1 Le garde national, 24 November 1831, unsigned; see Marie-Hélène Coudroy, La critique parisienne des grands opéras de Meyerbeer: Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète, L'Africaine (Saarbrücken, 1988), i, 10. Robert le diable was first performed, at the Paris Opéra (Académie Royale de Musique, Salle Le Peletier), on 21 November 1831.Google Scholar

2 La gazette de France, 23 November 1831, unsigned; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 11.Google Scholar

3 For Robert le diable's prehistory as an opéra comique, see Everist, Mark, ‘The Name of the Rose: Meyerbeer's opéra comique, Robert le diable’, Revue de musicologie, 80 (1994), 211–50.Google Scholar

4 On Robert le diable establishing grand opéra as a recognizable genre, see Pendle, Karin, Eugène Scribe and French Opera of the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, 1979), 453.Google Scholar

5 For a retrospective appreciation of Véron's brilliant use of publicity, see Charles P. Séchan, Souvenirs d'un homme de théâtre, 1831–1855 (Paris, 1883), 189.Google Scholar

6 See Laurie C. Shulman, ‘Music Criticism of the Paris Opéra in the 1830s’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1985), 41–3.Google Scholar

7 See Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 184–7. Press commentary on these practices of Meyerbeer – perhaps understandably – did not really begin until after his death; thus there is a special kind of ‘Meyerbeer as we knew him’ air (not always eulogistic, and sometimes faintly anti-Semitic) about the criticism of L'Africaine that distinguishes it from earlier reception.Google Scholar

8 For the earliest sketches, see ‘Le prophète, opéra en cinq actes: Plan’, in Scribe's notebook for 1833–6, F–Pan n. a. f. 22562, ff. 663–70, and Meyerbeer's Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Heinz Becker and Gudrun Becker (Berlin, 1960–85), ii, 491. See also Alan Armstrong, ‘Meyerbeer's Le prophète: A History of its Composition and Early Performances’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1990).Google Scholar

9 La revue et gazette des théâtres, 19 April 1849, Prosper Pascal; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 17.Google Scholar

10 The first concert in the series, conducted by François-Antoine Habeneck and featuring the ‘Eroica’, took place on 9 March 1828; see James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995). For a summary of Parisian Romantic attitudes to the mysteries of Beethoven, see esp. chapters 15 ('Beethoven Triumphant') and 16 ('The Musical Experience of Romanticism').Google Scholar

11 For two of the most sophisticated recent treatments, see Burnham, Scott, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995), esp. chapter 1 (‘Beethoven's Hero‘), and Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning(Cambridge, 1999).Google Scholar

12 See Bloom, Peter, ‘François-Joseph Fétis and the Revue musicale (1827–1835)‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1972), and, for later developments, Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Paris: La revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–80 (Cambridge, 1995).Google Scholar

13 Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 8–14.Google Scholar

14 Donald Gíslason, ‘Castil-Blaze, De l'opéra en France, and the Feuilletons of the Journal des débats (1820–1832)‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1992), 27.Google Scholar

15 See Ellis, Katharine, ‘A Dilettante at the Opera: Issues in the Criticism of Julien-Louis Geoffroy, 1800–1814‘, Reading Critics Reading: French Opera and Ballet Criticism from the Revolution to 1848, ed. Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford, 2001), 46–68.Google Scholar

16 Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Paris, 9 and note 5.Google Scholar

17 As in this praise from the Journal des théâtres (25 April 1849, unsigned): ‘l'exécution du Prophète a maintenant un cachet de supériorité […] qu'on ne rencontre d'habitude qu'aux concerts du Conservatoire, où, c'est prouvé, se fait la meilleure, la plus irréprochable musique du monde’ (‘the playing in Le prophète now has a cachet of superiority […] usually found only at the Conservatoire concerts – where, it has been proven, there is the finest, the most irreproachable music-making in the world’; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 140).Google Scholar

18 Le national, 4 December 1831, ‘Z.‘; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 52.Google Scholar

19 Le journal des débats, 16 December 1831; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 60.Google Scholar

20 François-Joseph Fétis, La revue et gazette musicale, 14 April 1850; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 81.Google Scholar

21 The title of Kerry Murphy's Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1988) advertises one instance of this tendency. Steven Huebner makes a similar point in ‘Opera Audiences in Paris, 1830–1870‘, Music and Letters, 70 (1989), 206–25 (p. 207).Google Scholar

22 Mark Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and Reception of French Opera’, Reading Critics Reading, ed. Parker and Smart, 86–108 (p. 88).Google Scholar

23 La revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 13 March 1836, and Le journal de débats, 20 April 1849 respectively; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 156, and ii, 79.Google Scholar

24 La revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 13 March 1836; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 150, and also Hector Berlioz, La critique musicale, 1823–1863, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard, ii (Paris, 1998), 436.Google Scholar

25 See Abbiati, Franco, Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1959), ii, 794, and Julian Budden, The Operas of Verdi (Oxford, 1981; rev. edn 1992), iii, 16.Google Scholar

