Giacomo Meyerbeer "Les Huguenots" opera (concert performance)

Les Huguenots was some five years in creation. Meyerbeer prepared carefully for this opera after the sensational success of Robert le diable, recognising the need to continue to present lavish staging, a highly dramatic storyline, impressive orchestration and virtuoso parts for the soloists – the essential elements of the new genre of Grand Opera. Meyerbeer and his librettist for Robert le Diable, Eugène Scribe, had agreed to collaborate on an epic work concerning the French Wars of Religion, with a drama partly based on Prosper Mérimée's 1829 novel Chronique du règne de Charles IX. Coming from a wealthy family, Meyerbeer could afford to take his time, dictate his own terms, and to be a perfectionist. The very detailed contract which Meyerbeer arranged with Louis-Désiré Véron, director of the Opéra, for Les Huguenots (and which was drawn up for him by the lawyer Adolphe Crémieux) is a testament to this. While Meyerbeer was writing the opera, another opera with a similar setting and theme (Le pré aux clercs by Ferdinand Hérold) was also produced in Paris (1832). Like Meyerbeer's, Hérold's work was extremely popular in its time, although it is now only seldom performed.

Meyerbeer decided that he wanted more historical details of the period and a greater psychological depth to the characters than Scribe's text was supplying so he obtained Scribe's approval to invite a second librettist, Émile Deschamps, to collaborate on the text in order to furnish these elements. Meyerbeer was recommended to take his wife to a warmer climate for her health, and while in Italy for that purpose he consulted with the librettist of his earlier Italian operas, Gaetano Rossi. With his advice Meyerbeer himself re-wrote the part of Marcel, one of the most striking and original characters in the piece. Meyerbeer also accepted the advice of star tenor Adolphe Nourrit, chosen to create the part of Raoul, to expand the love duet in Act 4, which became one of the most famous numbers in the opera.