Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/138

 to have shown strength, but to have been conceived in that form of stiff and cold scholasticism that has generally been achieved by those who have sought to copy the majesty of Handel (the Saxon master whose work was so nobly influenced and modified by the environment of aristocratic England), without being able to copy his genius or his grandeur of sentiment. They had no success. Now Nature had created in Jacob Liebmann Beer (he had added Meyer to his name in obedience to the wish ifof [sic] a rich relation whose heir he had become) a man hardly capable of imagining any polestar but success for artists at the crossroads of life, success being, beyond dispute, the polestar of merchants anxious to find a market for their wares. Who was successful in Europe just then? Rossini. Meyerbeer is off to Italy, steeps himself in the methods of Rossini, and brings out at Padua, Turin and Venice three operas in Rossini's first manner. He translates his first name Jacob into Italian, and becomes Giacomo Meyerbeer. A symbolic combination, as M. Lionel Dauriac has wittily remarked; for in the operas of his settled manner, it was constantly to happen that an air begun in the German style should go on in the Italian, that Handel should give way to Rossini or Donizetti, that Meyer should provide the air and Giacomo the refrain.

However, the affectionate remonstrances of Weber, added no doubt to the signs of wear which Rossini's manner (the Rossini of Tancred and Semiramis) was beginning to show, and the great expansion in style of Rossini himself, led Meyerbeer to conclude that he had gone too far in the direction of Italy. He resumed relations with Berlin and composed an opera of mixed, or rather double, style, Il Crociato in Egitto, which