Meyerbeer's Music of the Future Gabriela Cruz The Opera Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 3-4, Summer-Autumn 2009, pp. 169-202 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/opq/summary/v025/25.3-4.cruz.html Access provided by University of Michigan @ Ann Arbor (24 Jun 2013 03:23 GMT) Meyerbeer’s Music of the Future {gabriela cruz} I cannot exist as an artist in my own eyes or in those of my friends, I cannot think or feel without sensing in Meyerbeer my total antithesis, a contrast I am driven loudly to proclaim by the genuine despair that I feel whenever I encounter . . . the mistaken view that I have something in common with Meyerbeer. —Richard Wagner, letter to Franz Liszt, 18511 Richard Wagner’s well-known words to Franz Liszt of 1851 pose the problem of grand opera for posterity. The genre’s historiography begins, as Thomas Grey noted, with a disavowal in four parts—Wagner’s denial of a Meyerbeerian affiliation in The Artwork of the Future, Judaism in Music, A Communication to My Friends, and Opera and Drama.2 The writings have left a mark, even if current scholarly respectability dictates a certain distance from the words of the master in addressing the subject. We know that the author of Rienzi was a Meyerbeerian, and long after he cast Meyerbeer in the role of his antithesis, musicologists still find Wagner secretly engaged in a more respectable and properly Hegelian path of artistic sublation. In this spirit, John Deathridge has written on the commonalities that bind the allegories of revolution in the earlier Robert le Diable and the later Götterdämmerung, and Thomas Grey has annotated various exemplary moments in which Wagnerian drama discreetly takes on grand operatic themes, procedures, and a sense of theatricality.3 These are recent additions to a long established Wagnerian theme of affiliation, a subfield of musicological inquiry that has contributed a salutary sense of time and place to the Wagnerian project. My concern here is less with this ongoing historicist exercise, than with its largely unrecognized flip side: the obscure and marginal position that the once dominant culture of grand opera—and most particularly Meyerbeer’s oeuvre— holds in contemporary histories of opera. This peripheral positioning is largely a Wagnerian effect. Playing the historiographic game of precedence and consequence—wherein the artistic promise of the Parisian genre comes to historical fulfillment in the hands of Wagner and Verdi (Verdi himself a more recent alternative)—has made narratives of nineteenth-century opera impervious to the notion that grand opera once held its own promise for modernity. The Opera Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 3 –4, pp. 169 –202; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbp047 Advance Access publication on January 4, 2010 # The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org. 170 gabriela cruz Did Giacomo Meyerbeer ever busy himself with the future? This is, by no means, an innocent query. Teleologies never are, and music futurology is a distinctly Wagnerian ploy, born out of a well-documented political and aesthetic program for modernity, and one that is still potent today, still remarkable for its kaleidoscopic refracting efficiency. Over the years, Wagner’s radical agenda for the future has included the dissolution of tonality, music semiotics, symphonic opera, the fusion of dramatic arts, the claim to absolute music, a return to nature, decadent artificiality, political art, and aesthetic solipsism, to mention but a few. The same cannot be claimed for Meyerbeer, who in the role of Wagner’s antithesis has been consistently relegated to the role of the unambiguous representative of the status quo. Carl Dahlhaus articulated this prevalent historiographic view with characteristic terseness when he wrote, “Scribe and Meyerbeer dominated the ’zeitgeist’ by subjecting themselves to it.”4 In scholarly practice this has meant a peculiar understanding of Meyerbeer’s historical relevance and of his artistic acuity, seen as strongly rooted in its present, a period that now seems so distant. Sieghart Döhring wrote of Meyerbeer’s music as “a moment of realism belonging to the pre-history of new music”.5 More recently, Anselm Gerhard has made the strongest case for a “presentist” Meyerbeer, emphasizing the rootedness of his art in tangible elements of experience and discourse of nineteenth-century liberal modernity.6 Complementarily, the composer has also become known as a “visualist,” an artist uniquely committed to shoring up a solid frame of representation for music in opera.7 The one quality lacking in this historical Meyerbeer is a yearning for utopia, and to this extent my concern for “Meyerbeer’s vision” departs from the established historiographical argument. “Future” and “utopia,” the two terms I wish to mobilize on behalf of grand opera, have long been fundamental pillars of Wagnerian discourse. I invoke them in spite of the ideological load they carry and in recognition of the fact that they belong first and foremost to the discourse of modernity writ large. Let me then begin by issuing a double disclaimer: my purpose is neither to produce yet another Wagnerian reading of grand opera nor to rescue the genre’s éminence grise from the peripheral position to which he has been relegated in music histories poisoned by Wagnerism by claiming that he was, after all, Wagner-like. Instead, this essay concerns Meyerbeer’s own and thus far unrecognized affinity to emerging modernist aspirations, considered here in light of the composer’s pursuit of a new musical poetics of sensation and perception in L’Africaine, his final work premiered in 1865. The trigger for aesthetic experimentation in L’Africaine was poetic, the image of a manchineel, a Caribbean-American seashore tree (Hippomane mancinella) discussed in eighteenth-century reference books with words of warning. Its fruits, we are told in the Encyclopédie, resemble apples, and their smell is meyerbeer’s music of the future so suave and appetizing that one is tempted to eat them. It is one of the most violent poisons in nature. . . . It is even dangerous to fall asleep under the shadow of the manchineel; its atmosphere is so venomous, that it causes headaches, inflammation of the eyes and itching of the lips.8 The poisonous tree was brought into the fabric of the opera by the librettist Eugène Scribe in 1837, placed center stage in the second scene of act 5, a presence that brings the female protagonist to a fragrant death. The tree had a long history in romantic letters, where it became a recurrent point of departure for explorations of a new poetics of sensation culminating in Charles Baudelaire distilled arboreal imagery in “La Chevelure” and in his consideration of the sensational potency of new artificial paradises. Baudelaire, inaugural French Wagnerian, addressed the questions of perception and sensation in a consequent musical fashion, a subject brought out in fine critical detail in the recent work of Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Susan Bernstein, and Margaret Miner.9 In this essay, the poet is treated less as the object of investigation than as a critical fold illuminating the terms of Meyerbeer’s engagement with new symbolist aspirations and with the idea of lyrical sensation in L’Africaine. Baudelaire, I should note, was a personality entirely absent from Meyerbeer’s cultural horizon, never mentioned in his diaries. Another barely present after 1851 was Richard Wagner. Yet Meyerbeer’s musical turn to the richness of the symbol was partly coincident with a cultivated interest in the musics of Lohengrin and, to a lesser extent, of Tristan and Isolde in the 1850s and 1860s, an attraction that has so far escaped musicological attention. Unremarked intellectual firewalls protect grand opera and music drama from each other, as well as from the suspicious work of poetry. Therefore, I pursue a play of correspondences, annotating the endings of Tristan and Isolde in light of L’Africaine, of L’Africaine in light of Lohengrin, and of both in light of Baudelaire’s imagery in “La Chevelure” and his aesthetic argumentation in Paradis artificiels. I do so with three purposes in mind: The first is to push historiographic debate on grand opera beyond the well-established and treaded boundaries of finitude that have so far enclosed it. The second is to shed critical light on Meyerbeer’s late creative years which, I will show, entangle in significant ways with moments of the Wagnerian project, including the first opera polemics in 1849, the growing reputation of Lohengrin in the 1850s and 1860s, and the publication of Tristan and Isolde in 1859. L’Africaine, thus far barely a footnote in most histories of opera, has been considered sparingly under the lenses of creative exhaustion, of grand operatic conventionality, and of historical representation; it remains unexamined in light of more contemporary concerns, the 1860s poetics of perception and the attendant Wagnerian entanglements, which I consider here.10 To this end, I give detailed consideration here to the ways in which Isolde and Sélika’s death scenes may be understood to deploy parallel poetics of 171 172 gabriela cruz inebriation. This does not imply that the two death scenes are stylistically related, for they obviously sound different and have produced distinct analytical observations regarding form, tonality, and instrumentation. They do entwine convincingly in the realm of ambition, not of realization. It is the differences, rather than the similarities, that are enlightening. My final purpose is to draw attention to the idea of revolution in grand opera. There is no good historical reason to imagine that the notion of a future for opera, bursting like a not-so-improvised explosive device in European music circles after 1849 with the publication of Wagner’s The Artwork of the Future, would not speak clearly to its time, having been placed by a fully accredited “anarchist” at the doorstep of the all-commanding Opéra. Meyerbeer, of all people, took notice and I shall revisit the issue beyond the welldefined and readily understood bounds of Wagner’s polemics.11 It is not easy to cast the reticent Meyerbeer, famously averse to programmatic pronouncements, in the role of the futurologist. A known anecdote published by Henry Blaze de Bury a year after the composer’s death in 1864, illustrates the point. De Bury wrote, I remember one day in which so as to avoid having to respond [on the subject of Wagner], it was he who interrogated me. —But you, he told me, why don’t you explain yourself about that music? You were in Weimar for the premiere of Tannhäuser, and if I know you, you haven’t waited so long to make up your mind! —No, true! I have heard this music, it overwhelms me; the more I hear it the more it is impossible for me to see something other than a colossal mystification. The music of the future, you know my opinion—it is Don Giovanni, Fidelio, William Tell, Freischütz, The Huguenots.12 The