Metaphors for Meyerbeer

Abstract

The avowed inability of nineteenth-century Parisian critics to express in words their impressions of music (whether instrumental or lyric) doubtless has something to do with a more or less general lack of training, but in the case of the works of Meyerbeer it also points to a particular idea of opera. An intense interest in orchestration (outlined here in reviews of Robert le diable, Les Huguenots, Le prophète and L'Africaine; also in Berlioz's Grand traité d'instrumentation et d'orchestration modernes) is articulated in enthusiastic examination of the instruments themselves, and in striking metaphors of science, technology and manufacture. The presence of this gloss on Meyerbeer in otherwise Romantic appreciations (for example Balzac's Gambara) suggests a way of reading opera reception in tune with the urban culture of the period.

Casting Metal: Opera Studies after Humanism

“…There is no question that scholars have begun to explore the agential capacity of opera's objects, not least in the pages of this journal, and I will consider the trajectories mapped out by some of this recent work. 6 Part of what appears to have motivated this scholarship is a fascination with the abundant, not to say lavish, materiality of operatic practice, of props and sets, of costumes and makeup, of interior surfaces that reflect and absorb sound and light, of mouths, limbs, lungs, and vocal cords. What binds the gesturing arms of singers in Mary Ann Smart's Mimomania (2004) with the singing mouth shaped into an "O" in Lawrence Kramer's Opera and Modern Culture (2007) and with the embodied performance and spectatorship as presented in Linda and Michael Hutcheons's Bodily Charm: Living Opera (2000) is an attention to the materiality of the body in opera.…”