The 19th century's equivalent of Phantom of the Opera

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable was the 19th-century’s closest approximation to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. Both were instant worldwide hits, wowing crowds as far afield as Calcutta, Buenos Aires and Melbourne; both had elements of spectacle and melodrama; and both were accompanied by a score which pleased the public more than the cognoscenti.

The comparison may have occurred to Lloyd-Webber: the opera gets a brief name check in his musical’s auction scene.

What must give him pause to think is that Robert le Diable is now almost forgotten outside the history books. The new production which the Royal Opera presents next month will be the first in Britain since 1890. Meyerbeer ultimately fell from grace, and it’s unlikely that his reputation could ever fully recover. What happened?

Born near Berlin in 1791, Meyerbeer came from a wealthy Jewish family and benefited from a superb musical education. After a decade or so of apprenticeship in the shadow of Rossini, he enjoyed his first major success with Robert le Diable, a watershed in the development of a specific musical form known as “Grand Opera”.

What characterises this genre, which flourished in the state-funded major opera house in Paris, is not just largeness of scale. Grand Operas normally focus on a specific historical period, generally medieval or Reformation Europe. Divided into five contrasting acts, their scores feature showpiece arias alongside big choral scenes and ensembles bringing at least two of those acts to a rousing climax.

In the pit, a large orchestra contributed a wide range of accompanying sounds and colours: Robert le Diable includes ophicleides (the forerunner of the bass tuba), organ and thunder machine. A magnificent processional march and a ballet sequence somewhere in the middle acts were also de rigueur.

Robert contains some skilfully wrought and superficially attractive music, but that was never the key element in its popularity. What pulled in the punters was a plot with a frisson of Gothick supernatural horror.

Set in 13th-century Sicily, its libretto spins a yarn round the figure of Robert, Duke of Normandy. His soul is a battleground which the devil in disguise, name of Bertram, is fighting to control. Robert wants to marry the saintly Princess Isabelle, who loves him, too, but first she has to save him from Bertram’s malevolent clutches.

However, what hit the headlines was a ballet interlude which showed Bertram raising the ghosts of dead nuns, who proceed to dance friskily on their graves. It was pure gimmickry, of course, and a bit scandalous, but everyone wanted a peek.

Such vulgar sensationalism was new to opera, and it left a profound mark on what came later. Rossini was so floored by Robert le Diable that he decided to throw in the towel. Gounod’s Faust would not be the same without the model of Robert, and one can trace more distantly its influence on Verdi’s Don Carlos and Wagner’s Tannhäuser, as well as other less durable pieces.

So why did Robert fall so drastically out of fashion? Partly perhaps because it was so very fashionable, and when fashions changed a rather flimsy musical and dramatic skeleton was shamingly revealed; partly because by the end of the century, there was a shortage of tenors and sopranos capable of singing its demanding lead roles; and partly because, unless a full house could be guaranteed, the expense of mounting this behemoth, with its numerous scene changes and large cast, was extreme.

But perhaps the crucial name in the collapse is that of Richard Wagner. The story of his animosity towards Meyerbeer is complex. Meyerbeer was 20 years his senior and did him several kindnesses when he was starting out. Wagner later resented this, on the grounds that he considered Meyerbeer a vastly inferior talent, more interested in putting on a show than walking the lonely high road of art. The fact that Meyerbeer was making huge amounts of money increased Wagner’s exasperation.

Thus far he had some justification. Meyerbeer’s music lacks nobility, simplicity and integrity. The first time you hear it, you may be impressed and even involved, but the longer you listen, the more it dissolves into a series of bombastic effects and sweeping gestures, cunningly stitched together from ideas often borrowed or filched from elsewhere.

Had Wagner stopped there, it would be hard to argue with him. Nor was he alone in taking this hostile line – Schumann and Berlioz would also attack him on similar grounds. But he went much further: Jewishness in Music, a scurrilously anti-Semitic essay he published in 1850, accused the whole race of Jewish composers (Meyerbeer is unmistakeably implied but not specifically identified) not only of being personally repellent but also so rootless and superficial that they could never produce anything authentic.

The attack was below the belt, but it stuck in people’s minds, especially as Wagner’s concept of music drama proposed an aesthetic concept superior to that behind Grand Opera, and the result was that through the latter half of the 19th century Meyerbeer’s oeuvre appeared ever more tarnished and jejune.

In my opera-going lifetime, I believe that only two of his mature operas, Les Huguenots and L’Africaine, have been professionally staged in London – neither of them greatly acclaimed.

Covent Garden hasn’t so far had much luck with its resuscitation of Robert either: some diable has cursed it by removing one of the production’s originally announced stars – Diana Damrau has withdrawn.

Can her replacement, combined with the tenor Bryan Hyrmel, the direction of Laurent Pelly and the conducting of Daniel Oren, meet the challenge of explaining to modern audiences why Robert le Diable was once the biggest hit in town?

Robert le Diable is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (roh.org.uk; 020 7394 4999), from Dec 6