Meyerbeer Studies: A Series of Lectures, Essays, and Articles on the Life and Work of Giacomo Meyerbeer.(Book review)

Meyerbeer Studies: A Series of Lectures, Essays, and Articles on the Life and Work of Giacomo Meyerbeer. By Robert Ignatius Letellier. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. [238 p. ISBN 0-8386-4063-X. $47.50.] Illustrations, index.

Meyerbeer Studies consists of ten chapters reprinted from such sources as articles in the Opera Quarterly, reviews, and texts presented on the Internet. The book opens with a study of what Robert Letellier calls "Music's Great Enigma," and subtitled "Giacomo Meyerbeer: Neglected Master of Grand Opera" that reads very much like a general introduction to the composer which collapses into little more than single-paragraph notes on such astonishingly wide-ranging issues as "vocalism" (p. 29), "melody" (p. 33), and "harmony" (pp. 33-34). Letellier begins with two intriguing assessments of Meyerbeer: brutally negative in the case of Hubert Parry in 1893 and a resounding positive from Paul Bekker in 1926 (pp. 19-20). As is so often the case in this collection of essays, all sorts of historical subtleties are side-stepped. Was the quotation from Parry really his from 1893 (The Art of Music [London: Kegan, Paul, 1893]) or from H. C. Colles's revision of the book in 1930 (The Evolution of the Art of Music [New York: D. Appleton, 1930])? And is it really correct to juxtapose Parry and Bekker as composer and musicologist? In 1893, Parry was shortly to replace George Grove at the Royal College of Music and had held academic positions for a decade. On the other hand, when Bekker published his Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formwandlungen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1926), he had just finished a year as Intendant at the opera house in Kassel and was soon to hold a similar position at Wiesbaden from 1927 to 1932. The two quotations could have been the beginning of an interesting set of observations on changing attitudes to Meyerbeer either over time or in different parts of the world (Bekker was to emigrate to the United States in 1934), but the reader is simply treated to a commentary on another set of comments, this time from George Eliot and Thomas Mann, which is equally underdeveloped.

Some of the later chapters "Meyerbeer, Halevy and Auber," "Bellini and Meyerbeer," and "Hector Berlioz and Giacomo Meyerbeer" are based almost exclusively on extracts from Letellier's own four-volume edition of Meyerbeer's diaries. The Bellini chapter is the best of these three; it attempts to identify the influence of Bellini's Norma on Les Huguenots. But even here, it is difficult to summon up a great deal of sympathy when one is invited to read far too much into some fairly oblique references. For example, on 25 April 1834, Meyerbeer wrote to his wife, after hearing Norma in Bologna and Modena, that "I am really grateful to this work which has provided me with two wonderfully enjoyable evenings, and has stimulated my work." Letellier states this "as much as admits the role [Norma] played in the gestation of parts of his own most famous work [Les Huguenots]" (p. 173). Used as a trigger for a discussion of various comparisons between the two works, the inference from Meyerbeer's diary entry is surely overstated: Meyerbeer says nothing more than that the experience of enjoying two performances of Norma had encouraged him in his work, not that it has changed his working methods or his attitude to original or borrowed material.

In matters of detail furthermore, the points of comparison are elusive, although intriguing. Letellier invites a comparison between "Casta diva" from Norma and "Beaute divine" from act 2 of Les Huguenots. The basis is a sound one: both are in F major, in [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], both use the same sort of arpeggio accompaniment, both use obbligato instruments (flute in Bellini, violin in Meyerbeer), and both are invocations--in Norma to the moon goddess and in Les Huguenots to Marguerite de Valois. But when Letellier points to "a kinship born of inversion (Bellini's long initial [a.sup.1] followed by three short notes descending to [g.sup.1] mirror-imaged by Meyerbeer into three short notes rising from [a.sup.1] to repose in ...