That Romanticism should have taken up the theme of the French Wars of Religion is hardly surprising. Conscious of living through a period of crisis, the authors of Alexandre Dumas’s generation (he was born in 1802) saw in those conflicts a tremendous dramatic crucible and the mirror of a collective fear, that of civil war. Through the interplay of analogies, the conflicts opposing Protestants and Catholics evoked the cruelties of the Terror, the spectre of which haunted romantic artists. In both cases, France was torn apart and those wielding power eliminated. Under the Restoration and in the aftermath of 1830, as the forty- year period following the beheading of Louis XVI was assessed, the Wars of Religion, long past though they were, offered contemporaries sombre matter for reflection.

1572: a “flash point”

For the romantics, whether reflected in the bloodbath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre or in the blade of the guillotine, History was punctuated by crises. Now the exactions of the Wars of Religion were many and exorbitant, on both an individual and a collective scale, and constituted a rich reservoir of material for fiction: conspiracies, machinations, worst case scenarios ... everything concurred to attract the artist’s attention to those troubled times. Marked by the night of August 24^th 1572, one of the most painful events in the history of France, the Wars of Religion enticed the Romantics to reconfigure history. In his preface to Histoire des Guerres de religion (1856), Jules Michelet thus sees in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre a “point rouge” or flash point, the tragic culmination of political wrangling and disastrous prevarication. By exploring the origins of the event, he unveiled the failure of the crown in the face of religious conflicts and describes the powerful rise of clan violence. Shadowy dealings, diplomatic secrets and plots are fertile soil for literary dramatization and political reflection. Historical studies and fictions have rewritten the story of the collective trauma that radiated out from the catastrophe of August 1572. La Reine Margot by Dumas concentrates its entire plot around that bloody night, describing the macrocosm of the massacre through the conflictual microcosm of the court.

In accordance with the interpretation of Romantic historians, fiction portraying the Wars of Religion neglect genuinely religious and theological questions. It places the emphasis on political motivations, the personal ambitions of individuals at the head of the important families (Guise, Montmorency, Navarre, etc.). The controversial dimensions of Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer and La Reine Margot stem less from spiritual and religious rifts than from the political discourse conveyed by the two works. In both cases also, the great tragic history of France is caught up with individual passions: on the eve of the massacre, impossible lovers’ pacts are sealed, the outcomes of which are irremediably tragic. The loves of Queen Margaret of Navarre are played out with the bloody canvas of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre looming disastrously on the horizon.

The Tragedy and its Actors

The Wars of Religion provide a list of dramatis personae worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. On one side, the last of the Valois and their mother; on the other, enemies and allies, linked by blood or oath to the royal family. Religious conflict was also rendered more interesting by the dynastic crisis that ensued after the accidental death of Henry II. The history of the last of the Valois was propitious to the rise of the legend: each of its actors bears characteristics engraved on the collective imagination. François II was an ailing, weak infant, Charles IX was a mad king, Henri III an effeminate fop and the Duke of Anjou consumed by jealousy ... These sons are dominated by their mother, Catherine of Medici, a masculine and misunderstood figure. A configuration such as this is manna from heaven for a writer of fiction. Alexandre Dumas, for example, rewrites the psychology and the actions of the Great from the clichés that crystallised around them. In his version, Catherine de Medici becomes the stuff of sinister legend. She pursues her political ends with horoscopes and alchemy; she is sometimes represented as a loving mother and sometimes as a disciple of Machiavelli. In his drama Henri III et sa cour, Dumas plunges into clichéd anecdote, attributing for example the queen’s taste for the occult to her Italian origins. Other works, like Aoust 1572 by Lesguillon (1832), show Charles IX in his intimate relationship with Marie Touchet. In times of war, that is not the image of a monarch pacifying his kingdom. The Romantics fantasised endlessly about the reign of this king, besmirched as it was by the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres. The complex and even contradictory relationship that Charles maintained with his mother and with Gaspard de Coligny worsened the case against him. Bloodshed taints the personality of this unstable king. His death, treated by Dumas in a spectacular manner, symbolised the cruelty of an entire era:

