¹ Gruneisen, Charles, Memoir of Meyerbeer, with Notices, Historical and Critical, of his Celebrated Operas, The Huguenots, Robert le diable, Il crociato in Egitto, etc. (London, 1848), 23–24 Google Scholar. This appears in the Memoir as an unattributed quotation; The Musical World attributes the words to someone writing in 1843 who was ‘thoroughly acquainted with Meyerbeer’. See ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer’, The Musical World (25 August 1855).

² There was one exception: in 1845 a touring Belgian opera company staged Les Huguenots in London. The London theatre companies themselves, however, had not staged Meyerbeer since 1832. On the early performance history of Meyerbeer in London, see in particular Hibberd, Sarah, ‘Grand Opera in Britain and the Americas’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 2003), 403–422 Google Scholar; Gabriella Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry: Opera at the Second Covent Garden Theatre, 1830 to 1856’, PhD diss., King’s College, University of London (1997); and Fuhrmann, Christina, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses: From Mozart to Bellini (Cambridge, 2015), in particular the chapter ‘Grand Opera: Competition and Copyright’, 146–169 Google Scholar.

³ See the entry ‘23 April–2 May’ in Ignatius Letellier, Robert, ed. and trans., The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Volume 1: 1791–1839 (Cranbury, NJ, 2001), 439–441 Google Scholar. Although the entry covers multiple days, Meyerbeer presents it as a summary of the period written in one sitting.

⁴ The Musical World (29 July 1848). For a recent introduction to the musical landscape of early 1800s London, see Parker, Roger, ‘“As a Stranger Give it Welcome”: Musical Meanings in 1830s London’, in Representation in Western Music, ed. Joshua S. Walden (Cambridge, 2013), 33–46 Google Scholar.

⁵ On these licensing acts, see ‘The Invention of Illegitimate Culture’, in Moody, Jane, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840 (Cambridge, 2000), 10–47 Google Scholar.

⁶ See Hall-Witt, Jennifer, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham, NH, 2007), 208–222 Google Scholar.

⁷ On their house calls, see the years 1846–9 in Letellier, , ed., The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Volume 2: 1840–1849, The Prussian Years and Le Prophète , 137–399 Google Scholar. Particularly pertinent entries include 7, 10, 11 and 24 October 1846; 22 January 1848; and 19, 20 and 22 October 1849.

⁸ On Gruneisen’s involvement with the Royal Italian Opera and his work as music critic, see Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, in particular the chapter ‘Listening in New Ways: Audience Behavior and the Cultural Politics of Opera Reviewing’, 227–64; and Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry’, 70–1. On the ways the management of Her Majesty’s and the Royal Italian Opera associated with and influenced the press, see also Hall-Witt ‘The Commercialization of Opera: Entrepreneurs and the Expansion of the Public’, in Fashionable Acts, 146–84; in particular, 170–2.

⁹ In practice, the landed elite associated with Old Corruption had faced numerous challenges to its authority since the late eighteenth century. Indeed, this ruling class had expanded to include ever-more families who were wealthy but untitled; common sources of new wealth included commercial and other professional endeavours. See Hall-Witt, ‘To See and be Seen: Opera and the “Theater of the Great”’, in Fashionable Acts, 98–139.

¹⁰ Michael J. Budds, ‘Music at the Court of Queen Victoria: A Study of Music in the Life of the Queen and her Participation in the Musical Life of the Time’, PhD diss., University of Iowa (1987), 1: 87, 95 and 113; cited in Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 252–3.