exchange is spectacularly uninformative, yet another instance of fabled Meyerbeerian waffling and aesthetic tunnel vision, or what Anselm Gerhard has described more kindly, and in the wake of Heinrich Heine, as a sensibility of “juste milieu,” utopian-resistant aesthetic pragmatics.13 Meyerbeer offers no immediate help to those intent on putting forth an argument for his artistic vision. He was not given to public polemics and rarely confided in friends on musical matters. Writers, such as de Bury and Jean F. Schucht, who consulted the composer while writing about him and his works, were never rewarded with the unguarded collaboration to which they aspired.14 Meyerbeer wrote candidly about both his music and that written by others infrequently and privately, making it difficult to produce a coherent story of his taste. Still, a fair amount of the composer’s old-age correspondence survives and has been recently published in the final volumes of the long-standing series Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel meyerbeer’s music of the future und Tagebücher, while his diaries have also recently appeared in well-edited volumes in English. These publications complement other manuscript sources pertaining to L’Africaine in important ways, which I consider here in a selected fashion: the sketches, scenarios, work plans, and autograph score of the opera, all underread and awaiting critical consideration. L’africaine and the Future The factual circumstances regarding the compositional history of L’Africaine are known. The work was once to follow Les Huguenots in Meyerbeer’s catalog. A composition contract was signed with Eugène Scribe on May 24, 1837, and the composer received the first libretto soon after, but by the next summer he had not written a single note. Admitting to difficulties, he turned to his friend Germain Delavigne for advice. Then, on Delavigne’s advice, Meyerbeer asked Scribe for revisions, which he received in 1843. Three years later, he finished his first version of the score, but it was never delivered to the Opéra for performance and is still missing.15 In the 1840s he worked on Le Prophète, and following its successful premiere in 1849, he considered another project, Judith, before returning to L’Africaine, reconceived, as he wrote to Scribe, “on an entirely new basis.”16 Scribe then provided him with a new version in October 1851. After seeing the prose draft for the new version, which turned the story of the African tribulations of the seventeenth-century Spaniard Fernand into a retelling of the Portuguese Vasco da Gama’s “discovery” of India, Meyerbeer declared, “[I am] enchanted by this new poem, on which I will begin [working] with great confidence and pleasure.”17 Then, he interrupted the project twice during the 1850s to compose L’Étoile du Nord (1854) and Dinorah (1859). He returned to the work in the 1860s, but died in 1864 before completing the final revisions, which were left in the hands of François Fétis. This is a story of prolonged writer’s block, which prompts at least one oldfashioned musicological question: if the 1837 project was so unsatisfying, why was it not simply discarded? As John Roberts has noted, in a sense it was. The prose version of 1851 is so significantly different from the earlier libretto that it merits the alternative title appended to the manuscript by the librettist: Vasco da Gama ou le géânt des tempêtes. The prose sketch only preserved in full the dramatic text of the final act, including the scene of Sélika’s hallucination and death under the manchineel tree.18 The ending was the reason Meyerbeer kept to the idea of L’Africaine, against the advice he had sought from Delavigne. The broad outline of the story was made public in 1865 by Meyerbeer’s old acquaintance Albert Vizentini, who noted in Le Grand Journal that “it was this situation [the scene of the manchineel] that persuaded Meyerbeer to write the score,” and discussed at length again by Wilhelm at the Revue Contemporaine.19 Wilhelm in 173 174 gabriela cruz particular was taken in by the story, recounting it in detail and dwelling specifically on the objections to the scene offered by Germain Delavigne twenty-seven years earlier, and unheeded by the composer: Consider, he said to the great master, that you no longer have here (under the manchineel), in order to sustain the dramatic interest of your drama, either the eternal fight between good and evil or the sustained combat of two beliefs. Neither religious passions nor political passions. Love is the only passion on which you may count. Here your heroine, in love like Dido, decides to end as her. Is this passion or resignation? The theater and the epic poem do not obey the same laws, what one admires most in one, may not be suitable to the other.20 Delavigne’s advice followed from literary principle. His rejection of the epic in opera followed a widely shared conviction regarding its unsuitability for the stage, one theorized by Goethe and Schiller in 1797. To the Weimar poet and the Jena dramatist, the poetics of revolutionary modernity lay in the theater, in the presentness of drama, its experience of being in time, at once transitional and cacophonous. In his “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” Goethe neatly parsed out the poetics of modernity embedded in drama from those of the epic, pitting the world of the actor against that of the rhapsodist.21 To the former, he suggested, belongs the here and now, the experience of immediacy, a movement toward the future and passionate appropriation. To the latter a world in stasis, filled with revered eternal truths, ideas, and objects “bathed in the light of their own completeness.”22 Sélika hallucinating under the death tree, immersed in sensorial impression, belongs to this remote sphere of contemplation, and as such she evades theatrical values predicated on social and historical engagement. It makes sense, in light of Goethe and Schiller’s theorizing, that the scene would meet resistance. Following decades of theatrical activism and the intellectual watershed of the French revolution, the proposed substitution of the composer-actor with the composerrhapsodist sounded an odd note of retrenchment. Indeed, the manchineel scene represents a first step toward what Theodor Adorno has described as the “elimination of the political” in opera, which he tags to Wagner’s turn to myth and archaic imagery beginning with Lohengrin.23 Adorno finds this process of entrenchment of bourgeois false consciousness in opera to be dismal, a pointed moment of regression in modern art. Yet also unremarked until now is the fact that this dismal regression initially met resistance on the part of listeners and critics and had to be fought into operatic habit and taste. Delavigne was only the first to object. L’Africaine’s turn to myth under the manchineel initiated a problem with operatic endings which music historians routinely associate with Wagner, accepting the composer’s well-publicized claims to leadership in lyrical reform. The problem with endings is enshrined in one of the oldest, and most central, tales of Wagner’s creative mythology. In 1845 the composer sketched a radical denouement for his Lohengrin: following the meyerbeer’s music of the future revelation of his identity, the knight of the Grail was to depart for good, abandoning Elsa. The gesture subsumed history to the imperative of myth and, as retold in My Life (1870), Wagner remained unsure about its dramatic feasibility. He showed his prose text to Hermann Franck, who dissented on this particular point. Wagner wrote, [Franck] thought it offensive to effect Elsa’s punishment through Lohengrin’s departure, for although he understood that the characteristics of the legend were expressed precisely by this highly poetical feature, he was doubtful as to whether it did full justice to the demands of tragic feeling in its relation to dramatic realism.24 Wagner hesitated and turned to others for advice. Among these, Adolf Stahr concurred with Franck, adding to his consternation. Retrospectively, he looked on his decision to keep to the ending as an act of artistic heroism. The message to Liszt, his staunch supporter in this matter, reproduced in My Life—“Stahr is wrong and Lohengrin is right”—emphasized his impetuous defiance after the fact. Wagner took full credit for imposing transcendence upon drama, and since then perceptions of Lohengrin’s path to the future, opening the way to radical Tristan, have contrasted significantly with those of L’Africaine’s long-winded failure to wrestle itself out of grand operatic conventionality. The Manchineel My argument against the idea of L’Africaine as conformist art begins with the obscure manchineel. One needs to make sense of the poisonous tree in light of what has become known as the “music of the future.” In the first prose verses of 1837 the manchineel overtook the stage, its branches extended toward the wings, framing an atmosphere saturated by fragrance and sound. Gunima, the name of the first Sélika, succumbed to the tree’s poisonous perfumes while, to the sound of the celestial harps, the branches of the manchineel open and through the foliage one sees spirits and angels carried by groups of shimmering, light clouds. The dream of Gunima is presented to the spectator.25 In the 1830s, and by means of its sheer excess, the voluptuousness conjured on paper by Scribe looked ahead to a poetic culture of the symbol. Nicolas Fétu, the Dijon critic, recognized the ambition, when, sitting in the theater in the 1860s, he discovered “in this divine music, even more clearly than in Plato and Swedenborg, the revelation of a spiritual universe.” The offhand remark, aligning lyrical and mystical content, was meant as a compliment. Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century scientist-turned-mystic was then popular among French intellectuals. Charles Baudelaire, dead a year before Fétu published his Analyse Descriptive de L’Africaine, had unfurled his revolutionary “Correspondances” (1857) with a keen eye on the older Traité des Répresentations et Correspondances.26 175 176 gabriela cruz It would be inappropriate to place Meyerbeer and Baudelaire at the same table on the basis of one remark by a critic from Dijon. We know, in any case, where Baudelaire preferred to sit, musically speaking. Still, the luxuriant suggestion to short-circuit the senses under the manchineel, so irrevocably forgotten in the modern reception of the opera, deserves attention. The moment cannot simply be brushed aside as yet another orientalist exercise in the depiction of exotic (female) death. The plant had strong roots in the European imagination, drawing the attention of botanists first, then toxicologists, chemists, and poets. Charles Millevoye (1782–1816), born in the Somme and a Parisian by acculturation, by all measures a man unfamiliar with the outre-mer, seems to have been the first to have plucked it out of familiar encyclopedic tomes. In the 1811 elegy “Le poète mourante,” a poem Meyerbeer set to music in 1836, the tree is an evocation, distant knowledge that colors the experience of impending death. The poet sings in the manner of the ancients, holding his lyre, chastely contemplating personal demise. Then, in an outburst, he recalls the strange tree where: Le plaisir habite avec la mort Sous les rameaux trompeurs malheureux qui s’endort! Volupté des amours! Cet arbre est ton image. [Pleasure lives with death, Woe unto him that sleeps beneath its treacherous boughs! Love’s pleasures, that tree is your image.] The three verses open the elegy to music, to rhythmic complexity in the form of metric play.27 The song born out of a poisonous tree runs counter to romantic celebrations of natural benevolence. It sounds out against Wordsworth and Coleridge’s tree-hugging poetry in “Lines left upon a seat in a Yew-tree” and “This Lime-tree bower my Prison,” texts filled with a pantheistic confidence in the goodness and immemorial wisdom of nature.28 And it looks similarly askance at contemporary German obsessions with trees of knowledge, ubiquitous as symbols of self-perpetuating being and cultural rootedness, resonant to the truly sensitive, if we are to believe Novalis.29 Against the widespread trope of the nurturing, wisdom-granting tree, the manchineel poisons delicately and, in French poetry, repeatedly. In Millevoye’s work, the death tree returned in full bloom in Le Mancenillier (1811), an early source for L’Africaine. King Nélusko demands the love of Zarina, who escapes him by placing herself under the tree. Her experience is explicitly resonant: O charme pur! ô voluptés nouvelles! Esprit de l’air, est-ce toi que j’entends? Viens-tu déjà m’emporter sur tes ailes? meyerbeer’s music of the future [Pure magic! New delights! Spirit of the air, is it you that I hear? Are you to take me under your wings to the woods of eternal spring?] Millevoye distilled a narcotic out of the poison, and the tree developed into an early poetics of immorality. This is not to say that the poet, a pensioner of the empire to whom Napoléon once commissioned an epic celebration of his Italian campaigns—the manly, mediocre, and eminently forgettable Charlemage à Pavie (1808)—was inclined toward Baudelairean praise of inebriation and suicide. Rather conventionally, Zarina falls senseless to the ground, to be saved by her beloved Zephaldi. They marry the next day while King Nélusko gives up unrequited passion, and the morality of poetry is safeguarded. The manchineel lived on in French poetry beyond Millevoye’s death in 1816, as an image belonging to another nature—perverse, narcotic, pleasurable, resonant, and forbidden. It became a recurring romantic distraction, one which Alexandre Dumas, père, considered with the care of a seasoned apothecary in 1829, pursuing in lucid language the exotic nexus between botanic blossom, fragrance, voice, and death: C’était au sein des mers, sur ce lointain rivage Où sous un ciel plus pur on voit les fleurs s’ouvrir, Où des parfums plus doux courrent dans le bocage Où le mancenillier étend son noir feuillage Et son ombre qui fait mourir. [It was in the blossom of the seas, on that remote river Where the flowers bloom under the purest sky Where the sweetest perfumes sweep the hedged farmland Where the manchineel extends its dark foliage and its deadly shade] In this first version of “Le Mancenillier,” published in La Psyché in 1829, the poet keeps his distance. The cool observer of tropical tragedy and unknown nature, he hears a dying woman’s tale of forlorn love and learns about botanical exotica—the knowledge about the manchineel passed down to the woman by her mother. Then, in the second version, written in 1832 and collected by his biographer Charles Glinel, he draws closer to the woman and tree and witnesses the extraordinary.30 Breathing in the poisonous fragrance, the woman’s voice drops to a murmur passing over the threshold of meaning into that of resonance: Des voix lui parlèrent. Vers un être invisible elle étendit les bras: D’un sommeil enivrant ses regards se voilèrent, 177 178 gabriela cruz Elle ferma les yeux et ses lèvres tremblèrent Quelques mots qu’on n’entendit pas. [Voices spoke to her. She stretched her arms towards an invisible being: her eyes were veiled by drunken sleep, she closed her eyes and her lips whispered some words which no one heard. Rewriting the poem, Dumas stood on the edge of a safe zone. He was not alone in doing so. Even the briefest survey of references to the manchineel in French and German letters of the period finds Dumas in good company here—Jean Paul Richter, Johann Rudolf Wyss, Victor Hugo, Joseph Méry, Théophile Gautier, Armand Pontmartin, and so many others kept to the habit of contemplating the tree from afar. Eugène Scribe, who borrowed shamelessly from Dumas in the libretto of L’Africaine, copying the picturesque description of the tree, the story of forlorn love by a dark beauty, and the vision preceding suicide, also kept to the detached tone of noninvolvement. To remain cautious is to risk little. Regarding poisonous plants, and art more generally, the modern argument is one for forceful experimentation of the kind exemplified by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rapaccini’s Daughter (1847).31 Here, very briefly told, the botanist Rapaccini has raised his daughter in an enclosed garden filled with artificially bred botanical species and in close proximity to a scented tree of which she has become the human double. Like the tree, Beatrice possesses an otherworldly beauty and exhales a powerful scent that “embalms her words with a strange richness”—she exhales perfumed sound, attracting unwitting victims to their demise. Flowers, insects, and men die from the fragrant breath of Beatrice. This fragrant breath is a haunting figure, one with a certain longevity in French letters, and tellingly associated with Baudelaire. Charles Yriarte recalled in Les Portraits Cosmopolites (1870) how Théophile Gautier used to invoke Hawthorne’s story of the “botanical toxicologist” in regard to his younger friend.32 He added, “poets understand poets: without doubt the flower may give death, but its purple, golden and velvety corolla attracts and seduces. It is a manchineel under whose shade one should not rest, but one is tempted to approach it so as to collect its deadly fruits and to admire its flexible branches.”33 Yriarte’s suggestion is double: that Baudelaire came too close to the tree and also that he himself became it—a male Beatrice. Baudelaire held fragrances in high esteem. Perfumes retain the trace of love objects lost. They are essences in absence, threads leading to what is or has become hidden. Thus, he wrote: Commes d’autres esprits voguent sur la musique Le mien, ô amour! nage sur ton parfum. meyerbeer’s music of the future [As other spirits float over music Mine, my love! It swims on your perfume.] “La Chevelure,” often read in reference to Jeanne Duval, the exotic mistress born in Haiti, encircles scent in the language of maternal roundness and biological flow. In the words of Robert Cohn, hair, “Daphne-like, a tree coming right out of nature,” entwines the maternal and arboreal, a return to a natural matrix now perceived as disturbingly “faraway, absent, almost defunct [lointain, absent, presque défunt]”.34 Another central image in the poem, the sea (“mer,” in French so like “mère”) unfolds synaesthetic diffuseness and affective depths which Cohn has explored in detail under the same maternal sign. Bliss comes at Un port retentissant où mon âme peut boire A grands flots le parfum, le son et a couleur. [A resounding port where my soul can drink, in great waves perfume, sound and color.] The poem, a monument to sensorial submersion, speaks of a state of being others have imagined under the manchineel. For it is helpful to remember, the poisonous tree is itself a kind of maternal knowledge, passed on from mother to daughter. Perfumes Immersion and awakening abjection are at the core of “La Chevelure” and of the death tree that bound Meyerbeer to L’Africaine. It is here that the radical poet and the timorous composer meet fleetingly, the most unlikely of companions. A third guest sits at this table: we have accustomed ourselves to diagnosing Isolde’s death as an effect of the purely musical. Most recently to John Deathridge, she “sinks lifeless into the world of the absolute . . . as the orchestra surges forward with seductive symphonic grandeur.”35 Deathridge’s conclusion is grounded in musicological and philological detail, and echoes a long established critical stance. He notes that Isolde’s dying words approximate those of Nikolaus Lenau in “Beethovens Büste,” a quieter and more conventional celebration of music’s powers. The texts are strikingly alike, for Wagner like Scribe, knew where to copy. They differ only in a tiny but significant detail: Lenau’s lines, Sind des Weltmeers kühle Wellen Süß beseelt zu Liebestimmen? [Are the cool waves of the ocean sweetly soulful voices of love?] 179 180 gabriela cruz become in Isolde’s mouth, sind es Wellen sanfter Lüfte? Sind es Wogen wonnige Düfte? [is it the waves of the soft air? Is it the surging, the sweet fragrances?] Beethovenian voices give way to Tristanesque perfumes, and invisible music is recast as organic exhalation, discreetly anchored in matter. The poetic transformation is no mere turn of fancy, for Isolde’s awakened sense of smell preserves, in the final textual version, an image already present in the initial prose sketch for the scene, one to which Robert Bailey drew our attention years ago.36 Here, “Isolde, bent over Tristan, recovers herself and listens with growing rapture to the ascending melodies of love, which appear to rise up as if out of Tristan’s soul, swelling up like a sea of blossoms, into which, in order to drown, she throws herself and—dies.”37 It is perhaps unsurprising that the fragrances and the blossoms have so far escaped musicological detection. The reference to scent and flowers is strangely out of place in a scene so often celebrated for upholding the purely musical, or what Nietszche has seductively described as a “total world of hearing.”38 The blossoms in the prose sketch could be written off as a misplaced literary avatar—a throwback to Gottfried von Strassburg’s lovely description of Tristan and Isolde’s romancing under the sweet smelling branches of a lime tree, or Wagner’s more prosaic indication that the two should meet in a forested garden in act 2.39 Yet, Isolde’s testimony on the possibility of a fragrant, fluid, sound (“Shall I breathe? Shall I listen? Shall I drink, immerse?”), points in a more radical direction, toward the perfumed voice of Beatrice, recast in reverse gender. We may never know if Wagner read Rapaccini’s Daughter, and of course he did not place a poisonous tree centerstage on the scene of Isolde’s transfiguration. The question is less one of reference than of symbolic trajectory. Isolde, mute and immobile in the prose sketch, later made to vocalize her visionary delight on stage, mirrors the figure of the