Meanwhile, an abundant sweat had broken out all over the King; and as Charles suffered from a relaxation of the capillary vessels, which caused a skin hæmorrhage, the bloody sweat had alarmed the nurse who was unaccustomed to this strange phenomenon and who, being a Protestant let it be remembered, repeated endlessly that it was the blood of the Huguenots shed on Saint Bartholomew’s Day that was summoning his blood. (“The Sweat of Blood”, LXII, La Reine Margot)

The Romantics were also fascinated by the devastating power of the clans of the Religious wars. At the head of the Catholics, the Duc de Guise, “le Balafré”, always played the villain. In Henri III et sa cour, he has all the characteristics of a traitor from melodrama. Like a new Othello devoured by jealousy, he has his rival strangled with his wife’s handkerchief, not without announcing his regicidal intentions: “Good! And now that we have finished with the valet, let us look after his master” (Henri III et sa cour, V, 3). A foil to such blackness, the Amiral de Coligny is a martyr to the cause. In the theatrical version of La Reine Margot, he has the visionary gift of great politicians. Of the future Henri IV he declares: “This is the king who can make of the kingdom he governs the greatest kingdom in the world”. The Romantics thus often take the part of the Protestants, in other words, the victims, according to the agonistic pattern opposing ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. More ambiguous is the role played by Henri de Navarre. Before acceding to the throne, he is portrayed as a pragmatist, always with an eye to the future – one remembers here the memorable hunting scene in La Reine Margot in which he saves Charles IX by killing a wild boar, before the eyes of his brothers who do not lift a finger. Patrice Chéreau made it one of the key scenes in his film adaptation.

It was in response to this caricatural or anecdotic vision of the Wars of Religion that Balzac wrote Sur Catherine de Medicis, one of the most original essays on this troubled period. Adopting the opposite point of view to the propaganda concerning the Queen, Balzac highlights her political adroitness, her art of navigating between men either weak or avid for power. He attempts to restore each to his rightful place:

Catherine de Medici, on the contrary, saved the French crown; she maintained royal authority under circumstances in which more than one great prince would have succumbed. Wary of sedition and of the ambitions of the Guise family and the House of Bourbon, of men like the two cardinals of Lorraine and the two Balafré, the two princes of Condé, Queen Jeanne d’Albret, Henri IV, the constable of Montmorency, Calvin, the Coligny family and Théodore de Bèze, she had to deploy the rarest qualities, the statesman’s most precious gifts, under fire from the Calvinist press. These are facts that are certainly incontestable. (“Le Martyr Protestant”, Sur Catherine de Medicis).

Fiction is nourished by the actions of the personalities that lived during the Wars of Religion. All of them, to a greater or lesser extent, bear some responsibility in the civil wars that, for Alfred de Vigny, continued during the reign of Louis XIII. Thence, the intention of the Romantics was not to re-establish the truth about the facts but to show the violence of History tragically illustrated by the Wars of Religion.    

Despite making quite an impact at the Avignon Festival in 2010, Andreas Kriegenburg remains largely unknown to French audiences. It is a mistake we should correct, especially when we take into account the exceptional European stage career of a man charged with the demanding mission of staging Les Huguenots. Portrait.

