Every year as the centerpiece of SummerScape, Bard College’s wide-ranging performing arts festival, the institution’s president and impresario Leon Botstein exhumes an opera that has been rarely performed in the United States. Often the work is one audiences may be completely unfamiliar with like Dvorak’s Dimitrij or Korngold’s Der Wunder der Heliane or Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, which was last year’s rediscovery.
But for 2024, Botstein turned to a very famous title—Le Prophète by Giacomo Meyerbeer, a composer whose works for decades were among opera’s most performed but whose presence on world stages since the early 20th Century has nearly vanished. Prophète, with its haunting contemporary parallels of backroom political conspiracies cloaked in cynical faux–religiosity, received a fervent performance by the Bard forces, but its lead tenor’s indisposition seriously diminished the opera’s persuasiveness.
Like Lully and Gluck before him, the German-born Meyerbeer found his greatest success in Paris in the mid-19th Century, where he created the most famous examples of French Grand Opera, a genre that proved wildly popular worldwide.
During the Metropolitan Opera’s first two seasons (1883-85), it mounted three of the composer’s best-known works: Les Huguenots, Robert le Diable and Le Prophète, with L’Africaine following several years later. These sprawling, audience-pleasing operas offered many opportunities for great singing as well as for enthralling spectacle. For nearly fifty years, the Met presented its most important stars in Meyerbeer operas sung mostly in either Italian or German, from Lilli Lehmann and Jean and Edouard de Reszke to Nellie Melba, Enrico Caruso and Ernestine Schumann-Heink to Rosa Ponselle, Beniamino Gigli and Giovanni Martinelli. But by 1915, Les Huguenots, famously known as “The Night of Seven Stars,” had disappeared never to return, and no Meyerbeer opera was presented by the Met for more than four decades when an ever-so-brief renaissance arose with the company’s 1977 production of Le Prophète revived for Marilyn Horne.
Like La Scala’s 1962 Les Huguenots with Joan Sutherland and franco corelli and stagings in San Francisco, London and Barcelona of L’Africaine starring Placido Domingo during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the Met’s Prophète failed to recapture Meyerbeer’s hold on the opera public which has moved on from his style of grand opera. Yet to this day if you ask opera fans what works they most want to see revived, many will answer an old-fashioned Meyerbeer extravaganza.
There hadn’t been a major U.S. Meyerbeer revival for more than twenty-five years when SummerScape mounted Les Huguenots in 2009 in Thaddeus Strassberger’s production and Botstein led a fine cast headed by then-rising stars Erin Morley and Michael Spyres. It proved a rousing success, but the only local follow-up was Amore Opera’s 2019 revival of Dinorah, a charming opéra-comique by Meyerbeer very different from his expensive large-scale works.
Over the past decade or so there has again been sporadic interest in mounting Meyerbeer’s works, many featuring American singers: Venice’s La Fenice staged Le Prophète with Gregory Kunde, while Covent Garden’s Robert le Diable starred Bryan Hymel and John Relyea, and the Paris Opéra’s first Les Huguenots in many years provided a significant success for Lisette Oropesa as Marguerite. Lately, L’Africaine has welcomed a new name—Vasco da Gama—and a recording by the Frankfurt Opera starring Spyres has just been released on Naxos.
American tenor John Osborn stars in two other recent Meyerbeer recordings, Le Prophète and Robert le Diable; the latter also features Morley and Amina Edris who took the role of Berthe in Bard’s Prophète. If only Osborn or Spyres had been available the afternoon I attended Christian Räth’s imaginative Bard revival where it was announced that Robert Watson, its earnest Jean de Leyde, was ill but would still be performing. Handsome, bearded Watson proved a picture-perfect Jean, the opera’s gullible anti-hero who allows himself to be manipulated by three sinister co-conspirators into becoming their new “prophet.” But as the performance progressed, it became increasingly clear that the brave Watson wasn’t up to his role’s fierce demands.
By the riveting prison scene in which Jean is reunited with both his doting mother and his bereft lover, the tenor was tiptoeing through his music, taking most things down an octave and effectively eviscerating the opera’s most affecting scene. He proved to be husbanding his dwindling resources as he briefly recovered to command the flamboyant finale when Jean denounced his devious cohorts and set ablaze the site of his coronation, incinerating everyone, including himself and his mother. Projections by Elaine McCarthy and Rick Fisher’s lighting combined for a startling yet economical conflagration.
Before the cataclysm, Edris excelled in Berthe’s gruesomely moving suicide. She brought a sumptuously rich tone but also a precarious top that often splintered in her frequent dramatic outbursts. Her character suffers, in particular, from the reckless sweep of Eugene Scribe’s libretto. Co-written with Emile Deschamps and based on the 16th-century historical figure of Jean of Leyden, it frequently loses focus as it labors for an epic sweep.
Fidès, Jean’s mother, emerges as the opera’s most compelling character as she is torn between love for her son and horror at the dangerous political machinations with which he’s become involved. Jennifer Feinstein bravely tackled Räth’s confusing vision of the character who often appeared to have lost her mind. Feinstein’s earthy wide-ranging mezzo-soprano tore into her demanding music with a manic intensity that won loud ovations. Her understated “Ah, mon fils” made its mark, but her strenuous, over-the-top approach made a mess of the spectacular coloratura that concludes her long monologue “O prêtres de Baal.” She and Edris, however, partnered beautifully in their happy-sad reunion duet.
The three Anabaptists, Prophète’s villains who dripped with hypocrisy, were chillingly well taken by tenor Brian Vu and basses Harold Wilson and Wei Wu. Wilson particularly shone as the suavely dapper Zacharie, who called to mind Mephistophélès in Gounod’s Faust, which premiered in 1859, the same year as Le Prophète. Zachary Altman relished the dastardly dealings of Oberthal but his unfocused bass-baritone gave little pleasure.
As always James Bagwell’s dynamic Bard Festival chorus handled its complex duties with vigorous precision. Botstein kept tight control over his large forces but couldn’t prevent Meyerbeer’s long work from feeling attenuated and diffuse. Despite some cuts, including its famous ballet, Le Prophète’s nearly five-hour running time felt very long indeed. The addition of its lengthy rediscovered overture allowed Räth to stage Jean’s fevered dreams populated by dark angels. Räth’s ingenious design, co-created with Daniel Unger, consisted of three enormous volumes (Bibles, perhaps?) which twisted and turned throughout, suggesting the opera’s locales with rapid facility.
The sporadically involving Prophète pleased far less than Huguenots had fifteen years earlier. While I enjoyed the sweep and ambition of Meyerbeer’s work, both revivals felt like a lot of time and money had been devoted to effective but unmemorable operas. It’s difficult to imagine that in the 21st Century, their composer’s oeuvre will ever be more than occasionally tantalizing oddities.
Perhaps Smetana’s Dalibor, scheduled for next summer, will be the revelation that Le Prophète was not.
