Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/137

 Boïeldieu? To create for himself the necessary resources, he had to provision himself, if I may put it that way, with an exaggerated quantity of sound-material, and to enlarge greatly the orchestral mass. The heaviness, the excessive weight, what has been called the obesity of the modern dramatic orchestra, which has become in our time the nightmare of all refined lovers of music, dates from Meyerbeer. The Germans put up with it gladly, nay revel in it. But for French musicians it is a condition incompatible with the free development and liberty of their nature; and French musical art, which has unfortunately allowed it to prevail far too much, could only continue to tolerate it at the price of its own extinction and death.

I have no intention, nor indeed have I the opportunity, of following the first part of Meyerbeer's career when he was producing work without having yet found I will not say his personality, but his form, the form of the works which have filled the world with his name. As to his personality, I do not consider he ever found it; at most he found it only in rare and disjointed fragments whose authenticity is never very sure. The series begins with Robert the Devil, which was triumphantly successful at Paris in November 1831.

But it is very interesting, or rather it is necessary, to indicate briefly the incarnations, multiple and complete avatars, through which he had gone before reaching this point; he was in succession a German composer, an Italian composer and a French composer.

He began in Germany with an oratorio and two operas, produced at Darmstadt, Vienna and Stuttgart. According to the testimony that I have been able to gather about these works of his youth, they seem