woman under the manchineel. From the sketch to the stage, these blossoms— fruits of an absent plant—are distilled into a deadly perfume, saturating the moment of death. Thus, Wagner completes the inward movement of narcotic, sensual immersion, already pursued by so many others before him, by erasing all material clues. The radical new condition of the Liebestod is one of concealment. The sense of abjection awakened by the recognition of poison—of the perverse matrix, Baudelaire’s keen awareness of the “almost defunct”—is suppressed. In the midst of beauty of oceanic proportions, no one will suspect the toxicologist. meyerbeer’s music of the future Isolde dies of music, consuming it like drink and air. Hence, her movement toward death is naturalized. Critics routinely speak of maternal bliss, of Schopenhaurean metaphysics, and of the symphony—disciplinary affiliations count here. All presume a pure essence at the origin of the scene: the presymbolic, metaphysics, absolute music. The work itself produces an elaborate claim on the origin of this sound. Famously, the music that kills Isolde is prefigured in the second act. The motif shared by the woodwinds that crowns the E major musical climax on Isolde’s “Welt-Atem” (world-breath) has an initial cryptic foreecho in Isolde’s own voice, her explanation to Brangaene that Frau Minne “wills it should be night, that brightly she illuminate” (es werde Nacht, daß sie dorten leuchte) in act 2. This promise of a brightly lit darkness (ex. 1), evasive of a previous E minor tonality, only discreetly adumbrates artificial paradises ahead. But Isolde’s story (or her knowledge) is in due time taken over by the orchestra. Tristan and Isolde sink to the floor before “O sink hernieder” to a full-blown musical preface of Liebestod’s climactic ending. Here, the slow circle of descending fourths underpinning the chromatic unfolding in the melody keeps the music gesturally close to the lovers’ bodies collapsing on stage. The melody itself, carried by the woodwinds and supported by the brass, is delivered in magical slowness, like the first step out of time and into the woods. In the love duet and the Liebestod, this music submerges everything else. And in the third act, when Isolde finally names her sonic surroundings, when she calls it a “world-breath,” the orchestra’s massive resolution of the long-prepared and harmonically enriched dominant to the similarly enriched tonic in E major, also acts like a lightswitch, unleashing, at long last, Frau Minne’s “illuminated night.”40 Darkness illuminated, Friedrich Kittler noted, is the artificial paradise of the theater.41 Kittler has written about the Liebestod in similar terms, considering Isolde’s final address in light of the modern techne, writing, World breath, Isolde’s last word, is no metaphor. It is the orchestra’s own and appropriate name. The orchestra—as drill, as power, and as instrumental unit— was also a creation of the great nineteenth-century, just like the division, the fighting unit comprising three arms systems: infantry, cavalry, and artillery.42 Here Kittler proposed that we hear the figure of transfiguration as substitution, human breathing replaced by the dual mechanics of inhalation and exhalation—a machine-made voice. He issued no warning against technology, but simply redirected us to Hawthorne’s insight: to every art, its artificial paradise. Artificial Paradise The artificial paradise is a hallucination. Isolde’s and Sélika’s visions hinge on the idea of altered perception brought forth by chemistry. In distinct ways they share in the poetics of intoxication put forth by Baudelaire in Les Paradis artificiels (1860). 181 182 gabriela cruz Example 1 Wagner, Tristan and Isolde, act 2, scene 1, “Daß hell sie dorte leuchte.” The little book on perception and the facts of drug-induced experience works through an anxiety about the poorly defined boundary between aesthetic clairvoyance and inebriated perception. Most useful in light of our theme are the poet’s considerations about the consumption of hashish. He mentioned a state of grace, “that constant elevation of desire, a tension of the spiritual forces toward the heavens,” which the artist alone achieves by force of concentrated labor, but which is democratized in drug consumption. Vision altered by this “vegetable emanation” is still a phenomenon of nature, faithful to the physiology and biography of the individual within whom it originates. Hashish, Baudelaire insisted, reveals nothing to the individual but the individual himself.43 But it assaults the subject with particular intensity, opening up an unprecedented facility for analogy: External objects slowly and in succession acquire new singular forms; they are deformed and transformed. Then, equivocations begin, misunderstandings and transpositions of ideas. Sounds are dressed in colors, and colors contain music. This, some will say, is only natural. Every poetic mind in its sane and normal state will work out these analogies.44 Baudelaire emphasized the powers of amplification. Intoxication by opium and hashish, like profound artistic absorption, produces a state of ideality supported by sensorial intensification and cross-modal perception. The poet, famously enthralled by painting, once wrote of Delacroix’s colors as “thinking by meyerbeer’s music of the future themselves, independently of the objects, which they dress.”45 This same hallucination of material agency and autonomy is transferable to the auditory realm. In tune with Baudelaire, Kittler remarked on the “amplifier named orchestra” in the Liebestod—the symphonic as sonic hallucination.46 The poet’s theory illuminates Wagner’s procedures in Tristan. A sense of inebriation is implicit in the work which Hanslick decried as leading to “oppressive fatigue resulting from too much unhealthy overstimulation.”47 In a similar sense, more explicitly perhaps, it explains the path toward lyrical modernity at the end of L’Africaine. Under the manchineel, as in proximity of the dead Tristan, breath is musical and audition and scent converge in a single impression. Yet, Sélika picks the tree’s fragrant blossoms in the most prosaic of operatic manners, during an oldfashioned recitative harmonized in the strings (“O riante couleur” [Oh smiling color]). It is when she inhales the fragrances that a gradual process toward acoustic saturation begins. Thus, the scene begins as a conventional grand aria—a recitative (“D’ici je vois la mer [From here I see the sea]”), a lyrical andante (“La haine m’abandonne” [Hate abandons me]), and a transitional recitative (“O riante couleur”). Each new formal subsection punctuates the character’s deliberate movement from the wings of the theater toward the tree planted centerstage. Then, under the tree, musical form briefly takes shape after an alternate principle, that of breath. A melodic period made of a well-rounded repeated motif, performed at the octave by the cellos, violas, bassoons, and clarinets, invites a new pace for breathing, colored in a new timbral atmosphere (ex. 2). Each inhalation by Sélika is complemented by a long exhalation by the grand flutes producing a series of suspended triads in the upper acoustic register. The first breath produces a drawn out tonic–dominant progression in D major ending in an ethereal A major triad (mm. 1–6 of the Andantino). Sélika echoes the A an octave below and quickly leaves it behind to conflate vision, sleep, love, and death. Dans les cieux entr’ouverts un instant il fait vivre Et puis d’un long sommeil à jamais nous endort Comme l’amour il nous enivre et comme lui donne la mort [In the half-opened heavens for an instant it makes us live And then puts us to a long sleep, forever Like love, it inebriates us and like it gives us death.] 183 184 gabriela cruz Example 2 Meyerbeer, L’Africaine, act 5, scene 2, “Ton doux parfum,” mm. 1 – 30. meyerbeer’s music of the future Example 2 Continued. The A, forgotten by the voice, persists in atmospheric form, in analogy to a discreet scent, articulated with rhythmic fidelity in the viola for the entire length of Sélika’s musings. Then, a second breath is signaled by an F major triad (mm. 7 –10), and a pattern of behavior is established. A third breath gives way to a similarly prolonged A major triad (mm. 11 –14). A fourth breath leads to a near stratospheric D-flat major triad. Each instrumental exhalation pushes the acoustic ceiling of the manchineel a third higher, opening up space vertically. Voice sets up the condition for music, but is subordinate to instrumental sonority. Crucially, the harmonies in the flute leave a mark in Sélika’s voice, who speaks, prolonging fundamental pitches of the harmonies above: A, then C, E, and A-flat. In this sense Sélika’s breath gains an acoustic signature, enriched like that of Hawthorne’s Beatrice, said to exhale resonant perfume. Recognizing herself intoxicated (“what hallucination holds my senses enchanted” [de mes sens enchantés quel délire s’empare]), her voice is finally absorbed in the tonal universe of the flutes, outlining a D-flat triad. Here, as elsewhere, inebriation opens the door to cross-modal perception. Meyerbeer, we should note, began distilling music out of perfume well before 185 186 gabriela cruz his contemporaries. Distillation should be understood here as an imaginary process, for Meyerbeer never conceived of the radical possibility of introducing scent on stage. However, his compositional idea proceeds from perfume, an absent object supplemented in the theater by means of an acoustic trace. His sketches for the scene, produced sometime between 1841 and 1843, are preserved in “Skizzen Vasco,” Mms. autograph G. Meyerbeer 1, at the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Berlin. The manuscript assembles ideas for the opera dating from the 1840s to 1864.48 Folios 43, 47, 48, and 53 contained the earliest compositional ideas, dated circa 1841–43, all related to the manchineel. Folio 53, the most relevant here, laid out the fundamental ideas for the moment of intoxication. A key sketch, transcribed in example 3, annotated register, harmony, instrumental color, and melody. It departed from Meyerbeer’s usual compositional methods in which vocal lines took precedence, annotated, and developed first and over the barest annotation of a harmonic framework. Here, exceptionally, the composer proceeded from a predetermined acoustic idea, anterior to drama. He assembled three important elements: the prolonged chords in the flutes, iconic of breath, the idea for a melodic presence worked out in octave doublings, opening a suggestion of acoustic space, and finally the pitch “A” prolonged in the middle register, a persistent resonance to be delivered by the violas. These compositional jottings found on staves 9 and 10 of the folio are preceded in staves 4 and 5 by another small sketch for the vision attached to the words “I hear them, I see them, the pleasures of heavens offer themselves to my eyes” ( je les entends je les vois, / à mes yeux s’offrent les voluptés des cieux), rewritten