Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/139

 we know; the biographers whom I have quoted say truly that in it he thought to attain originality by drawing inspiration simultaneously from Rossini and Weber. Il Crociato was presented at the Théâtre-Italien in 1825. This circumstance was decisive. Contact with Paris and the first-hand discovery of French music and its virtues revealed to the musician the path of his future triumphs. He was approaching forty, but no change alarmed him, and he resolved to become a French composer. From that time it was on books written in French, or at any rate in a sort of French, that he composed all his operas. The first fruit of this resolve was Robert the Devil presented at the Opera on the 22nd November, 1831, poem by Scribe. Its success was sensational, and when at a later date Robert was performed at Berlin, we shall find Frederick-William IV endorsing the applause of Paris by appointing Meyerbeer director-general of music at the Prussian court.

Robert the Devil is an important date in the history of music. In this work Meyerbeer had created a new branch of art, a branch that was destined to make his fortune and derive its fortune from him—Grand Opera. But is "branch" the right word? No, it was rather a combination. The legitimate branches of literature and art have their foundation in nature. Tragedy, comedy, the epopee, the novel, satire, the madrigal, epigram—or again, lyric drama, comic opera, oratorio, the cantata, song—these correspond to so many aspects under which things can be regarded, painted, or sung, or to so many natural modes of feeling,