One hears dark hints that the anti-semitism of loud-mouthed Wagnerian shills is to blame, or that singers simply cannot manage difficult music for the many hours a Meyerbeer opus requires. Balderdash. As the Bard Summerscape run of Le Prophète that concluded on Sunday made abundantly clear, Meyerbeer’s grand operas are melodious, exciting, relevant to political controversies of his day and ours, and offer scope and reward to well-schooled singers.

But, good Chronos! are they ever long! (Le Prophète, last Sunday, clocked in at well over four hours, with the ballets omitted and two 20-minute intermissions.) The man didn’t know the meaning of the word “brief” in any of his several languages. And Parisian grand opera was never designed for a taster’s menu: it’s the full-course Sunday dinner, with five desserts.

Too, staging grand opera in the Paris of Louis-Philippe and Louis-Napoleon, in the most technologically and orchestrally advanced opera house on earth (the premiere of Le Prophète in 1849 was the first time electronic effects were employed in a theater) could be ruinously expensive, even before you hired six or seven world-caliber star singers.

It was the expense, and the endlessness of the drama, as well as the sheer age of these monsters that drove them from the stage. Opera audiences, like most, tire of the same-old. They crave novelty. Meyerbeer became old hat, like many of his contemporaries. And once these dinosaurs had ceased to play, they could not easily be brought back to life. There was a whole new style of storytelling through music, and a new style of singing, with fewer frills and repetitions.

Too, Le Prophète has been blackballed hereabouts since the Met took a bath on the infamous John Dexter production of 1977, designed for the talents of Marilyn Horne and James McCracken. Horne had had her eye on the role of Fidès for years, and the Met took a chance. Fidès gave her a chance to display both her ability as a vocal tragic actress—seldom praised as she deserved—and her spectacular coloratura. McCracken was anxious to measure himself in one of Caruso’s great roles.

It is a curious fact—I don’t think I’ve ever seen it discussed—that in Parisian grand opera, the emotional center is almost always a mezzo soprano or contralto rather than a high soprano, brilliant as the higher roles may be. This is true in all four of Meyerbeer’s grand operas and also of Halevy’s La Juive, Donizetti’s La Favorite, Gounod’s Sapho, Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII, Thomas’s Mignon, and Massenet’s Hérodiade, Werther and Don Quichotte—not to mention an opéra-comique like Carmen. Was this due to the talent of such individuals as Cornélie Falcon, Rosine Stoltz and Pauline Viardot (who was the first Fidès, Sapho, and the intended first Dalila) or was it some Parisian emotional response to the quality of deeper female voices?

It is also unlikely that Verdi, who attended the first night of Le Prophète and spent the next five years nagging Meyerbeer’s librettist, Eugène Scribe, for an equally striking opera text, would have based his non-Scribe Trovatorearound a mezzo soprano mother had he not seen what the relationship of Fidès and Jean de Leyden could accomplish in emotional terms.

In any case, back in the ’70s, though Horne delivered a superb performance, and later Florence Quivar sang it even more beautifully if with less ideal fioritura, Met audiences did not flock to the confusing and heavily cut production of a no-longer familiar score. Rumor has it that this experience led general manager Joseph Volpe to ban further Meyerbeer experiments at the Met in his own time, and to advise his successors never to trifle with such repertory.

Bard’s conductor and president, the ever-resourceful Leon Botstein, chose to present Le Prophète as the centerpiece of this year’s Summerscape, which focuses on Berlioz (who also attended the 1849 premiere), in part, Botstein has explained, because the plot deals with the corruption of the body politic by religious hypocrites. He found this theme relevant to current events in the United States. Indeed, the Wednesday performance (third of five) was livestreamed to warn us all.

Jean of Leyden, the leader of an Anabaptist rebellion in sixteenth-century Münster, executed when his utopian experiment was suppressed, is, in the opera, an innkeeper given to feverish dreams of being chosen for a sacred destiny—represented, in Bard’s Christian Räth production, by dark angels with texts from the Book of Revelation on their burnt-edged wings. The unit set consisted of three movable stage-high tomes that, with help from Rick Fisher and Elaine McCarthy’s elaborate lighting design, became a citadel, a cathedral, ominous city streets and the squalid dungeon where Fidès has been confined. The discontented peasants became a crowd of desperate refugees, and the concluding orgy resembled a bunch of glitterati at an Event Space.

