​

(b. Vogelsdorf September 5, 1791; d. Paris, May 2, 1864)
 

German composer. The most successful composer of grand opera, he responded to the Zeitgeist of post-1830 France—socially conservative but hungry for vicarious thrills, earth-shaking spectacle, and awe-inspiring demonstrations of wealth, power, and prestige—by creating lavish escapist entertainments for the bourgeois multitude. His concepts in orchestration, visual effect, scene structure, and pacing were innovative and revolutionary, and his works powerfully influenced the development of opera in the 19th century, shaping the vision and style of Richard Wagner in particular, and echoing through the scores of Berlioz, Verdi, Gounod, and many others.
 

Meyerbeer was born into a wealthy, accomplished, cultivated Berlin Jewish family. His parents and grandparents were successful in banking and business, and he had prominent rabbinical ancestral roots as well.
 

The eldest of three boys, Jakob was a child prodigy on the piano and had lessons in composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter (later Mendelssohn’s teacher) and Georg Joseph Vogler. He befriended his contemporary Carl Maria von Weber (who regarded him as one of the finest pianists of the day), and in 1816, after showing promise with a couple of German operas and several cantatas and occasional pieces, he turned his attention to Italian opera. He began using the Italian form of his first name, Giacomo, and during the course of nearly a decade spent in Italy, developed his skills and built an impressive portfolio of half a dozen theatrical successes. By the mid-1820s, he was being seen as an heir to Mozart and a figure worthy to stand alongside Rossini, who recognized his rival’s talent and furthered his career by producing Il crociato in Egitto (The Crusader in Egypt), the last of Meyerbeer’s Italian operas, at the Theatre Italien in Paris in 1825. With its success Meyerbeer was securely established in Paris; with Rossini’s retirement in 1829 he got down to business ... the business of grand opera.
 

Despite his relatively small output—four grand operas and two comic operas in 33 years—Meyerbeer loomed large in Parisian operatic life. His debut effort for the Paris Opera, Robert le diable (1831), set to a libretto by Eugene Scribe, became one of grand opera’s touchstone works and cast a potent spell on many other artists; among its most ardent admirers were Balzac, Berlioz, and Chopin. Five years later, Les Huguenots brought the style to new heights of dramatic and musical sophistication (in many ways it remains the quintessential grand opera). Le prophete (1849) was important in several respects; its staging was a technological tour de force involving the first use of an electric spotlight, its crowd scenes gave new meaning to the word “sublime,” and the role of Fides, sung by Pauline Viardot at the premiere, proved to be one of the most magnificent and challenging parts of the 19th century. With L’Africaine (premiered posthumously, in 1865) Meyerbeer created a work at once intimate and spectacular, and introduced a taste for the exotic that was to be an influence on Aida.
 

Independently wealthy, Meyerbeer was able to maintain artistic control over composition and presentation to an unusual degree. All four of his grand operas were written to librettos by Scribe, and, without being formulaic in any way, all dealt with the drama that arises when individuals are caught in the flux of forces larger than themselves, whether metaphysical, religious, political, or historical (or any combination thereof). For Parisians, who liked their tumult on the stage, not in the street, they proved matchlessly entertaining. In Les Huguenots, Le prophete, and L'Africaine, the plots involve the struggle of one group against another and the efforts of individuals to deal with the tragic complications love brings to their situation. In many ways it is not so much the particular historical events that are the crux of these dramas— the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, the Anabaptist revolt, the voyages of Vasco da Gama—as the historical process itself, which Meyerbeer views as his subject. This aspect gives them a richness that is lacking in many other works of the era, and looks forward to the theatrical concerns of the 20th century.
 

While Meyerbeer’s main focus was on pacing and scenic impact, he was not indifferent to color and characterization. His treatment of the orchestra was masterful; he was one of the first composers to exploit solo divisi strings, a technique both Wagner (Lohengrin) and Verdi (Aida, Otello) later employed to great advantage. He also made innovative use of obbligato instruments to comment on a character’s state of mind, e.g., the solo viola d’amore in Raoul’s Act I romance “Plus blanche que la blanche her-mine” in Les Huguenots. These touches were not lost on Wagner, nor were Meyerbeer’s distinctive, darkly expressive shadings of the orchestral tutti—using low horns, bassoons, bass clarinet—which found their way into Rienzi, Derfliegende Hollander, and Tannhauser, and became part of the lexicon of 19th-century orchestration.