Ten composers -Ten operas. 3:Les Huguenots

It is hard now to think that Les Huguenots was once a mainstay of the operatic repertory(the Paris Opera reached its 100th performance of the work in 1906).  Indeed had you turned up at random at any opera house between 1850 and 1900 the chances that you would be seeing Les Huguenots or Faust must have been very high.



Yet now Les Huguenots is a beached whale of an opera - its aesthetic far removed from what we expect an opera to be like.



It is easy to point out what is lacking in Meyerbeer.   Sometimes his harmony can be astonishing crude (I remember at university listening to a recording of Robert le Diable and seeing one of my fellow listeners - now a distinguished composer - literally wince at the gauche chord progression in the opening bars and I could see him thinking -"how many hours of this have I got to listen to!").  Equally he could never be regarded as master of transition: some of the links between numbers are perfunctory in the extreme.





But that is only one side.  On his own terms the operas work!   The big moments in Les Huguenots - such as the consecration of the swords, are thrilling - he certainly knew how to use a chorus, soloists and orchestra together to great effect, and there rage of colours and moods is extraordinary. The bathing scene in act 2 may have been put into please the men in the audience whose reasons for attendance may not have been entirely musical, but the colour in the music and the charm of the melody are still hugely affective  (as a bassoon player I would love to have a chance to play this).

But there is some genuinely great music here.  The big duet at the end of Act 4 has a melody to die for (literally as it turns out) and Verdi must have heard echoes of it when he came to write the end of Aida.  But there is much to admire elsewhere.  It was a tradition for many years to end the opera with Act 4 - this seems very odd indeed given that there is so much interesting music in Act 5, particularly the extraordinary recitative and trio with accompaniment by solo bass clarinet and the use of the offstage voices singing the chorale melody.  Wagner, for all his jibes about Meyerbeer, must have absorbed this scene into his musical DNA.


Les Huguenots will surely never return to the operatic repertoire other than as an occasional curiosity - tastes have changed.  But that it is pity.  So much of the later 19th century operatic repertory would have been very different without this opera - indeed part of my enjoyment when listening is identifying the pre-echoes of later works. I've already mentioned Wagner and Verdi, but you can also hear glimpses of composers as diverse as Sullivan and Mussorgsky.   And there are not that many other things linking those two.


It is remarkable that aural evidence of the great tradition of Meyerbeer performances still exists.  This is one of the famous Mapleson cylinders, recorded live from the stage of the Met in the early years of the last century.  If you have never heard one of the cylinders before you will need to get used to the very heavy surface noise, but if you persist you will be able to hear a surprising amount of the performance.  This is the end of the Queen's aria in Act 2 - one of the great show stoppers of the repertory.  Controversy still remains over whether or not this singer is Melba, or the less well known Susan Adams, but whoever she is she was on blistering form.     Surely this is what the 19th century operatic experience was all about