26 Berlioz's Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes (Paris, 1843) first came out as a series of articles entitled ‘De l'instrumentation’ in La revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1841–2). References will be to Lemoine's reprint of the 1855 second edition, Traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration (Farnborough, 1970; first published c.1860).Google Scholar

27 Berlioz, Grand traité, 292.Google Scholar

28 Berlioz, Grand traité, 284.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 148–9.Google Scholar

30 The versions from the 1840s are even more sketchy – as might be expected, given that the instrument was invented only c.1840.Google Scholar

31 Le prophète: Opéra en cinq actes, paroles de M. E. Scribe, musique de Giacomo Meyerbeer, représenté pour la première fois au théâtre du grand opéra de Paris le 16 avril 1849, repr. in Early Romantic Opera, 21, ed. Philip Gossett and Charles Rosen (New York, 1978), 555.Google Scholar

32 See the Supplément à la Revue et gazette des théâtres: Mise en scène Le prophète, opéra en cinq actes, paroles de M. E. Scribe, musique de M. G. Meyerbeer, représenté pour la première fois, à Paris, sur le théâtre de l'Opéra, le 16 avril 1849, repr. in Douze livrets de mise en scène lyrique datant des créations parisiennes, ed. H. Robert Cohen (Stuyvesant, NY, 1991), 151–82.Google Scholar

33 ‘Placez la musique militaire sur le théâtre, en vue du public’; see Douze livrets, ed. Cohen, 169.Google Scholar

34 La gazette de France, 23 November 1831, unsigned; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 62.Google Scholar

35 Joseph d'Ortigue, La revue de Paris, 33 (1831); see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 61.Google Scholar

36 For an introduction to the livret de mise-en-scène, see H. Robert Cohen, ‘Les livrets de mise en scène et la Bibliothèque de l'Association de la Régie Théâtrale’, Revue de musicologie, 64 (1978), 253–67, and ‘On the Reconstruction of the Visual Elements of French Grand Opera: Unexplored Sources in Parisian Collections’, International Musicological Society Congress Report, ed. Daniel Heartz and Bonnie Wade (Kassel, 1981), 463–81. The standard reference work is Cent ans de mise en scène lyrique en France (env. 1830–1930), ed. H. Robert Cohen and Marie-Odile Gigou (Stuyvesant, NY, 1986).Google Scholar

37 See for example Les gravures musicales dans L'illustration, 1843–1899, ed. H. Robert Cohen (Quebec, 1982).Google Scholar

38 Le siècle, 21 April 1849, Louis Desnoyers; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 48.Google Scholar

39 It cost 30,000 francs, or fully 20% of the entire budget; see Drysdale, John, ‘Louis Véron and the Finances of the Académie Royale de Musique, 1827–1835‘ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southampton, 2000). Lormier's source was Pierre Palliot, La vraye et parfaite science des armoiries (Paris, 1660).Google Scholar

40 Le journal des beaux arts, 25 March 1849, unsigned; La presse, 1 May 1865, P. de Saint-Victor; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 99 and 235.Google Scholar

41 This and other mishaps are described in Shulman, ‘Music Criticism of the Paris Opéra’, 55–9.Google Scholar

42 In Le temps, 4 March 1833. Gustave III, ou Le bal masqué was first performed, at the Opéra, on 27 February 1833. This taste for architectural reproduction needs to be thought of in the context of the diorama, very fashionable in 1820s Paris; for a full account, see Alison Gernsheim and Helmut Gernsheim, L.-J.-M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (London, 1956).Google Scholar

43 But see Catherine Join-Diéterle, ‘Robert le diable: Le premier opéra romantique’, Romantisme, 28–9 (1980), 147–66, and Sarah Hibberd, ‘“Cette diablerie philosophique”: Faust Criticism in Paris c. 1830‘, Reading Critics Reading, ed. Parker and Smart, 111–36 (p. 130), who suggest a number of real and literary sources for this scene. See also Max Milner, Le diable dans la littérature française de Cazotte à Baudelaire (Paris, 1960).Google Scholar

44 La gazette de France, 23 November 1831; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, i, 58.Google Scholar

45 Wagner used this phrase to describe Meyerbeer opera in general, in the context of a discussion (in Oper und Drama, 1892–9) of Le prophète in particular; see Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. and ed. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE, 1995), ii, 95–9.Google Scholar

46 See William L. Crosten, French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (New York, 1948; repr. 1972), 1–7, where he outlines the distinction between state subsidy and private enterprise in the management of the Opéra.Google Scholar

47 Here the name of Adorno should perhaps be invoked; see the essays ‘Bourgeois Opera’, trans. David J. Levin, Opera through Other Eyes, ed. David J. Levin (Stanford, 1993), 25–43, and ‘Opera’, Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1976), 71–84, for a characteristically hard look at opera's materiality.Google Scholar

48 For more on these fascinating showcases of nineteenth-century technology (also those of 1878, 1889 and so on up to 1937), see Jean-Jacques Bloch and Marianne Delort, Quand Paris allait ‘à l'Expo‘ (Paris, 1980).Google Scholar

