Giacomo Meyerbeer, Le Prophète (1849)
Conductor: Giuliano Carella
Principal Performers:

• John Osborn — Jean de Leyde
• Marianne Cornetti — Fidès
• Lynette Tapia — Berthe
• Aalto Theatre Opera Chorus
• Essener Philharmoniker

Label: Oehms Classics
Catalogue Number: OC 967
Release: Live performances recorded in Essen
Year: 2017/18 issue
Format: 3 CDs

There are composers whose reputations decline gently over time, and there are composers whose reputations collapse so violently that later generations begin to suspect a historical misunderstanding. Giacomo Meyerbeer belongs emphatically to the second category. Reading nineteenth-century criticism before actually hearing the operas can induce genuine anticipation. You encounter references to titanic effects, revolutionary orchestration, overwhelming drama, colossal public scenes. You see the reverence paid him by contemporaries, the fear and envy he inspired in rivals, the fortune he accumulated, the sheer dominance he exercised over European opera for nearly forty years. Then you listen, and you listen, and then you listen still further.

The result, at least for me, is often a curious mixture of admiration and exhaustion. You understand the mechanism without feeling the magic. You recognise theatrical intelligence without encountering much musical genius. This admirable Essen recording of Le Prophète demonstrates the problem with painful clarity, because it removes every excuse. The performance itself is excellent. The opera remains the musical equivalent of eating cardboard.

It must first be said that this set presents Meyerbeer under unusually favourable conditions. Giuliano Carella understands the style thoroughly. He grasps that Meyerbeer depends less on melodic momentum than upon large-scale theatrical architecture. The score requires patience, discipline, and absolute command of pacing. Carella supplies all three. If at times he adopts the rather brisk tempi fashionable in modern opera houses, the underlying conception remains intelligent and coherent. He prevents the immense spans from collapsing altogether, which is no small achievement.

The Essener Philharmoniker play magnificently. Indeed, one of the recurring ironies of Meyerbeer performance is that the orchestras often work harder than the music deserves. The playing throughout is polished, sonorous, and vividly coloured. The brass writing in the great public scenes has tremendous weight without vulgarity. Woodwind textures emerge with unusual clarity. The famous Coronation Scene in Act IV is managed with impressive ceremonial splendour. One hears exactly why younger composers studied Meyerbeer’s orchestration with such care.

The chorus of the Aalto Theatre Opera Chorus also deserves high praise. Grand opera lives or dies by its choral forces. Here the singing possesses discipline and stamina. The Anabaptist scenes carry real menace. The huge ensembles maintain clarity even in the densest passages. Meyerbeer’s gift for organising mass theatrical movement remains undeniable, and this chorus realises those moments superbly.

Among the soloists, John Osborn gives an extraordinarily committed performance as Jean de Leyde. The role is punishingly difficult: heroic declamation, lyric introspection, religious hysteria, political manipulation, and vocal endurance on an almost Wagnerian scale. Osborn negotiates these demands with remarkable assurance. His singing combines elegance with steel. He avoids the temptation to bark or force the tone, preserving genuine musical line even in the more overheated prophetic scenes.

Dramatically, he captures something important about the character: Jean is not truly a titan but an unstable dreamer gradually consumed by forces larger than himself. Osborn understands the character’s passivity. He begins almost diffidently, then slowly acquires the frightening authority of a man half hypnotised by his own destiny. The transformation is intelligently realised.

The finest singing in the set, however, comes from Marianne Cornetti as Fidès. Meyerbeer’s operas often suffer from emotional hollowness, but Fidès is one of his few genuinely great creations. Whenever she appears, the opera acquires moral gravity. Cornetti’s great recognition scene in Act IV becomes, for a few precious minutes, something close to genuine music drama rather than spectacular mechanism. Her voice possesses warmth, authority, and tragic dignity. Unlike Jean, who remains curiously abstract despite his centrality, Fidès feels human.

The scene in which she must publicly deny her own son to save him from destruction contains some of the most effective music Meyerbeer ever wrote. One notices at once how much more compelling he becomes when dealing with intimate moral agony rather than historical spectacle. Cornetti understands this instinctively. Her performance repeatedly threatens to raise the opera onto a level the surrounding material cannot sustain.