The director of Les Huguenots found his way in to the theatre via a somewhat surreptitious route. It is generally known that he was born in 1963 in what was then the German Democratic Republic. A carpenter by trade, he acquired his theatrical experience on the job before becoming famous through his collaborative projects with the author Dea Loher. However, the body of his work is far more extensive: in a career that has spanned 30 years, Andreas Kriegenburg has staged 130 productions in some of Germany’s most prestigious theatres. So who is this artist whom the singer Barbara Hannigan considers as her mentor, along with Krzsysztof Warlikowski and Katie Mitchell? What image do the productions and work that have made his name across the Rhine give us?
By chance, at the end of his training, the young carpenter joined the workshops of the Magdeburg theatre. Whilst there, he discovered a place of potential freedom and ultimately went on to become an assistant director in Zittau. Bubbling with a beginner’s enthusiasm, he presented an extremely complex project for the staging of Heiner Müller’s Philoctetes to the theatre’s director. Andreas earned his trust and was given the task of staging the theatre’s annual fairy tale. A few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he directed his first real production: Strindberg’s Miss Julie (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1989).
In the euphoria of reunification, Kriegenburg joined Frank Castorf at the Berlin Volksbühne and whilst there he scored his first big success. His production of Büchner’s Woyzeck (Volksbühne, 1991) drew the attention of the critics, and, at the age of 28, they took him under their wing and invited him to the prestigious Berliner Theatertreffen. Soon thereafter, Kriegenburg befriended the dramatist and theatre director Ulrich Khuon, who in turn introduced him to the Hanover Staatstheater. In 1995, by staging Dea Loher’s Fremdes Haus, he forged another key relationship in his life as an artist. The author’s delicate prose, her piercingly lucid perception of reality, the extreme sensibility with which she described the vulnerability of others won him over. Over the next seventeen years, Andreas Kriegenburg staged sixteen of the German playwright’s works.
The 2000s were a period of success. Briefly associated with the Burgtheater in Vienna where he staged Wedekind’s Lulu, Kriegenburg ultimately chose to re-join Ulrich Khuon at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, where he had become the principal director. Whilst there, Kriegenburg staged Dea Loher’s Innocence (2003) and The Last Fire (2008), which earned the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis for the play itself and the Faust-Theaterpreis for the direction. He also made his opera debut with Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice (Magdeburg, 2006). However, his first true success in the genre came two years later with Berg’s Wozzeck (Munich, 2008).

At the time, the Deutsches Theater was regarded as the finest in Berlin and when Ulrich Khuon took over as director, Kriegenburg again followed him. Whilst there, he staged Kleist’s The Prince of Homborg (2009) and Loher’s Diebe (2010) which earned him the title of scenographer of the year. Also in 2010, he received a warm welcome from audiences at the Avignon Festival where he presented an adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial with the troupe of the Munich Kammerspiele.
It was at this point that Kriegenburg earned recognition in the domain of opera. To express the traumatic presence of the war in Otello’s mind and the way it impacted his behaviour, Kriegenburg transposed Verdi’s eponymous work into a refugee camp (Berlin, 2008). The director continued to explore these questions in Ödön von Horváth’s Don Juan kommt aus dem Krieg (Salzburg, 2014) and Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (Munich, 2014), hailed as the production of the year by Opernwelt magazine.
However, his most successful production in the genre was his Ring (Munich, 2012), in which he sought to employ a “collective narrative” by exploiting the visual aspects of Wagner’s drama. The various elements of the set were represented by a crowd of extras, a sort of corporal raw material successively embodying the waters of the Rhine, the flames of the furnace, the dragon Fafner and Valhalla… However the legend implicit in these fantastic visions gave way to a world devastated in the aftermath of Fukushima and the financial crises. This was a Twilight of the Gods which was also our own. Here, his cast direction is implicit in the decadent gesture: by amplifying the stirring, intimate details, it gave them precedence over the symbolic and made the gods more human.
If his theatre feeds on images, it is difficult to distinguish Kriegenburg’s own style, since his work explores different angles and viewpoints .
As someone who became involved in theatre through manual labour, Kriegenburg gives practice precedence in his conception of the theatre. Indeed, the term Theatermacher, which could be translated as theatre practitioner, suits him better than Regisseur or stage director. His use of the body in the persistent elements of his work—be it choreography, acrobatics or dance—also demonstrates this shift in accent. Just like his permanent back and forth between writing and performance, by favouring the adaptation of non-dramatic works, a collage of texts, stage writing or the staging of his own texts (Kassandra: Ein Projekt 2003; Die Zelle 2008…)
As such, Andreas Kriegenburg embraces the concept of Autorentheater developed by Ulrich Khuon in the middle of the 1990s. Not a French-style "théâtre d’auteur" but, rather, “the continuous collaboration between director, author, actors and dramatists”. Rather than writing for the theatre per se, Dea Loher, for example, who sees the stage as a “language space”, places her texts in the hands of a practitioner capable of revealing their inherent theatricality. From this perspective, Kriegenburg constantly strives to link body language with semantic language. He notes, for example, that Kafka’s text changed the actors in The Trial: “Language marks the body of the one who uses it and Kafka literally creates the body as a receptacle for his language.”

