Giacomo Meyerbeer

Giacomo Meyerbeer Synopsis

When Giacomo Meyerbeer died in 1864 at the age of seventy-two, he was widely regarded as having written the greatest operas since Mozart. And yet, remarkably, his fame and his very name were all but eliminated from the history of music for approximately a hundred years. Who did the dastardly deed? Each for his own reasons, the principal culprits were Schumann, Mendelssohn, Heine, and Wagner. David Faiman presents here an outline of Meyerbeer's life: his precocious childhood in Prussia, his rise to fame in Italy, his reluctant achievement of superstar status in Paris, the jealousy this engendered among some of his less successful colleagues, and the way one of the above-mentioned availed himself of the latent anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century audiences to remove Meyerbeer's works from our stages and airbrush his very name from our awareness. Thankfully Meyerbeer is now enjoying a deserved revival. This book helps to reintroduce some of the music world's greatest long-lost pleasures.