Meyerbeer: Struensee - incidental music

Day 305

Meyerbeer: Incidental music to Struensee

NDR Radio Orchestra and Choir

Michail Jurowski

I’ve now reached the first of November and am very pleased not to have missed a day in this project. So for this month I intend to fill more of the gaps in coverage of important composers. I’ve already included more than 300 figures but there are still some notable absentees. Then in December I can do a final wrap up and perhaps chose some more obscure, even quirky figures to bring the project to an end.

I’ve always enjoyed the music of Meyerbeer. It is difficult to appreciate now just how dominant a figure Meyerbeer was throughout the 19th century. I have a poster in my apartment for the 905th performance of Les Huguenots at the Paris opera. This was given in June 1897 - that was only 60 years after the first performance so it gives an idea of how popular the work was - those sorts of statistics could be repeated across all of the major opera houses.

Meyerbeer’s dominant place in the repertory disappears almost overnight after the First World War and never really recovered although there are still occasional performances. At university we put on Robert le Diable. In truth the musical and dramatic demands of the piece were way beyond us but the opera still made a positive impression. I don’t think that anybody has ever bettered Meyerbeer’s mastery of creating lavish spectacle and thrilling musical tableaux.  That’s not to say that he belong at the highest table of operatic composers. The music is uneven, there is a lot of routine ‘painting by numbers’ and he was never good at transition - there are too many really clunky gear changes. Sometimes the melodic invention is weak. But despite all of this his operas are greater than the sum of their parts and are worthy of repeated listening.

This is not an opera but incidental music to a play by the composer’s younger brother. It is scored for full orchestra and male chorus - a reminder that in the 19th century large theatres could call on significant musical resources. It has a long overture - quite serious in tone which might to the blind ear have been thought to be by Schumann and then a series of miscellaneous short movement. These are more varied in tone and some of them are reminiscent of the lighter moments in Meyerbeer such as the dance scenes. 

It is not a masterpiece but neither it is negligible. There is some attractive music here which is well worth listening to. How effective it would be in the theatre is an unknown quantity. The chances of anybody reviving the play with full orchestra and choral forces seems remote. But Meyerbeer was a man of the theatre so I would hazard a guess that it is all worked well in context.