Regarding theatre as a celebration of language, Kriegenburg likes to construct a narrative in his productions. To achieve this, he explores all manifestations of theatre that have given dramatic form to the problems of their time be it the original ancient Greek tragedy (Medea 1991, 2001 ; The Oresteia 2002), the great dramatic works of Shakespeare confronting the advent of modernity, the drama of the Enlightenment inventing liberty (Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Mozart…), the theatre of the 19^th century questioning the social and industrial changes (Strindberg, Büchner, Ibsen, Chekhov…), that of the 20^th century questioning political subjectivity in the face of fascism (Lorca, Brecht, Sartre…) or contemporary writings grappling with a pervasive crisis of purpose  (Loher, but also Houellebecq and Anja Hilling). For him, dramatic texts are both universal and relevant to our time. Just as Kriegenburg gave added meaning to the Ring or Otello by placing them in the context of the contemporary world, in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme (which he staged in Hanover in 2003) he sees less of a novel about sex tourism than a “profoundly romantic” work on the nostalgic quest for true love.
Other than being a language space, the theatre for Kriegenburg is also a crucible of experimentation for the other arts. If his penchant for narrative naturally led him towards the novel (he will be staging Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler in Munich, after Les Huguenots), Kriegenburg has also produced choreographies (Feuer/Vogel, 1988; Kaffee-Braun 1999); musicals (Satie’s Le piège de Méduse, 1992; Burroughs, and Waits’ The Black Rider, 2000 ; Brecht’s The Three Penny Opera, 2017) and has adapted films such as I Hired a Contract Killer (Aki Kaurismäki, 1997) Les Enfants du paradis (Prévert and Carné, 2001), The Idiots (Lars von Trier, 2004) or From the Life of the Marionettes (Bergman, 2007). Combining drama, narrative and image, film is particularly present in his work, notably in his production of The Trial which exploits the use of images on every level. First, because the play unfurls in a gigantic eye, at the centre of which a pivoting iris serves as a gantry for the actors. In this set, evocative of both the sketches of Kafka and the eerie locales of expressionist cinema, the eight actors each in turn perform the role of Joseph K and the other characters of the novel. Thus multiplied, the hero is constantly confronted by his own reflection and, against this backdrop, the actors are forced to play with an air of gravitas a succession of gags inspired from comic cinema—in particular, the films of Kriegenburg’s favourite actor Buster Keaton.
The emotion, or rather the combination of contradictory emotions is also a feature of his work. Just as he draws The Trial towards “humour and a harrowing sort of tomfoolery” we find laughter in all his work, even in his sombre and pessimistic vision of the Ring. “His best works conceal so much strength, humour and melancholy poetry", comments Christine Dössel, "that it cleaves every heart between a feeling of pain and joy.”
Andreas Kriegenburg looks upon theatre and his approach to it as a work of language: language through body, images, and narrative in which the actor takes precedence over all else. Here, a conception of the world shows through. Sometimes bittersweet, sometimes tragi-comical, and sometimes pessimistic, it is always sustained by hope.

In taking up Les Huguenots by Giacomo Meyerbeer, an opera set during the sombre hours of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Andreas Kriegenburg brings a contemporary resonance to the work. Here he explains his vision of the work.

A.K.: The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is one of the most striking traumas in the history of France, and also in all of European history, in which it plays a profoundly seminal role. The massacre contributed to the forging of our cultural identity and showed that Europe could be a fertile territory for religious fanaticism, the expression of all kinds of excesses, of monstrous violence. Today we are living in a period in which the manipulation of the masses by the use of supra-religious motifs is more relevant than ever. My objective was therefore to liberate myself from the original historical context that surrounds the work and thus distances it from us. I didn’t seek to transpose Les Huguenots to a period closer to our own than is the reign of Charles IX. Rather, I wanted to situate these events beyond the frontiers of France in a timeless future in which humanity would be on the verge of disappearing. In fact, we observe that fashion, politics and even horror and outrage seemed doomed to repeat themselves. I’ve imagined then a kind of endless ritornello, as if History were forever beginning again, as if what we are living through now were an ominous foreshadowing of what is to come.
    