Jean has a mother, Fidès, and a girlfriend, Berthe, but their feudal superior, wicked Count Oberthal, wants Berthe for himself. Oberthal obliges Jean to choose between girlfriend and mother, and though Jean chooses mom, of course, his bitter resentment renders him putty in the hands of three dark-voiced evangelists who are roaming the countryside urging the peasants to revolt. The sinister trio help Jean set up a dictatorship (women in Handmaid’s Tale bonnets, officers with machine guns). Fidès, thinking her lost son has been murdered by the infamous Prophet, rumored dictator of Münster, goes mad, and wanders the streets with a baby carriage.

At the climactic coronation of the Prophet, Jean has no sooner proclaimed himself the Son of God than a cry of “Mon fils!” rings out from within the crowd. It is Fidès, of course. The evangelists threaten to murder Jean to maintain their deception, and Fidès must disown him to save his life. In the last scene, everyone betrays everybody—the evangelists and Oberthal attempt to turn Jean over to the besieging imperial forces, and Jean blows up the castle where he is giving a party (with drinking song). Fidès joins him in the last chorus.

Although the story takes its own sweet time to make its effects, Meyerbeer’s melodies and intricate orchestrations remain pleasing and effective, and the climaxes often startle us agreeably. (However, Berthe’s suicide, when the man she wants to murder for slaying her boyfriend turned out to be that very boyfriend, provoked a general titter.)

There is so much good music in a Meyerbeer score—any Meyerbeer score, and I’ve seen six of his operas—why does no one give Robert le Diable? It was L’Opéra’s biggest hit for a century—only the loss of the grand sets in a fire prevented further revivals—that any performance with decent singers will arouse any audience to enthusiasm and curiosity. Bard did itself proud on this score—Summerscape usually does.

I’m told that Robert Watson, who sang Jean de Leyden, was suffering from a cold on opening night. A week later, he was in very fine fettle, a strong, ardent lyric-Wagnerian voice, subtle in his cross-examination of Fidès, repentant and cringing in the dungeon scene, joyous in wrath at the conclusion.

Jennifer Feinstein has a more contralto sound than either Horne or Quivar, but her voice is highly attractive and her fioritura impressive. I found her lacking in the poignance, the limpid self-pity that Horne projected in Act III, but her physical portrayal of desperate madness was most affecting.

Amina Edris, who sang Berthe, a singer I had admired in Gounod’s Sapho at the Washington Concert Opera, had the evening’s most perfect combination of declamatory technique, coloratura style, and gorgeous instrument. She is already something of a Meyerbeer specialist, having recorded Alice in Robert le Diable. These three singers made a particularly exquisite thing of the dungeon trio in Act IV.

The corrupt evangelists were a very solid trio. Harold Wilson hit the Jerome Hines notes in his exhortations and threats, and Brian Vu wielded his tenor with self-satisfied malice, while basso Wei Wu projected a thunderous sound, sinister and ominous. Zachary Altman’s sharply economical movements as Count Oberthal made him a striking Hollywood Nazi.

The Bard Festival Chorale reproduced that modern video standby, the refugee encampment, and morphed neatly into a street uprising and a bloodthirsty crowd. The staging, like far too many modern opera productions, shoved all the singers, solo and chorus, onto the stage apron—you’d never guess there was plenty of room behind them where acting and singing used to occur. Are people afraid of missing television cues? Or are they unable to project from mid-stage, as singers used to be trained to do?

Under Botstein’s hand, the succession of grand scenes and intimate ones achieved an easy propulsion. I missed some of the recollected bombast of the Coronation Procession (was it heavily cut at Bard?), but the central confrontation of mother and son and crowd and indignant religious phonies was very clear.

The drama of Le Prophète held us in thrall. There were very few early departures.

Photos: Andy Henderson