Scribes & pharisees

Musical Times, Summer 2003 by Thomson, Andrew

A strong revisionist case is at last being made for Parisian grand opera, which triumphed in circumstances where Berlioz and Wagner signally failed. Particularly associated with the Jewish composers Meyerbeer and Halevy, it has for all too long been adversely coloured by antisemitic Wagnerian opprobrium and regarded as elaborate entertainment for the nouveaux riches of the July Monarchy era of Louis Philippe (1830-48). Extravagant staging and scenic effects using the latest state-of-the-art technology, together with the mandatory ballet, only enhanced this gross image of conspicuous consumption in the pioneering era of laissez-faire economics.

By contrast, the vital part that this hitherto suspect genre actually played in the intellectual culture of a particularly vibrant capital city experiencing rapid industrial, financial and political development - the world of Balzac's La Comedie humaine - is the subject of Diana R. Hallman's illuminating and rounded study of Halevy's opera La Juive (1835). Its portrayal of acute conflicts between the Roman Catholic Church and traditional Jewish religion during the 1414 Council of Constance was highly relevant to contemporary French society where, despite the grantings of civil rights to Jews, the Catholic establishment remained unequivocally hostile; moreover, socialist and anticapitalist criticism focused on Jewish merchants, industrialists and bankers, typified by the fabulously plutocratic Baron Rothschild. Usefully widening the historical discussion, Professor Hallman deals with the earlier contribution of Voltaire and the philosophes of the eighteenth century Enlightenment to this area of controversy; their famous critique of the religious intolerance and political despotism of the ancien regime did not, however, preclude strong condemnation of Jewish superstition and resistance to reform. Throughout Europe liberalminded Jews like Moses Mendelssohn were endeavouring to shake off their doomed inheritance by acculturalisation or religious conversion; and indeed, according to the late Oxford philosopher of ideas Isaiah Berlin, it was the very 'outsider' character of the Jew which increased his qualities of empathy with other cultures.

Hallman's full account of the enlightened famille Halevy complements Berlin's more intellectually brilliant essays on Disraeli, Marx and Moses Hess (included in Against the current, 1979). Like the young Meyerbeer in Berlin, Fromental Halevy came from a highly educated and cultivated, though much less moneyed, background. His Bavarianborn father Elie Halevy, a distinguished Talmud scholar and leading figure in the Jewish community of Paris, worked indefatigably for cooperation with Christian society and the institutions of modern France by adapting - but not fully renouncing - the ancient Jewish religion and traditions. Elie's other son Leon received an elite education at the Lycee Charlemagne, becoming a progressive author and advocate of Saint-Simon's social vision of a new industrial order; he also argued for a purification and drawing together of the two faiths along primitive lines - 'Just as the Pharisees had distorted the Mosaic law before Jesus, so had the "Pharisees of Catholicism" disfigured Christianity after Jesus'. Similarly, the young Fromentin, a student of Cherubini at the Paris Conservatoire, was actively involved with synagogal musical reform in alignment with French practices. After becoming Chef du chant at the Opera, La Juive catapulted him to fame, and thereafter his rise to the top of the French establishment was inexorable - by way of a composition professorship at the Conservatoire and the permanent secretaryship of the Academie des Beaux Arts.

An essential contribution to the success of grand opera as a medium capable of communicating with the thinking man was made by the prolific playwright and librettist of La Juive, Eugene Scribe, to whom Hallman does full justice. Indeed, she firmly rebuts Jane F. Fulcher's neo-marxist thesis (in The nation's image: French grand opera as politics and politicised art, 1987) that Scribe and Louis Veron, the director of the Paris Opera, were little more than 'mindless and valueless manipulators of public taste or government values'. In fact, Scribe professed liberal 'Voltairean' beliefs, supported the political centre-ground of le juste milieu, and was the sworn enemy of the repressive censorship which had characterised the previous reactionary reigns of Louis VIII and Charles X. The theatre he regarded as a force for ameliorating society, defending its right to make controversial statements and remain independent of government restraints. Was there, I wonder, a foreshadowing of George Bernard Shaw here in the ability to make effective theatre out of political argument?

Scribe must also be seen in terms of the wider Romantic movement. He had, like Turner, travelled in Switzerland and Germany and fully experienced their sublime mountain scenery; indeed, the memory of his visit to Constance in 1826 may well have inspired the setting of La Juive. Moreover, along with such leading French romantic figures as Stendhal, Balzac, Berlioz and Delacroix, he was affected by the post-Napoleonic vogue for British literature and painting. In an especially fascinating part of her book, Hallman reveals the intertextual dimension of the opera's elaborate and prolonged gestation. Although Shakespeare's The merchant of Venice provided a clear literary stereotype for the main character Eleazar, he differs from Shylock in being torn between the love of his supposed daughter Rachel and hatred for Christians, with the aspect of material greed significantly reduced. In marked contrast, the sympathetic and equivocal Rachel - her split identity as both Jew and Christian enabling her to move between these two inimical worlds - resembles Rebecca in Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819). Noble, courageous and caring, she likewise exudes an aura of oriental exoticism, enhanced by her 'turbaned and caftaned' theatre costume. Her horrific execution in a cauldron of boiling water probably reflects the similar death of Barabas in Marlowe's Elizabethan drama The Jew of Malta.