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.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-225) and index.
Contents
Childhood
Serious studies
The land where lemons blossom
Paris at last!
Superstar status
A brief interlude in Berlin
Two comic operas
An unexpected end
Meyerbeer's music
Meyerbeer the man
The falling star
Meyerbeer and anti-Semitism
The case of Richard Wagner
Meyerbeer in Israel
Finale
Appendix 1: early Meyerbeer recordings
Appendix 2: Palestine opera productions
An annotated bibliography.
ISBN
9789657023150 (paperback)
9657023157 (paperback)
OCLC
1183421873
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