in the final version as “It is a wonder, the splendor of heavenly pleasures offers itself to my eyes” (Est-ce un prodige / que de splendeur / à mes yeux s’offrent les voluptés des cieux); voice proceeds from music, capturing a resonance succinctly spelled out in the flute/oboe alto vc 5 comme l’amour il nous enivre et comme lui donne la Example 3 Meyerbeer, sketch for “Comme l’amour il nous enivre” in “Skizzen Vasco,” Ms. autograph G, Meyerbeer 1, G-Bds, fol. 53. meyerbeer’s music of the future arpeggios for the harp (ex. 4). In the two miniature sketches, Meyerbeer set up an acoustic archive, preexistent music that grounded Sélika’s experiences under the manchineel, and which the composer saved diligently, even as he discarded most of his other work for the opera in the 1850s. One cannot make too much of this small instance of music hoarding. It is, in a sense, remarkable that Meyerbeer would stay so faithful to his early ideas for the scene, and that he would persist with the scene itself, eventually recomposing the drama around it so as to save the idea of inebriation for opera. The musical ideas he stored up around the manchineel in the early 1840s opened a path to the future. To be sure, it was not a grand passage to large-scale artistic innovation. In L’Africaine, detailed consideration of acoustic resonance and the purely musical are dramatically circumscribed; they do not prompt an evasion out of the wellestablished economy of grand opera. Still, experiments are no less significant for their modesty. Until 1843, the two sketches in folio 53 opened the way to those musical figures already discussed as crucial to the Liebestod: a breathing orchestra, voice/instrument substitution, resonance, and amplification. Wagneriana Here, I would like to return to the question of artistic affinity outlined at the beginning of this essay. This is not so as to issue the customary Meyerbeerian “gotcha” at Wagner—to note that the composer of Tristan may have indeed stood closest to the creative ambitions of the elderly Meyerbeer, just as his music seemed to take flight from opera in the most radical of ways. The issue I want to address at this point, itself a crucial context to Meyerbeer’s compositional approach to L’Africaine after the 1850s, is that of his turn toward the music of Wagner. Meyerbeer had no public words for his colleague after having become Je à mes yeux les s’offrent entends les je voluptés les des vois cieux Example 4 Meyerbeer, sketch “Je les entends” in “Skizzen Vasco,” Ms. autograph G Meyerbeer 1, G-Bds, fol. 53. 187 188 gabriela cruz aware of the content of The Artwork of the Future in November of 1851. Because of his silence, musicologists have assumed that he never really cared for or understood the work of Wagner.49 The diaries, however, indicate the opposite. Even though Wagner’s recent music was not easily accessible in the 1850s, and Meyerbeer had no interest in publicizing his own curiosity, he succeeded in keeping himself up to date with the work of his colleague. He borrowed a score of Tannhäuser from the Grand Duchess of Weimar “for perusal” even before the opera’s premiere in August of 1850.50 In 1855, acting on last minute news that the work would be performed in Hamburg the next day, he traveled at the spur of the moment to attend it, even writing a minireview of the composition in his diary. As was his habit, he hoped to remain incognito in the theater and was disappointed to learn he had been identified among the public.51 In Berlin the next year, he was less concerned with anonymity and heard Tannhäuser a number of times. Meyerbeer’s attraction to Lohengrin was even more enduring. In 1846 he had already learned about the existence of the work from Wagner himself.52 He read the poem “and also part of the music” at home in May of 1852.53 In 1856, he heard the “introduction and chorus from act 3,” describing them in his diary as “beautiful pieces.”54 His enthusiasm was guarded, however. A few months later in Berlin, knowing that a chorus from the opera was to be performed at a Court Concert, he excused himself from the performance. “I do not want to touch it,” he wrote again in his diary.55 His studied avoidance of the work in public contrasts with the intensity with which he pursued it privately. On August 30, 1858: “Read the poem of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Did nothing else.”56 A month later, ill and in bed, “as my pastime read the vocal score of Lohengrin.”57 On April 17, 1860, “for the first time I heard Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin,” and the next day, “read the vocal score of Lohengrin.”58 In 1860 and 1861 in Berlin, Meyerbeer returned at least five more times to the theater to hear the opera. At home, he studied Tristan and Isolde, reporting it in his diary in December of 1860 and January of 1861.59 Then in 1862, a surprising confession: “Because of the mental exhaustion and strain I experience when listening to Wagner’s Lohengrin, I have usually stayed for only a part of act 3, and never to the end. Today, therefore, I attended act 3 only.”60 The next day again he “heard the third act of Lohengrin.”61 The diaries open a vista unto Meyerbeer’s progress as a Wagnerian. In the 1860s, he may well have been the most venerable among Wagner’s admirers, and a forefront practitioner of the Wagnerian firewall, purposefully turning a blind eye to his colleague’s politics in the face of his music. Still, we would do well to take seriously Meyerbeer’s belated confession that Lohengrin’s music took something out of him, and was therefore self-prescribed with caution. meyerbeer’s music of the future Meyerbeer’s turn, and return, to Lohengrin took place in well-defined contexts. He read it for the first time three weeks after Julius Schaeffer published his discussion of the work in light of Opera and Drama at the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung (May 12, 1852). The diary annotation from May 30 that he read the poem and “part of the music” suggests that he may have then considered Lohengrin in light of Schaeffer’s analysis—he too may have briefly hunted for Stabreim or the new art of modulation. By the time Theodor Uhlig came out in defense of Wagner in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on June 18, 1852, Meyerbeer had moved on from the score and poem.62 Still, the matter which Schaeffer and Uhlig succeeded in putting in such tedious pedantic terms, measuring and defending music and poem against the yardstick of Wagnerian theory, was also a key concern for Meyerbeer as he turned yet again to consider L’Africaine as operatic vision. Franz Liszt’s 1850 salutation of Lohengrin, the first public statement on the work, had put the issue clearly. Liszt, famously enthralled by the work’s involvement with myth, and taken in by its utopian yearnings, celebrated the ways in which Wagner had taken refuge in the past so as to more freely conjure the future. He pinpointed the heart of this operatic revolution in Lohengrin’s prelude, a sonic monument ushering extraordinary sight. He wrote in 1851, “[Wagner] initiates us into the Holy Grail, he causes to shimmer before our own eyes the temple of incorruptible woods, with its fragrant walls, its doors of gold, its joists of asbestos, its columns of opal, its vaults of onyx, its partitions of cymophane.”63 Liszt writes as rhapsodist, contemplating the eternal in sensorial delight, off handedly extracting sight out of sound, extemporizing on the intensity and synaesthetic quality of new musically induced perception. Given the right music, doors could shine brightly and walls could smell sweet, while the eyes met sheer enchantment. Baudelaire, who quoted this precise excerpt in his “Richard Wagner and Tannhaüser in Paris” (1861), recognized the artificial quality of Liszt’s paradise as he made it his own, writing that music in the prelude soared “above and very far away from the natural world.”64 Meyerbeer, probably unaware of the particulars of the poet’s reaction, faced up to the same density and intensity of experience on his own. In Berlin, between 1861 and 1863, he measured his exposure to the music, building up sensorial endurance through the end of the third act. Does that make him a Wagnerian? Liszt’s and Baudelaire’s advocacy for a new, music-induced sensorial regime in art called for a new virtue of submission, opening the way to modern rituals of subjection—those which Nietszche was only the first to diagnose as endemic to Wagner’s new music. In the role of the 189 190 gabriela cruz listener, Meyerbeer acquiesced; as a composer he pursued a more ambiguous path. Meyerbeer’s first perusal of Lohengrin’s score coincided with his return to L’Africaine as well as the first time he considered augmenting Sélika’s scene with a musically induced vision. He wrote then to Scribe, One must find her [Sélika] a brilliant stretta—which will not be easy in this situation—to be placed before the dream and not begin the dream before the end of the aria. In the dream, one must set, above all, original dances. This could be the apotheosis of Selica and Vasco after their death in the Indian paradise. Or it could be that Selica, thinking that it is the difference of religion that takes Vasco away from her, would see in her dream the confrontation of the delights of the Indian paradise with those of the Christian paradise to fix the choice of Vasco after her death. In the first would be with Selica, in the second with Inès. The dream could begin in the following manner: four fairies take across the air the dead body of Selica in a veil. The Indian paradise opens in all its splendors to receive Selica who changes (at sight) into a fairy.65 To be sure, Meyerbeer did not know then what he wanted, aside from the fact that music was to give way to vision, that vision should be cast in the distancing mode of pure gesture, and that magic was of the essence. In the following years, the composer kept experimenting, and his plans for staging Sélika’s vision accrued chaotic complexity and monumentality, but ultimately he abandoned the idea of storytelling in a double paradise and settled for something less gestural and more magical, closer indeed to the spirit of Lohengrin, and repeating Wagner’s well-known trouble with overdone denouements. A handwritten addition to the Berlin manuscript, the poetic basis for his compositional work in the 1860s, reads as follows: At this moment the branches of the manchineel open and one sees through transparent foliage the dream of Sélika in action: from the two opposing sides of the theater, one sees two group of shimmering clouds, one over the top where Sélika is set, the other on the bottom where Vasco is set. The cloud supporting Vasco rises while Sélika’s lowers (on a diagonal line), and they become one as they meet. The celestial bayadères dance around those clouds, which are pulled by swans. Brama, Schiva and Wischnou descend from a heaven above to bless the marriage, while on earth the wedding ceremonies of act four take place once more.66 