RECORDINGS OF THE YEAR

Awards issue

‘Erin Morley’s brilliance as Isabelle is sensational, all staggering coloratura, electrifying high notes and real depth of feeling’

Tim Ashley is thrilled to be won over by an outstanding recording of a seminal opera,

one of the most influential of the 19th century yet now rarely performed

Meyerbeer Robert le diable John Osborn ten �Robert Nicolas Courjal bass �Bertram Amina Edris sop �Alice Erin Morley sop �Isabelle Nico Darmanin ten �Raimbaut Joel Allison bass-bar �Alberti/Priest Paco Garcia ten �Herald Chorus of the Opéra National de Bordeaux; Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine / Marc Minkowski Bru Zane (BZ1049 c • 3h 37’) Includes synopsis, libretto and translation

Robert le diable was first performed at the Paris Opéra on November 21, 1831. The theatre’s new manager, Louis Véron, spared no expense with it, and the premiere caused a musical and theatrical sensation, provoking the awestruck critic of Le Figaro to describe it, in language that uncannily pre-empts Wagner, as a work that ‘makes all the arts work together towards a single goal’. It rapidly became one of the most frequently performed operas of the 19th century – by

1840 it had been heard in 1843 theatres worldwide – and it made Meyerbeer the most popular composer of his age.

Yet nowadays we hear it infrequently, and many approach Meyerbeer with caution. After his death in 1864 envy, rancour and antiSemitism gradually eroded his standing. His cosmopolitan style, fusing Italianate melody, French declamation and German orchestral subtlety, was deemed eclectic in an increasingly nationalistic age, and the argument that his reputation exceeds his worth, voiced by detractors in his lifetime, still stubbornly clings to him. As a result, we have lost sight of his centrality and importance, of which Marc Minkowski’s superb new recording of Robert, made in tandem with a semi-staging in Bordeaux last year, comes as a forceful reminder.

The opera’s influence was pervasive. The Gothic subject – the moral redemption of the sensualist son of a demon and a mortal woman – fed into the contemporary fashion for diablerie that informed multiple adaptations, operatic or otherwise, of the

Faust legend, of which Scribe’s libretto is a variant. More crucially, Robert consolidated the five-act form of French grand opéra that dominated European musical thinking until the fin de siècle, and which no composer who aspired to write for the stage could ignore. Much written in its wake consequently took it as a point of departure, whether by a process of imitation, assimilation or rejection, and its music and dramaturgy echo down through Verdi, Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Gounod, Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, Sullivan: the list goes on.

Its impact was not solely musical. Véron’s insistence that it be performed by gaslight with the house lights down was groundbreaking, while the original designs, by Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, brought new grandeur and realism to the stage. The whiteclad dancers, meanwhile, of Filippo Taglioni’s infamous ballet of ghostly nuns, unfaithful to their vows and summoned by Robert’s demonic father Bertram to assist in luring his son to damnation, became the prototype for Giselle and Swan Lake, the foundational

26 GRAMOPHONE GRAMOPHONE RECORDINGS OF THE YEAR 2022

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