A.K.: In Les Huguenots, the tragedy is born out of a misunderstanding lying at the heart of the opera: an excess of religious faith and, paradoxically, a lack of trust. Raoul, a Huguenot, holds the Catholics responsible for the fact that his beloved Valentine is the mistress of another man. His reason seems to have been hi-jacked by the boundaries imposed by his religious convictions. Love fails to override these preconceived ideas. What is touching is that, later on, the lovers succeed in extricating themselves from these shackles, of demolishing the ideological walls that confine them. At this point one is aware of a kind of contrast between the violence and stupidity of the easily manipulated masses and the lovers’ life-affirming moment of intimacy as they create their own weapons to combat religious domination and adopt a position both ethical and moral. I believe that one has to start from the cliché of the pure love that unites Raoul to Valentine. One cannot tell this story if one does not defend this love. When Raoul sees Valentine with Nevers, he is wounded to the depths of his being. It is difficult to show this wound in such a brief passage in the drama, but it is essential for me to make it apparent.

A.K.: The world we represent on stage seeks to follow the libretto whilst also adapting it: the feast scene, the garden... Splendour subsides into horror, elegance into rigidity and brutality. A realistic set would give the impression that the characters take part in this reality. If we take away the colour, we modify our perspective on this world. The environment recedes before the characters who take part in the action. Scenography becomes a laboratory in which human beings are more present, as if laid bare, and within which one can observe their relationships. One can then measure and expose the mechanisms of manipulation.    

Since it contributed greatly to defining the contours of a genre – Grand Opera – Les Huguenots is one of the most important works in the history of the Paris Opera. But are you familiar with a work that enjoyed colossal and uninterrupted success only to drift into oblivion for almost a century?

Giacomo Meyerbeer was born near Berlin, Germany in 1791. After a debut that did not go unnoticed in Darmstadt and then Vienna, he knew success in Italy, composing in the style of Rossini whom he considered to be his mentor. He then came to Paris where, in the space of just three operas, he became the most performed composer of the 19^th century.

Prior to Les Huguenots, Meyerbeer was famous for having composed Robert le Diable, one of the Paris Opera’s most acclaimed works: first performed at the Le Peletier theatre in 1831 and based on the legend of the Duke of Normandy who was supposedly the spawn of the Devil, the work helped to make the French capital one of the most important places for opera during the era. It was Robert le Diable, before Les Huguenots, that defined the rules of Grand Opera that composers like Verdi and Wagner would bow to in order to conquer Paris.
  

       The huge success of Robert le Diable had unexpected consequences: it paralysed Meyerbeer: Fearful of nor reproducing the same success he kept delaying the composition of Les Huguenots.   

In addition to the fear of failure, the first version of Eugène Scribe’s libretto did not satisfy Meyerbeer. Furthermore, his wife’s illness forced him to interrupt the composition: as a result, the completion of the work was considerably delayed to the point that the director of the Opera forced the composer to pay 30,000 francs for non-compliance with the contract that bound him to the institution. The premiere of Les Huguenots almost did not take place.

And yet Eugène Scribe knew his craft: both a dramatist and a novelist, he was the principal librettist of Grand Opera, writing some of its greatest texts: Auber’s La Muette de Portici, Halèvy’s La Juive, Donizetti’s La Favorite and, of course, Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes.

Les répétitions des Huguenots furent houleuses, la partition étant jugée inexécutable. L’œuvre fut finalement créée le 29 février 1836 dans une mise en scène fastueuse qui coûta 160 000 francs, chiffre astronomique pour l’époque.

The rehearsals for Les Huguenots were turbulent for many people deemed the score unplayable. The work finally had its premiere on February 29 1836 in a lavish production that cost 160,000 francs—an astronomical figure for the times.

The opera tells a love story set against a backdrop of religious tensions which culminate in the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Since the subject of religious conflict was a sensitive one, the action was often transposed to enable the opera to be performed abroad. One had to wait until 1848 for the censors to loosen their grip and allow more faithful versions of the work to be performed.