Meyerbeer wanted magic here, as urgently as Wagner had wished for it in the sinking of the ship and rise into heaven of Senta and the Dutchman, embraced and transfigured in the early version of the work’s ending, or in the sudden apparition, out of the smoke, of Brünnhilde “mounted on a glowing horse, as a Valkyrie, leading Siegfried by the hand through the clouds” in the first Ring prose verse.67 Shimmering clouds had been a feature of Sélika’s earliest dream scenario meyerbeer’s music of the future of 1837, but they increased in the updated version, absorbing a new intensified interest in the poetics of veiling, the suggestion of revelation in concealment that captured the imagination of Baudelaire in regard to Lohengrin. The swans brought into this new vision are even more complicated figures. They favor a double turn to the mystical purity of the Grail and to sensuous classical myth, modeling Sélika’s ascent to heaven on the image of Venus moving through the skies in a chariot pulled by the same aquatic birds. Meyerbeer had encountered this motif in the context of Vasco da Gama’s conquest of India in Luı́s de Camões’ sixteenth-century epic Os Lusı́adas, which he read in the French translation in 1850.68 The symbolic denseness of Sélika’s vision deepened in the final working libretto, reaching a point of impossible theatrics. The remaining compositional history of the scene traces a complex process away from the grand operatic habit of visual monumentality.69 Meyerbeer persisted with the idea of music as a source of vision. In 1861, he put together a new visionary narrative for the protagonist, and invited Germain Delavigne, the same friend who decades earlier had attempted to dissuade him from Sélika’s death under the manchineel, to write the verses for it. The text he obtained, “Un cygne aux doux ramage, etc.” was made into the scene’s new stretta, as he called it, allowing Sélika to report on her own intoxicated hallucinations: Vasco approaches in a chariot pulled by a swan over a cloud, encircled by creatures of paradise, he addresses her, embraces her, and both lovers ascend toward Brahma. On the grounds of dramatic design alone, the narrative is an early piece of Wagneriana. Here the old Meyerbeer has his cake and eats it too: Vasco in a swan-drawn chariot nods to Lohengrin but entails a corrective to Wagner’s punishing decision on Elsa’s fate. In Meyerbeer’s score, Stahr is suddenly right and so is Lohengrin, all in blissful ignorance of the 1845 polemic. Still, there is one final, more consequent, way in which Sélika’s narrative, conceived as the composer turned his attention to Tristan and Isolde, drew on new Wagnerian procedure. The final version of the manchineel scene, preserved in the autograph score of 1864, contains no visual trace of the dream. Here Sélika, in the new manner of Isolde, recounts her vision and then succumbs to the acoustically saturated atmosphere of the tree. She narrates and subsequently joins with the aerial voices sounding around her—the score requests that the wordless chorus be performed by singers concealed under the tree on stage.70 A turn to Tristan entails a sudden disappearing act—an erasure of direct optical perception. In the final version, vision is finally recast as the figure of desire that it always was—an object veiled by music and words, revealed only in an act of concealment. Meyerbeer’s last act was to dismantle grand opera, something music histories have long ignored, perhaps because musically Sélika’s song-narrative falls short of the beauty of the Liebestod. Even in 1865, the trivial waltz to which 191 192 gabriela cruz Sélika sang her “Un cygne aux doux ramage” was found to be offputting, and by Joseph D’Ortigue no less, an oldtimer in the Paris musical establishment.71 Few writing on Meyerbeer aesthetics have faced up to this problem, and discussions of the moment generally defer to the idea of creative exhaustion. Döhring once put forth an argument for it as a piece of old-fashioned operatic love-madness.72 More straightforwardly, John Roberts made excuses for the master: the waltz is simply a leftover, written in light of the disappeared staged vision, linking Sélika’s words to the ballet Meyerbeer never composed.73 This is more than what turn-of-the-century critics, writing under the spell of Wagner, were willing to concede. To them it was simply bad music, too “trivial” and “absurd” to merit the effort.74 Sélika’s waltz is, in a very clear sense, pure music. It subsumes the voice, which turns inexpressive, unable to phrase, without dynamic range, timbrally altered and amplified by the flutes and cellos that perform in unison with it. In all this, the piece does share in the poetics of sound encircling Isolde’s vision. Yet, the difference between both scenes is inescapable. Isolde’s speech pushes through new levels of musical intensity; Sélika’s lies flat. This shallowness breaks with the earlier trajectory of the scene toward an enhanced state of acoustic inebriation in “O riante couleur” (Oh smiling color), “Quels celestes accords” (What celestial chords), “Divin délire, accords joyeux” (Divine delirium, joyful chords). It turns the beautiful into the homely, the soulful into the obnoxious. No wonder this is a tree under which virtually no one has felt the urge to lie. From all this follows the inevitable conclusion: Meyerbeer, the Wagnerian, falls off the bandwagon of the future, to an unenviable end. Yet, the question to ask here is if there is no other future. Baudelaire, who deserves credit for the high standards of intellectual honesty he held for himself, valued the artificial bliss achieved by means of drugs and art in full awareness of its attendant fall from grace. “Those who deserve happiness,” he wrote in his introduction to Les Paradis artificiels, “are those on whom bliss, such as mortals conceive of it, has the effect of an emetic.”75 Critics often marvel about Baudelaire’s mastery in lining ravishment with the abject.76 In “La Chevelure,” one more time, tout un monde lointain, absent, presque défunct Vit dans tes profondeurs, forêt aromatique! [A whole far-away world, absent, almost defunct, dwells in your depths, aromatic forest!] Darkest abjection awakens in the experience of the purest, most unspoiled nature. But abjection is knowledge kept most emphatically at bay in the Liebestod, where music, basking in much celebrated “oceanic beauty,” remains impermeable to, and indeed conceals, the horror of what is occurring on stage, meyerbeer’s music of the future dead body and all.77 Yet despite the serious lack of sonorous evidence, imputing abject pleasures to Wagner’s music is not an uncommon critical pastime these days, a singular gift of Lacanian theory to contemporary musicology, found useful in recent efforts to reinscribe the composer’s beautiful music, for so long held in aloof and sacred reverence, in his problematic biography.78 And what is good for Wagner studies has been deemed desirable for musicology at large. Lawrence Kramer has recently led the argument on behalf of abjection as a critical tool in musical interpretation, a means to rescue music from the isolationist aestheticism of modernism, making it relevant for a new age, empowered in the consideration of the structures of desire.79 Such efforts, however, should not distract us from the fact that Wagner, the composer, dabbled in the powers of horror only rarely and mostly in old age—in Titurel’s voice most notoriously.80 In this he repeated, oddly enough, a trajectory previously taken by Meyerbeer, who arrived at his own expression of musical disquiet following his Wagnerian travails. Pharmakon In order to discuss abjection as the final element of Meyerbeer’s music for the future, we must return to the manchineel, to consider it this time as Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville (a painter noted for his canvases of military life) found it on the stage of the Opéra in 1865: overwhelming, frightening, and ancient (fig. 1). At the beginning of the scene was just a double articulation in the timpani, the cadence for a dirge, perhaps. Then, just as Théophile Gautier heard it, a “strange phrase of disturbing supernatural beauty, of a sonority unknown to the human ear, that seems to come from another planet”81 (ex. 5). A ponderous gesture, wavering between major and minor, evocative of a failing voice. A melody pieced together out of complementary attempts at expressive flight, letting off a sense of a breathing crisis at every sinking return. The imaginary voice struggled in search of the right pitch, beginning its song in central C, then moving on to D, and finally producing a melodic idea with a definite expressive profile: an ascent to the high C fortissimo—“an inhuman cry” ventured Edmund Rack—quickly defeated.82 The “sixteen measures,” as it was immediately named in the press, like a freakish object to be considered only in analytical abstraction, is odd enough—a unison produced en masse by all bassoons, clarinets, cellos, violas (on the third string), and violins (on the fourth string)—resultingly nasal, pungent, strangely vocal, and unexpectedly booming. It is musical sound born out of industry, but semiotically marked as human, delivered in a melody punctuated by breathing points, expressive of effort and striving for fulfillment. Fundamentally impure, a musical blend conceived as an approximation of the strange chemical makeup of the poisonous tree. This is what, in the elevated vocabulary of classical culture known to Meyerbeer, would be a pharmakon, a 193 194 gabriela cruz Figure 1 Alphonse-Marie-Adolphe de Neuville, detail from “Académie Impériale de Musique–L’Africaine, grand opéra en 5 actes d’Eugène Scribe et G. Meyerbeer” in Univers Illustré, May 6, 1865, 285. substance of indeterminate qualities, indifferently good and bad, used to heal and to poison.83 A strange blend it is, distilled off opera’s matrix—a voice maternal in range and plain in tone, fitted with an ability to breathe and the energy to strive, yet strangely amplified, and of a disquieting allure. There is something powerfully Wagnerian, or more specifically Tristanesque, about this music. A quality brought forth in the engulfing size of its acoustics, in the suggestion that the orchestra has now become the final word in breathing/singing apparatuses, and in the adoption of tempo and respiration patterns restored from Isolde’s transfiguration. What this music is not, is beautiful. Impure sensation, music suspended between beauty and ugliness, nature and the artificial, is Meyerbeer’s contribution to the vocabulary of modernity. meyerbeer’s music of the future Example 5 Meyerbeer, L’Africaine, act 5, scene 2, Andante cantabile. The utterance that swells up from under the manchineel runs counter to romantic aesthetics of purity, the art of composition as a distillation of primal essences brought to virtuosic heights in the Liebestod, a perfection subsuming all else. If the radical condition of Isolde’s last song is, as I have claimed above, one of concealment, then the