By Stephen A. Agus
As he was born and died a citizen of Berlin, and between his birth and death he became one of the most famous and successful composers of opera of all time, you may be dismayed by the fact that you will never see his music in a concert program of music of German composers. Despite the fact that when, as a young man he Italianized his name and composed a series of increasingly successful operas in Italy in the bel canto style, you may be shocked to discover that you will not see any of his operas performed these days in festivals of Italian Opera. Given that his immense and long lasting international reputation was sealed with his four unique French Grand Operas – operas that dominated the world repertory for nearly a century – you might be astonished when you realize that his music will not be performed in any program devoted to French music or French composers. And, as he was one of Queen Victoria’s favorite composers, selected by her to compose the overture to the London World Exposition in 1862, you might find it remarkable that his music is not to be featured in concerts and anthologies of English composers.
Look through the listings of classical music offerings in any newspaper, and you’ll see that -- with rare exception -- what I write is true, week in and week out. Meyerbeer, it seems, is excluded from all national categories of composers. Yet the nationality of composers seems to matter a great deal to our repertory makers. When foreign visiting orchestras come to New York, they are expected to perform the music of the composers from their home country. As proof of this, I offer the remark by reviewer Bernard Holland published in today’s (March 12, 2005) New York Times review of The Oslo Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall, in which no Norwegian music was performed. “These concerts were unusually nonpatriotic: nothing from Norway or even a Scandinavian neighbor.” And, I might add, though the actual program was heavy on French composers, there was nothing of Meyerbeer. In the Sunday paper (March 13, 2005), sure enough, we find that The China Philharmonic arrived in New York to offer a mostly Asian composed and Asian-themed program.
Giacomo Meyerbeer was not lucky enough to have been born in Italy. That’s a problem because every important composer born there has an annual festival, and even the lesser composers are well represented in other festivals throughout the country. Sure, this may be done more to promote tourism than musical purity, but it is nevertheless heartwarming to know the music of both the famous and the obscure composers is revitalized and renewed. It’s the same for many composers in many other countries. The music of Ravel and Debussy can be found anywhere in France, or the U.S. for that matter. Even the never-too-well-known Chausson, I see, has been added to the repertory of the New York Philharmonic as a French composer good enough to be heard on the same program as Ravel's tedious Bolero (yes, but can an audience that comes for Bolero appreciate Chausson's profound "Poeme"?). Likewise, fans of Antonin Dvorak should never worry about finding the music of their composer. The Czech embassy in Washington just completed a Dvorak retrospective exhibition a few months ago, so you might not have to travel to Prague to find his music. Besides, in the U.S., Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” is as ubiquitous as “La Donna e Mobile” in pasta sauce advertising.
It seems that Meyerbeer loses out every time the repertory
makers sit down to create a concert program.
In Germany, Nazism effectively destroyed what remained of Meyerbeer and
all Jewish German culture after a half century of repetition of Wagner's
diatribes, but after the war, the Germans never got around to making
music festivals for native-son composers who happened to have been born Jews.
On the other hand , the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (“IPO”) does
not perform Meyerbeer either, not for domestic consumption and not abroad.
A reason could be that Meyerbeer’s music is neither Israeli nor Jewish,
and IPO might be sensitive about performing the music of a composer “just
because” (they might use the Hebrew term “dafka”) he was a Jew, or be
afraid that they might be accused of doing so, in which event they would
purposely choose not to perform that music.
Ditto for the skittish "New Israel Opera"
that has ducked the performance of any Meyerbeer just as the old Israeli
Opera did in all the years after 1930. If
this is due to self-deprecating thinking, it is a thought process that does not
seem to bother the China Philharmonic Orchestra.
But who knows what the management of the Oslo Philharmonic (which
performed the music Ravel, Debussy, Strauss, Gershwin and Previn)
were thinking? Perhaps they
were just sensitive enough to realize that the New York audience has heard
enough of Grieg’s “The Hall of the Mountain King” to last a lifetime?
Maybe the time will come – after the city of Berlin establishes an annual Meyerbeer festival to celebrate the achievements of its distinguished citizen -- to strip the composers of their national identities, and just perform their music without regard to their national and religious origin. Our libraries of 19th century history inform us of the magnificent music and opera that helped to shape a world evolving into nationalist states and the emerging industrial revolution. Except for such racist anti-semites as Richard Wagner, the world of yesterday had no trouble believing that the music of Meyerbeer (and, before him, that of Mozart, Beethoven, Spontini and many others) transcended national and ethnic boundaries. The music of dozens of composers from many countries were key elements of that period and a major part of that history. But our concert stages, our recording studios, our radio and television stations and our opera houses have fallen asleep at the switch, and as a result, they omit key parts of that history. It’s our job to wake them up.
March 12, 2005
copyright 2005 Stephen A. Agus
no reproduction without written permission of the author
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