¹¹ In some cases, the sole extant documentation of this criticism can be found in letters that were not published at the time; these nonetheless are indicative of the views that prominent musicians and critics held. Negative reviews about Meyerbeer expressed by Mendelssohn, for instance, are to be found in the latter’s letter to Karl Klingemann, 10 December 1831, reproduced in Selden-Goth, G., ed., Felix Mendelssohn: Letters (New York, 1945), 181–184 Google Scholar, in which he describes Robert le diable as lacking a heart, adding ‘such a work is as different from art as decorating is from painting; decorating produces more effect, but if you take a good look at it, you see that it is painting done with the feet’. Schumann issued a famous diatribe about Les Huguenots in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that prompted a backlash in Paris in particular. For a translated reproduction, see Schumann, Robert, On Music and Musicians, ed. Konrad Wolff (New York, 1946), 193–199 Google Scholar. Letellier provides an overview of critical reactions to Meyerbeer in the nineteenth century: Letellier, ed., The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1: 47–8; for a reproduction of various reactions to Meyerbeer from the 1830s to the current day, see Ignatius Letellier, Robert, ed., Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Reader (Newcastle, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹² Wagner now famously made these remarks in an essay entitled ‘Das Judenthum in der Musik’ published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 3 and 10 September 1850 under the pseudonym K. Freigedank [K. Freethought]; he then reissued it under his own name and in edited form in 1869. See ‘Judaism in Music’, in Wagner, Richard, Judaism in Music and Other Essays, ed. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, 1995 [1907]), 75–122 Google Scholar. For an overview of the dynamics of Meyerbeer and Wagner’s relationship, see Kaufman, Tom, ‘Wagner vs. Meyerbeer’, Opera Quarterly 19 (2003), 664–669 Google Scholar. Other famous attacks on Meyerbeer that post-date the 1849 Prophète premiere include that of Eduard Hanslick in 1875. See Hanslick, ‘Meyerbeer – With Special Consideration of His Last Operas’, in Letellier, ed., Giacomo Meyerbeer: A Reader, 151–76. Hector Berlioz was generally in favour of Robert le diable and Les Huguenots but was more critical of Le Prophète, as evidenced by his lukewarm review in the Journal des débats (20 April 1849).

¹³ Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 195–7.

¹⁴ The Musical World (8 May 1847). For similar character assassinations see, for instance, The Era (23 July 1848); and The Musical World (22 July 1848).

¹⁵ See, for instance, Leigh Hunt, ‘The Theatrical Examiner’, The Examiner (28 April 1849); and [Anon.,] ‘Music and the Drama’, The Athenaeum (4 August 1849).

¹⁶ Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, 1972), 6 Google Scholar, 13. See also Houghton, William E., ‘Earnestness’, in The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, 1975), 218–262 Google Scholar; and Abrams, M.H., ‘Poetic Truth and Sincerity’, in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953), 312–320 Google Scholar.

¹⁷ On the finances of the Royal Italian Opera in the first ten years, see Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry’, 82–105.

¹⁸ Hall-Witt, ‘Listening in New Ways’, Fashionable Acts, 227–64.

¹⁹ On Mozart as an earnest alternative to Italian opera, see the numerous references to Mozart in Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts.

²⁰ See Fulcher, Jane, The Nation’s Image: French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, in particular the chapter ‘Radicalization, Repression, and Opera: Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète’, 122–63; and Hibberd, Sarah, French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

²¹ Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghai, La critique parisienne des ‘grands opéras’ de Meyerbeer: Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète, L’Africaine, 2 vols. (Saarbrücken, 1988), 2: 146–59; Newark, Cormac, ‘Metaphors for Meyerbeer’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127 (2002), 23–42 Google Scholar; Tresch, John, ‘The Prophet and the Pendulum: Popular Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria around 1848’, Grey Room Quarterly 43 (2011), 16–42 Google Scholar; and Dolan, Emily I. and Tresch, John, ‘A Sublime Invasion: Meyerbeer, Balzac and the Opera Machine’, Opera Quarterly 27 (2001), 4–31 Google Scholar.

²² The new theatre opened on 7 April 1847 with a seating capacity of 4,000. For details about the interior, see The Builder (10 and 17 April 1847).