Lynette Tapia sings Berthe attractively enough, though the criticism that she sounds slightly too youthful and light for the role is justified. Berthe requires more tragic amplitude than Tapia entirely provides. Still, the fault lies partly in the writing itself. Meyerbeer seldom gives her truly memorable music. One admires her endurance more than one remembers her scenes afterwards.

The edition used here includes some restored material omitted from older performances, including Berthe’s original suicide music with saxophone accompaniment. Such details are musicologically valuable and often theatrically interesting. Yet the cuts elsewhere remain puzzling. The omissions from the Ballet des Patineurs are regrettable, particularly because the ballet music is among the few portions of the score possessing genuine charm and rhythmic vitality.

This points toward a larger issue. Even Meyerbeer’s admirers often praise isolated scenes rather than sustained inspiration. The modern critical defence of Meyerbeer usually runs as follows: he was a supreme man of the theatre, a master of atmosphere, a pioneer of orchestral colour, a genius of scenic pacing whose works suffer in purely audio form because they were conceived as total spectacles.

There is truth in this. Le Prophète undoubtedly worked more powerfully in the nineteenth-century theatre than it can on disc. Meyerbeer thought visually. He belongs to the prehistory of cinema more than to the central lineage of purely musical drama. Gas lighting, stage machinery, gigantic processions, skating ballets, cathedral interiors, explosions, bells, and crowds were essential components of the experience.

But this defence only goes so far. Great music ultimately survives abstraction from staging. Remove the scenery from Giuseppe Verdi and the emotional structure still burns with life. Strip away production values from Richard Wagner and the harmonic language alone sustains attention. Even lesser masters survive reduction because the musical invention itself compels repeated listening. Meyerbeer too often does not. The problem is not incompetence. Meyerbeer was highly intelligent and technically formidable. The problem is imaginative depth. He rarely writes music that feels inevitable. You constantly sense calculation where you long for inspiration. Scene after scene displays craft without inner necessity.

Indeed, you begin to suspect that Meyerbeer’s reputation rested less on musical genius than on his perfect adaptation to the tastes of a specific civilisation: bourgeois, imperial, ceremonial, fascinated by history, intoxicated by spectacle, and willing to spend five hours watching gigantic scenic constructions unfold slowly. His operas were the blockbuster entertainments of post-Napoleonic Europe. Once that civilisation disappeared, so did much of his power.

The comparison with Wagner is revealing. Wagner learned from Meyerbeer, especially in public ceremonial scenes and large-scale dramatic pacing. Yet Wagner eventually surpassed him because Wagner possessed metaphysical obsession. Even when Wagner becomes absurd, he remains impossible to ignore. Meyerbeer rarely risks absurdity because he rarely risks profundity.

Verdi provides an even harsher comparison. Verdi could achieve in eight bars the emotional truth Meyerbeer seeks for half an hour. Compare the human desperation of Don Carlo, the political terror of Simon Boccanegra, or the concentrated tragedy of Otello with the sprawling machinery of Le Prophète. Verdi’s drama grows organically from musical character. Meyerbeer assembles effects externally.

Most damaging of all is the comparison with composers theoretically below Meyerbeer in historical rank. Listening again to Daniel Auber or Fromental Halévy, one is repeatedly struck by how much more enjoyable they are. Auber may lack philosophical ambition, but he possesses wit, elegance, rhythmic life, and melodic freshness. Halévy, especially in La Juive, achieves emotional sincerity Meyerbeer seldom approaches. Neither composer was hailed as the supreme genius of European opera. Yet both often provide more immediate pleasure.

This is perhaps the final difficulty with Meyerbeer. You can admire him historically while remaining curiously untouched aesthetically. His operas are important and occasionally impressive. They are also, too often, boring.

That word sounds brutal given the scale of talent assembled here, but prolonged listening leaves little alternative. Whole scenes pass without leaving melodic residue in the mind. Ensembles accumulate weight without generating emotional inevitability. You admire the engineering while remaining unmoved by the structure erected.

And yet this recording remains valuable because it presents the strongest possible case for Meyerbeer. Anyone wishing to understand why nineteenth-century Europe revered him should hear it. The Essen forces realise the score with conviction and technical excellence. Carella sustains coherence where lesser conductors might permit total sprawl. Osborn and Cornetti give performances of genuine distinction.

If, after all this, you still remains unconvinced by Meyerbeer’s claims to greatness, the problem almost certainly lies not with the performers but with the composer himself. Or that is my own final judgement.