Staging a production of Les Huguenots demands the joint collaboration of seven exceptional performers: for the premiere, the cast brought together the greatest voices of the day. The difficulty of assembling such a cast explains in part why the work was so rarely staged during the 20^th century.

Berlioz, who chronicled the premiere, noted among other musical innovations, the appearance of an intermediary form between aria and recitative: it presaged the continuous melody which would later be developed by Wagnerian opera.

“You ask if it would be unappealing for me to work for the French stage. I assure you it would be a far greater honour to compose for the French Opera, than for all the theatres in Italy – in the principal ones of which, incidentally, I have already performed my works.”
Meyerbeer, in a letter to Nicolas-Prosper Levasseur, July 5, 1823.     

Who today can hum Marguerite de Navarre’s aria “ Ô mon pays” or recall the “Bénédiction des poignards”, both of which feature in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots? This grand opera, which in 1936 celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its premiere after more than a thousand performances—a feat practically unequalled in the history of the genre—then all but drifted into oblivion. But what exactly lies behind the term “grand opera”? Behind that expression, we detect monumentality, dramatic tone and a quest for a specific “French-style”. Brought to its apogee by German and Italian composers, it is in fact the result of an astute combination of Italian melody, German experimentation with instrumentation and the rigour of French prosody. The portrait of a genre anchored in a century of political and aesthetic upheavals.    

The origins of French grand opera seem to lie in the realms of lyrical tragedy. Invented during the reign of Louis XIV by the Italian Jean-Baptiste Lully, this genre in five acts combined the magnificence of sets and costumes with a particular focus on French prosody far removed from the vocal devices and virtuosity which ensured the success of the Italian composers. The evolution of society and then the French Revolution would usher in a wind of change and liberty that would lead to an aesthetic evolution and, more importantly, the revamping of the genre: Aimed at a wider audience and often saddled with a propagandist purpose to promote the new republican ideas and the various regimes that followed, opera embraced a violent realism with shorter librettos that forsook subjects from antiquity latching instead onto the political stories of the day. Theatres and new works flourished until 1807 when the Emperor Napoleon reinstated the Privileges that applied under Louis XIV. Henceforth, only eight theatres would be authorised in Paris, four of which were “imperial” or “Grand Theatres”: the Comédie-Française, the Opéra-Comique, the Théâtre-Italien, more commonly known as “Les Bouffes”, and first and foremost, the Académie Royale in the Rue Le Peletier. The delimitation of genres was extremely strict and for several decades the Académie Royale had the exclusive privilege to stage grand operas. In 1807, it was the Italian Gaspare Spontini who made the first successful transition of a revolutionary work towards this new genre with La Vestale. This was followed by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1828) and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (1829) both of which are considered to be the first accomplished examples.

In 1825, the young German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer settled in Paris. A student of Abbé Vogler, a composer all but unknown today but the genuine precursor of German musical romanticism, Meyerbeer arrived in Italy where he quickly became immersed in Italian bel canto and began a brilliant career as an opera composer alongside Rossini. Even though, like Rossini, he staged his early Italian works at the Théâtre-Italien—as required by the separation of genres —it was really at the Académie Royale that he sought to see his works performed. Thus, in a letter to the French basso Nicolas-Prosper Levasseur, dated July 1823, he wrote: “Where else other than Paris can an artist who wishes to compose truly dramatic music find the vast means that French Opera offers?” The timely support of Luigi Cherubini and an encounter with the principal librettist of the genre, Eugène Scribe, led to the composition of Robert le Diable (1831). The work brought both the newly-privatised Paris Opera and its new owner Louis Véron fame and fortune. Henceforth, the consecration of any composer seeking to be recognised in the field of opera would be dependent on a commission from that institution. In 1861, even Wagner would bow to it by having Tannhäuser translated before suffering the ignominy of disappointment, notably for failing to satisfy the requirement of the members of the Jockey Club to insert a ballet into the second act of the opera since that those gentlemen usually arrived in their boxes after the first act. In 1836, Meyerbeer composed the greatest success of the 19th century: Les Huguenots.

