L'Africaine, and drew from no other source their notions and judgments on the middle ages, French royalty, religious wars and the Inquisition!
From the musical point of view this style of art has been and was bound to be utterly sterile. All that one can say is that it has marked a stage in a development from which music is very far from having derived nothing but benefits, and largely of Germanic origin. I refer to the exaggerated increase of the orchestral mass.
There are people to-day who would like to stir up enthusiasm for Meyerbeer by emphasising that it was Wagner who killed him. No doubt he did, but in France Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet and Massenet contributed infinitely more than Wagner to the result.
Meyerbeer is dead, stone dead. Multa renascentur, many things will come to life again, as the poet says, and I hope that in time soon to come music will see many purely French things come to life again on the ruins of the German mania which choked them. Meyerbeer will not come to life again. His apologists plead the brilliance of his success. Certainly, it is an argument. But those successes belong to the worst period that French art has known.
