity to satisfy my curiosity: listening to the 1963 BBC broadcast of L'Africaine, buying the Sutherland-Bonynge Huguenots as soon as it came out in 1970, and travelling 200 miles for the 1972 concert performance of Il Crociato in London (I far more recently saw the staging in Venice). I now have recordings of eight of his operas. Yet the satisfaction of my curiosity has brought increasing disappointment with the music.

The first Meyerbeer piece I ever heard--only retrospectively identified--was the Patineurs waltz, which was used as the signature tune for the early 1950s children's programme Mr and Mrs Mumbo. I still love that tune, with its lop-sided lugubriousness. The second piece was the coronation march from Le Prophète, which was in an old anthology of piano pieces in our piano stool. As I played through it as a fourteen-year-old, I remember thinking that the opening melody seemed artificially calculated rather than spontaneously invented, and that the conclusion of the piece bore no relation to the opening. This is still my view of about 70% of Meyerbeer's music. Only L'Africaine now seems to me to work in any sustained way. There are moments of enjoyable free invention in the Italian operas (I particularly like Emma di Resburgo), but--until L'Africaine--his invention seemed to get more and more short-winded and inhibited once he had moved to Paris. Most of Le Prophète is very feeble and trivial, and one can see why it made Wagner--who by then had written three of the four greatest operas so far produced in the nineteenth century--flip, even as one deplores the form that flipping took.

I'd seen a live Il Crociato and an amateur production of L'Étoile du Nord, but not one of the big Paris quartet, so I hoped that seeing Robert in a lavish production would finally make my love of Meyerbeer equal to my erstwhile curiosity about him. To give it the best chance possible, I bought a seat near the front of the stalls, which at least gave me a fetching view of the debauched nuns.

The plot of Robert le Diable has a strong central situation, which is sadly wasted through incoherence and dead ends, such as the episode of the magic branch, which leads nowhere. In its pitting an indecisive hero against an ambiguous demonic figure, and solving the conflict by the striking of a clock, the libretto recalls the far stronger one for Marschner's Der Vampyr (1828). Unfortunately, the director, instead of trying to rescue the situation, resorted to IRONY. As a result, my Row D seat gave me a close-up view not only of the nuns but of the silly facial expressions that the principals were at times obliged to adopt in order to convey IRONY. It was (I thought) a uniformly good musical performance, and the singers (grimaces apart) all looked their parts, but they deserved a better production. Arguably, they also deserved a better opera.

There is some good music. The prelude is evocative and there are spirited choruses in the opening scene. The bridal chorus in Act IV is charming, and 'Dieu tout puissant' really takes off, as (almost) does 'Robert, toi que j'aime'. There is a lively duet for Isabelle and Robert, and the seizing of Robert after he relinquishes the magic branch is fun. But alas for the remaining 70%. There is nothing memorable for the hero or villain, and the demonic dances and choruses are, uniformly, embarrassingly trivial. Covent Garden programmes are normally very good, but this one seemed to be padded with peripheral material. It was almost as though the opera could not generate a sufficient weight of relevant contextual commentary.

Yet, more than any other fallen or unrisen star (except, perhaps, Havergal Brian), Meyerbeer encourages hype from his champions. He's not merely a historically important figure who on that account merits occasional revival: he is great. Robert Letellier was at hand in the programme to declare just that, and to support his contention with some odd readings of the Meyerbeer libretti. Does L'Africaine really show 'the transcendence of the sacrificial self-offering of the redeeming heroine', as Letellier claims? I'm not au fait with the textual variants of this opera, but in the libretto I'm looking at (Paris, 1865) she approaches death in a state of drugged delusion: 'délire' and 'séduisante ivresse'. The ethereal chorus is a figment of her imagination ('que croit entendre Sélika dans son délire'). And then there is a chill awakening : 'C'était un songe!'--Vasco is not awaiting her in heaven but sailing away with another woman. Letellier seems to me to be cavalierly imposing on this ending the meaning he wants to be there.

Other justly eminent scholars seem to lose a sense of proportion where Meyerbeer is concerned. Thus, we are told that the motivic use of Senta's Ballad in The Flying Dutchman would be 'unthinkable' with the example of Robert, or that 'Act II of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg would never have existed without the model of Act III of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots.' Well, both acts contain a night watchman.

The advantage of such claims is that they can never be disproved. They also, however, produce an infinite regression. If Wagner needed the example of Meyerbeer in order to create his night watchman, whose example did Meyerbeer need in order to create his? And so on, back to the ark. Is the bridal chorus in Lohengrin unthinkable without the bridal chorus in Robert?

As for motivic reminiscence, I concede that it is used a lot in Robert, but importance is not merely a matter of feet and inches. One of the most dramatically profound early instances of motivic reminiscence occurs in a German opera of 1833. Early in the opera, a sidekick of the hero sings a misogynistic ballad about a beautiful woman who turns out to be an ugly old witch in diguise. Later, in a terrible moment, the hero curses the heroine, and as he does so the orchestra intones the melody of the misogynistic ballad: the cynicism of his comrade has been released from its latency in his own mind. This is a moment of psychological penetration far beyond Meyerbeer. The composer was, of course, Wagner; the opera, Die Feen. It postdates Robert by a couple of years, but no-one to my knowledge has suggested a debt to Meyerbeer. If the 19 year-old Wagner could do this, he didn't need any lessons in leitmotif from Meyerbeer.

One can admire Moscheles without equating him with Chopin, or Marschner (my favourite unsung composer) without equating him with Wagner, but for Meyerbeer fans it often seems to be all or nothing. Aut Caesar aut nullus. And perhaps it is absurdly excessive enthusiasm, such as Letellier's, that creates an extreme and opposite reaction. Some of the hostile press reviews of Meyerbeer's contribution to the evening were fun, but a bit OTT in their condemnation. For a particularly good example of unfair fun, see http://www.opera-britannia.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=829:robert-le-diable-royal-opera-6th-december-2012-&catid=8:opera-reviews&Itemid=16. I'd award this 70% for accuracy.