49 Douze livrets, ed. Cohen, 161.Google Scholar

50 La gazette de France, 19 April 1849, ‘A.‘; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 141.Google Scholar

51 Douze livrets, ed. Cohen, 165.Google Scholar

52 Revue et gazette des théâtres, 26 April 1849, Prosper Pascal; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 152. An unsigned review in Le messager des théâtres (22 April 1849) carried the following reassuring information: ‘toutes les toiles des décors ont été enduites d'une composition chimique qui les rend incombustibles’ (‘all the cloth used in the sets has been coated with a chemical compound to make it fireproof’; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 153).Google Scholar

53 Honoré de Balzac, ‘Gambara, étude philosophique’, Revue et gazette musicale de Paris, 33 (August 1837). References will be to Gambara/Massimilla Doni (Paris, 1997).Google Scholar

54 See Hibberd, ‘“Cette diablerie philosophique”‘, and Léon Guichard, La musique et les lettres au temps du romantisme (Paris, 1955), 328. For a reading of how Gambara reacts to Robert le diable which tends slightly closer to the present discussion, see Pendle, Eugène Scribe, 430.Google Scholar

55 Quoted in the preface by Francis Claudon, Balzac, Gambara, 15.Google Scholar

56 Balzac, preface to Gambara, 23. The seminal reading of Sarrasine is, of course, Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris, 1973); for appreciations of Gambara and Massimilla Doni, see Brzoska, Matthias, ‘Mahomet et Robert-le-diable: L'esthétique musicale dans Gambara’, L'année Balzacienne, nouvelle série, 4 (1984), 51–78, and ‘Mosè und Massimilla: Rossinis Mosè in Egitto und Balzacs politische Deutung’, Oper als Text: Romantische Beiträge zur Libretto-Forschung, ed. Albert Gier (Heidelberg, 1986), 125–45.Google Scholar

57 Balzac, Gambara, 85–6.Google Scholar

58 Balzac, Gambara, 101.Google Scholar

59 Ibid., 69. Gambara further elaborates this duality in the succeeding narrative, 69–78 (esp. pp. 73 and 77).Google Scholar

60 Ibid., 71.Google Scholar

61 Ibid., 73.Google Scholar

62 Ibid., 49.Google Scholar

63 Ibid., 116.Google Scholar

64 Maometto II (1820; revised for the Paris Opéra in 1826 as Le siège de Corinthe) and Mosè in Egitto (1818; revised for the Paris Opéra in 1827 as Moïse et Pharaon): Gambara's opera is, we recall, Mahomet, and Mosè is frequently mentioned in Massimilla Doni.Google Scholar

65 La presse, 1 May 1865, P. de Saint-Victor; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 235.Google Scholar

66 Balzac, Gambara, 62.Google Scholar

67 Anselm Gerhard, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago, 1998), 119–21.Google Scholar

68 For a sketch of Schlesinger, whose gift for marketing was comparable to Véron's, see Anik Devriès, ‘Un éditeur de musique “à la tête ardente”: Maurice Schlesinger’, Fontes artis musicae, 27 (1980), 125–36.Google Scholar

69 Henry Eymieu, L'oeuvre de Meyerbeer (Paris, 1910), 72; see Coudroy, La critique parisienne, ii, 81.Google Scholar

70 Crosten (French Grand Opera, 94) makes a similar point. Nicole Wild stresses that, after the era of Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, the imaginative element of staging was more and more replaced by historical exactitude; see ‘La recherche de la précision historique chez les décorateurs de l'Opéra de Paris au 19e siècle’, International Musicological Society Congress Report, ed. Heartz and Wade, 453–63 (p. 463). For mention of Scribe's use of footnotes to bolster pretensions to historical accuracy, see also Pendle, Eugène Scribe, 454.Google Scholar

71 L'Africaine is the most obviously ‘exotic’ of Meyerbeer's works; for more, see Roberts, John, ‘The Genesis of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, 1977), and Gabriela Cruz, ‘Giacomo Meyerbeer's L'Africaine and the End of Grand Opera’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1999). Robert Wangermée has written about exoticism and materialism as two sides of the same coin; see ‘L'Opéra, sur la scène et à l'écran: A propos de Carmen’, Approches de l'opéra: Actes du colloque Association Internationale pour la Sémiologie du Spectacle, Royaumont, septembre 1984, ed. André Helbo (Paris, 1986), 251–8 (p. 252).Google Scholar

72 Emblematically, by those Beethoven symphonies being received so rapturously in Paris in the same period; for more on this huge topic, see the introduction to Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, 1989), in which he points out (p. 24) that composers writing symphonies in the late 1820s and 30s expected for the first time that their works, if they endured at all, would exist alongside, and not supersede, those of Beethoven. See also Lydia Goehr's meditation on some similar ideas, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992).Google Scholar

73 See note 42 above; also Cohen, ‘On the Reconstruction of the Visual Elements of French Grand Opera’, 475, note 8, and Wild, ‘La recherche de la précision historique’, 454, note 8. For an inkling of how much in the public mind the diorama was in 1820s Paris, see also Balzac's Le père Goriot, in which the word is Vautrin's catchphrase.Google Scholar