²³ Gye filed patents in both 1861 and 1878, the former for a new kind of hydrogen lamp, the latter for an arc lamp. For a reproduction of the documents filed, see Wilmore, David and Rees, T.A.L., British Theatrical Patents, 1801–1900 (London, 1996), 8 Google Scholar, 42. On Gye as a Victorian inventor, see Dideriksen, Gabriella and Ringel, Matthew, ‘Frederick Gye and “The Dreadful Business of Opera Management”’, 19th-Century Music 19 (1995), 15 Google Scholar.

²⁴ On visual/sonic asynchronies in Meyerbeer, see Ann Smart, Mary, ‘Every Word Made Flesh: Les Huguenots and the Incarnation of the Invisible’, in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, 2004), 101–131 Google Scholar.

²⁵ For recent literature on grand opéra and cultural transfer, see in particular, Newark, Cormac, ‘“In Italy we don’t have the means for illusion”: Grand Opéra in Nineteenth-Century Bologna’, Cambridge Opera Journal 19 (2007), 199–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera; and Everist, Mark, ed., Meyerbeer and Grand Opéra from the July Monarchy to the Present (Turnhout, 2016)Google Scholar. A core resource on the circulation of grand opéra outside Paris remains ‘Part IV: Transformation of Grand Opéra’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. Charlton, 321–422.

²⁶ On the compositional history of Le Prophète, see Alan Armstrong, ‘Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète: A History of Its Composition and Early Performances’, 4 vols., PhD diss., Ohio State University (1990); and Roberts, John H., ‘Meyerbeer: Le Prophète and L’Africaine ’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. Charlton, 208–232 Google Scholar.

²⁷ See ‘Meyerbeer’s Prophète’, The Musical World (28 April 1849).

²⁸ On the London Prophète and, in particular, the quasi-directorial role Viardot had in the production see Stier, Melanie, Pauline Viardot-Garcia in Großbritannien und Irland: Formen kulturellen Handelns (Hildesheim, 2012), 33–64 Google Scholar; and (as Melanie von Goldbeck), ‘“Sie ist Kapellmeister, Régisseur – mit einem Wort, die Seele der Oper”: Pauline Viardot and Le Prophète in London 1849’, in Meyerbeer and Grand Opéra, ed. Everist, 185–202. Von Goldbeck shows that Viardot was entrusted with rehearsing fellow singers at the piano and with the orchestra, and also with staging decisions.

²⁹ See, for instance, ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Musical World (4 August 1849).

³⁰ ‘Je crois qu’il faudrait que ce fût un personage excentrique, en proie à des rêves, des visions, monté par les doctrines des anabaptistes qu’il connaît déjà. Il faut que les paysans auxquels il sert à boire dans la première scène du second tableau se moquent de lui, l’appellent Jean la visionnaire, l’homme aux rêves, etc.’ Cited in Gerhard, Anselm, ‘Meyerbeer and Reaction’, in The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago, 1998), 261 Google Scholar. Various London critics had reservations about Jean’s character as well. The Spectator, for instance, remarked on 28 July 1849 that while Scribe had ‘softened the most revolting features of his character’, he had nonetheless ‘failed to make him an object of interest’, adding: ‘Jean is a personage who creates no sympathy; a mere embodiment of fanaticism, a mixture of hypocrisy and madness.’ Parisian commentators had similar reservations about the coherence of Jean’s character; see, for example, Scudo, La Revue des deux mondes (22 April 1849), cited in Sarah Hibberd, ‘Le Prophète: The End of History?’, in French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination, 165.

³¹ The Athenaeum (21 April 1849).

³² The Musical World (28 July 1849).

³³ On Fidès as moral compass of the opera, see in particular the work of Henry Chorley, the main music critic for The Athenaeum from 1830 to 1868: Chorley, Henry F., ‘M. Meyerbeer’s Operas – ‘Le Prophète ’, in Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2 vols. (reprint New York, 1984), 2: 91–103 Google Scholar.

