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Opera open thread: Reasons to ban Le prophète [1]
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Date: 2025-02-22
The Nazis had a very simple reason to ban Le prophète by Giacomo Meyerbeer: the composer is a German Jew. I thought that sort of thing could never happen in America, because most Americans seem to not care about opera.
But then dictator wannabe Donald Trump, apparently dissatisfied with just having the title of president of the United States, decided to jam himself into the presidency of the Kennedy Center Honors. That wasn’t on my bingo card, which did include idiotic trade wars and subservience to Dictator Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Trump doesn't understand how tariffs work but he does understand that a lot of people, enough people, do care about the arts, including opera.
Not that he actually understands opera either: at a special concert in Germany for many world leaders, Trump seemed to think that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is an opera with a 40-minute overture and a 20-minute single act. Well, the lowbrow idiot probably fell asleep during the opening Allegro ma non troppo and didn’t wake up until some point after “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!”
Banning Le prophète is probably not a big priority for today’s Nazis, given how obscure the opera has become. At its 1849 première in Paris, it was a much bigger success than Salieri’s Les Danaïdes more than a half century earlier. That was another hit French opera by a German-speaking composer. But just as with Salieri, Meyerbeer’s œuvre fell into obscurity after its composer’s death.
Richard Wagner was surely envious of Meyerbeer’s success. Wagner had several criticisms of Meyerbeer, with varying degrees of legitimacy. For example, Meyerbeer sometimes uses the opera chorus in ways that are confusing to the storytelling.
Though I doubt Wagner mentioned that particular criticism in his anti-Semitic essay of 1850. Wagner’s opinion of Meyerbeer certainly did not help Meyerbeer’s reception in his native Germany in the decades leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
Aside from concert excerpts, Meyerbeer was forgotten all over the world. The last time Le prophète was performed by the Metropolitan Opera was, from what I can gather, in 1979. Compare that to Beethoven’s Fidelio, which was last performed in 2017 and is on the schedule for next month.
Which makes last year’s production at the Bard’s SummerScape festival at Annandale-on-Hudson (roughly a hundred miles north of New York City) quite remarkable. The production, available for streaming on YouTube, invites us to draw comparisons between the opera’s story and present day events.
The plot summary from Ricordi, the Milanese publisher of the critical edition, does not really suggest that this opera might have any greater relevance to current events than any opera written by any of Meyerbeer’s contemporaries.
Anabaptists incite a revolt among the peasants in order to free themselves from tyranny. The bondswoman Berthe wants to marry Jean, for which she requires Count Oberthal’s permission. But she and her companion, Jean’s mother Fidès, are instead arrested. Berthe manages to flee to Jean. The count gives Jean a choice between having Fidès killed and giving up Berthe. He decides to save his mother’s life, and Berthe is taken away. Jean joins the anabaptists as a new prophet out of vengeance. They manage to conquer the town of Munster where Berthe is supposed to have fled. Berthe and Fidès believe that the prophet has killed Jean, who has meanwhile crowned himself king. When Berthe finds out that the bloodthirsty megalomaniac Jean is in fact the prophet, she commits suicide. Fidès forgives him, despite his having disowned her as a mother. Jean still wants to take revenge on Oberthal and sets fire to the imperial castle during an assault. In doing so he kills himself, his entourage, and Fidès.
Ronald Blum’s article in the Seattle Times draws parallels between the opera’s time period and the present day from the very first line.
A demagogue and religious fanatics impose a theocracy. What sounds like a ripped-from-the-headlines 21st century story was portrayed by Giacomo Meyerbeer 175 years ago in “Le Prophète” and brought back in a compelling production by Bard’s SummerScape festival. A success at Paris’ Salle Le Peletier in 1849, “Le Prophète” became a world-wide hit only to disappear as Meyerbeer’s grand operas lost favor in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bard’s staging, which opened Friday [August 2, 2024] at the 900-seat Sosnoff Theater and runs through Sunday [August 4, 2024], is the first major U.S. production since the Metropolitan Opera’s performances in 1977 and ’79. [...] “The piece unfortunately, feels very, very modern and rings a lot of bells for today,” [opera director Christian] Räth said. “Although it’s set sometime in the 16th century, the original story, it just translates to our recent history or to present seamlessly,” “Le Prophète” was groundbreaking, debuting the year after the 1848 revolutions and including the first staged use of electric lights. “In German-speaking lands in the early 1920s, Meyerbeer gets caught in a kind of double fork,” [musicologist Mark] Everist said. “On the one hand, Weimar Republic liberals viewed him a kind of royalist lackey — he was the general music director in the Prussian court, for example. On the other side, you got right wingers who are chastising him for being Jewish.” Soprano Amina Edris as Berthe in Act V. In Act I, she wanted to marry Jean. “Le Prophète” tells the story of John of Leiden (Jean), who became an Anabaptist prophet, led the 1534 takeover of the German city Münster, proclaimed it “New Jerusalem” and declared himself king. The city was retaken by prince-bishop Franz von Waldeck a year later and John was executed in 1536.
The production also starred Amina Edris as Berthe (Jean’s former fiancée), Jennifer Feinstein as Fidès (Jean’s mother) and Robert Watson as Jean. Edris had previously starred in an important recording of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable. Blum notes that
At the exact time Feinstein was on stage at Bard on Sunday [July 28, 2024?], her husband, bass-baritone Nicholas Brownlee, was making his Bayreuth debut as Donner in [Wagner’s] “Das Rheingold.” Feinstein studied under Marilyn Horne, who sang the role [of Fidès] at the Met.
Watson made his professional début in Wagner’s Lohengrin. Of Le prophète, Watson said
“It’s about a cult of personality. Everyone’s manipulating everyone else. … It’s this kind of repeating motif of history, of the dangers of following these flawed individuals and what motivates that sort of person.”
The most famous piece from Le prophète is definitely the Act IV coronation march, and it is no accident that there are a lot of women onstage during Act IV in this production who look like handmaids, as in handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale.
The whole performance ran more than four hours, though the ballet, something French operagoers expected and demanded in every opera production, was omitted.
x YouTube Video
The open thread question: How is Meyerbeer’s Le prophète relevant today? In what ways might it make the people in power nervous?
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