So what are the characteristics of grand opera that were set definitively by Robert le Diable and respected by all of Meyerbeer’s contemporaries; Berlioz and Wagner included? In the first place, it embraces everything associated with grandeur and grandiosity: From its roots in lyrical tragedy, grand opera generally retained the five acts and incorporated a ballet— often cut from today’s productions—but it also boasted incredibly sumptuous sets and costumes imbued with realism and spectacular stage effects. In addition to the numerous, highly demanding solo roles the productions also included huge processions, major crowd scenes, and Bacchanalian drinking binges and orgies which delighted the public. Grandeur also defined the subject matter: a genuine “sweeping epic” generally unfurling over four or five hours, grand opera primarily drew on historical subjects but above all sought dramatic truth. In addition, the music had to reflect the sense of the words and the situations. In this, Meyerbeer’s contribution was decisive; it was he who generalised the use of “continuous melody” blurring the line between arias and recitatives and allowing for greater dramatic consistency. Moreover, the overture of Les Huguenots is based on variations of the Lutheran choral “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott”, a Leitmotiv signalling the religious overtones which surface throughout the work and inspired Wagner.

Finally, grandeur defined the orchestration, which anchored the genre in musical romanticism: the orchestra was enriched with low register instruments—bass clarinet, double bassoon, ophicleide, tuba—and high-note ones—piccolo, cornet, saxhorn. New instruments also appeared in the ensemble, including the English horn and the harp, which until then had generally been confined to private appartments. In Act I of Les Huguenots. There is even a viola d’amore (often replaced by the viola) which is meant to accompany Raoul’s love song. It is an innovation that reveals the importance which Meyerbeer placed on instrumental timbres intended to blend with the voice of the singers to create a dramatic double effect. Concerning Les Huguenots, Berlioz, himself a commensurate orchestrator, wrote in the Gazette musicale the morning after the premiere: “In terms of instrumentation, in terms of mass vocal effects, this score surpasses everything attempted until now. […] It astounds the ear.” The emphasis on unusual or exotic timbres also enriches the romantic orchestra’s palette of percussions and accessories, notably through the addition of military drums and antique cymbals in Berlioz’s Les Troyens, or by the use of bells, castanets and even anvils. In addition to all these characteristics, which require considerable financial resources, and which, in part, explain the genre’s decline in the 20th century, grand opera stands out from other opera genres for its requirement that the libretto be sung from start to finish solely in the French language. For this reason, in 1857, Verdi reworked his Il Trovatore (which became Le Trouvère), and he then composed Don Carlos to a French libretto to satisfy the requirements of the genre.

The 19th century was riddled with a succession of revolts and revolutions which left a lasting impression in the minds of artists—no less than seven assassination attempts were made against Louis-Philippe I between 1832 and 1846, and four plots were thwarted. A product of the Reign of Terror, grand opera assimilates the violence inherent in the troubled times that France was experiencing. Added to this is the utterly romantic fascination for the supernatural and the macabre that we find particularly in the dance of the nuns in Robert le Diable. And if the subject of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572) was of so much fascination at the time, it is because it echoed the numerous conflicts that divided monarchists and republicans, but also Catholics and protestants. The content of the works also evolved to reflect the changes in power, often assigning villainous roles to the nobility, against a backdrop of anticlericalism. The exaltation of Liberty is also a common theme in grand opera, echoing the numerous restrictions on individual freedoms and the regular intervention of the censors. However, the true subject behind the various historical and political events always remains love—love often thwarted or love that is simply impossible: Valentine and Raoul in les Huguenots (1836), Didon and Énée in Les Troyens (1863), Élisabeth and Carlos in Don Carlos (1867)… In this, grand opera joins its competitors, Italian opera and comic opera, with the timeless and universal appeal of librettos that are particularly well adapted for today’s stage. Accused of “cosmopolitism” in the context of the rise of anti-Semitism at the end of the 19th century, declared “degenerate” and totally banned in Nazi Germany, Meyerbeer’s music is, today, rehabilitated. The performances of Les Huguenots at the Paris Opera offer a unique occasion to rediscover a precursory genius, who was acclaimed and much copied by his peers and who gave grand opera a prestige that has yet to be surpassed.