sixteen measures do the work of disclosure. They bring an awkward strangeness out of the lyrical experience, mingling awe, pleasure, and revulsion, shaking the listener out of common complacency. This disclosure is dramaturgical—hear how strange this tree really is—but it is also more 195 196 gabriela cruz fundamentally musical, a call of attention to the potent strangeness of voice and the artificial powers of orchestration fine tuned to elicit uneasiness. In this, the sixteen measures point away from Wagnerian naturalizing poetics, and in the direction of a Baudelairian scandalous insistence on the artificial, a first step down the complex path of impure experience that spelled so much institutional trouble for the poet. Comparisons between the sixteen measures and the radical revelations of Les Fleurs du mal, the “almost defunct” in “La Chevelure” for instance, end with this simple observation: a gulf separates the reception of Meyerbeer’s miniature musical essay on the abject and Baudelaire’s persistent exploration of its thematics throughout his oeuvre. The poet, apparently indifferent to grand opera and ailing already in 1865, may never have heard the piece; it is futile to wonder if, had he heard it, he would have recognized the affinity to his own art. Yet, even if we miss the lucidity of Baudelaire’s pen in regard to music under the manchineel, it is fair to note that others reacted to it in an atypically alert fashion even in 1865. Henri Trianon, librettist of some merit and at one time a collaborator with Nestor Roqueplan at the Opéra Comique, confessed himself affected by “this lie, this absurd root, this botany of fairy-tale that pours, as if from a mysterious vein in this desperate and tender phrase” exhaling “from I don’t know which divine soul”, a reminder “of the real hallucinations generated by the juice of Indian hemp.”84 To Trianon’s ears, the Opéra delivered an artificial paradise, forbidden pleasure. More pointedly, the caricaturist Alfred Grévin, a specialist in parisianisme, punished the indecency of this latest Paris sensation in Le Journal Amusant (fig. 2). His illustration of the experience of the sixteen measures depicts a terrified man, brought out of peaceful sleep by homemade horrors, an unannounced back scratch with a manchineel branch enhanced by the smell of freshly cut onions—a sort of dysfunctional aromatherapy. The caption read: Would you like to make a succinct idea of the ritornello of the second scene of the fifth act? Bring yourself to a warm bed; then wake up suddenly and startled, and ask your cook to slowly bring before your nostrils one, two, or three little onions freshly pealed, while a friendly hand gently shakes a branch of a manchineel between the night gown and the skin on your back, and bitch of bitches [bagasse de bagasse], you will return with news.85 Trianon’s gate into the forbidden is Grévin’s rude awakening. There is no question of false consciousness, of the usual pleasures of lyrical escapism and of the distractions of luxury; here the new Meyerbeerian brew comes as a frontal attack on the shimmering and upmarket architecture of the beautiful in music. Grévin, at least, recognized the shadow of the bas-fond in it, and in his hands Meyerbeer’s music of the future assaults in a depraved revolutionary manner. Modernity invites the listener to indulge in loathsome play. meyerbeer’s music of the future Figure 2 Alfred Grévin, “L’Africaine,” Journal Amusant, May 20, 1865, 7. 197 198 gabriela cruz It is proper to emphasize the newness of this music, which D’Ortigue considered with alarm in his posthumous and notoriously slanderous assault on the composer’s reputation. In “La Vérité sur Meyerbeer” he asked, “to what then is owed the effect produced by this phrase [the sixteen measures]? Simply to the combination of sonorities, to the force of the unison, to the fact that the melody appears naked without harmony or accompaniment.”86 In the sixteen measures, D’Ortigue identified an alarming degradation of musical language, the abandonment of all art for an experiment in musical sonority, a klangfigur. He is right about the moment’s turn to a primitive aesthetics even if he sees nothing good in it, and his argument against the composer is nothing short of vitriolic, peppered with anti-Semitic clichés—accusations of selling out for success, of artistic appropriation, mimicry, and deceit. Still D’Ortigue’s aesthetic judgment on the music under the manchineel is worth keeping in mind in light of the piece’s contemporary reception, to which I turn to conclude. In Paris, and later elsewhere, the sixteen measures became the object of repeated and ritualized audition. This music, heard in the drama only once, was quickly dubbed a ritornello in the press. It returned, indeed, not by means of compositional deployment, but as a form of consumption. At the Paris premiere, the unusually muscular ovation meeting the first orchestral rendition of the piece obliged a reprise, initiating a ritual of repetition later enacted throughout France and the world. And to this spontaneous demand for reaudition, the Opéra added a planned one. That same night, April 27, 1865, following the final ovations, the curtain was raised one final time, uncovering Meyerbeer’s bust strategically placed on stage, illuminated by a ray of electric light and encircled by singers who silently crowned it with palms and head garlands, to the sound of the sixteen measures.87 Meyerbeer, too, had his illuminated night in repeated evenings, turning bizarre fantasy into even more bizarre artistic ritual. Beyond the theater even, the ritual went on. Soon after the premiere, Paris music dealers peddled a strange object, “Le dernier pensée musicale de Meyerbeer” (The last musical thought of Meyerbeer). Possibly the oddest piece of sheet music ever published, hopelessly unsuited for the piano or for the voice, neither glamorous nor charming, and wretched outside any outstanding symphonic performance, it was sold internationally and brought into a wide geography of parlors. When referring to similar cases in which operatic excerpts and other such cases of music are lifted out of their original texts and contexts and made to stand in isolation (the Liebestod is such an example), musicologists typically write of commodification. “Le dernier pensée musicale de Meyerbeer” resists the simple application of this critical menu. It is wordless music, but there is no evidence it was ever fetishized as absolute music, celebrated as pure aesthetics. The meyerbeer’s music of the future logic of consumption attached to it is that of the pharmakon, its recipe parodied by Grévin, as a substance producing a new form of sensorial indulgence. The crucial point, however, is that from the start this act was inscribed in the circularity of ritual, made respectable through collective contract. The reprise, the word “ritornello,” the repeated musical deployment of the illuminated bust, and the “last thought” made democratically within reach of the many, tamed the radical quality of music brought under the sign of the manchineel—the destructive difference of the early klangfigur—with an offer of sacrificial atonement. To this end, Meyerbeer, dead since 1864, was brought back on stage for a bizarre posthumous homage, repeated many times over. The composer, whom contemporaries had always regarded with undisguised ambivalence in life, was offered as pharmakos after his death. Like the human scapegoat of classical Greece, most often a slave, a cripple, or a criminal, chosen to be expelled from the city at times of disaster or crisis and often sacrificed in the name of communal purification, he was brought before the community of listeners under the fragmentary guise of figure and thought, so that musical difference could be felt and simultaneously declared over and of the past, contained in judiciously regulated repetition. And here finally rests the affinity of the invented Parisian ritual to our own historiographic one, many times reenacted in modern histories of the genre, where French grand opera is often showcased as an example of artistic finitude, of what was once popular but not quite satisfying, finally interred on behalf of operatic modernity. notes Gabriela Cruz is a researcher at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical of the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she teaches music. She also lectures at the Universidade de Coimbra. She has published on Meyerbeer and nineteenth-century opera in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, and Current Musicology. She is currently leading a new research group studying musical comedy in nineteenth-century theaters in Portugal and Brazil with funding by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal. I am grateful to Alessandra Campana, Dana Gooley and Roger Parker for reading this essay and for their valuable suggestions. 1. Selected letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (London: Dent, 1987), 222. 2. Thomas Grey, “Richard Wagner and the Legacy of French Grand Opera,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 336. 3. Ibid., 337. 4. Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: California University Press, 1989), 131. 5. Sieghart Döhring, “Les oeuvres tardives de Meyerbeer,” Schweizerische Musikzetung 115 (1977): 64. 6. Anselm Gerhardt, The Urbanization of Opera, trans. Mary Whittall (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 174. 7. Mary Ann Smart, Mimomania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 102. 8. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie ou dictionnarire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 20 (Paris: chez les Sociétés typographiques, 1780), 916 – 17. 199 200 gabriela cruz 9. Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth-Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Margaret Miner, Resonant Gaps: Between Baudelaire and Wagner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). 10. John H. Roberts, “Meyerbeer: Le Prophète and L’Africaine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, 222 –32; Robert Letellier, Meyerbeer Studies: A Series of Lectures, Essays and Articles on the Life of Giacomo Meyerbeer (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 41 –64; Gabriela Gomes da Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine and the End of Grand Opera” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1999); Steven Huebner “Italianate duets in Meyerbeer’s grand Operas,” Journal of Musicological Research 8 (1989): 203 –58. 11. Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Sabine Henze-Döhring and Hans Moeller, vol. 5 (Berlin: Walter de Cruyter & Co, 1998), 454. 12. Henri Blaze de Bury, Meyerbeer, sa vie, se oeuvres, et son temps (Paris: Heugel, 1865), 114. 13. Gerhardt, The Urbanization of Opera, 174. 14. Jean F. Schucht, Meyerbeers Leben und Bildungsgang, seine Stellung als Operkomponist in Vergleich zu den Todichtern der Neuzeit, noch ungedruckten Briefen Meyerbeers (Leipzig: Heinrich Matthes, 1869). 15. Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, ed. Heinz Becker, vol. 3 (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Bruyter & Co., 1975), 3, 336, 340, 361, 400, 552, 594, and v4, 86, 157, 281. 16. Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, 5: 431. 17. Ibid., 603. Meyerbeer, letter to Gouin, Berlin, May 30, 1852, “Je suis enchanté de ce nouveau poëme, que j’y vais me mettre avec grande confiance et joie.” 18. The libretto also preserves the dramatic text for the act 5 duet between Sélika and Inès, set in the final version, and the choruses for the sailors and the women in act 3. The chorus numbers are conventional to the point of interchangeability, and therefore their importation into the new version can be discounted as a simple matter of dramaturgical convenience. Finally, the new libretto also was incorporated in 1851 as well as Sélika’s old because of act 2 and Nélusko’s couplets of act 3. These were later substituted by new numbers. 19. It is known that it is this situation (the final scene of the opera) that persuaded Meyerbeer to write the score, and he treated it with extreme care and poetic sense. Albert Vizentini, “La Partition de L’Africaine,” Le Grand Journal 14 (May 1865): 2. 20. Wilhelm, “Revue Musicale: ‘L’Africaine,’” Revue Contemporaine 15 (May 1865): 175. 21. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Epic and Dramatic Poetry,” in Goethe’s Literary Essays, trans. Joel Elias Spingarn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Cie, 1921), 100– 03. 22. Andreas Gailus, Passions of the sign: Revolution and Language in Kant, Goethe and Kleist (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2006), 84. 23. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 1981), 116 – 17. 24. Richard Wagner, My life, authorized translation (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1911), 394. 25. Eugène Scribe, “L’Africaine. Opéra en cinq actes” Meyerbeer Nachlaß, G-Bsb, cited in Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer ’s L’Africaine,” 38. 26. Lynn Wilkinson, The Dream of an Absolute Language (Stony Brook: SUNY Press, 1996), 30– 35. 27. Charles Millevoye, Oeuvres, vol. 1 (Paris: Quantin, 1880), 133. 28. Hendrick Roelof Rookmaaker, Towards a Romantic Conception of Nature (Amesterdam: John Benjamins, 1984), 63. 29. Stephen Backer, Signs of Change: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 107. Novalis writes of a “tinkling tree, full of golden fruits,” in Heinrich von Ofterdingen (London: J. Owen, 1842), 127. 30. Alexandre Dumas père, Alexandre Dumas et son œuvre; notes biographiques et bibliographiques, ed. Charles Glinel (Genève: Slatkine reprints, 1967), 239 – 40. 31. I am grateful to Carolyn Abbate for calling my attention to the tale. 32. In Les Poëtes français of 1863, Téophile Gautier wrote about Les Fleurs du Mal in light of Hawthorne’s story. There he described Rappacini’s garden in fanciful detail, and tellingly included a manchineel among the dreadful species of the botanist-toxicologist: a tree “with little poisonous apples like those which once hanged in the tree of knowledge [l’abre de la science].” “Charles Baudelaire,” in Les poëtes français: recueil des chefs-d’oeuvre de la poésie française depois les origines jusqu’à nous jours, ed. Charles Augustin Saint Beuve, vol. 4 (Paris: Gide, 1863), 433– 36. In Portraits contemporains, written meyerbeer’s music of the future after Baudelaire’s death, he recalled the poet’s delight in his t comparison. Théophile Gautier, Portraits contemporains: littérateurs, peintres, sculpteurs, artistes dramatiques (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), 162 –63. 33. Charles Yriarte, Les Portraits cosmopolites (Paris: Laclaud, 1870), 143. 34. Robert G. Cohn, “Intimate Globality: Baudelaire’s ‘La Chevelure,’” French Studies 47 (1988): 292 –302, 293. 35. John Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 139. 36. Robert Bailey, “The Genesis of Tristan und Isolde and a study of Wagner’s Sketches for the First Draft” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1969), 25. On the sketchbook see John Deathridge, Martin Geck, and Egon Voss, eds., Verzeichnis der musikalischen Werke Richard Wagners und Ihrer Quellen (Mainz: Schott’s Söhne, 1986), 431 –35. 37. Translation by John Deathridge in Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil, 140. 38. Friedrich Kittler, “World-Breath: On Wagner’s Media Technology,” in Opera Through Other Eyes, ed. David Levin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 232. 39. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan, with the Tristan of Thomas (New York: Penguin, 1967), 267. 40. On the symbolic significance of E major in act 2 see Carolyn Abbate, “Wagner, ‘On Modulation’ and ‘Tristan,’” Cambridge Opera Journal 1 (1989): 51. 41. Friedrich Kittler, “Opera in Light of Technology,” in Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature, ed. Beate Allert (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 74. 42. Friedrich Kittler, “World-Breath,” 233. 43. Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis artificiels (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1860), 80. 44. Ibid., 50. 45. Cited by David Carrier, “High Art: Les Paradis artificiels and the Origins of Modernism,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20 (1997): 218. 46. Kittler, “World-Breath,” 233. 47. Eduard Hanslick, “Tristan and Isolde,” in Music Criticisms 1856 –99, trans. and ed. Henry Pleasants (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1950), 226. 48. On the structure and chronology of “Skizzen Vasco” see Roberts, “The Genesis of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” (PhD diss., The University of California at Berkeley, 1977), 169–70. 49. The question has never been properly formulated in Meyerbeer studies. Still, Tom Kaufman has dedicated some attention to the topic of Wagner in his review of Robert Letellier’s edition of Meyerbeer’s diaries in Opera Quarterly 19 (2003): 514 – 20 and Opera Quarterly 21 (2005): 189 – 91. 50. Robert Ignacius Letellier, ed. and trans. The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Years of Celebrity, 1850 – 1856 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 46. 51. Ibid., 318. 52. Giacomo Meyerbeer, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, vol. 4 (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1975), 7. 53. Ibid., 164. 54. Ibid., 383. 55. Ibid., 392. 56. Robert Ignacius Letellier, ed. and trans., The Diaries of Giacomo Meyerbeer: The Final Years 1857– 1864 (Madison, NJ: Faileigh Dickinson Press, 2004), 88. 57. Ibid., 91. 58. Ibid., 156. 59. Ibid., 180. 60. Ibid., 274. 61. Ibid., 277. 62. The circumstances of the polemic are outlined by John Deathridge in “Through the Looking Glass: ‘Lohengrin,’” in Analyzing Opera, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 68 – 69. 63. Cited in Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth-Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 142. 64. Charles Baudelaire, “Richard Wagner et Tannhaüser à Paris,” in Sur Richard Wagner, ed. Robert Kopp (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994), 14. On the context for Liszt’s program essay on Lohengrin, Baudelaire’s use of the essay and the terms of his own reception of the Lohengrin prelude, see Margaret Miner, Resonant Gaps, 25– 98; and Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 43 – 61. 65. Giacomo Meyerbeer, “Plan des cinq actes de Vasco de Gama retranscrit par le copiste de Meyerbeer avec indications des numeros et lettres de renvoi aux notes de Meyerbeer et reflections particuliers et générales sur le dit plan,” Papiers de Eugène Scribe, n. a. fr. 22508, F-Pbn, fol. 182 cited in Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” 45. 66. Meyerbeer, L’Africaine, F-Pan, fol. 15 (act 5), cited in Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” 46– 47. 67. Richard Wagner, Sammtiche Schrifen und 201 202 gabriela cruz Dichtungen, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1912), 228. 68. For a detailed account of the reception of Luı́s de Camões poem in L’Africaine, see Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” 59 –66. 69. See Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” 48–53. 70. “Il faut placer les choeurs (quoique il doivent rester invisibles au public) sur la scène ( prés de Selica) et non pas dans les coulisses. Il faut arranger le décor de façon à rendre cela possible.” Meyerbeer, L’Africaine, autograph score, D-Bsb, cited in Cruz, “Giacomo Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine,” 73. 71. “Unfortunately, through the transparent harmonies of the aerial chorus, she does not produce more than a terrestrial waltz: Un cygne au doux ramage. . . . It is unfortunate that this be her swan song.” D’Ortigue, “L’Africaine,” Journal des débats (July 8, 1865): 1. 72. Sieghard Döhring, “Die Wahnssinnszenen,” in Die Couleur locale in der Oper des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Heinz Becker (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1976), 287. 73. Roberts’s argument rests on the assumption that the ballet would have been written had not Meyerbeer died prematurely. I find the argument unconvincing because Meyerbeer did compose all other dance music for the opera, but he left no music for an act 5 ballet. He also did not include the number among the “things still to do and to complete” among his final annotations regarding L’Africaine in 1864. John Roberts, “Meyerbeer: Le Prophète and L’Africaine,” in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 229. The list of “things to do and to complete” is preserved in Ms. 4702, Département de Musique, F-Pn. 74. Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, April 4, 1866, 111; Destranges, L’Oeuvre théâtrale de Meyerbeer (Paris, 1893), 64; Lionel Dauriac, Meyerbeer (Paris: Alcan, 1913), 147. 75. Charles Baudelaire, Paradis artificiels, 11. 76. David Carrier, “High Art: Les Paradis artificiels and the Origins of Modernism,” 219. 77. Michel Poizat, The Angel’s Cry: Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 166. 78. Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, 153– 55. 79. On this argument made on behalf of Liebestod, see, for instance, Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, 149 – 55. On musicology and abjection see Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 33– 66. 80. Carolyn Abbate, In Search of Opera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 132. 81. Théophile Gautier, “Revue des théâtres,” Le Moniteur Universel, May 1, 1865, 2. 82. Edmund Rack, “Revue Musicale,” La Gazette de France, May 5, 1865, 2. 83. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 129. 84. Henri Trianon, “Chronique Musicale,” Revue Française, May 1, 1865, 144. 85. Alfred Grévin, “L’Africaine,” Journal Amusant, May 20, 1865, 7. 86. Joseph D’Ortigue, “La Vérité sur Meyerbeer,” Le Correspondant, 1865, 456. 87. Félix Baudillon, “Premières répresentations,” Revue et Gazette des Thêátres, April 30, 1865, 2.