³⁴ Von Goldbeck makes a similar point: ‘“Sie ist Kapellmeister, Régisseur”’, 187 and 199. Chorley went so far as state: ‘there can be no reading of Fides [sic] save hers’. See Chorley, Thirty Years’ Musical Recollections, 2: 94–5.

³⁵ The Musical World (28 July 1849). Comparable statements can be found in numerous sources, including The Athenaeum (21 April and 28 July 1849) as well as ‘The Theatres’, Illustrated London News (28 July 1849). On The Musical World’s lack of obvious bias towards one opera house or the other, see Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts, 171. Von Goldbeck notes that the coronation scene was so striking that Queen Victoria ordered a large painting of it as a Christmas present for Prince Albert. See The Examiner (13 July 1851), 453; cited in Von Goldbeck, ‘“Sie ist Kapellmeister, Régisseur”’, 198.

³⁶ Willson, Flora, ‘Classic Staging: Pauline Viardot and the 1859 Orphée Revival’, Cambridge Opera Journal 22 (2010), 312 Google Scholar. On Pasta as actress, see Rutherford, Susan, ‘“La cantante delle passioni”: Giuditta Pasta and the Idea of Operatic Performance’, Cambridge Opera Journal 19 (2007), 107–138 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aside from Stier’s work specifically on Viardot in Great Britain and Ireland cited above, other recent biographies of Viardot include Kendall-Davies, Barbara, The Life and Work of Pauline Garcia (Newcastle, 2012)Google Scholar; and Steen, Michael, Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse, Lover (Thriplow, 2007)Google Scholar.

³⁷ See, for instance, Georges Bousquet’s review in L’Illustration (21 April 1849); cited in Coudroy-Saghai, La Critique parisienne des ‘grands opéras’ de Meyerbeer, 2: 111.

³⁸ Voskuil, Lynn, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, VA, 2004)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Voskuil, Acting Naturally, 25.

⁴⁰ Reviewers also noted that identification with the character allowed for transformation of the self: The Spectator, for instance, described Viardot’s relation to the character of Fidès in these terms: ‘[she] views such a character with an artist’s eye, forms a clear conception of a living, individual creation, and throws her whole soul into it with an earnestness which seems to transform her into the being she represents’. See ‘Theatres and Music’, The Spectator (28 July 1849).

⁴¹ On Viardot’s intellectual social world see, in particular, Everist, Mark, ‘Enshrining Mozart: Don Giovanni and the Viardot Circle’, 19th-Century Music 25 (2001), 165–189 Google Scholar. For recent articles on Viardot, see Poriss, Hilary, ‘Pauline Viardot, Travelling Virtuosa’, Music & Letters 97 (2015), 185–208 Google Scholar; and Willson, ‘Classic Staging’.

⁴² See, for instance, Desmond Ryan, ‘Operatic Stars – No. XII – Pauline Viardot’, who wrote of Viardot: ‘so great an artist must necessarily be a perfect mistress of all styles of singing, but her intellect evidently inclines her to the severer and loftier school. Her countenance … is full of fire and intelligence, the forehead being indicative of great mental powers.’ The Musical World (29 September 1849).

⁴³ Eliot, George, Adam Bede (New York, 1860), 431 Google Scholar; cited in Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 218. Adam Bede was first published in 1859.

⁴⁴ Desmond Ryan, ‘Operatic Stars – No. XIII – Jenny Lind’, The Musical World (2 September 1848).

⁴⁵ Hazlitt, William, ‘Madame Pasta and Mademoiselle Mars’, The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, 2 vols. (London, 1826), 2: 309–334 Google Scholar. Reprinted in The Plain Speaker: The Key Essays, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford, 1998), 178–90.

⁴⁶ The Musical World (28 July 1849). Leigh Hunt, writing for The Examiner, also remarked on how quiet this entrance is. See Hunt, ‘The Theatrical Examiner: Royal Italian Opera’, The Examiner (28 July 1849).

⁴⁷ The libretto that circulated at the Royal Italian Opera makes no mention of the aria whatsoever, nor do the most comprehensive reviews such as those in The Musical World. A vocal score from c.1849 based on the Royal Italian Opera version nonetheless includes a translated version of it. In view of the overwhelming similarities between the Paris and London versions (notwithstanding a decision to cast the opera in a four-act version for London audiences) this could have been included in the vocal score to simply ensure the score as a whole was comprehensive and representative of the Paris version; it could also indicate that Castellan sometimes included the aria in her performances at the Royal Italian Opera. For a copy of the libretto that circulated at the 1849 Royal Italian Opera performances, see Meyerbeer, Giacomo and Scribe, Eugène, Le Prophète: A Lyric Drama in Four Acts, trans. Manfredo Maggioni (London, 1849)Google Scholar. For the score, see Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Le Prophète, a Grand Opera (London, [1849])Google Scholar. For Paris, Meyerbeer in fact wrote two versions of the aria: see Robert Ignatius Letellier, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Prophète, Le: The Manuscript Facsimile (Newcastle, 2006), xi Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ All subsequent references to the London libretto will therefore be in Italian.

⁴⁹ See Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1976), in particular ‘The Text of Muteness’, 56–80 Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ On the influence of Walter Scott on operatic character types, see Hibberd, , ‘ La Muette de Portici: Reliving the Past’, in French Grand Opera and the Historical Imagination, 20–56 Google Scholar.

⁵¹ See Gerhard, , ‘Eugène Scribe, an Apolitical Man of Letters’, in The Urbanization of Opera, 145–150 Google Scholar; Hibberd, Sarah, ‘ La Muette and her Context’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. Charlton, 149–167 Google Scholar; and Smart, , ‘Wagner’s Cancan, Fenella’s Leap: La Muette de Portici and Auber’s Reality Effect’, in Mimomania, 32–68 Google Scholar.

⁵² See Ann Smart, Mary, ‘Roles, Reputations, Shadows: Singers at the Opéra, 1828–1849’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. Charlton, 110–116 Google Scholar.

⁵³ Meyerbeer wrote the role of Valentine for the French soprano Cornélie Falcon.

⁵⁴ Smart, ‘Roles, Reputations, Shadows’, 122–8.

⁵⁵ See Smart, ‘Roles, Reputations, Shadows’, 124; and The Musical World (28 July 1849).

⁵⁶ ‘Theatres and Music’, The Spectator (28 July 1849). A review in The Observer also notes that the character’s initial reticence lends the later scenes their power. See ‘Royal Italian Opera’, The Observer (29 July 1849).

⁵⁷ ‘Theatres and Music’, The Spectator (28 July 1849).

⁵⁸ The classic text on music and gesture in nineteenth-century opera remains Smart, Mimomania. On music and motion, see also Esse, Melina, ‘Speaking and Sighing: Bellini’s canto declamato and the Poetics of Restraint’, Current Musicology 87 (2009), 7–45 Google Scholar; and Rutherford, Susan, ‘“Unnatural Gesticulation” or “un geste sublime”: Dramatic Performance in Opera’, Arcadia 36 (2001), 236–255 Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Viardot returned to the Royal Italian Opera almost annually throughout the 1850s, where Le Prophète was revived each year until 1853, and frequently thereafter. The singer retired from the stage altogether in 1863. See Dideriksen, ‘Repertory and Rivalry’, 216 and 357–8.

⁶⁰ See in particular Newark, ‘Metaphors for Meyerbeer’, 23–42; Tresch, ‘The Prophet and the Pendulum’, 16–42, and Dolan and Tresch, ‘A Sublime Invasion’, 4–31.

⁶¹ Leigh Hunt, ‘The Theatrical Examiner’, The Examiner (28 April 1849).

⁶² ‘Music and the Drama’, The Athenaeum (4 August 1849).